Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Why did the Composer Era die out and why don't we have great composers today?

As far as the Night Fantasies recordings go, I have not heard the Karis or Jacobs, the others I all like - the thing about great music is that there can be no definitive recording of it, everyone who comes to it brings something different.

As far as the rest of the nonsense here, I listened to Carter's Dialogues for Piano & Orchestra this morning and enjoyed it just as much, and with no more mental effort than a Mozart Piano Concerto. I feel no need to formulate a manifesto to justify the piece. The same tradition that held up Beethoven and Brahms now holds up Carter. It is not academia that has made his career, it is the musicians who have championed his music and the sold-out audiences who now are giving him standing ovations at his new premiers. If any of the anti-modernists here have the musicianship of, say Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Charles Rosen or James Levine I might be bothered to read their blather, but I seriously doubt this is the case. I am deeply suspect of people who waste their time and everyone else's by formulating diatribes against music they don't like. Personally I would not expend the effort to bother with them. I have always tried to give established composers the benefit of the doubt - if there music does nothing for me that does not mean it may not do so at some later time. There are many composers I personally do not care for (like Stockhausen for example) but I figure that is as much me as Stockhausen & I reserve the right to change my mind.

del - duplicate post

I don't see any attempt to divide listeners into average and elite groups, it is only you making that division. The term "average" is used strictly in the statistical sence, which has no negative meaning attached to it. I agree that the term "elite ear", which comes up once, is perhaps not the best term as it can be misinterpreted, but I'm sure that it was intended as "the ear that has more reference points when listening to such music", not "the ear of an intellectually more developed and in general more awesome human being than the ignorant bypassers in the street". He doesn't at any point try to say that either ear, or either kind of music is in any way better than the other. No need to be offended just because he classified you as the "average listener", he's just saying that you have the majority on your side.

Have you ever went to the cinema with a lighting engineer? Or an editor? I have, and I can tell you that they notice a lot of things that I, with my average eyes, cannot see. It doesn't mean that they miss the plot and focus on technical analysis, they just know so much about their particular subjects that they can't help not to notice.

Analysis is not something that comes later, it happens all the time. Our brains constantly analyse all incoming data based on our previous experience and knowledge. That's why there is no such thing as universally good music, everybody listens to music within their own reference frame.

RogerW says: "Our brains constantly analyse all incoming data based on our previous experience and knowledge. That's why there is no such thing as universally good music, everybody listens to music within their own reference frame."

We listen to music from where we are at this moment in our lives.

Our preferences are fast to kick in - we judge some "great", "good", and some "never". Natural selection as far as we are concerned, and our right to judge what we like or don't like. We don't have to know much about what the music represents, the organization of it, it's history.

We only want the feel good experience, and if we are learning it on an instrument, we want for it to be easy enough to do well with minimal effort.

Nothing has to have a redeeming value, it only has to please us in some way that is important to us. (Music as candy.)

For those with much more abilities of discernment, studied musicians, we have more criteria with which to judge with. Our preferences can be at a much higher grid of choosing favorites.

Each person takes to their own - as they do in food and every other preference which they claim.

If one were to truly understand a person, knowing their likes would be helpful, but perhaps knowing what they don't like would be more helpful. Especially if they were capable of a discussion about the likes and dislikes they hold about their own preferences.

If there such a thing as "Musical Pergatory"?

Betty

Your conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. It follows if you think that the opinion of an inexperienced listener is as valid as the opinion of a more experienced listener in determining the value of a piece of music. Even David Hume didn't think that it was.

There's still plenty of great new music. Just a few examples...


Explosions In The Sky, James Taylor, Kanye West, Lowell Liebermann, Ned Rorem, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, John Corgliano, Radiohead, Van Morrison, Coldplay, Simon and Garfunkle, Damien Rice, and countless others.

I didn't even have to pause while typing that list. Music hasn't reached valley of despair, it has just changed a LOT.

I trust Rosen's judgement. So, did he say somewhere that Carter is the equal of Beethoven and Brahms? Did the other musicians you mentioned say so? I would imagine that some of them think such comparisons invalid.

Also, whether you happen to enjoy Carter as much as a Mozart concerto is beyond the point. I enjoy reading Jack Vance as much as I enjoy listening to Mozart, but they are nevertheless incomparable, because one is a writer and the other a composer. Perhaps all modern composers are incomparable, each living in his own personal culture, having devised his own personal language, trying to avoid the risk of being compared with Beethoven.

Kissin once said in an interview that there isn't a single modern work that he knows of that is as good as the best stuff by the great classics like Bach and Beethoven. So there's one capable musician for you who believes that a work of music is comparable to another work of music, regardless of the date of composition, and that comparison proves new music inferior to the classics. Can you find me an opposite example?

As far as I'm concerned, that's a straw man, since I didn't say I don't like modern music. What I said was that the great classics are still the best there is, and until the West starts to feel proud of its past for a change, and becomes courageous enough to risk comparison with the classics, there won't be another era of great composers.

To clarify, what I meant was "that's why there is no music that is universally appealing to every human being". In this case no other opinion than that of the listener can be taken into account.

I don't think that any single person's opinion is valid in determining the value of a piece of music. Mainly because I don't think you can determine any kind of absolute value of a piece of music. Perhaps you could clarify and define the terms "value" and "valuable music".

Of course.

(1) The greater the depth of a given work of music, the greater its value. Just as a small child finds wonder in simple everyday things, so may an inexperienced adult find wonder in such works of music that a more experienced listener would quickly get tired of. Depth is the quality of lasting wonder.

(2) The greater the number of people who can relatively easily appreciate a given work of music, across times and across cultures, the greater the value of the work.

(3) The more distinctive its aesthetic effect, the greater its value. I don't mean distinctive in the way a blood stain on a shirt is, but distinctive in the way Thomas Jefferson was. By the aesthetic effect I mean the whole structure of sound when competently perceived. That might require a few listens with the help of the score, even for the most experienced listener.

(4) The quality of the emotional content or content as such. Is the content heavenly or mundane? Mundane doesn't have as much value. Bach's cantatas are heavenly, though not necessarily very distinctive. Nursery rhymes may be distinctive, but they're mundane as well.

To conclude: easily appreciated and deep as a bottomless well, as well as distinctive and heavenly, those are the traits of a genuine work of creative genius.

You know I absolutely can not stand most modern music, but I completely agree with this statement above. No matter how you cut it music is subjective. I do think there may be able to be a line drawn between what is and isn't music (probably something to do with compositional method - recording traffic is not music, for example), but you can't say what is good and bad music. It is different for everyone.

Umm. Antonius, I would not say that Bach's cantatas are "heavenly". I don't know any Bach piece I would call heavenly. You're making huge assumptions that everyone has your taste. I find Rameau's works FAR and away more heavenly than any Bach I've ever heard. I would trade all Bach's works for the operas of Rameau. There is real depth.

So I am an experienced listener and a composer. How do you explain my opinion if all musical beauty is so absolute?

You're digging a big hole to fall into when you make such statements about Bach or anyone else.

More attempt to mask biased subjective ideas as intellectually pondered facts. Music has no iuherent value except the value that the "circumstance" or the "listener" appends to it. I would like to see any evidence that the value of a piece of music is something universal, encompassing whether situation and easily objectively determined.

Complexity is not a value, period.
It might be a value in a context in which something or someone determined that it is the "value", but to state that complexity is some kind of objective intrinsic value is absurd.

Again it is the circumstance and the listener that determines the artificial value of something. The same exact piece of music might change its appended value millions of times according to which context it is judged in. Depth is not the "quality", is just one of the millions of qualities that in different contexts might either be great or meaningless. Semplicity is a value as much as complexity is and neither of them is superior to the other and neither of them is intrinsic to greatness. Finding wonder in the simple things demonstrates the ability to experience the greatness of simple things. Getting bored because of the lack of complexity of a piece of music rather than because of its content is just idiotic.

Of course, it sounds like a great manual for the modern snob which is fortunately a race in extintion. But I'm a musician as well, I had ear training and studied in a conservatory and yet I don't feel the need to feel snob, I don't feel the need to make an idiot out of myself claiming that beauty is objective, I don't feel the need to promote my tastes objective using pseudo-intellectual arguments and I don't feel the need to feel superior to the whatever other listener. My tastes can be criticized as much as yours and as much as any composer with an "educated" ear and as much as any individual in this forum. I don't know how can such trivial drivel masked as intelligent analysis and arrogance masked as knowledge can be considered spot-on.

*claps*

I had a theory major roommate here at CCM first quarter who claimed that to him, simple music had emotional content whatsoever, and the only interest he had in it was its complexity. He was saying that a complex work was the only type of music that he thought was any good. Not surprisingly, he is always miserable and over analyzing everything.....

It got really annoying - everytime I put on mozart, "Oh come on, V-I-V-I put on something that isn't so predictable". I am so glad he moved out....

Very interesting, Scott, and thanks for your contribution.

And yet.. well I am an organist. Bach's organ works -and Rameau wrote none- are amongst the greatest works ever written. Check out the Wedge fugue -per another thread- you might find a depth there that I have never experienced with Rameau.

IMHO of course, but I simply cannot agree with you.

This line doesn't make sence to me. In what way is complexity separate from the content? Can you reduce (or increase) the complexity of Bach's counterpoint, Beethoven's thematical development, Liszt's harmonies, Stravinsky's rhythms or Rachmaninov's pianistic textures without changing the content?

I'm hoping at this point that people can define or describe what musical "content" is. To me, it's an extremely slippery idea to discuss, but it's a concept that pops up often and I would like to hear what people think it is. For myself, it is something that I tend to perceive as feelings I get about what a piece "means" more than anything else, but somehow that doesn't seem to really cover it, since oftentimes two people don't think a piece means the same thing.

Well that's an interesting take on "musical content". I would have defined musical content as the musical material in a piece - melodic, rhythmic, harmonic material. That's certainly what I would mean if I used the term. What you're talking about I would have called "meaning" (perhaps?) and I agree that's very hard (impossible?) to pin down.

The content is dependent on the view point (as has already been put). A composer, a stage director or an actor will each hear a different 'content'. Ya pays ya money and takes ya choice.

And what would be the reason for reading the blather of the pro-modernists here, who are equally unlikely to have the musicianship of Aimard, Rosen, or Levine? Serious doubts impede the view in every direction....

And this is totally inconsequential, but...it seems like you must read the blather of the folks you have deemed to be anti-modernist, because how else would you even be able to identify them as such, in order not to read them? You know?