How The 20th-Century Avant-Garde Committed Musical Suicide
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- Our current musical era is sometimes described as "post-modern" (whatever that means) or maybe "post-post-modern," but however you characterize it, the period of wild, self-described "avant-garde" experimentation that occupied much of the 20th century is dead. Originality, if that is the composer's goal, has to be achieved by other means. Here are some thoughts on the matter for your consideration.
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Retired symphony violinist here. The number of pieces that we had to play that were written on graph paper and involved stop watches... so moving! Many years later, when I was orchestral librarian, I discovered a wall in a storage room where all those works had been stored. In ten years, only one piece was requested, by the composer.
Exactly. Very little serious music being created today reaches heart and mind. Great intelligence , systems ,extravagant experiments , fresh new ideas can be dead before their first breath.
Greetings from Germany! Thank you so much for all your terriffic videos! Your RUclips channel is one of my favorites! In the 1980s I studied composition at the Munich music academy (Musikhochschule). We students were strictly forbidden to use any harmonic sounds but forced to write cacophonic music like the at this time hyped German composer Wolfgang Rihm. After one year I was so frustrated that I stopped my studies and changed to the conductor's class. To hell with the 20th-Century Avant-Garde!
Agree totally with your comment. 20th-Century music, politics and art in general was atrocious. Avant-garde was like a papal office. At least now we have diverse styles of music with just as many popes ;-) But we are free to choose and that counts. Everyone can choose what gives them soul's pleasure!
That is like entering university in a mathematics course and being forbidden from doing any arithmetic. Completely bonkers! It should have been the other way around: ban students from doing anything modernist as part of their course work until they are very advanced in their studies and are able to write a decent piece in Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Impressionist style.
Modernism is about bending the rules but in order to bend the rules in any artistically meaningful way, you need to be perfectly capable of working within them.
Exactly.
... a complete misunderstanding of Wolfgang Rihm's work...
@@classicallpvault8251 And Webern would never have approved of it. An English musician who studied with him reports that he disapproved of the then popular depreciation of Wagner, and that he praised greatly the arch of melody in the works of Brahms.
Even nowadays in academia (and note this is just anecdotal), there's an over-insistence on composition students to be 'original' and 'find their own style,' which feels like a hangover from decades ago.
Thinking back to my undergraduate just a few years ago, this attitude unintentionally caused mine and my colleagues' music to sound stifled and hemmed in; any whiff of 'pastiche' was marked harshly.
I went to another institution and my new supervisor had better advice: 'I don't care if it's original I only care if it's good.'
😢 Originality should never be the aim, telling a story, finding your voice, these are the aims.
Originality will emerge naturally, born by the mere fact that composers' influences and listening history are inavoidably different. Contrived 'originality' is a fool's errand. A cautionary tale about putting the cart before the horse.
My fondest memories when performing such music was being at ease since no one could tell if you’d made a mistake.
That's so true! And it says a lot about "composition" of those pieces. Since when did emotion leave symphonic music? Since when did the great masterpieces that brings us joy or tears, etc. become outdated. In this world of AI it is a bit scary.
On the other side of the coin: it really bothered me when as a composition student something of mine was performed poorly, people would reassure me that no one would be able to tell something went wrong, anyway. That suggested my music had no rhyme or reason to anyone but myself and no one expected it to. To me it was dismissive. If music is no longer an act of communication, they've lost the plot!
An excellent point. There was, back in 2012, a conference given by the pianist Jérôme Ducros at the Collège de France, where he compared atonal vs. tonal music. He had specially composed a short tonal piece for the conference, and everybody realised two notes were wrong near the end. Then he played the first page of a known atonal piece from Schönberg, and played more than half wrong. Nobody noticed, not even the musicologists who were attending and were supposed to know that piece. This tells rather a lot.
The conference and its transcripts can easily be found.
When Penderecki was accused of betraying the avant-garde, he replied: I was not a traitor to the avant-garde, but the avant-garde was a traitor to music.
Weirdly enough, I find Penderecki's earlier avant-garde works to be more enjoyable and accessible than his later ones. Much of his later music sounds like what you'd get if you took a Brahms piece and rearranged all the notes to make it atonal. His musical style underwent a similar transformation to that of Ligeti and Lutoslawski in that, they all started out writing sonoric/aleatoric music and later abandoned that technique. The difference is that Ligeti and Lutoslawski's later works demonstrate that they had substance as composers that went beyond writing shifting tone clusters. Penderecki, however, didn't have anything unique to say when he abandoned avant-garde techniques.
@@alans98989 Thanks for mentioning "sonoric" music, I've been looking for the term to describe Ligeti's music with. Sonorism!
I was a student of Stockhausen’s at the U of Penn in 1964. I was 22. I also got to know John Cage very well not as a follower but a good friend and as an engaging conversationalist. I also was one of the last students of Stefan Wolpe. Your theory is quite well defended. The basis for a useful essay which I encourage you to write.
My own pathway took me to many places both within and outside of the framework of avant-garde “movements”. I was fortunate to have always disdained being “part of a movement”, a major aspect of my own liberations. It’s a long story (I am 81). But I wanted you to know that (as someone directly involved) your analysis is spot on.
Thank you very much.
Virgil Thomson called Cage's work "A ping qualified by a thud"
@@Mackeson3 I think we always have to suspect that there was an element of sexual politics in Virgil Thomson's comments about other gay composers. I think it's important to remember that Thomson bribed Ned Rorem with a Guggenheim fellowship to get Rorem to write laudatory criticism of Thomson's work.
I worked as an usher at a concert that featured a work by John Cage. After the piece, the composer was asked to the stage and was loudly booed.
@@johnsimca7093 Yikes. Which work was it?
As a composer who lived through the indoctrination of serial and 12 tone education in the late 70's and early 80's, I completely concure. It took me a good 10 years to clear myself of my 'education' to begin to write anything that had any significance to the 'real' world. I think your analysis is spot on. Thank you for sharing your insight.
Ravel put his finger on the problem when he described Schoenberg's serial technique as "laboratory music". Method became an end in itself, and the audience was lost.
Ravel was wrong. Schoenberg was a Romantic through and through.
Ravel was ALWAYS right 🎉
Strangely enough, he didn't think so.
@thomaslaubli1886 Actually, he wrote both kinds of music, as well as tonal music. De profundis is serial. The last two movements of the second string quartet are twelve-tonal/pan-tonal/freely atonal. The Suite in G for Strings is tonal.
Rene Leibowitz came up with the term "serialism" in 1947 to describe Schoenberg's "method of composing with twelve tones" - the music Schoenberg began writing with the Piano Suite, op. 25. It's a handy synonym. However, Schoenberg wrote all three types of music throughout the rest of his career.
@@steveschwartz8944 Don't forget that Schoenberg's best music was tonal.
“They wrote themselves out of existence” is what I’ll tell my child when he will inevitably ask me what happened to the 20th century musical avant-garde.
Or perhaps "they de-composed themselves..." 🙂
As I listened to your really thoughtful comments, two things came to mind. I heard a specialist in Chinese philosophy, a Canadian-American, observe that the discipline of modern philosophy had given up its roots as "love of wisdom" to become "love of knowledge", a shift from "philo-sophia" to "philo-episteme", or something like that. It seems to me that so much of the academic world has made this shift, under some quest for "deeper" meanings. I see it as a residue of the identification of sin with the body (flesh), or a perpetuation of an "ideal" over what's "real" and here-and-now. I think you can see it in the quest for "authentic" performance in the world of HIP in music. It's permeated the visual arts too, where we move from abstraction to "purely" conceptual art. Artist's like Donald Judd would choose industrial materials, and simple repetitive shapes. He would draw up plans and have manufacturers make the work, so that he hoped his art would be free of his physical touch, free of the taint of feeling - the traditional signs of artistic genius. Be rid of paint brush marks, be rid of the artist's hand, be rid of feeling so that all that remains is pure Idea. Artists where I taught spoke of being "post-media": it didn't matter whether you painted, built, filmed, or performed. What mattered was that your concept determined what media you used. Having lived in this world of contemporary art for decades, I'm not so cynical as to claim that it was always intended as a scam or to "pull the wool over people's eyes." I think it was and continues to be a matter of real belief, for the most part (I've also seen work that I really thought was a scam), but that it was about building its own protective, self-energizing and self-affirming bubble - a kind of shield against real feeling, vulnerability, and against the real hard work that is necessary to create something and share it with others. Thanks, as always, for your wisdom and desire to share.
Even traditionalist painters often feel the pressure to add a conceptual element/concept to their work, even if it’s totally irrelevant. And don’t forget talent. That helps, too. The reams of serial compositions by composers using the method as a replacement for authenticity and creativity, while being praised for it, smothered music for a generation at least.
Two quotes:
"A composer isn't original because he tries to be, but because he can't help it." - Ralph Vaughan Williams
"I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life.” -Bernard Herrmann
I love the story of RVW being shown a piece of 'avant garde music' by a young student, apparently, he handed it back to him with the words "If you ever DO think of a tune old chap, don't forget to write it down will you?" 🤣
Latter quote is by Beecham.
@@pianomaly9 Not according to several Vaughan Williams biographies in which I’ve found it - but, given Beecham’s famous disdain for RVW’s music, perhaps he appropriated the quote out of malice!
@@Mackeson3 Fifty years ago Ives scholar/associate or whatever John Kirkpatrick came to Cal State Fullerton and gave a talk to the composition class. He said to the budding young avant-gardistes (which was by then, as Dave implied pulling the last stops on its organ) "never be afraid of a good tune".
@@musicianinseattle I'm remembering it in Schonberg's "The Great Conductors' , Beecham replying to some query as to what he thought of/didn't conduct Berg's Wozzeck. btw, down here in Covington, Black Diamond and Maple Valley triangle.
Ultimately, expecting people to listen to music designed to be non-melodic, non-rhythmic, non-emotional, non-pretty, is absurd. These were spoiled brats. Their main accomplishment was to cure people of guilt for not appreciating new music; the middle-brow public simply walked away.
I agree with you on this one. I live near a very large university with a music school, so I can have my fill of free but usually very good recitals from faculty and students, on almost any day of the week. Generally, the composition students are moving away from anything avant-garde or serialist or things that do the equivalent of repeatedly blasting F-sharp at 100 decibels, but every once in a rare while I sit through a very avant-garde recital, from someone still trying to beat the proverbial dead horse--and the "message" I get from their "compositions" is so clear that it could just as well be announced with trumpets: "Someone give me a grant! Anyone, PLEASE, give me a grant!"
My parents took me to see Peter Maxwell Davies conduct his "Eight Songs for a Mad King" as a kid. I have had a soft spot for him since then. He fits your pattern. His later works like "Orkney Wedding" and "Mavis in Las Vegas" are far more approachable. An afternoon with his Naxos quartets is a good afternoon for me.
American composer, Stephen Albert said of the atonal/serial movement, "Once you brought the cultural bolshevism of the time, you were down the mindless trail of the avant-garde. Twenty-five years down the line I suspect that one will look back with mystification as to how people took the fifties to the seventies seriously except as some kind of sociological aberration." It seems that Albert had it right.
I'm suspicious of any sentence containing the phrase "cultural Bolshevism".
As a PhD student I feel I must offer an explanation for that "irrelevant minutiae" that have become the common theme of so many doctoral dissertations in musicology and humanities in general. 30 or 40 years ago, a dissertation could take 10 years to complete and end up being like 1,000 pages long. However, as the number of PhD students have increased, the means to finance their research have run thin. Nowadays, a typical doctorate lasts between 4 to 6 years. Some research grants in my country last for just 3 years. This includes at least 1 year to write it up and about 4 more months of revision. This means you may have as little as 2 years for conducting reseach before you're pushed to start writing. That's not much when you're trying to make an original contribution. And to make it even worse, you're are also burdened with other obligations: attenting conferences, doing reseach stays abroad, lecturing and tending to undegraduate students, helping to organize seminars, etc.
In these conditions, it's no wonder we are pushed to limit our reseach to narrower and narrower topics. In my experience it's not really an "Academic Avant-Garde mentality" problem. We would love to expand the scope of what we're doing. It's more of a resources and a systemic problem.
It's still a problem.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Indeed it is! All I wanted to say was that it's not specific to musicology or related to the restrictive mentality of Avant-Garde music, but more of a general (and practical) problem. Great and insightful video, by the way. As always.
Dear Mister Hurwitz, I've been enjoying your mini conferences ( sometimes not so mini, in fact ) for a while now. I find them entertaining AND enlightning. What grabs me most, however, is your immense, exuberant, humourous LOVE and deep, direct, sensual knowledge of music. It is contagious and exhilirating. À propos of this particular topic of the avant-garde and its demise, it seems to me your views intersect with those of Leonard Bernstein's during his famous NORTON LECTURES « The Unaswered question ». His attempt at demonstrating that tonality was embedded somehow in the human condition seems nowadays to be legitimized by this generalized return to a new kind of tonality in music all over the world. I myself spent years -- especially in my youth -- listening almost exclusively to serial, electronic, conceptual abstract compositions. And, with time, I became, as you so rightly put, more INCLUSIVE. Simply, more human. Unafraid of my own emotions. Thanks a million.
Thank you!
@@DavesClassicalGuide The great art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich, whose son I knew, believed tonality to be the natural form of music, and he was an immensely learned Viennese man who had seen all the original avant-garde movement in person. And so, I think, did his friend, the philosopher Karl R.Popper - another Viennese who had seen and heard everything and reached his own conclusions.
My problem with most of the avant-garde is that they ran out of ideas very quickly and had little sense of what their predecessors had already done. I remember attending a concert of contemporary music and realizing that all of the "new" techniques had been done in the Twenties.
@thomaslaubli1886 As I say, I'm interested in new music and go to contemporary programs. The problem, as I've hinted, is who is considered avant-garde? It's hardly a monolith. It includes a wide range of disparate composers, some better than others.
Also, it's hard to begin from scratch with each new piece. Virgil Thomson recognized this when he predicted to Boulez that he would have a very small catalogue. This says nothing about the quality of Boulez's music, but it's right on the money about its scarcity.
The pianist and wit Oscar Levant knew Schoenberg in Los Angeles. He was visiting Schoenberg and Mrs. Schoenberg brought out the coffee. Schoenberg began humming "one of those unhummable tunes" and demanded of his wife, "What work is that?" She didn't know. "That was the piece I dedicated to you."
Levant and Schoenberg were discussing the Violin Concerto. Levant, objecting to the difficulty of the music, asked, "Who's going to play this?" Schoenberg replied, "In a hundred years, everybody."
Only 12 more years to go!😃
@@steveschwartz8944 Schoenberg's Violin Concerto is programmed (it does get played!)at this years BBC Proms prefaced by RVW's 'Greensleves' I'm quite looking forward to that unlikely pairing!
What happened in music after ca. 1950 closely parallels what happened to the visual arts during the same period.
Thank you for your video. Until now I've figured I was just a musical philistine when it came to my disdain of most avant-garde works. I've echoed Rimsky-Korsakov's criticism of younger composers churning out "brain-spun" works with no heart. Now I know I'm not the only curmudgeon out there, and you've enlightened me on why many modern composers have jumped t tracks in the pursuit of soulless exercises. Keep up the good work!
I could be wrong, but I have long felt that not only did the mid-20th century avant-garde music burn out gloriously. But it also seemed to be so unpalatable, that it played a major role in the general public’s overall loss of interest in “classical” music altogether.
The majority hardly like to hear “beautiful classical music”. Why would they go to the concert hall for more chaos?
The classical audience voted with their feet.
I went to grad school to further my composition craft and all I got was some lousy ideas.
Perhaps it was just the particular school and department (it was in the UK), but when I was there they didn’t seem to know what to do with masters students who weren’t studying musicology. They were embroiled in the question of how composition could be a research subject. I’m not sure if the avant-grade actually died or morphed into a different matter. But I still read program notes which read like thesis statements and are more interesting than the music they explain, from composers my generation (millennial) and younger.
That's a good point. Either way, music-making has been ham-strung and suffocated by academia. They've lost the plot.
I loved your presentation. I often wonder that my own symphonies will be hated, not because they are avant garde in any way, but because they are the complete opposite.
I agree, as another composer. I have seen my "romantic" style music turned down and then gone to concerts where a new "modern" work was presented and was, in my Humble Opinion, noise notated to get attention, not express human emotion.
The gatekeepers at our major symphony orchestras need to be replaced by Dave Hurwitz. I would trust him to make better choices. @@PeteFine
I have long felt that music that can be enjoyed needs to have elements that are in some sense familiar, with points at which the composer diverges from our expectations. Without the divergence, the music would be predictable and therefore boring; but without the familiar, with no recognizable form to grasp on to, the sounds become just a series of sounds, with no connection/progression that can transform them into music. Thus, if a piece strays too far from our musical understanding, rather than an intellectual basis, it is difficult to appreciate it, emotionally or otherwise, as music. In a similar way, it is because of Picasso's enormous emotional strength in his earlier works that imbue his less obviously representational later works with their communicative ability. (It is also easier to give a composer who has demonstrated his understanding of 'real' music the benefit of the doubt with his more esoteric works - Tippett and Nicholas Maw come to mind.)
You know the 20th century Avant-Garde was over when the writing (bloviated philosophy) about the music/visual art/performing art(s) was more interesting than the actual performed music/painting/dance. Arvo Part is another great example of a composer who went from 12 tone composition to a more expressive style. Great topic Dave!
Everybody has different likes and dislikes and all I can say is more power to you for not liking Part - it is your privilege. I happen to like Part and have listened to him since the 1990@@thomaslaubli1886
Interesting point of view, largely agree. About Penderecki: I studied with him for several years. The last time we were together he told me over lunch that even though he had spent his summers for years in Lucerne, Boulez--who ran a music festival there--had never programed one of his works. There was a personal animus between them. Plus, I don't think Penderecki's works, since he was a Pole, received the clandestine financial support the avant-garde received from the Committee for Cultural Freedom and its various successors--both of these things might have colored Penderecki's comments about the "avant-garde." There's an irony, that has yet to be addressed, that probably the most performed piece of post WWII music, and probably most loved, is Giazotto's "Adagio." It would be interesting to hear your comments on this.
Boulez made a lot of enemies. On a memorable occasion, he had to be polite to Shostakovich, on one of his visits to the West, after having attacked his music in the bitterest terms decades earlier. Shostakovich had not forgotten, and was freezingly polite in response.
For me, a composer who I guess would be classified as "late Romantic" or so, I find so much modern music (including that which is referred to as Avant Garde, to be little more than an experiment in sound and not containing the emotions that make us human. Some are brilliantly orchestrated but where is the musical content? I hear so many "Look what I can do with the orchestra...look how strange I can sound...isn't that so original?" works that, unfortunately, conductors see worthy of performance. I realize that, in his day, Beethoven, or Mahler, etc. were considered "modern" and "new" but the expressiveness and tonalities that convey emotions were always there. So much of modern composition for classical instruments lacks that, in my view. I truly believe that these new works will never survive and be listened to for centuries like the great masterpieces we still love.
I think that only now, with more sophisticated electronic avant garde music or noise in general becoming a ricurrent element (also in more mainstream Digital composed music) the younger generations are very sensible to atonality and noise. I mean, It all started with rock and roll and then Velvet underground, and now you can see that what people consider cool strong moments in a Song (in contrast with more melodic calm parts) seems to be what composers as Stravinskij or maybe Penderecki invented as atonal elements in their music. If i listen to some of the Penderecki avantgarde works i can recognize a lot of elements that are present in today electronic music and made their way to PoP music in the last Years. Its difficult tò explain in detail. But i think if you are a youngster and you know both avantgarde music and today's electronic music you can see of what im talking about.
Really interesting talk - I agree 100%. I was fascinated by the avant garde as a teenager (40+ years ago) in the sense of marvelling at how quickly music was changing (in the 60s and 70s) and how experimental it had become BUT I was almost always left with the feeling of "This is interesting but doesn't do anything for me [emotionally]". There was also the feeling of this "music" doesn't require any skill to compose. As you say, this music essentially reached a dead end.
The greatest composers are those that could/can actually compose and have something to say which they share with us. So I love Bach to Berg, Reich/Glass, some Maxwell Davies, Tippett, Messaien, even some Xenakis...while some pieces can be initially very difficult to "get" after some perserverance I discover a great emotional message in their works. Conversely I find composers such as Ferneyhough and his New Complexity pretentious drivel that leaves me cold.
A friend and I listened to some Ferneyhough in a Prom Concert in London years ago, and we agreed that the question was, how can you tell whether it's even good or not?
I largely disagree on this. I find most works of the new tonality deadly dull, repetitive and unconvincing. The Avant-Garde of the '50s-'70s hasn't died. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna etc. continue to be performed and recorded. They may have literally passed on, but they continue to influence many young composers. At least in their early works, they were genuinely expressive. (eg. Boulez: Le Soleil des Eaux, Stockhausen: Drei Lieder, Nono: 3 Epitaphs for Garcia Lorca, Maderna: Tre Liriche Greche). True, they placed strictures on themselves with twelve note and serial ideas, but often used these to great expressive purpose. Also defending the twelve note compositions of what is sometimes called the middle generation, the composers who studied with or were directly influenced by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. (Gerhard, Valen, Skalkottas, Searle, Lutyens etc., all of whom were able to work successfully in large musical forms. Off my soap box now!!! Otherwise, I greatly enjoy your postings!
It may surprise you to learn that I don't actually disagree with you about the fact that many of those composers wrote excellent music. The reality, though, is that nothing you have said matters a bit, because even your list of "good stuff" repulses most listeners, and ultimately,, even in the snotty and rarified world of classical music, listeners do matter.
@@DavesClassicalGuide - "most listeners" don't want to hear any non-pop music whether it be avant-garde or not. Although, if given the choice, they would probably hear Pachelbel (for the millionth time) over Xenakis.
@@JohnPrepuce Exactly. And, to be honest, I am tired and sick of Pachelbel's Canon, which most people feel and believe is beautiful, and wonderful while, for me, is overplayed, nothing happens in that piece, and I even prefer some minimalist pieces in which happen more things.
@@JohnPrepuce Even If I don't like every piece by Xenakis, but give me, for example, Pleiades, or few other works than Pachelbel's Canon. Or Vivaldi's Spring.
@@bernab - I would easily listen to any of the composers the OP listed than Pachelbel's canon, or any other pop music, Kenny G, or Taylor Swift, or whoever. Pop doesn't really do it for me.
Excellent talk, Dave. Thank you!
I think the avant- guard underestimated how complicated it is to write music that’s actually good in that style. Berg’s violin concerto is a work that I think sounds great, but most other pieces are just music for musicians that, like free jazz, has no heart and soul.
Some free jazz I like, but a lot of it was just crap.
@@Warp75 Yeah, you have to be really good to know what to do with all that freedom.
@@SoiledWigThat’s exactly it
It would seem to me that the musical history of the 20th century was such a liberation of formal styles, eclectic interests, raw emotionality and psychology, disturbing expressionism and political and social restrictions and upheaval, that growing pains would be inevitable. No wonder so many Serialists abandoned the form and re-embraced tonality. No wonder that radical changes prompted the post- and neo- influences (neo-Classical, post-Romantic, etc.); was it experimentation or fear or something else? It seems to me that some avant-garde music is just academic, experimental for its own sake. It’s music that I can walk away from without regret. I love both tonal and atonal (I wish there was another word!) and dissonant and lyrical music, but not everything. Not all aleatory music is as good as Lutoslawski, for example. What we call “Modern” is still developing.
Excellent and thoughtful comments. However, there are still many critics and some influential (younger, oddly enough) composers in academia who still persist in a single-minded agenda: either absolute novelty or a great deal of abstraction are still the only allowable angles in 21st century composition. (The embrace of technological novelty doesn't help). Or, especially for some middle-aged critics, normal human emotions are too 'sentimental' to be allowed in new music. Dave is so correct in pointing out the inhumanity in this kind of agenda. For us tonally- minded composers from the late 20th who got sidelined, and who also did not follow the minimalists' path, this is still an uncertain and strange time-we might have some musical and life experience to offer, but too many younger composers whose ears have been too often numbed by simplistic pop and electronics cannot relate. Not all, to be sure. However, one of the problems (as Dave points out in a subtle way) is that a lot of avant-garders young and older really don't have much harmonic facility. Nor are they able to create memorable melody. Nor have they the capability to even play a wedding gig. I know that's an extreme statement, but....listen.
I have thought about this: The Avant Garde were musical nihilists. But far from being dead, it's alive and well today, it evolved into 'Techno' and EDM. And now millions of so called 'musicians' make this awful 'grand child of minimalism' up on their computers with no idea really what they are doing apart from just looping and looping. Put a beat with it and your set to go. That is what some of these good intentions ended up being. On the other hand people like Glass and Reich became classicists and Glass in particular became a great symphonist in later life. I think your premise is correct, Dave, and thanks for your video. Very interesting.
You got it right. Can't be said or discussed better 👍
Thanks for this very thought-provoking presentation. It's a subject I've considered many times from my extremely unacademic viewpoint. It seems to me that the 20th and even 21st century composers we most enjoy are those who continued the traditions of instrumentation left to us by the 19th century. So through the 20th century we had Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, etc. This continues now into Adams, Macmillan and so on. It seems to me that fast technological developments, especially in the field of electronics, lured some musicians into a route to composition which avoided the rigours of the centuries. The use of electronics in instrumentation and performance using recorded music/sound allowed the merely modern to parade as academic and ingeneous. Some excellent composers do use electronics but I struggle to think of any who have not previously and to a greater extent used 'traditional' instrumentation.
I'm glad that stuff exists for its own sake.
I have never had any use for it.
Your description of a inclusive composer fits the beatles perfectly!
Modern composers seem to think music should be seen but not heard. They have so intellectualized it that audiences have a hard time connecting with it, and in its place movie soundtracks have become the modern version of concert music. It conveys emotions, drama, story telling and is often memorable, hummable and even singable and audiences can associate the music with something specific.
In his history of twentieth century music, “The Rest is Noise,” Alex Ross describes members of the avant garde as detesting music that appealed to normal audiences.
My experience in a music department fifty years ago, there was the "everything composed between 1600 and 1950 is crap" crowd.
*What a contribution.* Done in a leisurely, casual style, yet you touched some corner stones of the XXth century music phenomena. I sometimes don't agree with your reviews (mostly well), but even then you feel there is a great musical intellect and insight behind judgements you don't approve with. This video has confirmed to me that I haven't spent many hours on your channel in vain.
One thing that might elude you in this survey: the art is born within / out of its age. The _zeitgeist..._ The artists, especially the composers, cannot transcend their day and age and break out of the world they live in... Well perhaps only some, like *_Arvo Pärt,_* or performers like *_Elisabeth Chojnacka,_* but they occupy a special and rather limited niche. Briefly, there cannot be a grand heroic or even cheerful juicy music in an age of fallen, limp humanity, shaped by consumerism and media lobotomized, reduced onto a lower stage of existence with the art surviving just in the form of left-over exotic islands far from the society's mainstream.
In the 20th century, a very confused century, intellectually speaking - the narrative became more important than the event. Many composers would mostly base their careers on their ideas about music rather than the music itself. In fact, the music would simply be attached to the narrative just in order to justify the concert and the label of the composer. There are though many great avant-garde composers and compositions, and many important ideas, concepts and techniques worth studying and enjoying. Actually, I think they are indispensable for a composer.
Ideology is a terrible glitch of the mind that both led to horrible death on a massive scale in 20th Century wars and to the horrible sound of the ‘Avant-garde‘ attempt to apply ideology to ‘music‘. I’m convinced that in the future, most of it will be of interest only to clarify that - if education gets around to the task of protecting us all from the ideolgy glitch
Brilliant Video. WOW.
George Rochberg turned his back on the Avant-Garde and thereby achieved considerable success. See his: Violin Caprices, String Quartets, Transcendental Variations, and Symphony 5.
...and how dogmatic they were. Thinking about young Boulez booing neo-classicist concerts by Stravinsky...
I subscribe to the comments of the great musical humorist, Anna Russel. With modern music, you never know if the composer has reached great new heights, or if he is just trying to put one over on us.
depends how familiar you are with the idiom? when I first heard Debussy's 'Jeux' as a teenager i was utterly perplexed by it but i just listened to umpteen times til i felt as if i could relate to it. I hesitate to say' understand' as i think the piece retains a mystery. Nonetheless, it would have been easy for me to write the piece off on first encounter.
@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist I’m nearly seventy and I stil struggle with Jeux. However, with kind people reconstructing Nijinsky’s choreography as best they can and putting it on RUclips I have become more familiar with the piece. It’s grown on me much more. As for the usual knee-jerk response to unable to hum a tune from modern music, I defy anybody to find a truly extended tune in Jeux. There are fragments all over the place, creating a mosaic. Those guardians of the sacred tune wouldn’t denigrate it as tuneless as its ‘nice’ because it’s Debussy.
Rant over.
@@Gwailo54 great description of the ballet score.
Long ago I found that there was a parallel with visual art, namely painting, and music. In the early 1970s I took the art class at the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia. Violette DeMazia gave a lecture on abstract art as compared to art that had (figurative) subject matter. Without saying that abstract art was bad, she pointed out that all the elements of abstract art; drawing, composition, color etc. are also contained in figurative art. So the intellectual appreciation can be similar. But figurative art has the extra benefit in that anyone can more easily have a relationship with the work of art.
Likewise, melody gives everyone an entry point into a work of music. Take that away and you are left with just intellectual appreciation.
Excellent. I'd like to hear you continue this premise and expand into the 20th c. rise and dominance of popular culture especially for the general listener. Concert music and new music movements of the day can never seem to compete with the commercial machine as a cultural phenomenon.
I got into Shostakovich from an early age and his marvellous mid to late 20th c music was dark, beautiful, amazingly expressive and largely tonal.
Umm....Soviet Union under Stalin and the Communist Party?
Hallo from Greece! Enjoyed your way to talk! Beside playing almost exclusively Bach I find much innocent pleasure in Turkish classical music.
Hi Dave, I hope you do a video on your favourite classic pieces of the 21st century.
At some point in “art”, I think the avant- garde & ultra-modernism just had to come about and then eventually run it’s course. We just happened to be alive to experience that epoch. Unfortunately for many of us “art” in the 20th century took on the most reprehensible aspect of politics-sheer arrogance. “We’re going to shove this stuff down your throat whether you like it t or not. You`re sitting in the middle of the row and were going to shove George Walker into your ears between two Beethovens. Deal with it! What are you gonna do, get up and leave?” [The NSO did just that.] I agree that there is a lot of modern music in the last century which is inventive & interesting and engagingly challenging to the ears, which can be satisfying in itself, but there is a limit to general audience patience and acceptance. Even Stokowski often dealt with that issue during his life.
Cage's In a Landscape and Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness seemed to come from nowhere given their composers. And what did Leonard Bernstein mean when he said music is "about nothing"? BTW Mr. Hurwitz, your recommendation of the DORAT'S box set of Beethoven's nine symphonies was spot on. I am very happy with the purchase and realized there was more to composer's symphonies than 5, 7, and nine. Thank you again. Your channel has become a daily indispensable treat. I am subscribed.
Thank you for watching!
The modernist tendency was to believe how you communicated was more important - or, indeed, of more interest, than what you were trying to communicate. Same with the Avant-Gard, perhaps.... 17:37
"Modern" composers opened doors to bring in dissonance, ambiguity, descriptive timbrality and timbral experimentation. I think these things are important TOOLS for further expressions in composition, But NOT the purpose of composition. That said, I do find previously unheard concepts executed exciting at times.
Haydn did all that too, and he did it better.
I remember seeing a documentary about Simon Rattle, he was rehearsing some Hans Werner Henze stuff with The CBSO and all at once he stopped and said "Hang on, I think I've found a tune here somewhere!"
My old music teacher went to a concert featuring something or other by Peter Maxwell Davies. He said where he was sitting he could see the score on the conductor's music stand and he said it just looked as if someone had loaded some ink onto the tip of a 12 inch ruler then flicked it onto the page "Flick flick flick orchestrate that!" he said.🤣
This was a really interesting take, David. Loved it.
I like your thesis about this. One point of mine: I think many of the post WW II avant garde started writing for other composers and gave the finger to general audiences. Didn't Milton Babbit write an article for a music magazine saying composers didn't need audiences anymore? Maybe it's personal with me. I learned, over a year, some insanely difficult pieces by a local composer, played some of them in recital, and recorded them and his other pieces for organ. After that was out of the way, he broke our acquaintance, considering me too stupid to tolerate now that I had recorded his music. I don't think he's the only composer to think that way. After all, Wagner thanked Hans von Bülow for his devotion by stealing his wife!
No good deed goes unpunished (sigh)!
@@DavesClassicalGuide Actually, he took offense by my liking the music of a local woman composer, whose work was very different from his...still fighting the avant garde culture war.
This is why Tchaikovsky wrote the most moving, beautiful music ever written. Thank god he realized that music should be beautiful.
To attempt an analogy, rather like spelunking (or 'pot holing' if you are English), there is some value in mapping subterranean tunnels even if most of them are dead-ends. It can be a dangerous pastime especially when the dead ends become literal. Very very occasionally a new passage is discovered and options are widened. Devoting years of one's life to such exploits is risking wasting precious creativity time (not that composition is a competition). The classical tradition is just that - a tradition, and traditions tend to preserve the best aspects of the past and evolve cautiously if new accretions prove sufficiently robust when tested. In the music technology sphere there was a period in the late 1980s when computing and MIDI was offering enticing potential for compositional exploration with crude artificial intelligence - random notes which obeyed programmable rules of probability and so forth. It produced interesting and fascinating results for the spelunking operator, with memorable happy accidents etc. but for an audience it would eventually become tiresome - like an unwanted wind chime.
To me the ultimate irony is how much of this music was eventually unoriginal. So much sounded like the same chaotic mess with little to grab onto as a listener. I'm glad most composers today do not go that route.
Great composers are pretty rare, no matter their style. Why would we expect anything different from the avant-gardists?
Also, what do we mean by "avant-garde?" It seems that it depends on the current musical consensus. Boulez reacted against neoclassicism and Romanticism, moving toward greater architectural complexity. The minimalists reacted against the complexity. As you point out, the better minimalists moved toward greater inclusivity of traditional methods and viewpoints and greater expressivity. Reich went from phase tape pieces to Different Trains, Adams from Shaker Loops to the Violin Concerto.
Speaking of Rochberg: is there any indication that Naxos will finish that fabulous collection of his symphonies? I have learned to love Rochberg, but he is seriously under-recorded. In my humble opinion.
I agree, and I wish I knew.
I can't ever remember leaving the symphony humming a twelve tone row. I wouldn't know what one sounds like to identify it without a heads up in the program notes, and then I still wouldn't when I was hearing it.
First time on this channel. What a magnificent work of thought and sensibility this video is. If you have it transcribed, i'd LOVE to translate it to Spanish, so I can share it with non English speaking people around here. (The RUclips automatic translation of automatic subtitles works awfully, sadly).
Cheers, and thanks!
Sorry but I don't have it transcribed--thank you, though, for your kind thoughts!
Nobody listens to classical modern avant garde classical music, like most modern art it becomes completely shallow.
I was jealous of a fellow student who said his college major was "composition" -- I desperately wished I could be him. Then, after a year or so, I asked him "How's the composition going?" "Oh, I quit." I felt terrible for him. He explained, "If you write anything beautiful, they make fun of you. Everything has to be ugly. I didn't choose to be a composer in order to write music that I don't like." What he said kept ME from becoming a composer for at least a decade. I think EVERY composer in the world needs to watch your video here -- it has been a long time in coming.
How long ago was that? i was a comp. major in the late 90's, and at least at my school, we weren't hamstrung in that manner.
I remember now, it was in 1978. Fortunately for me, in 1977 John Williams released that wonderful 2-LP set of STAR WARS with the London Symphony which, for me, was a revival of "Classical Music" being composed, by FILM composers. So, I (eventually) used that ("Film music") as my excuse to become a composer. Now I write classical music, which is all I really wanted to do all along.@@SoiledWig
perfect workaround!@@kellyrichardson3665
@@kellyrichardson3665 Bravo!
I really think that there were two kind of avant-garde composers: those who cared about his music actually being listened and enjoyed by someone (Penderecki, Zimmermann, Ligeti...), and those who didn't (Stockhausen, Kagel...). It seems a fact that the first ones evolved and survived the avant-garde dictatorship, and the others didn't.
But I agree with you: the first ones where great musicians, and the others just weren't.
For me, Part & Gorecki (among a few others) publicly blew the whistle on the whole thing from the early 1990s onwards. Clearly, uncompromisingly modern- but immediately & hugely popular as well. The common put-down that audiences were like sheep- only wanting to hear unchallenging classical era stuff- just didn't hold water any more.
I don't know -- those two are both pretty easy to listen to.
@@jimcarlile7238Very easy to listen too
@@jimcarlile7238 Mmm, well, it depends on. The famous works are easy to listen to. But I am not sure the first part of the Second Symphony of Gorecki or Lerchenmusik would be very welcome by the same ones that like his 3rd Symphony.
Medtner and Busoni wrote already early in the 1900's pamflets against the type of modernism they saw as perilous to Music. Not yet even having heard anything that would be the later Avant Garde. Maybe Pierot Lunaire was already too much for them...
Fascinating stuff, truly. Does anyone have any links to academic papers / sources that are drawn from in the video? I'm working on an essay. Thanks :)
Fear, inhibition and negation.....so true. Very wise, Dave. In the music dept. of my uni in the early seventies, it was clear that the pervading style was all about not doing whatever had been done before. It was a kind of arrogence, thinking that rhythm, harmony and melody were old hat, passè, no use. Without them, though, you cannot entice audiences (only those few who suscribe to the emperor's new clothes). They would loath your frequently stated view that music is entertainment. It was a puritanical, life denying attitude which, thankfully, no longer exists to any great deal, as far as I am aware. I once asked Wilfrid Mellers, who was the Professor when i was an undergraduate, if he'd ever seen minimalism coming. Could he have predicted it? And he said no....but he didnt know what else could have come after Berio, Cage etc. Athough i have to say that I did enjoy a few of the concerts at the time. If it's going to survive at all, such music needs to be heard live, watching the musicians at work. Then, sometimes, the sonorities of certain passages can be fascinating.
The avant-garde still rules... it has shaped 21st century music . Take a look and listen to the Pulitzer Prize winners of this century. or at the works selected for ACO readings and the like, no one dares to play anything with a melody, and the truth is many composers who attempt melody are simply inept at it. Great composers are very rare
Classical music is a niche in the world of music, and Avantgarde is one in classical music. 99.99% of the results might be failures, but I'm always sympathizing with the SF approach to explore new worlds. I think successful examples for this approach are Liszt's b minor sonata and Schönberg's 2nd string quartet.
I like the phrase that Rorem used, "any notes will do."
I've always thought it was a shame that Schoenberg didn't stick with tonality longer because some of his early works like The Gurre-Lieder and Verklarte Nacht are just beautiful. Verklarte Nacht was even considered "danceable" and Anthony Tudor used it as the score for his ballet Pillar of Fire. Even though the themes of this ballet are very dated, it's still worth seeing because of how well it fits with Schoenberg's music.
It's like what I say about architecture: an interesting concept is all very well, but you can't live in a concept. Music, like architecture, must serve human needs ahead of any ideology or abstract ideal.
When I’m not able to tell the difference between when the musicians tuning their instruments or when they play the music, then I know it is Avant-Garde.
Although the beginning of Beethoven's Choral Symphony always sounds to me a bit like a tuning-up ... but not the rest! Maybe a Beethoven joke.
very good lecture which I shared on facebook. Coming from a different art form, the art school I attended reminded me of what Churchill said about German culture: "In Germany, everything is prohibited except what is allowed." The full quote is in four parts: "In England, everything is allowed except what is prohibited. In Germany, everything is prohibited except what is allowed. In Russia, everything is prohibited including what is allowed. In France, everything is allowed including what is prohibited." Perhaps, the music schools are like German culture.
Spengler said that western music blasted apart with Wagner and that western art faded away with the Impressionists.
And all of that is nonsense.
The classical avante garde community and project progressed beyond stale dogma to their own fresh dogma- which of course eventually became stale, too. But for a while, it was fresh. And some of the works created were wonderful nevertheless.
During the last Century IRCAM seemed to reighn supreme. Did they ever produce a listenable piece of music? At least Picasso in his Rose and Blue periods produced works that could be understood and apprecieated by a large percentage of the population.
As a composer with personal and professional connections to many fellow composers and musicians I can say without hesitation that those working exclusively within avant garde idioms of their own design are unequivocally the absolute least naturally musical people I know of (with the possible exception of those working at record labels lol), and I mean less musical than your average lawyer. I enjoy some of them on a personal level and respect their intellectual rigor, but without fail these are rigid, fearful, inhibited, insecure, and highly judgmental folks, possessing little if any knowledge of, and zero interest in, the popular music of their own or any other time period. Rather, their artistic interests begin and end with other composers who work exclusively within their own invented avant garde idioms - and I don’t even mean listening to said composers, I mean reading up on their own intellectual justifications for their own works. None of it is about music. It’s about being the smartest person in the room. I honestly think the idea of having a tune stuck in their head would strike them as simply annoying. The rampant insecurity underpinning this mindset tends to bring with it an intense desire to denigrate and dominate those who create art based on genuine emotion and might actually be a little bit fun to listen to or look at, and this is very damaging to real artistic progress. My overarching response to the avant garde composers in my life: “Maybe you’re just not that into music?” IMHO 😂
I agree with you, it seams to me that all of art have it's limits - the human spirit is alveus in search for some now media to express itself when the old one drains out the given possibilities , which, I think, is not necessary a bad thing - that aside, I wonder, how do you value the Schnittke's work among the others avantgarde composers of the late XX century, let's say from mid 70's up to now, and his music in general?
Sometime in the early 70's I got hold of a set of records put out DG that had an anthology of several composers oh five or six long playing records, I really don't recall how many but after slogging my way through and the composer you mentioned Heinz was one of them the rest I don't recall but I'm sure Cage was there also.
Bare in mind that I had paid out good hard cash for this set but I was basically very, very disappointed with most of it >Sound generators and other clicks and pops but ZERO as in Zero emotional involvement . I found most of it to t be pretentious and elitists in the worst possible sense.
Dave: What do you think about Harry Partch?
I've discussed him here and at Classicstoday.com.
The title of Milton Babbit's 1958 essay sums up the post-WW2 zeitgeist: "Who Cares if You Listen?" The antithesis was stated well by Randall Thompson (1899-1984) when he said, "A composer's first responsibility is, and always will be, to write music that will reach and move the hearts of his listeners in his own day," but Thompson was a stubborn holdout against that zeitgeist.
That was not Babbit's title.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Yes, he often said that. But he was a bit disingenuous since he allowed it to be published under that title.
10:00 this is exactly my problem Boulez' music. I'm sure if you have the score and years of music theory training it's very clever but to listen to without that, it's meaningless.
Having met several dozens of contemporary composers, and having performed a number of their pieces, I can say this: The vast majority of them lack any sense of humility; both interpersonally and intellectually. Especially the younger ones.
Finally someday said it: "the Emperor is wearing no clothes!" How difficult was that? Thank you!
Boulez was the classic example of someone "pretending to be a genius". He was a fine technician but just lacked musical inspiration - even though I quite like some of his works - Structures and Repons - as "curiosities".
I've thought about this and there's some merit to your "dead end" hypothesis. I do think one problem with the mid-20th century avant garde (and, especially, those strangely holding on to that mindset today) is the idea of "moving the art forward." But art doesn't work like that! For all of Haydn's longing for "what remains to be done" art, I've found, is like an organism: it evolves naturally.
Perhaps this will consign me to continued anonymity. But what the hell!
You are misinterpreting Haydn's comment for the sake of your point.
You give me too much credit! I am misunderstanding it. @@DavesClassicalGuide
Even during, after ànd before the Schönberg 'revolution' there were great composers that worked on the egde of tonality, in a realm that Wagner made possible: Debussy, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Janaceck, Bartok to name a few. And more recent: Glass, Pärt etc. During the 'reign' of atonality, these were deemed bourgeois, retro, sentimental, outdated etc. But atonal music never reached people's hearts or even minds - it cannot because it ignores a few basic and organic requirements to proces or enjoy music or be touched by it. It is a dead brainchild, whose protagonists ruled the musical world for half a century, as a very powerfull elite (Boulez) - allthough they had no real audience. They are now clearly and finally outdated themselves.
You’re absolutely 💯 correct ✅ I’m 54 years old and I’m an audiophile and “ musicophile “ and this avant-garde movement(s) is bankrupted, discontinued and a by gone era in music 🎶 and Cinéma 🎥. The only side of this movement that was incorporated and effectively so is in the film 🎥 industry and in the scenes and sequences that “thrill” is needed which with the help of surround sound technologies it brought the audience to the edge of their seats 💺. That’s the only powerful and effective fruit 🍎 of avant-garde music 🎶 used as sound special effects in different genres of films 🎥. In the end our brain 🧠 is always an instinctively so looking for melodies, harmonies, rhythms and structures and frames 🖼️♾️💎✨🎶👂🫵
Very simply classical music had a connection to and incorporated popular music and tunes. It died when it became overly academic and disconnected from broader culture, as academics are prone to do.
Yep! Turning something into an academic exercise is the quickest way to lose the plot.
BRAVO DAVE! YES!!!
"Who Cares if You Listen." Milton Babbitt, High Fidelity, 1958
Actually, he never said that and he took issue with the title of that article (it was the magazine's).
his music isn't unattractive. There's a good description of it in Alex Ross's ' The Rest is Noise'
I studied with Henri Lazarof. You touched on aspects and dimensions of his musical persona quite accurately.
Sorry, but for the most part, 20th-century avant-garde music is simply unbearable. Unlike many of the symphonies from the classical and romantic eras, these safe and effective concoctions of musical gobbledygook never motivate us to buy the CD or download the music, as in "Oh, my, I absolutely must have this new rendition of Brahms's 4th!" Very few of us can remember the sequence of tones or non-harmonic progression, and it's hardly far off to say that in some cases, the scratching of fingernails on the classic chalkboard would be preferable.
One of the things I always appreciated moving from classical music to jazz, was that avant garde jazz was based upon commercial realities just as much as the "normal" stuff.
If anyone was willing to go out on a limb and do the whole free jazz thing, and actually make a career out of it from a paying audience - more power to them. If they could not, then perforce they would do something else. There wasn't the whole insulation from reality provided by government subsidy as in the world of avant garde classical music.
Even in this situation free/avant garde jazz was attacked by certain personages who claimed that the listeners were pretentious know-nothings who had no taste. But here the laws of capitalism go the other way; if people actually want to spend money to listen to Cecil Taylor or Peter Brotzmann, it really is nobody's business whether they are a "competent" audience or not. To me it's far preferable for music to proceed in that direction, than in the direction of subsidy.
There has been plenty of subsidized free jazz/improv, in Europe at least. Fully subsidized month long tours of the US, often playing for audiences of 5 people. Power dynamics, trends, and in-groups operate much in the same manner as academics. Seems this is losing steam though
In pretty much any creative endeavour there is always a coterie of self-appointed experts which feels compelled to undo the parameters of the thing they claim to love.
Gourmets who eat bugs; poetasters who despise rhyme and rhythm; novel readers who sneer at plots and characters; listeners who choose noise.
In every case, those people deserve pity: they have killed the thing they love, as Wilde wrote.
Hey, what's bad about eating bugs? I lived in Asia for decades, so I've feasted on mole-crickets and a few other odd things, and frankly, they were delicious! It's all in the preparation ...