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Hi there! Great educational vids about avant garde composers. That's so good you bring them to life... Xenakis?! Definitely the most important composer of our times! Do you have anything about Fausto Romitelli, Per Norgard, Giacinto Scelsi, Toru Takemitsu?

@JeetSarkar-dw4ev: in response to your query, all these videos contain accurate ways in which to pronounce all the opera terms. Thanks for watching.

Alannah, you are such a delight, beautiful and knowledgable! This is fantastic! Thank you!!

What about someone who's had a convivial lunch and is now jolly and tipsy?

This is excellent.

Men are so petty.

Well done. !!! If radio 3 hadn't been butchered by woke middle class clichés. ?????

I met John after one of his performances at Knox college in Galesburg. I shook his hand ,he never said a word.

Round one. Fight! Oh wait, wrong everything....

I was at Stanford when they celebrated John Cage's 80th Birthday in 1992, soon before his death. They had musicians playing throughout the Music School Building and also had special performances in theaters. It was a wide variety and we watched Cage play bongos!

I would have liked to watch this in full, but the editing makes me seasick. Could you keep the camera on yourself without cutting to closeups every half second?

Highly recommend listening to the conversation between Morton Feldman and John. It's on youtube. Really gives a sense of John's lightness of being and their humour and interests. Beautiful conversation i'm glad was recorded.

I do like hearing about Cage from the perspective of someone who is an actual composer. I appreciate the perspective of someone who has certain practical experiences here that I don't. This is true of all your videos, actually, but it really comes out when you talk about artists I am conversant with like Cage. I appreciate your work, as always.

John Cage ( 1912 - 1992 ) American composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher.

commenting for engagement

Have been following your channel for quite some time, really fond of the topics you choose for videos! Especially like when you reflect on material you present in a more improvisational manner. I suppose I was aligned mentally with John Cage far before I have discovered his works: my music teacher has always said how you should listen to music and experiment with it / interpret in different ways to understand it better. Only after applying these principles I understood some of the classical composers. Before, when listening to them, they didn't make sense - only after tackling their pieces for some time I noticed focal points of their works. At one moment when returning from my lessons I was so sensitive to any sound that a chaos of a street mixed with engine sounds and rumbling of the car I was riding in transformed into some kind of composition. It lacked rhythm and harmony in traditional sense but it still was mesmerizing to me because my heart was open to any discovery at the moment. After this experience I am convinced that everything is music and John Cage only approves it more showing us that nothing is music too.

Do deaf people, especially deaf from birth, experience silence? Or maybe they have noisy thoughts? Or maybe they can also hear their own body? I don't know how it works.

thank you, great video

finally, a woman with a brain

I can do this as a countertenor but they make it look really easy to hit those notes it is incredibly hard.

Many thanks, learnt a lot! Here's a performance with cube visualisation, which may be of interest. m.ruclips.net/video/fWlceolQMGQ/видео.html .

Nice overview, but when it comes to microtonality I think you should have mentioned composers like Harry Partch and Ben Johnston who related the use of microtonality to the overtone series.

That's quote a mouthful of words.

Great insightful journey through the 20nd century 😀Added schoenberg and Anton Webern to my playlist. Did not listen to them before (don't know much about classical).

It was lovely to see another of your great vidoes appearing on my feed. As you said, composers don't slot neatly into categories, some expressionistic pieces sound impressionistic - ruclips.net/video/Fh7t30u1IhA/видео.html - some serial pieces sound neoclassical like the central sections in Agon - ruclips.net/video/tpygslSyQTY/видео.html - and yes, you should definitely do a video on Feldman, I've heard all manner of attempts at classifying him, from 'Webern extended into serentiy' to experimental to minimalist. Where would you place Feldman's old mate Birtwistle?

Thank you very much for your videos.

Thank you! 🙏

🌹🌹🌹

Thank you

Don't know if Ill get a reply but, if I'm a male who can't go below a c4 comofrtably, but can hit high Aflats and Bflats with relative easy, saying this as my technique isn't perfect, what would that make me. For context I speak in the high third to early fourth octave and I had for the most part a normal puberty other than well, my voice. That and according to my vocal coach my voice has matured so.....

Superbes commentaires et analyse.❤ ça donne effectivement des idées.😊

I love you

How to discuss something very gender-specific is you first say gender doesn't matter.

Good stuff yet again. !!!! Taa so very muchly. Uncle warren

Perhaps I'm thick but can't find your great piece on Birtwhistle. ???

Really , really , well done. !!!!! At last intelligence AND music. How can we thank you. !!!!

Cool ! On en redemande. Parlez moins vite svp. Le traducteur s'affole.😊. Bien à vous.

Interesting video. I think one of the lessons with avant-garde music is that it can be an acquired taste. We don't always 'get it' straight away. I started with writing serial music, at that time the music of Xenakis made a terrific impression on me, now I'm still interested in Xenakis, but also the music of Terry Riley and Conlon Nancarrow. There is perhaps a debate to be had about minimalism when it's done well, I still think minimalism can have lots of positive aspects and can still be innovative and push the boundaries, just in a different way. There is nothing wrong with making the music 'more accessible' and 'easy to follow,' so long as it doesn't devolve into a kind of dismissive rubbishing of atonal music.

3:36 ligeti and xenakis actually wrote good music, unlike a large amount of the avant garde....

Ligeti was the best among the group

As a child, oh so many moons ago, I grew up around and on farms. There's a phrase, "headless chicken," that comes from converting live chickens to meat-ready-to-cook. Listening to most avant garde music is like watching a headless chicken run. No rhythm, no tonality, and completely unpredictable. We live in a world where the first predictable sound is our heart and breath, and tone comes from voices and sounds around us. So what should avant garde music be? A quick definition is "music that is considered to be at the forefront of innovation in its field" but that doesn't define which field it is out standing in, or whether cattle are/were in the field. I remember when I fist heard a piece by Arvo Pärt. It was "Fur Alina" and it riveted my attention. With that piece, I discovered a new form of music. For me, Pärt is avant garde because when I study what he does, I find new paths of music. Music doesn't have to be deliberately gratingly bad to be at the forefront of innovation. Avant garde should be create a sense of "I wonder what else there could be, and how can I do that," instead of, "I wonder if that person is off their meds." Consider this theoretical piece: "Threnody for Cockroaches" for large room, four-year-olds with pots and pans, and cats. Arrhythmic, atonal, and completely unpredictable. Now, I know that the four-year-olds would be having fun, and would miss the concept of a threnody in its entirety. The cats would definitely be lamenting. If the piece were accompanied by the right thesis, then it would be avant garde. Without the written premise, i.e., sales pitch, then it would be a room full of four-year-olds making a racket and yowling cats.

"Pause and listen". I paused for 2 seconds. I've never heard a faster performance of that piece. And slower ones neither.

I am a undergraduate in composition and am quite conflicted between doing like avangarde music and am also like writing much more “simpler and tonal” music and am really struggling with the complete canyon that is between these world, and of course there are more multimedia composer that have eased the blurring, but still my collegues and teachers don’t speak very highly of them. As a composer yourself who simigky has lived through some of my experienced though on a larger scale, do you have any suggestion or encouragements?

Something that really bothers me about contemporary classical music is the fetish many composers have for justifying their compositions with a concept or explanation. John Cage did this a lot; the explanation of *4'33"* often ended up being more interesting than *4'33"* itself. I believe that a good piece should stand on its own without needing an explanation from its composer, or even without the composer altogether.

One valuable thing to keep in mind when it comes to acting drunk is that alcohol doesn't really change your core personality traits and morals that much; at least not in the way that one might think. The main effect of alcohol is that it loosens your inhibitions, and makes you more giggly and impulsive, and this can make you act in more random ways and not think very clearly. But you will still generally have your normal sense of right and wrong: if you would feel bad about acting in a certain way while sober, then you would most likely feel bad about it while drunk as well, and so on. This more uninhibited form of behaviour is also one reason for why some drunk people start expressing how much they like their friends; this is very likely how they genuinely feel about them, and the alcohol simply makes it easier for them to express those feelings without feeling shy.

I find Diana Damrau's vice to be so confusing, can you kindly explain what voice type she is? She sings coloratura repertoire but her voice quite dramatic too. 🤣🤣 not you experiencing a vocal identity crisis at 5:05. Story of my life.

I am here for the dramatic tenor! My favorite tenor voice type, Franco Corelli. Did you know that a young full lyric tenor has the capability of maturing into a dramatic tenor? Just like how soubrette sopranos can mature into coloratura sopranos or full lyric sopranos. It's so fascinating.

I thought that a male soprano and a countertenor are completely different due to the difference in "tessitura." The tessitura is the most acceptable and comfortable vocal range for a given singer. It is the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding (or characteristic) timbre. I am seeing some comments that are equating a countertenor (which is usually a singer who is naturally has a tenor, baritone or bass tessitura, but trains their falsetto/head voice to sing in female range.) to a male soprano which refers to a male singer who has the tessitura that naturally sits in female range (this means that their chest voice sits in alto/mezzo soprano and soprano range). I know the two voice types (male soprano and countertenor) to be 2 completely different voice types. Also, a countertenor does not have 2 voices, they have one voice, they just use two styles of singing to achieve the sound they want to achieve. Head voice for singing countertenor and chest voice for baritone, tenor or bass. A male soprano on the other hand is exactly that, their full voice sits in soprano/mezzo soprano range and they aren't even able to sing lower (unless their range extends there) and the phenomena is said to be the fact that their voices didn't drop during puberty, and this means their vocal cords/larynx are like that of a female. This means, physiologically a male soprano and a countertenor are fundamentally different and that a male soprano and a female soprano practically have the same size vocal cords/larynx.

For a different (mostly non-classical, but Xenakis and some others are in there) perspective on the avant-garde circa 1979, you might want to look into the history and contents of the famed Nurse With Wound List. Wikipedia has a good starting point: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_with_Wound_list . The early "industrial" scene drew very heavily on avant-garde methods, and this list is a thing I point to when people don't know that. Enjoy!

Thank you, this was very much the level of analysis of this piece that I needed. As someone with only the most rudimentary music theory, I had always enjoyed Xenakis as avant-garde but never really understood the conceptual basis for what he was doing. This video has me psyched to get more into his work. Thank you! (and also, yeah, I want to hear your composition too. It'd be a really good counterpoint (ha!) to hear a different piece composed with similar methods)