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To add to what Theowne writes above, here is something by David Foster Wallace, a currently very popular avant-garde writer:

"Well, the analogy [between art and these sciences] breaks down because math and hard science are pyramidical. They're like building a cathedral: each generation works off the last one, both in its advance and its errors. Ideally, each piece of art is its own unique object, and its evaluation is always present-tense. You could justify the worst piece of experimental horseshit by saying 'The fools may hate my stuff, but generations later I will be appreciated for my ground breaking rebellion.' All the beret-wearing 'artistes' I went to school with who believed that line are now writing ad copy someplace."

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_wallace.html

Perhaps you could show me a quote where I have said something like that.

I take it that your silence means that you couldn't find a suitable quote. I must admit that I find your presumptuous claim rather insulting, as you accuse me of the exact opposite of what I stand for. Could we please refrain from such accusations in the future and keep this discussion civilized. The only time I have said anything about any style in general was when I said that "there is no such thing as "good style" and "bad style", but in all styles there is good and bad music". I have also mentioned and praised Giya Kancheli, a living composer who composes mostly tonal music.

An important part of composition studies is to learn as widely as possible about different styles and techniques. Students are taught styles ranging from Palestrina to the present and are required to compose in all these styles. As a result the students graduate with a "tool box" filled with different techniques that they may or may not choose to use. At this point it is all up to the composer to decide what kind of music to compose. I can assure you that all academically educated composers would be able to compose pastiches in the classical style if they decided to do so. However, very few composers choose to use only one single technique. With the vast amount of tools available, most composers tend to mix different techniques and through this try find their own voice. There is of course also the composers that invent all new techniques, the innovators that apparently are thoroughly despised around here. Only a small part of all composers can be counted to this category, but as the history books usually only focus on these composers, most people live under the false impression that all composers are like that. Another reason why people get this impression is that as they are not familiar with the techniques developed in the past one hundred years, they mistakenly assume that works written in styles that have existed for almost a century are modern radical experiments.

A lot of composers choose to use tonality as one tool. Mostly it is in the form of 20th century nonfunctional tonality (=major and minor chords, but without the tonal functions, as used by Debussy). Bitonality or polytonality is also commonly used. There is also those who use functional tonality and write in a more classical idiom, but these composers do not get as much exposure as those who use a more modern language. I guess this is because orchestras that wish to perform classical music chooses Beethoven over a modern work in the same style, because the name Beethoven attracts the audience. New tonal music is mostly heard in movies, though film music also uses a lot of 20th century techniques, such as bitonality, quartal harmony and different twelve tone techniques.

He might be a popular writer, but this statement is obviously not true for music. Every musical generation has worked off the last one. Even the strict serialists were very strongly influenced by tonality as they conciously tried to avoid all tonal references. Alongside these there was of course the French followers of Debussy and the Russian Symphonics who without doubt did continue the tradition of the previous generations. When trying to think of music that was not influenced by what was before, only the American experimentalists, lead by John Cage, comes to my mind. Although their works were closer to performance art than music.

I think the real difference between science and music is that in science you can find the truth. In music there is no right or wrong. Every individual has his own sence of right and wrong based on previous experiences. What sounds like a beautiful harmonic progression to you might feel completely different to someone who hasn't been exposed to tonal music before. Remember that the third was once considered a dissonance. In the absence of a real truth, I don't blame any composer for trying to find alternative solutions to the ones we are aware of. I listen to all kinds of music as open mindedly as possible and try to evaluate each piece individually. It doesn't matter if it is baroque music, extreme modernism, pop music or a new work written in a tonal classical style, I still make an effort to find out whether there is anything interesting to me in the music or not. I never utter an opinion on music I haven't heard, other than "I'd like to hear it".

It means I was sleeping, or doing something else.

You wrote:

"Music [is] constantly evolving ... You cannot stop this evolution. Even suggesting that something like that should be done is absurd."

I hadn't suggested that nobody should compose music that sounds modern, so comments like that seemed to me to be demonstrations of a general negative attitude towards anything traditional being composed today by serious composers.

Yes, of course. I never said composing old music wasn't considered acceptable as an exercise. But if it's considered acceptable as a serious artistic expression where you come from and not discouraged in any way, then that's most certainly news to me.

See, there again... Or are you using the word 'pastiche' in a purely neutral manner? If so, then why should anybody compose a pastiche, instead of something completely original using traditional tonality and traditional forms? Would you call Beethoven's 9th symphony a pastiche? If not, then why would you use the word in this context either?

And no, hard scientists or mathematicians building on the achievements of the past isn't analogous to artists' picking and mixing, experiencing works of art and experiencing life, and building something from those experiences.

And yes, there are certain realities such as acoustic laws that affect what can be done in art and with art. You often just don't have to know anything about those realities to make your creations work in some way, and learn something from the reactions others have to those creations, and then make art that works even better. Building a refrigerator that works in just the right way, you have to be more careful with that. The problem with many modern artists is that their wildly false ideologies make them ignore the often massive evidence that their art isn't working. The existence of works that their makers call polytonal is a good example of the existence of delusional composers. However, I'm by no means saying that all modern, or relatively modern, composers are delusional in this regard. See, for example, the section "Challenges to Polytonality" here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytonality

You also said that thirds were once considered a dissonance by some ancient music theorists or composers. But do you know why? Here's a guess: their lutes and ancient keyboards were tuned so that the thirds weren't even close to pure, so they were considered a dissonance, because that's what they were in practice: dissonant. That's just a guess, but it will do until someone comes up with the real answer. I do recall hearing it once, the answer, and if it wasn't what I mentioned above, it was nevertheless just as scientific and objective. Nothing to do with some bizarre mystical kids' version of subjectivism or relativism.

No, it was only a reaction to the negative attitudes towards innovation.
Composing music with tonal influences has indeed long been discouraged by a certain school of composers. I know that you also still have Paavo Heininen at the Sibelius Academy teaching that the major/minor triad is a dead concept, but oh how he was proved wrong by Lindberg's clarinet concerto. This is why I said this work is a cornerstone in the other thread, after this work I have felt a general change in attitudes toward tonal influences.

From my Oxford dictionary of current English:

Pastiche - an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.

I already said that late Beethoven was composing in no other style than his own, so no it's definitely not a pastiche. As I said in my last post, composers tend to sit upon a large toolbox. If a composer decides to compose a tonal work, he has a lot of more tools at his disposal than those commonly used in Beethoven's time. The modern composer does know how to surprise the listener with unprepared distant modulations, how to add colouring with late romantic chromaticism, how to smoothly move between tonally unrelated chords, how to add tension by introducing elements that are foreign to traditional tonality. If the composer choses to not use any of these tools, it is most likely because of a concious decision to write in the style of Beethoven - a pastiche. Maybe there is some composer that feels so strongly about that particular period that he does compose in that style as his true expression, but I haven't met this composer yet. Most composers who take influences from the classical period combine this with more modern techniques and are thus known as neoclassicists. Lots of them around today, did your phrase "composers who sound modern" include these?

If you only knew how much your ears fool you here. In the end the human ear doesn't care very much about the physical realities, it adapts to accept the familiar. Here's a simple example I found:

(warning, some soundcards might play an unwanted loud sound in the beginning of the clip when receiving the midi tuning data)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~huygensf/midi/beatgen.mid

In the first minute some chord progressions are repeated. The first one sounds right, while the second one sounds out of tune, especially when the seventh is introduced. According to the physical facts you refered to, the first one is wrong, the second is right. Our ears have adapted to accept the equal temper as "right", even though it is in fact horribly dissonant. If you do it the other way around and first listen to chords in just intonation for about a minute, then your ears get used to that, and if you immediatelly follow it up with an equally tempered major chord, the latter sound very dissonant.

If you regard the harmonic series a definition for right and wrong, then you also rule out some arabic modes and percussion music, that have nothing to do with the harmonic series.

The harmonic series does not define beauty. The sounds that always have been universally considered beautiful, such as birdsong or the sounds of the ocean have absolutely nothing to do with the harmonic series. Every individual defines audible beauty in his own way based on his own reference frame.

I believe all composers who call their music polytonal are aware of this contradiction, but it hasn't stopped some of them from making beautiful music. Polytonal music does not need to be perceived as music with multiple tonal centers in order to function as good music.

Yes I do. And I do know that the ancient greeks had their strings a lot more in tune than our modern pianos. And reneissance choirs, who considered the perfect fourth to be a dissonance, could also probably sing more in tune than our modern pianos.

In early history, the human ear was not used to hearing harmonic sounds, because such sounds do not appear in nature. The sound of multiple simultaneous sounds with definite pitch produced conflicting overtone series which were considered dissonant. In the earliest music, only the unison and the octave were considered consonance, as their overtone series are not in conflict with each other. Gradually higher intervals from the overtone series were added to the accepted consonances as people got used to harmonic sounds (the higher you go in the overtone series, the more conflicting are the produced overtone series). Today most people immediately accept intervals at least up to the ninth partial as consonances (except the seventh, which is too far from the equal temper we're used to hearing).

Dissonance and consonance is something you learn. I'm sure there's lots of chords that you would consider a lot more dissonant than I would, because I am probably more used to listening to dissonant music.

Perhaps you aren't familiar with Missa Solemnis, which you should logically call a collection of pastiches.

In any case, why do you think a moden composer couldn't compose in his own style using traditional tonality and classical forms? Certainly there is more to style than the amount of formal or harmonic innovations that can be heard from it. Early Beethoven is still Beethoven, and valid music, even if Haydn could have composed it.

You said something about this, but perhaps the way we think about these things is so different that attempts at communication will only prove useless.

It's partly about memory, and expectation, and to that degree subjective. But there is always the part that has to do with the objective reality. You can become more sensitive to the tensions inherent in the qualities of sound, or you can become less sensitive to them. And in any case, many expectations don't cross borders. If they did, you probably couldn't derive much pleasure from Beethoven, even, not to mention Mozart (whose G minor string quintet you need to hear if you already haven't). Renaissance singers sang to an accompaniment that restricted how "just" they could be. I don't think you got your explanations right, there, anyway. I remember hearing better ones.

Well, to be honest, I should conclude this by saying that I sort of agreed or half agreed with much of what you wrote. Perhaps I haven't fully made up my mind about everything yet. I should get to it...

Before I make a final attempt at explaining this, I'd like to make sure that we are talking about the same thing. When you say traditional tonality and classical forms, are you specifically referring to tonality and forms used in the 18th century (and of course late Beethoven), or do you also include later tonal composers like Liszt, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich or early Rautavaara?

Something like that. You could say that by "classical forms" I mean the forms we ascribe to Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, although, as Rosen explains in The Classical Style, our ideas about sonata form stem from the formalized and inflexible 19th century misconceptions about the late 18th century practices. By "traditional tonality" I mean functional harmony. Of course, to some degree the two (classical forms and functional harmony) are connected.

To make my point of view more understandable, I should perhaps mention that while Haydn knew Mozart's music well, he never used as much chromaticism as Mozart did, as far as I know. You don't find passages in Haydn that are comparable to what you can find in the first-movement development of Mozart's 40th symphony, for example. You would say Haydn's harmonic progressions aren't as advanced as Mozart's. Yet Haydn lived some 18 years after Mozart had died, and was familiar with his work. Haydn kept re-examining and refining his style, but rarely if ever felt a need to use Mozart's advanced progressions, although they were available to him.

In the same way, a modern composer could be aware of any number of 20th and 21st century innovations, but choose to use none of them. Time and history are illusions. A thousand year old technique is new to anyone who hasn't encountered it before. You can choose to use it, or ignore it, just as any other technique. It doesn't matter when it originated. And don't say Mozart doesn't sound as radical to people today as it did to people in the 18th century. Say rather that Mozart doesn't sound as radical to you as to Mozart himself. But then, how do you know? This was a guy who composed whole-tone stuff as a joke. And be that as it may, we are in a position to transcend our musical conditionings, in that we can choose what we listen to with attention, and consequently what sort of expectations we cultivate, never forgetting the objective qualities of physical sounds. It took even Haydn a long time to become fully sensitive to Mozart's classical ideals (see Rosen), why should we be any more sensitive to them than was Haydn? A fine tonal sense is something that needs to be cultivated in adulthood. And as I wrote earlier, our memories are, metaphorically speaking, neatly enough organized and our expectations don't cross borders. There is no need to pretend that Lisztian chromaticism wouldn't sound inappropriate in a Mozartian setting, no matter who composed the piece and in what century. Just in the same way, a sudden cluster in the middle of a Mozart sonata will always sound wrong, or at least in bad taste. Just as expectations don't cross borders, some techniques don't, either. Consequently, there's no need to suppose that a modern composer would have to employ unnatural proceedings in order to suppress his desire to use chord clusters if he found himself in the middle of composing a tonally stable sonata-form movement, somewhat in the manner of Mozart. And why wouldn't he find himself in the middle of such activity? It's good to compose something orderly once in a while, something that is in harmony with the realities of nature and humanity, and so approaches timelessness in its worth and universality in its appeal.

Sorry for the rambling length of this post. If I were a Jew, I would be a wandering Jew, at least in my writing style. It's always easier to leave the organizing and refining of thoughts to the reader.

No, this isn't even remotely the same thing. Haydn was brought up in a certain musical environment, and developed his own style out of that. If you want to make some analogy to composers in that time, then you'll have to find an 18th century composer who composed in renaissance style, one who ignored the past two hundred years of development in music. As we have already mentioned, music constantly develops. Most of the great composers have been called radical in their youth and conservative at old age, as new radical ideas have been invented by then. This doesn't imply that they were composing in an old style at old age. They were composing in their own style.

Today we live in a very diverse musical environment. Everybody is constantly exposed to all kinds of music through different media and composers take influences from all of these. If you want to produce composers in classical style, then you'd have to abduct the children at birth and keep them away from all confrontation with any music that was not around in the early classical era.

Maybe a composer would find himself in the middle of such an activity, but as I already tried to explain to you, he would then be composing a pastiche, a consciuos decision to write in the style of Mozart.

Perhaps you could explain your logic.

Oh, come on. Realities of nature??? Didn't we already agree that harmonic sounds are in fact unnatural. Or have you heard a major triad in nature? Realities of humanity??? Western culture = humanity???

Beethoven used older techniques in it, from as far back as Renaissance.

Someone writes in a Wikipedia article that "the style is close to treatment of themes in imitation that one finds in the Flemish masters such as Josquin des Prez and Johannes Ockeghem, but it is unclear whether Beethoven was consciously imitating their techniques or whether this is simply a case of 'convergent evolution' to meet the peculiar demands of the mass text."

Tovey wrote that "there is no earlier choral writing that comes so near to recovering some of the lost secrets of the style of Palestrina." But he also writes that "there is no choral and no orchestral writing, earlier or later, that shows a more thrilling sense of the individual colour of every chord, every position, and every doubled third or discord." So your retort is easy to imagine. I say just observe Stravinsky's maxim that a good composer doesn't borrow but steals, in that a good composer makes his own whatever he takes. Please, don't forget to steal Beethoven, and give us some fine symphonies that sound like Witold Ludwig van Beethoven Lutoslawski.

As for finding a major triad in nature... Yes, you can find it in the overtone series. The fifth and the major third (some octaves above the fundamental) are the only intervals you can hear from the overtone series when you play a single note. That's a major triad, then, in nature. The other harmonics are too weak, and affect merely the timbre of the sound.

See the second illustration in the music page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series

Yet, in the first seven bars he immediately uses such a horrible modernist technique as a I-VI-II6-I64-V7-I harmonic progression. This is as much a reneissance pastiche as Lindberg's clarinet concerto is a Beethoven pastiche. Beethoven does exactly what composers are doing all the time today. He borrows from the past and adapts it to his own style.

In the overtone series of harmonic sounds, such as sounds produced by a string or air column vibrating at a stable definite pitch. How often do you see those in nature? The sounds in nature (such as wind, rattling leaves, trees falling, lightning, water hitting rocks, animal roars...) have disharmonic spectrum and not a definite pitch. As a result of this, the complex spectrum caused by the overtones of a cluster is a lot closer to natural sounds than a triad. (I'm not saying that all triads should be replaced by clusters, just pointing out scientific facts.)

I didn't say that Missa Solemnis is a pastiche from beginning to end. I believe I used the word collection. There's variety there, certainly. If you look through it, perhaps you can find a piece or two you could classify as a pastiche. Would this elevate the status of pastiche in your estimation, though?

I'm sorry, but this discussion is now getting ridiculuos. May I suggest that you study some reneissance music, how they treat the individual voices, rhythm, dissonance and harmony. Then study the missa solemnis, and if you find a passage that is not at all influenced by later compositional styles (like you'd like composers today to compose classical pieces without being influenced by modern techniques), then we may continue on this particular subject.

You don't seem to think that modern composers are able to compose completely traditional music (functional harmony, traditional forms) without imitating some particular composer or era. I would give a bit more credit to their intelligence and imagination in this regard. That's really the main issue here. If you compose a "classical" sonata, without thinking about what constitutes the Classical style (just as Beethoven would have), and just follow the logic of your musical ideas, and that leads you to a work that someone might mistake as a late Beethoven sonata, then that's still not a pastiche. It would be a pastiche if you really were weird enough to *not* be able to resist using clusters and tape recorders without trying to excruciatingly imitate late Beethoven. If you don't get this, then there is indeed nothing more to say.

No, I seem to think that no composer ever has been able to compose in a 250 years old style without imitating some particular composer or era. Feel free to prove me wrong.

And btw, I never said anything about clusters or taperecorders, there's other influences as well. Even if a composer has never heard 20th century "classical music", he is still influenced by romantic music, jazz, ethno, pop music, film music... Influences that aren't in contradiction with traditional tonality or forms, but didn't appear in the classical era.

Go ahead, "follow the logic of your musical ideas" and compose a piece that someone might mistake as a late Beethoven sonata, and I will point out to you what influences you have taken from the genres mentioned above.

A musical form plus functional harmony doesn't equal style. Feel free to, uh, "prove" me wrong.

If serialists were able to disregard numerous influences such as Wagner and Debussy, I'm not sure why modern composers shouldn't be able to disregard what they hear on TV, in supermarkets, at smoky clubs. And it's not really difficult at all to avoid "new music", unless you actively seek to hear it or go to a music school, where it's unfortunately force fed to absolutely everyone.

I don't find your limiting attitude essentially different from the attitudes of those who abused Rachmaninoff in the early 20th century for composing old music. Pastiche? Makes no difference what you call it. Those same guys who were responsible for Sibelius's 30-year silence from 1927 until his death in 1957. The same who abused Medtner for composing old music.

Oh, and "pointing out" similarities isn't the same thing as pointing out influences. If I compose something, you can pretend to know what influenced it all you want, but the truth is you haven't lived my life and you have no idea.

My dear mr. Hamus. I would appreciate it if you stopped expressing my opinions. Next time you want to say anything about my opinion or attitude towards something, please include a quote where I have specifically said that it is my opinion. If you read my opinion or attitude from the subtext of something I wrote, please quote the passage and include the words "Does this mean that your opinion on this subject is..."

I believe the only person here who reads something negative in the word "pastiche" is you. The only person who has ever talked about "composing old music" is you. I would personally never use such an expression, because it is a paradox in itself. You cannot create something old, because upon it's creation it is by definition new. You can only create a replica of something old.

You mentioned "following the logic of ones musical ideas". You could take any person who is associated with classical music in any way, composer, performer or student, play some late romantic music for them, and they will find it completely logical. Thus, the late romantic setting is part of the logic that guides their ideas.

I asked you specifically whether "traditional tonality and form" meant tonality and form as used by Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven, or if you also included later tonal composers. You chose the first and also pointed out that Lisztian chromaticism has nothing to do in such a setting. This is what makes the difference. I don't think there is a person alive whose musical logic would be limited to the harmony and forms used in that time. If a composer truly is following his own logic, he will not compose in the classical style using the harmony and form that was used in the 18th century. If he is composing in that style and can hear that the Lisztian chromaticism doesn't fit the style and therefore chooses not to use them, then he is following the logic of the style, not his own - he is creating music in another style = pastiche. However, if the composer doesn't care about the logic of the style and does everything the way he wants it, then it is of course not a pastiche, but then there will also be elements that would not have been used by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven. It will not correspond to your definition of "traditional tonality and form". My definition of traditional tonality and form is a lot wider than that and there is a lot of people today who compose in that style as their true expression.

Finally I'd like to point out that saying that "new music is unfortunately force fed to everyone in music schools" and in the next sentence accuse someone else for "limiting attitude" seems a bit odd to me...

My dear Lord Witold:

In that case all is fine.

Princely sincerely and
Yours very truly,
AH