response 51 of 88:

Mar 9 20:16 UTC 2001

What are the most recent trends (fads?) in modern 'classical' music (21st
century)?  I hear rumors of a romantic revival.  Can recent movie music be
classified as something separate, or does it fall into one or more other
categories?  Prokofiev wrote movie music.  How would one classify whatever
is being written for recent musicals (which I have not heard)?

response 53 of 88:

Mar 10 17:58 UTC 2001

I know a little, but not enough to say much.  Certainly Alan Lomax was one
of the big names.  You'd probably want to include the people who went out and
made *commercial* field recordings, blues & country in particular, in the 20s
& 30s, and some who went out tracing, locating, & providing exposure for some
of those same artists during the 50s through around 1970.  At one time I could
have at least dropped a few names, but it's been too long.

To pick a minor nit with resp 49: much jazz improvization is essentially free
creation of a new melody against a song's harmony, rather than variation on
the original melody; thus the unrecognizability becomes almost instant.  (This
is especially true since sometime around <dave gets vague> 1950 or so.)

response 55 of 88:

Mar 12 06:21 UTC 2001

I was once told, by a jazz pianist, that Jazz is defined by the use of a
particular chord progression, which he demonstrated to me, and then he
played a lot of jazz, with improvisation, and showed me that every one of
the pieces used chord progressions with the same characteristics. This is
a far cry from how md defines jazz. I do notice that musically trained
people can identify when jazz is played, but they are certainly not using
md's definitions, which in any case seems to be too vague to be useful:
people could write music according to the prescription given, which I am
sure would not be considered jazz. 

response 57 of 88:

Mar 12 15:09 UTC 2001

Sorry.  Jazz is music that always features the chord progression that a 
jazz pianist once played for Rane Curl.  Silly of me to think otherwise.

response 59 of 88:

Mar 12 17:08 UTC 2001

Well, there are some chord progressions that are especially typical of jazz
music, and some chord progressions that you'd almost never find in jazz.  This
is one of the things that distinguish jazz from other improvised music styles
(classical cadenzas or heavy metal guitar solos or whatever).  

From what I know about jazz, you'd have to look pretty hard to find a jazz
piece that doesn't depend on so-called ii-V-I progressions.  (Basically,
chord progressions that move downward by fifths.  Think "I Got Rhythm" or
the first few bars of the Flintstones theme.)  Starting in the '60s, there
were some pieces that would just sit on one or two chords rather than
using complete chord progressions and this was a big scary deal, the end
of music as we know it, etc., etc.  Coltrane wrote some pieces where the
chords sometimes move by thirds and not fifths, but these pieces also do
have some ii-V-I progressions in them, and the consensus seems to be that
they're damn hard to play and sound funny.  

So I'm sure you _can_ have a jazz piece without one of these progressions.
If nothing else, I'm sure someone's written one just to be contrary.  But
they're one of the features that will make a piece of music sound like
jazz, and removing them from jazz entirely would probably turn it into a
whole new style of music.

response 61 of 88:

Mar 12 18:50 UTC 2001

Some of us, anyway.  ;-)

response 63 of 88:

Mar 13 00:34 UTC 2001

Fads in 21st century classical music?  It's a little early to tell.

Fads in 20th century classical music?  Not one, not two, but A Lot.  
Serialism, chance music, socialist realism (Soviet and American 
varieties), neo-classicism, jazz-classical fusion (of various kinds), 
minimalism (Eastern European and American varieties) - these are some 
of the major ones.

I'm not sure what keesan meant by neo-Romanticism.  A few composers, 
like Sergei Rachmaninoff, kept on writing as they had in the 19th 
century, on the grounds that they weren't going to change their style 
just because the calendar had turned.  A number of non-faddish 
composers, like Jan Sibelius, were writing distinctively 20C music but, 
since they hadn't jumped aboard the fad wagons of massive change, 
sounded more conservative and thus closer to the Romantics than other 
composers, so they sometimes got called neo-Romantics.  And some of the 
American socialist realists, notably Howard Hanson and Samuel Barber, 
were more Romantic in temperament than the others.  Their music has 
some of that Romantic sound but, except for Barber's "Adagio for 
Strings" (which is an arrangement and doesn't sound as lush in the 
original string quartet version), isn't usually mistakable for 19C 
music either.

A lot of the early Hollywood film music composers wrote heavily lush 
stuff in their film scores, but the ones who wrote concert music were 
more akin to Sibelius (if not always sounding like him) in the approach 
they took to that.

response 65 of 88:

Mar 13 11:55 UTC 2001

[Star-Spangled Banner?]

I've never heard Barber or Hanson described as socialist realists 
before.  The American strain of listenable modernist music that 
corresponds to socialist realism is sometimes called "populist" (Aaron 
Copland, Roy Harris).  Socialist realism was mainly a Soviet 
phenomenon.  One critic defined it as "a tune Stalin can whistle."  

Barber and Hanson would've been denounced as "formalist" if they'd been 
writing in Russia instead of the USA.  Both have been described as neo-
romantic composers, however.  I never quite figured out what neo-
romantic is supposed to mean, exactly.  Something like "writes romatic-
sounding music after Stravinsky and Schoenberg taught us better."  
I.e., there has to be a gap between romanticism or clacissism and the 
composer's music for it to be called "neo-" anything.  In Hanson's 
case, there probably was no gap.

But there were elements of "modernism" in both Barber's and Hanson's 
music.  In Hanson it seldom goes much beyond Debussy, Ravel and Mahler, 
but Barber wrote some pretty abrasive stuff.  He even used a serialist-
sounding tone-row in his Piano Sonata.  As dbratman points out, only 
Barber's Adagio might've sounded at home in a 19th c. concert hall, and 
I wonder about even that.  Barber once addressed the critics' 
frustration at trying to pigeonhole his music by saying, "I just keep 
doing, as they say, my thing.  I think that takes a certain courage,"

Re #64, many of the composers who have been described as "minimalists" 
are now writing music of a neo-romantic cast.  John Adams was one of 
the pioneers, if you could call it that, of this trend.  Toward the end 
of one of his orthodox minimalist pieces, a full-blown melody erupts 
without warning.  Also, I'm told Philip Glass has been composing some 
treacly old-fashioned stuff, which indicates to me that he never had 
any talent to begin with.  All kinds of mediocrity can be hidden behind 
the various "movements," "schools" and "-isms."

response 67 of 88:

Mar 14 00:30 UTC 2001

keesan: the definition of neo-Romantic music as "a tune that the people 
[or Stalin, for that matter] can hum" is, intentionally or otherwise, a 
pejorative one, because it bears the assumption that modern music makes 
no concession to tunefulness, and any music which does is some antique 
19C survival, whether it actually sounds like 19C music or not.

20C classical tunes tend, as I said above, to be spiky and angular, but 
there are still some notable tunesmiths among composers - and these are 
ones who, like earlier great tunesmiths, _did_ something with their 
tunes instead of just playing them over and over like hacks.  Two 
composers who are particularly good at leaving me humming are Prokofiev 
(esp. "Peter and the Wolf" and the 5th Symphony) and Copland (in the 
ballets, though note that "Simple Gifts" in "Appalachian Spring" is a 
borrowed tune, not his own).  A lot of classical dance music is catchy: 
Khatchaturian's "Gayne" has some stunningly beautiful stuff in it, and 
Malcolm Arnold's "English Dances" are quite enjoyable.

md: forgive oversimplification.  The American populists often came with 
a load of socialist rhetoric, so they can be considered the American 
equivalent of the Soviet socialist realists of the same era, and the 
music bore some similarities of style once you adjust for nationality 
and quality.  The difference is that the Americans did it because they 
wanted to; the Soviets did it because Stalin put a gun to their heads.

Post-minimalist music is no more neo-Romantic in the strict sense than 
the populists - much less so than Hanson.  Insofar as it has elements 
of earlier eras, it's as much classical (in ornamentation) and baroque 
(in harmonic approach) as romantic (in instrumentation).  Some of 
Glass's music has been bad, to be sure, but Beethoven and Tchaikovsky 
also wrote reams of trash (I've heard some).  But much of his recent 
music has been excellent by the standards he upholds, and I'd advise 
listening to it before condemning it - particularly necessary with 
Glass, as his detractors so despise his composing goals that they're 
ready to condemn anything he writes, whatever its quality.

To summarize the goals question briefly, Glass's critics hold to the 
modernist principle of complexity.  (At their worst, they praise 
complexity regardless of whether the work is good, thus leading to the 
phenomenon of Augenmusik or "eye music" - stuff that looks really 
interesting on paper, but sounds terrible.)  They believe that 
composers who abjure complexity are either slacking off or (as you 
imply with Glass) don't know how to do it in the first place.  This 
criticism has also hit Shostakovich and even Schubert.  But these 
composers' goal is emotional effect, for which complexity is not 
necessary and may even get in the way.  Just as we needed the pared-
down orchestra and form of neoclassicism in the 20s to recover from the 
giganticism of Strauss and Mahler, so we need the pared-down harmony of 
postminimalism to recover from the jaggedness of serialism.

response 69 of 88:

Mar 15 00:20 UTC 2001

Re Prokofiev and Khachaturian, you are right that they have catchy tunes in
some of their music anyway.  I was asking about what sort of music is being
written now (since 1990) and whether catchy tunes, or other things that might
attract someone not trained to appreciate 'modern music' are coming back into
style.  Is anyone writing 'classical modern' music that can be played by the
amateur musician, as used to be done in previous centuries?  
Yes, Star Spangled Banner was the tune.  

response 71 of 88:

Mar 15 03:35 UTC 2001

We heard some Liszt which Jim identified as cartoon music.  Thanks, I will
look for the above composers at the public library.   As your prize you may
enter the numbers of another popular tune.  Cartoon music does not sound much
like movie music and it stands on its own much better.  What is it that people
get out of program music (movie music, symphonic poems, songs with words,
other things that don't make sense without a plot)?

response 73 of 88:

Mar 15 13:17 UTC 2001

Ba Ba Blacksheep.