It's funny how Ned Rorem is one of those names that keeps popping up as someone who's really quite important, but if you ask anyone you know to name a piece of his you'll probably get a blank stare. I'm one of those. I guess I better get with it.

Hey! I have "Perniciosus" on my iTunes! It's a hypnotizing piece. (I was banned from YC).

Then the chances are good that he/she will say it in a different way.

Allied to the question posed by this thread - 'why we don't have great composers today' - is the corollory whether cold muscicological brilliance and not any subjective pleasant feelings associated with a work should be the criteria in judging a piece.

Take the example of serialism, 12 tone compositons and Arnold Schoenberg and his school.

Schoenberg's innovations were brilliant. But my biased view is that if we read almost every work dealing with music therapy, Schonberg - or even anyone who ignores composing that respects the tonic, can be, and usually is stressful to those listening to it.

I would welcome what others ideas are here.

I know it smacks of elitism, but if the listener, like most here, who before listening to much of Schoenberg, Berg et al, has been properly taught the principles of **how** they are composing and the rules they are following, then even albeit one may in a cerebral sense not like their music, let alone find the slightest satisfaction in trying to play what can be very demanding pieces, - dare we suggest that they were not 'great composers'? I would not for one.

Discussions like these on this thread as we know invariably introduce the gigantic topic as to what is music per se. I have no intention of going down that semi-OT path. However a stage is reached with the sheer making of sounds I feel can no longer be called music - without forfeiting its rightful place elsewhere in the Arts. But not as 'composers'.

I certainly do not include those composers who have incorporated bird song(s), whales and other animals into their pieces.

Apropos the above, could anyone make any comments as to whether the listener's preference is a crucial factor in considering whether any composer is 'great' - or is it based on received knowledge in - from my accident of birth - Western musical history and heritage? Phew - what a run of emotionally subjective terms and expressions in a singe post!

All the best,

ILH

ScottM - I agree with your comments re 'degenerate music'

Of concern for me - and I am German - is that 'degenerate music' was of course a Nazi phrase.

Arising from this flows two issues I have:

The first is that by using a term of theirs - and a read of the 1937 Exhibition of Degenerate Music or Fred Prieberg's book on music in that period - we are resurrecting a phrase that in the way it was used, was utterly nonsensical.

The second is that I wonder just how many persons who have bought or been given upon the purchase of unrelated CD's at a store, either the 'Degenerate Music' Sampler or as a result of this, or independently as a result of the publisher's blurb, have bought recordings from such 'degenerate artists' - have upon playing same, almost unconsciously have at the same time listened to determine the 'degeneracy' of the work at hand.

The power of auto-suggestion is not to be sneezed at.

Regards,

ILH

Why? This doesn't make any sense.
A musical idiot is just that: an idiom, upon which every kind of message can be conveyed.
That's like saying that since Marion Zimmer Bradley is a writer of sci-fiction if someone has something different to say he or she won't write a sci-fi book because as long as she or he uses the idiom of sci-fiction he or she will automatically be identical to Marion Zimmer Bradley and will say necessarily the same things she has said.

[/b]

You can't base the idea of being a great composer to the concept of being a musician listener. Music is universal and if something is great it is great period regardless of who listens. Appreciation of music is also not much intellectual. You certainly can on your own appreciate the composition technique, the harmonic details and so on but when you listen something for the first time it's just you and the music and you're too busy absorbing the music which is or not hitting chords into you to worry about the technique behind it. This is the same of cinephiles. They indeed care about the direction, the photography, the lights, the costumes but this is an after-work. Even them, when they see a movie for the first time, just enjoy the sensations, feelings and emotions the story is giving them, they're completely absorbed and experience the thing emotionally not intellectually. As someone said theater and music requires the suspension of judgement and an almost trance condition of reception. The role of the artist is actually to use complex tools to create something which is immediate and doesn't require the knowledge or mastery of such tools to be appreciated. The great music is the music that a farmer who have never studied music might appreciate and not the music that can be appreciated only by those few who have studied music theory and only because they're resiting emotive absorption in favour of intellectually analysis; which as a concept is anti-musical in itself.

I don't think I was saying anything of the sort. What I meant was more like saying that the writer of sci-fiction with something different to say was unlikely (didn't say it was impossible) to write a sci-fi book in the style of MZB. I don't think harmonic idiom is quite analogous with a genre of writing.

I think 4'33" is music, and is exactly that, in very pure form. It certainly is high in the rankings of most profound music written the last century. At any rate, isn't it the composer who gets to decide the matter, not the listener? Seems to me that has to be the way it is, by definition.

Also, just so you know that some people have heard other of Cage's music, I attended a performance of his "Dance/4 Orchestras" some years ago, and it was one of the most beautiful things I've heard in the last couple of decades. His chance procedures don't always click for me, but when they do, it's amazing. Plus, there have been multiple recordings of his gorgeous Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, so somebody somewhere must be listening to his stuff.

wr: Let's not get into details and corrections and stuff like that. My comment was a general comment and should be taken as such.

Cage is (mostly, as in 51%) known for 4'33" which is not music as most people perceive it in the traditional sense.

I personally HAVE CDs of all prepared piano sonatas and interlludes and have linked people to a few youtube clips with such works by Cage, exactly to prove that.

I hope I didn't sound too condensending or anything, but as many times as I've seen the name Cage come up in a(n Internet) discussion the title 4'33" also comes up. That's all!

And no, actually, it's not the composer who decides, it's the listener and their past experience, as well as their mind. In highly complex music, or (to the opposite side) the mind can choose to take out any elements and augment them, in such a way to make them recognisable. To start listening to patterns which are not there intentionally, etc.

So, no, not in all cases. It is a balance I find between the composer, the performers AND the audience.

Danny Niklas: You probably have a tpyo in your post! It's musical idiom, or musical idiot?

EDIT: Wagner. Thought it was you, from the way your post sounded!

I don't think your farmer is going necessarily to appreciate late Beethoven quartets or sonatas, or Bach's Art of Fugue, just for a few examples that I think shouldn't be too controversial. It is true that the farmer might appreciate them without any special background in classical music, if she/he were a particularly sensitive soul and highly attuned to music, but I just don't think it can be assumed. And I think those pieces I mention should fall into any reasonable category of "great" music, if we're talking about music within the realm of Western classical music. If that's not what we're talking about, of course, those examples won't hold.

I also don't understand why "intellectual" content in music shouldn't count somehow. To me, it is so intertwined with music, I rarely bother to even think of it as separate. For example, the very basic elements of how the Classical era composers created a sense of inevitableness in sonata form is at least partly through their intellectual understanding of tonality and motivic construction - it wasn't pure instinct by any means. And to me as a listener, part of the musical pleasure comes from experiencing how they worked with the form on an intellectual level, even if I don't consciously analyze what I am hearing when I am hearing it. It seems strange to me that anyone would say music should not include that kind of stuff, when it is so much a part of what makes classical music classical music.

So what's the prescription, doctor? More ghost-centricism and post-biological feminism? More little-green-women-centricism? I expect more post-knowledge blather...

Really? The Nietzsche I've read is reasonable and insightful. You make him sound like he was mad.

Why not?
As I said I think each person who creates music as its own personal mark, it's unique fingerprints which become part of the music itself. So no one can write music like Mozart and no one can write books like MZB just like no one can write posts like yours or mine except us. But this doesn't mean the harmonic idiom can't be the same it will just be processed and treated in a different way.
For example there's a modern composer of music in the baroque style. His music is rather famous and appreciated and no one think "I would rather listen to Bach" because him and Bach are completely different and can coexist even if the idiom is similar.

I don't think you do.
I agree that musical analysis adds pleasure, for us musicians, to the appreciation of what we have heard but I don't think it is something that happens at your first listening were you're more aborbed in the emotive transportation of music.
It's like watiching "making of" of movies. After I have seen a good movie in DVD watching the "making of" and finding out how certainly seemingly easy scenes actually required a lot of work, expertise, precision adds a lot of pleasure to the whole expeirence, but this is hardly what I thought while enjoying the movie while my being was totally immersed in the plot and almost forgot time, space and felt immersed into that parallel world. Art shouldn't be made for artists to compliment each other but it is an universal language which is supposed to communicate with you on a level which shouldn't require technical knowledge as a painter, a sculptur, a musician/composer, a movie director, a photographer, a computer animator and so on; part of the artist work is being the only one who acknowledge the "secret" of the hand work behind its creation; in fact as an artist once said the secret of art is making the hand and complex (only the artist knows about) appear easy and effortless and natural; with a life on its own.

And who might this composer be?

If you feel like it, why don't you start composing baroque music yourself. If the world needs a composer like this as badly as you suggest, then you should reach fame and fortune rather quickly!

There is still much marketable value in composing in an old idiom. Mostly this is what is done in movie and film music. If anyone has seen the Pride and Prejudice series with Colin Firth you may or may not know that the title music was newly written by Carl Davis. It was supposed to have the feel of music of the early 19th century. It is a beautiful example of how old sounding music can still be useful and artful.

I can say with complete confidence that if John Williams composed his film music like John Cage he would still be down and out in Hollywood, poor and wretched. I will concede that prepared piano works may be music, but can you really see people admiring "Indiana Jones" movies if the music was written like that? They would be complete flops and Williams would be roundly criticized.

Or why didn't they just make the soundtracks for the Harry Potter movies by setting up a microphone and recording a few hours of London traffic a la 4'33"? It would be even better because it lasts longer wouldn't it?

If music was defined any old way you want, it would never have been invented. Do you think our ancestors just happened to call music sounds that were organized and not background sounds of mammoths being roasted? Music by definition is set apart from background noise. There is no way around it. 4'33" is not music -it is a listening exercise. However, the 50 or so people in the world who think it is music are not going to change what the rest of us call music. I can call a tin can a hat if I want. That doesn't change the fact it is still a tin can I choose to masquerade as a hat. It's the same thing with 4'33". Sorry if that sounds harsh. It's just the way things are.

I think we need to accept that music is just timeless. There's no old music, no past idioms, no antiquated sounds. Time is not a straight line and music is the best example of the circularity of time. Nothing is really new in music because every newly created idiom is the process of previous musical information absorbed in one's life and each idiom just goes into the collection of tools we have available to express ourselves. It's not by chance that the better a composer is the more varied music he listens and the more a composer shuts himself in an ivory tower and breaks the bridge with the outside believing to prevent derivation in this way and to be highly originaly the worse he is.

Well, in all honesty.

Strictly 'classical' or 'baroque' music in films exists only in extraordinary situations! When the film is period, when they project a university or a library (which for some reason is always hooked to classic fm or something! ), etc.

Even in older era films, you don't get orchestral stuff alone. You get the Zimmer type, or, at least, romantic (LOTR, maybe, or Conan, or POTC, or whatever really), with a hige injection of the current filter of the composer who is living TODAY!

But, by all means, the world needs more music, doesn't it? 'More' can be anything.

Scott: You won't believe how much "London traffic" goes on under each Harry Potter film. Do you have any idea how much folley work goes under the hat, which you don't realise? How much sfx goes in there, when the actors are simply in front of a green screen?

And do you have any idea how contemporary Williams trully is? He knows quite a lot about music, he's not the next random guy gone famous by pure luck! And he's using all the techniques, 20th century, etc. Plus he's written some wonderful stuff, outside films.

Finally, many films (for example Kurbic) have used (with our without! ) permission contemproary stuff. Kubric used Ligeti, in the very recent film "children of men" (an amazing film, btw), Penderevski AND Arvo Part were used. In "there will be blood", there was clusters, quarter tones, and Brahms violin concerto!

I don't think we can prove anything by such examples!

What I can speak of, is that whatever comission I know off, in the uk (at least London area), is contempoary stuff, or at least not baroque, or romantic. I don't doubt there is a world out there for such comissions, but I simply don't know it, personally.

At least I think we can agree that there are great composers out there. Some we know and some we don't. Williams really is an amazing composer and his film music is only part of his work. Personally I think some of his best is in the Harry Potter movies and can stand on its own. However, I don't like it when I hear things of his that you can tell are formulaic, because I know he is capable of much more.

EXACTLY!

And we can communicate quite nicely us two!

Movies, theatre and other means of storytelling is of course a different chapter. If the story (or the producer ) asks for a specific style of music and you don't want to use existing music, then of course new music in that style should be composed. I've personally composed in a very wide variety of styles for these media (including baroque ).

What's your obsession with John Cage? Seems like you use him as a personification of 20th century music... As Nikolas pointed out, Williams uses a lot of 20th century compositional techniques in his scores, probably a lot more than you've ever noticed. Take a look at this scene and listen closely to the music (can you hear Penderecki?). How much of that is in a style that predates Stravinsky? Sure, Indiana Jones would be awkward with a prepared piano soundtrack, but it would be just as awkward with a soundtrack by Bach, Mozart, Chopin or Brahms. Williams is a 20th/21st century composer that composes in a 20th/21st century idiom. Not even his main themes, which in general are a lot more tonal and melodic than the background score, are composed in an "old idiom".

I would also hope that you don't judge John Cage solely based on 4:33. He wrote lots of beautiful music, even music that would fit well on movie soundtracks. Check out his late orchestral works composed in the 1990s, you'll be very surprised! Or some of his earlier works, for example this piece , which might not be perfect for Indiana Jones, but I can imagine lots of other movies where it would fit very well.

After reading this thread I guess I would be interested in learning from other members of this forum which works for PIANO written in the past 50 years they think will eventually be recognized as masterpieces in the classical canon.

Roger, I won't pick on Cage anymore - or at least not on this thread. I haven't looked at the links you supplied, but I will. That's only fair. Thanks for the information. I don't mind learning new things (no, really... )

EDIT: this goes to Copcake, not Scott!

Oh I can answer that already!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMAIag5IPDg : (Messiaen: Vingt Regards No. 6 here, with a brillaint pianist, and I have the DVD (but did not upload the video myself! )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMbcIAjsjA :
Make it 60 years and you've included yourself some Prokofiev sonatas (8th for example, which is a brilliant masterpiece) as well as concertos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9DEfeU1lis (part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFZZw368lw4 (part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=487594W0dq4 (part 3)
The wonderful concerto for piano and strings by Schnittke!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHUmNNaxY0
Berio sequenza IV (All sequenzas are freakishly amazing, imo)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTaiDHqs5s
Ligeti Etudes (No. 13 in youtube, in a performance that I DON'T like, mainly for the direction of the video, plus the temperament in sound... )

A tiny bit older:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_36cPkLyvI (Bartok concerto for piano No. 2, composed in 1930-31)
right on the 60 year limit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUL4_l3Iga0 (3rd concerto for piano, composed in 1945).

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shostakovich+prelude&search_type=
Shostakovich preludes and fugues.

And the list goes on.

But really, these works are works that have been recorded by MANY pianists, MANY performances and get performer "regularly", as much as one would expect from contemporary music if not more. Some seem pretty obvious and less contemporary than others, but in the end, the question was the last 50 years... So... And I guess most of you know Prokofiev and Bartok, I just added them to create a stir! :p

I'd hate to think that any of the above could replace previous repertoire, but it doesn't have to. Why should Bach be shifted thanks to Shost? Nobody says that. The other end shifting behind Shost and Berio because of Bach and Beethoven seems more hostile to me.

eventually, nobody can tell, and maybe the beatles will be declared rubbish for all we know. Who can tell the future?

But at this current point, my (strongly opiniated) stand is that there are masterpieces out there. I've studied these works, I've seen them played live, I've tried to play a few of these, I've also "copied" (quoted in respect to the composers) from one two works.

__________________

Scott: quick "trick" question: Why pick on any composer?

Who said that I feel like it?

Who said that what I feel like doing is something fixed and predetermined rather than influenced by ever changing cistumstances?

Who said that the writing in a baroque-style is something that you think before beforehand, that you intellectual plan before rather than something that happens spontaneously because that's what your creative freedom is telling you to do in that precise moment you're creating?

Who said that I would reach fame and fortune?

Music is not based on what the world needs, there's no "world" out there, just a lot of different individuals who like and need different things.

Idioms are timeless in music, they just piled through time so that we now have more tools to express ourselves musically, there's not straight time line that separate the obsolete music of once upon a time with the music of nowadays and again just like a certain idiom didn't made composers write the same things (when it was more popular) there's no reason why a certain idiom would make nowadays a composer write the same things that other composers have already written.

When music changes and a new idiom is ready to be piled with the other music tools we heir it is because the places were music is experienced are changing as well and the culture is slowly influencing the sensivity and creativity of the people living within such culture.

This is why seeking innovation for the sake of it, almost "in vitro" in the accademies for the sake of shock value or fake innovation is plain stupid and the reason why Woodstoock has been a million times more important for music, the people and our culture than anything produced or experimented in musical accademies those years.

The composer I was talking about: www.giorgiopacchioni.com

1.) Today we have electronic equipment, computers, keyboards, software, to aid us in music creation.

2.) Today, it's easier to become a musician the proper way, much easier, today it's easier to learn about composition, then it was back in there time, today, we can hear what we are making while we make it.

3.) Not to mention, we have the support of these people you have mentioned.

aside from mainstream music, I believe it's the exact opposite, the composers today are better than the ones before.

Though there is no solid ground on which to say this on, if your talking strictly complex compositions, early 20th century composers take the cake easily. But that has nothing to do with actual music. >_>

I just think it's a wrong idea to say they are better when they most likely aren't. I personally think that people believe that the more complex the composition the better it is, I don't feel this way, I feel that it's the sound that counts. Thats why songs like moonlight sonata, as over played as it is, is one of the most famous "old" pieces there is, though most people are going with the trend when they say they like it, I believe that even though songs like moonlight sonata are very simple compared to alot of other songs, it is still far superior to them in every aspect.

Who said anything about innovation (for the shake of it)? Who said anything about academies ( = schooling in my book)
Who said anything about woodstock?

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, and excuse the capitals. Why do you feel the need to compare? Why do you feel the need to bring up woodstock being MORE[/b] important than anything produced, etc... Why should one try to reduce something and not try to teach something new?

The link to the composer you were talking about is a good start. The talk about academies, etc is a bad start.

[/b]

The same argument could be used in the opposite way: why trying to limit the whole in order to pretend that the "new" (expecially for the sake of it and not developed from genuine social transformations) is more important?

I'm not the one who started talking about what is important and what is not and I started contributing to this thread claiming that if there's a gap between people out there and the "classical music" is nothig but the fault of classical music itself; something widely acknowledge by many living in those years in the accademic environment. So the woodstock argument has got to do with it all (at least with my reply to the replies to my posts)

The sound and the emotions that it conveys to you which might sometimes be profound and deep and other time more playful and fun. Complexity has nothing to do with anything. Complexity is never something planned, it exists if it suits the mood and intentions of the composer while creating. Complexity for the sake of complexity is dishonest to the core, it's like writing random curses on your book not because they're functional to the plot but because you plan to do something weird and shocking to seel more or deluded that such a thing is originality and innovation.

yer, i might have made a bit of a huge generalization there. it's last night I went trough some performances of moonlight sonata first movement on youtube, these performance's where not good in any respect, no offense to the performer,

and it was getting comments like,

"beautiful"

"Best version of this i heard so far period."

"Talented"

and the list goes on. It really ****ed me off, are these people even using there ears?