Why I dislike Modern Atonal music...

[SaulChanukah]

Well, in my opinion Bach is one of the greatest composers ever, and this is just a fact. If you look at classical music since the Baroque Era all the way to Modern Music, what you would call Atonal music, you will see a slow but constant breaking down of order and consistency. The Baroque Era featured composers such as Bach and Vivaldi who dedicated their art to order, theme, and logic. This means that their music was a reflection of their time and their very selves.

People back then were more balanced and had more consistency and order in their lives, and their music reflected their way of life and inner being. As time went by, The classical era still kept the overall order but breached some aspects of the formal laws of music. Then came the Romantic Era, and so another breaking of that form, and more 'freedom' was given to composers to write as they please but even in that time, the formal form was still somewhat intact. But many of today's composers write music that is atonal, meaning void of any formality , they write music of 'come what may be’, even suggesting to put a cat to run over the piano, and the sounds that it produces they call ‘music’ or a ‘composition’.

We see a slow and gradual breaking of order since that Baroque Era until today. Back then people had more order and harmony in their lives and societies, and the music reflected that. As time went by, people began to feel inner turmoil, inside themselves and in their societies, therefore the music was more ‘free’ in form and gradually as time passed by became less orderly and less formal, breaking down the laws of music because the music reflected their state of being, and the state of the societies they lived in.

One of the reasons that Bach was great is because he was able to produce great and highly spiritual moving music in spite of the dedication to order and harmony, he was great because he kept the laws , and from these adherences to the laws of music he created masterpieces, something that many of today’s composers cant do even though they have all these ‘freedoms’ from the laws of music.

That is why I love Mendelssohn too, for he was a great baroque and classical Era lover, and his music was extremely formal. Mendelssohn, just like Bach produced great music precisely because he stuck to the laws of music. Hector Berlioz famously said that Mendelssohn ‘loved the dead too much’ , meaning that he loved Bach, Handel and Mozart too much because he wrote his music just like they did, with adherence and respect to the laws of music, in fact one can argue and say that he was the Baroque/Classical composer of the Romantic Era.

Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn and other Baroque composers are probably the greatest composers that ever lived precisely because they wrote the music in accordance to the laws of music, structure, formality, order, and harmony represented their inner peace and harmony, that ’s what makes us love them, because we also yearn and dream to have inner peace and inner harmony which so reflects in these composers’ music.

And this is the main reason why I so dislike modern atonal music.

Is it not enough that the world today is in such turmoil and confusion, do I also have to add music to be this way, disorderly and mixed up with no sense of logic and direction?


Cheers,

Saul

[johnQpublic]

Darn that thing called evolution.

Someone once said tonality started going downhill the first time a Medieval composer added a chromatic tone.

[Sator]

What about Medieval-Renaissance atonal music? Josquin is no more tonal than Schoenberg, and both of their music is based on the same sort of contrapunctal imitative style of writing. Berg saw Schoenberg as a return to the mainstream tradition of Western music.

[Chalkperson]

What about Medieval-Renaissance atonal music? Josquin is no more tonal than Schoenberg, and both of their music is based on the same sort of contrapunctal imitative style of writing. Berg saw Schoenberg as a return to the mainstream tradition of Western music.

I love Josquin des Prez, but, I always had a problem with Clement Janequin's Chansons,it started my lifelong lack of love for French Song...

[Lance]

It will be interesting to see SOMEGUY's (Michael) and KARL HENNING's thoughts on this subject! Go to it, fellows ... just your cup o' tea, eh?!?

[some guy]

You mean you haven't seen our thoughts on this dozens of times before?

I can't speak for Karl, of course, but I can say for myself that the umpteenth poorly worded and not at all thought out vaporings of yet another anti-modernist post doesn't sound like tea at all to me. More like poison.

Poison ain't my cuppa tea!!

[Sator]

Also hilarious is what people mean by "modern" music. Schoenberg was born in the Victorian era! Fact: Queen Victoria had another 27 years left in her reign after his birth. Fact: Charles Dickens had died only four years before his birth, at a rather young age of 58.

[Carnivorous Sheep]

Did you call Mendelssohn a Baroque composer =O

Some people like atonality, some people don't. I'm in the latter, but whatever. Not much left to say about this topic. Doubt many people are gonna be persuaded one way or another.

[Sator]

I like atonality. Josquin is wonderful - as are Obrecht, Isaac, Tallis, Piperlare and Gesualdo to name just a few. These composers thoroughly deserve to be called modern because they wrote music of great polyphonic complexity contrasting to the older tradition of plainchant, or the modal music of the ancient Greeks.

Schoenberg once called Bach the first ever 12 tone composer: the theme of the Chromatic Fantasia contains 11 out of 12 of the notes of the chromatic scale. The opening of Mozart's Dissonance Quartet is another example of "atonal" music.

[absinthe]

This discussion comes up often but no resolution emerges. People like what they like. Some are more adventurous than others and expand their listening, others are happy with genres they know. Nothing wrong. For many, music, live or recorded is entertainment to be enjoyed and that's about it. Some are prepared to work to familiarise themselves with different genres, without an ear to future enjoyment. Some convert easily to genres outside the comfort zone, others don't. It depends on what we individually expect to get out of music. These are private worlds

[SaulChanukah]

You mean you haven't seen our thoughts on this dozens of times before?

I can't speak for Karl, of course, but I can say for myself that the umpteenth poorly worded and not at all thought out vaporings of yet another anti-modernist post doesn't sound like tea at all to me. More like poison.

Poison ain't my cuppa tea!!

I wonder what's your problem?

I don't believe that you would have ever thought or looked about this subject in this way...so if you want to make fun of someone's intelligence, you would be a good start.

[Sator]

This discussion comes up often but no resolution emerges.

I started participating in internet music discussion since about 1999. It has been going around and around in circles on the internet like a stuck record.

[THEHORN]

Gamar Jobat , Saul. I'm surprised that a professional composer like you could think that the atonal or 12-tone works of composers such as Schoenberg, Webern ,Boulez,Carter,and other 20th century composers are not highly organized and every bit as tightly constructed as the music of the great composers of the past you mention,if not even more so.
Have you made a careful study of their music, and did you study it in music school or wherever you studied?
Those who claim that the atonal music of the 20th century sounds like a cat with its paws on a piano keyboard don't understand this music at all.
Music neither declines or advances over the centuries; it evolves.

[SaulChanukah]

Gamar Jobat , Saul. I'm surprised that a professional composer like you could think that the atonal or 12-tone works of composers such as Schoenberg, Webern ,Boulez,Carter,and other 20th century composers are not highly organized and every bit as tightly constructed as the music of the great composers of the past you mention,if not even more so.
Have you made a careful study of their music, and did you study it in music school or wherever you studied?
Those who claim that the atonal music of the 20th century sounds like a cat with its paws on a piano keyboard don't understand this music at all.
Music neither declines or advances over the centuries; it evolves.

Music devolves not evolves, because the quality of life and peace and harmony within humanity has devolved as time passed by. In the past the composers wrote more organized music, just listen to Bach and Handel.
If you really believe that anything the atonal composers such as John Cage among others has more order and logic then Bach, then you are flat out wrong.
From the Baroque Era, through the classical and romantic all the way to today's modern compositions, music has become less and less orderly and logical, with less adherence to the laws of music and harmony, this is just plain fact.

Same with visual arts. Back then artsits wanted to capture the themes as they were, today if you look at modern artworks.. do you see any order?
They splash paint on canvas and call it 'art'...


Cheers,

Saul

[Sator]

Those who claim that the atonal music of the 20th century sounds like a cat with its paws on a piano keyboard don't understand this music at all.

I am sure there are teenage Britany Spears etc fans out there who think that most classical keyboard music sounds like a cat walking across the keyboards. When I first heard Gesualdo, he sounded like a cat having its tail pulled. Actually several cats simultaneously in a feline chorus. The chromatic side steps in his music are usually utterly bizarre - much more so than in anything I have heard from any 20th century composer. Instead of giving up because it sounded strange and alien, I listened over and over until suddenly the bizarreness yielded an extraordinary world of musical phantasmagoria, utterly hypnotic and otherworldly. Ditto for the Second Viennese School, but that yielded nothing quite so fantastic - rather Schoenberg and Berg sound with every year that goes by increasingly like Brahms.

[Heck148]

From the Baroque Era, through the classical and romantic all the way to today's modern compositions, music has become less and less orderly and logical, with less adherence to the laws of music and harmony, this is just plain fact.

Same with visual arts. Back then artsits wanted to capture the themes as they were, today if you look at modern artworks.. do you see any order?
They splash paint on canvas and call it 'art'...

Man's entire philosophical and scientific evolution has followed a similar path.
in past millienia, an overly simplistic, even primitive philosophy prevailed- gods created the universe, set everything in order - heavenly bodies rotated most regularly about the earth, etc, etc - absolutes and certainties prevailed....people were not supposed to question the nature of things, but just accept what they were told..
obviously, this could not persist- inquiring minds - Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Pasteur, etc, etc continually probed into the mysteries of our existence - and showed that the so-called organization and regularity - the absolutes and certainties - were an illusion. relativities and probabilities are the realities with which we must deal...
art and music has followed the same path - rigid rules of form and content were tested, stretched, broken, reformed as human thought and experience progressed over the centuries...
there is definitely an organization, an order to atonal music...it's simply a different set than that applied to tonal music...
it's true, things aren't as simple as they used [incorrectly] appear. our experience shows that in all facets of human existence.

[Sator]

there is definitely an organization, an order to atonal music...it's simply a different set than that applied to tonal music...

In the case of twelve tone music it is a very old order: inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion of a principle subject is hardly a twentieth century invention.

[josé echenique]

I wonder if anyone here sings some Wozzeck or Lulu in the shower?
Or perhaps whistles Moses und Aron while driving?
It´s interesting to note: Britten´s very tonal operas have been accepted by the public at large, dozens of recordings and productions everywhere, while Berg´s remain forbidden territory but for a few cognoscenti.
Composers enjoy the freedom to write whatever they please, after all most Western governments grant many opportunities for their works to be heard and seen, but they should take note that in the past few decades, it is forgotten works composed hundreds of years ago the ones who are capturing the public´s attention. It is the Fairy Queen and King Arthur who are hugely popular these days, not the Midsummer Marriage. There must be a lesson there.
I actually like Berg very much, Webern slightly less.

[Sator]

I wonder if anyone here sings some Wozzeck or Lulu in the shower?
Or perhaps whistles Moses und Aron while driving?

Me!!! Me!!! These works are very singable. Ditto for Gesualdo and other modern atonal composers once you get into them.

[josé echenique]

I wonder if anyone here sings some Wozzeck or Lulu in the shower?
Or perhaps whistles Moses und Aron while driving?

Me!!! Me!!! These works are very singable. Ditto for Gesualdo and other modern atonal composers once you get into them.

You are a VERY sophisticated person!

[CharmNewton]

From the Baroque Era, through the classical and romantic all the way to today's modern compositions, music has become less and less orderly and logical, with less adherence to the laws of music and harmony, this is just plain fact.

Same with visual arts. Back then artsits wanted to capture the themes as they were, today if you look at modern artworks.. do you see any order?
They splash paint on canvas and call it 'art'...

Man's entire philosophical and scientific evolution has followed a similar path.
in past millienia, an overly simplistic, even primitive philosophy prevailed- gods created the universe, set everything in order - heavenly bodies rotated most regularly about the earth, etc, etc - absolutes and certainties prevailed....people were not supposed to question the nature of things, but just accept what they were told..
obviously, this could not persist- inquiring minds - Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Pasteur, etc, etc continually probed into the mysteries of our existence - and showed that the so-called organization and regularity - the absolutes and certainties - were an illusion. relativities and probabilities are the realities with which we must deal...
art and music has followed the same path - rigid rules of form and content were tested, stretched, broken, reformed as human thought and experience progressed over the centuries...
there is definitely an organization, an order to atonal music...it's simply a different set than that applied to tonal music...
it's true, things aren't as simple as they used [incorrectly] appear. our experience shows that in all facets of human existence.

Heck, you raise an interesting parallel with physical science and art. The gentlemen you name were all keen observers who were attempting to deduce laws from their observations. For the last 100+ years, the concert hall has been a laboratory where musical experiments have been conducted. But unfortunately, the "lab technicians" do not base their conclusions on observations. If they did, they would accept that the vast majority of paying "observers" to the experiment prefer what are perjoratively termed "warhorses". Because those observations may not fit their notions of complexity (perhaps because their intense association with the experiment), they seem to deny its results. They continue to run the same experiments in the hope of finding resilts that justify their conclusions. And when the paying observers voice their dissatisfaction, they are criticized for prefering the overly simple.

The Newtonian universe might be a good analogy for the tonal universe in music. It has a few loose ends that don't quite fit, but it's laws are a perfect fit 99.9999% of the time. The Einsteinian universe is a good model for the atonal universe. It seems to cover all the bases, but the areas of divergence with Newton seem a bit esoteric (not to deny how important some of those divergences really are).

There is a place for atonal music. People should be free to listen to what they wish. Corollary to that, those who do not wish to listen to it shouldn't have to, nor should they have to pay for it.

John

[jserraglio]

I'm not a big 12-tone music fan, but if some of it was good enough for George Szell (cf: Rochberg's Symphony 2 world premiere), it's good enough for me.

[absinthe]

I wonder if anyone here sings some Wozzeck or Lulu in the shower?

Particularly Countess Geschwitz's closing aria, "Lulu, mein Engel..."

It´s interesting to note: Britten´s very tonal operas have been accepted by the public at large, dozens of recordings and productions everywhere, while Berg´s remain forbidden territory but for a few cognoscenti.

I'm pretty certain that Lulu has been recorded far more than any one of Britten's operas. I may be wrong. His Peter Pears is quite well known...or is it Peter Grimes? I don't listen to Britten's music much, aside from the Serenade.

Composers enjoy the freedom to write whatever they please, after all most Western governments grant many opportunities for their works to be heard and seen, but they should take note that in the past few decades, it is forgotten works composed hundreds of years ago the ones who are capturing the public´s attention. It is the Fairy Queen and King Arthur who are hugely popular these days, not the Midsummer Marriage. There must be a lesson there.

Yes, I confess that to me Tippett does tend to confirm Saul's view that music has devolved. I suppose Tippet's music gradually became more inward looking, tunnelled, perhaps. I can listen to any amount of Berg, Webern, Schoenberg (though I prefer later composers from the avant garde) but King Priam..? No further comment.

I suppose music has evolved somewhat from those heady days at the beginning of time when someone with strong lips realised he/she could blow a diatonic scale (almost) down a pipe of some sort. But I personally think traditional music is now just a subset of organised sound. Things have grown around it. Serial music is nothing special, just that Schoenberg used the idea with very strict rules in the C20.

[Heck148]

But unfortunately, the "lab technicians" do not base their conclusions on observations. If they did, they would accept that the vast majority of paying "observers" to the experiment prefer what are perjoratively termed "warhorses".

no, wouldn't that be the equivalent of simply, docilely accepting the traditional church teachings regarding the nature of the universe??
these innovative thinkers went "outside the box" - sometimes to the great displeasure of the traditional institutions.

And when the paying observers voice their dissatisfaction, they are criticized for prefering the overly simple.

the analogy is of course, not exact - music and art must appeal, must be "sold" to a public - scientific thought and philosophy do not - they are governed by different rules...
did Einstein care whether the public embraced his Theories of Relativity?? Did Michelson and Morley care if the public was outraged that no ether could be detected?? I very much doubt it...
but - the analogy does apply to the progress, the changes in the patterns of thinking..reality isn't all lined up, nice and simple, as the church-fathers taught...the universe is not a nice, orderly place where a supreme traffic cop makes sure that all matter, energy, time and space abide by the divine rules..

The Newtonian universe might be a good analogy for the tonal universe in music. It has a few loose ends that don't quite fit, but it's laws are a perfect fit 99.9999% of the time.

it is inapplicable 99% of the time, since it does not adequately deal with velocities which approach "c" [speed of light] - which includes a huge portion on the universe as we know it.

The Einsteinian universe is a good model for the atonal universe.

I'm not sure I follow this...

the Taoist/modern physics concept of the universe seems most rational to me. stated perhaps overly simply: The Tao is the cosmic process in which all things are involved; the universe is seen as a continuous flow and change.

Corollary to that, those who do not wish to listen to it shouldn't have to, nor should they have to pay for it.

Hmmm.rather a different issue..but they shouldn't have to pay for the Tac-belle canon, or rachmaninoff 2nd symphony either.

[adrianallan]

I think that the reason that this argument gets played over again and again is that there is more to it than just personal choice.

Those in the anti-modernist brigade (like me) suspect that people who declare a love of atonal music are in fact, in many cases, pretending to enjoy it in order to appear sophisticated.


It is either that, or they have been blessed with a set of ears that find it possible to make sense of what appear to mere mortals as (very often) little more than random notes and unpleasant squeeks.

So it's the annoyance generated by paragraph II that is behind the main consternation of atonal sceptics.

[Chalkperson]

You mean you haven't seen our thoughts on this dozens of times before?

I can't speak for Karl, of course, but I can say for myself that the umpteenth poorly worded and not at all thought out vaporings of yet another anti-modernist post doesn't sound like tea at all to me. More like poison.

Poison ain't my cuppa tea!!

I wonder what's your problem?

I don't believe that you would have ever thought or looked about this subject in this way...so if you want to make fun of someone's intelligence, you would be a good start.

Saul, you may not have seen this subject brought up here before, it always causes huge fights, Michael has defended himself against the naysayers way too often and has finally decided not to bother arguing his case (which he does passionately) anymore...I cannot think of a more contentious issue, Brendan, (amongst others) has used every derogatory word imaginable, for once you and he agree on something...

[absinthe]

I think that the reason that this argument gets played over again and again is that there is more to it than just personal choice.

Those in the anti-modernist brigade (like me) suspect that people who declare a love of atonal music are in fact, in many cases, pretending to enjoy it in order to appear sophisticated.

I think that's true of concert- and soirée-goers with any "serious" music. However, I've played contemporary gigs and true, a few audience members are cult hangers-on but others genuinely find something in this music judging by comments made about contemporary music generally; an awareness of what they like and don't like among the many shades of the genre.

It is either that, or they have been blessed with a set of ears that find it possible to make sense of what appear to mere mortals as (very often) little more than random notes and unpleasant squeeks.

Though some are aware of their exposure through film and "multimedia". Sound compositions don't have to be unpleasant as long as they give the listener something to hang on to, so to speak. Some enthusiasts (including myself) just happened upon something that caught their interest (though I started on C20 symphonic music). I find much contemporary atonal music atrocious for reasons I've mentioned before but generally I'll give it a go. I always record BBC3's Hear and Now and other contemporary works for later digesting (or vomiting, as the case may be )

[THEHORN]

Wozzeck has been performed with great success at opera houses all over the world since its Berlin premiere in 1925, and such great conductors as Karl Boehm,Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Claudio Abbado have made outstanding recordings of it.
James Levine has conducted many acclaimed performances of both Wozzeck and Lulu at the Met, and would have led Lulu later this season there if not for his
unfortunate health problems , although for some reason he has yet to record them, which is also unfortunate.
Many great 20th century opera singers,such as Fischer-Dieskau, Walter Berry,
Evelyn Lear ,Hans Hotter, Anja Silja,to name only a few, have been in the recordings I mentioned and sung these operas all over.
I've seen Wozzeck twice at the Met, conducted by Sir Colin Davis and Levine.
Unfortunately, some members of the audience left early because they don't like it, but the rest cheered loudly.
And several years ago, when I heard a Met broadcast of Moses& Aron, which is probably more difficult to listen to than the Berg operas, I heard bravos at the end.

[Heck148]

Those in the anti-modernist brigade (like me) suspect that people who declare a love of atonal music are in fact, in many cases, pretending to enjoy it in order to appear sophisticated.

I'm sorry, that is alot of bullcr*p. I've heard that premise presented several times before, and it is rather offensive...one guy actually claimed that it was IMPOSSIBLE for anyone to like atonal music, because it didn't have singable melodies, and standard harmonies...
what drivel. it's really rather insulting...

or they have been blessed with a set of ears that find it possible to make sense of what appear to mere mortals as (very often) little more than random notes and unpleasant squeeks.

that may well be the case...but people come in all shape and sizes, with different talents and abilities...
to imply that nobody can really like atonal music...that such people are just putting everyone on is simply not true. why would anyone waste their time on such silliness??...there
are not enough hours in the day to listen to the music you do like - what would be the purpose??

[CharmNewton]

But unfortunately, the "lab technicians" do not base their conclusions on observations. If they did, they would accept that the vast majority of paying "observers" to the experiment prefer what are perjoratively termed "warhorses".

no, wouldn't that be the equivalent of simply, docilely accepting the traditional church teachings regarding the nature of the universe??
these innovative thinkers went "outside the box" - sometimes to the great displeasure of the traditional institutions.

No, I think it would just be accepting the empirical evidence that the large majority of classical listeners gravitate to a core set of works. It doesn't mean that listeners only want these works, but they are very likely to want works that have a tonal center. It doesn't mean that an atonal work cannot be beautiful or moving (Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet is a fine example of atonality, in my opinion). And I believe most listeners will judge a work fairly, provided it isn't rammed down their ears for their own good.

And when the paying observers voice their dissatisfaction, they are criticized for prefering the overly simple.

the analogy is of course, not exact - music and art must appeal, must be "sold" to a public - scientific thought and philosophy do not - they are governed by different rules...
did Einstein care whether the public embraced his Theories of Relativity?? Did Michelson and Morley care if the public was outraged that no ether could be detected?? I very much doubt it...
but - the analogy does apply to the progress, the changes in the patterns of thinking..reality isn't all lined up, nice and simple, as the church-fathers taught...the universe is not a nice, orderly place where a supreme traffic cop makes sure that all matter, energy, time and space abide by the divine rules..

If atonal music has any place in the marketplace of music, it will have to stand on its own feet. How can any composer be insensitive to the musical realities of audiences? If he/she doesn't care what an audience might feel about their work, they shouldn't expect anyone to buy a ticket.

The Newtonian universe might be a good analogy for the tonal universe in music. It has a few loose ends that don't quite fit, but it's laws are a perfect fit 99.9999% of the time.

it is inapplicable 99% of the time, since it does not adequately deal with velocities which approach "c" [speed of light] - which includes a huge portion on the universe as we know it.

But the Newtonian universe is a good model for the world we live in. It accurately predicts the force needed to get us from point A to Point B 100% of the time. My point was that it may be an imperfect model in the absolute, but it is good enough for most of the inhabitants of terra firma most of the time.

The Einsteinian universe is a good model for the atonal universe.

I'm not sure I follow this...

the Taoist/modern physics concept of the universe seems most rational to me. stated perhaps overly simply: The Tao is the cosmic process in which all things are involved; the universe is seen as a continuous flow and change.

The atonalists would argue that the preference for one sequence of notes (what we call a melody) has no intrinsic superiority over another. It is arbitrary. They are all just notes. That idea fits better with a model of the universe in free fall.

Corollary to that, those who do not wish to listen to it shouldn't have to, nor should they have to pay for it.

Hmmm.rather a different issue..but they shouldn't have to pay for the Tac-belle canon, or rachmaninoff 2nd symphony either.

I can't argue with that!

John

[Sator]

Those in the anti-modernist brigade (like me) suspect that people who declare a love of atonal music are in fact, in many cases, pretending to enjoy it in order to appear sophisticated.

I've come across people who don't like opera saying that all opera goers only pretend to enjoy the incomprehensible operatic screeches in order to pretend to appear sophisticated. I mean Mozart, Verdi and Puccini. There are millions of people out there for whom 99% of classical music is nothing but that: meaningless screeches and squawks. I don't just mean the countless underprivileged in the Third World who have never had a chance to learn to read let alone to enjoy Bach. A doctor once told me that the problem about going to the opera (eg Puccini's Turandot) is that you have to sit through a lot of pointless screeching and shouting before you get to the one bit you enjoy ie Nessum Dorma.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about try listening to Chinese opera (assuming you aren't a raving fan already). It too will sound like lots of empty banging and squawking to the uninitiated Western listener. I suppose all of those Chinese opera fans out there are only pretending to enjoy it. In fact, here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYWiQ_RnLWE

Try singing that in the shower. Even I must confess I'll have to stick to singing Berg.

[Heck148]

No, I think it would just be accepting the empirical evidence that the large majority of classical listeners gravitate to a core set of works.

no, the parallel is going against the established rules, the traditional thinking.
it has nothing to do with what listeners "want".

But the Newtonian universe is a good model for the world we live in.

our world, where Newtonian mechanics applies, is a minuscule part of the universe.

My point was that it may be an imperfect model in the absolute,

right, because the reality is based upon relativities and probabilities, not absolutes and certainties

The atonalists would argue that the preference for one sequence of notes (what we call a melody) has no intrinsic superiority over another.

so what?? it is simply another way to organize sound over time. if we look at other cultures in the world, we will see some very varied ideas about tonality, pitch etc. some cultures didie the octave up into 20 or more steps, rather than the western 12 semitones..
weastern music is certainly a valid system, but it's not the only show in town.

[stickles]

We see a slow and gradual breaking of order since that Baroque Era until today. Back then people had more order and harmony in their lives and societies, and the music reflected that. As time went by, people began to feel inner turmoil, inside themselves and in their societies, therefore the music was more ‘free’ in form and gradually as time passed by became less orderly and less formal, breaking down the laws of music because the music reflected their state of being, and the state of the societies they lived in.

Atonal Music also has its laws, but it's different from Baroque forms.
Pierre Boulez puts it best, one doesn't understand atonal music because one is not exposed to it enough. This can be applied to any kind of music including Peking Opera. Music is language, and one learns a new language by repeated exposure.

Is it not enough that the world today is in such turmoil and confusion, do I also have to add music to be this way, disorderly and mixed up with no sense of logic and direction?

Music is a reflection of human society. If one says degenerate society breeds degenerate music, I really can't argue against that. Hatred towards modern progress in music infers an indictment on human existence of the last and current century. There is nothing wrong with that. However I must say for me it is much more worthwhile trying to understand our world rather than avoiding it.

By the ways thanks for that Peking Opera link. I quite enjoyed it, although there was no singing in that particular clip. Here is an example of a Western equivalent of an aria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC6Ecc1LztY, if anyone is interested.

[CharmNewton]

no, the parallel is going against the established rules, the traditional thinking.
it has nothing to do with what listeners "want".

Then it's not surprising that people reject their music.

our world, where Newtonian mechanics applies, is a minuscule part of the universe.

I don't know anyone who is outside of it though.

John

[Sator]

By the ways thanks for that Peking Opera link. I quite enjoyed it, although there was no singing in that particular clip. Here is an example of a Western equivalent of an aria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC6Ecc1LztY, if anyone is interested.

Sounds like incomprehensible screeching to me. I just can't sing it like I can Schoenberg. Must be because it's bad music.

[Sator]

Again, if seems people have forgotten that the vast majority of Western music has no tonal centre eg Medieval-Renaissance music. Some people euphemistically refer to the older tradition as being "pre-tonal". However, whether pre-tonal or post-tonal, the end result is the same - absence of a tonal centre, or atonality. Tonality is the exception rather than the rule in Western music. Gesualdo and Josquin are no more tonal than Schoenberg. That is why Berg saw Schoenberg as someone who was returning to the true tradition of Western music: the contrapunctal imitative tradition. The diatonic-melodic era really represents a brief beak from that tradition.

There is a good reason why I have chosen Gesualdo (1566 – 1613) as a good example of the older atonality. It is organised much more like 12 tone music along contrapunctal imitative lines. What is more, you find these abrupt and unprepared chromatic side steps in the music far more jarring, bizarre and deeply disturbing than anything you will find in 20th century music. Once you get used to Berg it sounds like Brahms, but Gesualdo sounds just as eerie not matter how often you listen to it. These are good examples:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiEBfrk7LA4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvloqQPu2l4

Some of Stockhausen's work that are like Liszt or Berlioz on acid are also quite bizarre and otherworldly but nowhere near a weird as Gesualdo. I must confess it took me almost as long to figure out Gesualdo as it did to figure out the Second Viennese School. Some Stockhausen I have liked instantly on first hearing, others admittedly have taken much longer to understand.

The most rewarding music is often that which takes a lot of patience to come to grips with. There are plenty of people out there who regard all classical music including Mozart or Tchaikovsky to be unengaging squeaks and squawks. There are those who think all classical listeners are unbearable snobs who pretend to enjoy Mozart in order to appear erudite. The reason is that we live in a world where people expect instant gratification. The reality is that late Beethoven quartets, The Art of Fugue, or even an opera by Janacek is not something you can expect to understand straight away every time. Most people are too lazy to make the effort to come to grips with it, so they end up listening to little beyond the Moonlight Sonata and the Prelude & Fugue in D minor. Even I've been too lazy to really come to grips with Chinese opera. One day I will - but in the meantime it sounds to me how Schoenberg sounds to a lot of other people, and used to once sound to me: incomprehensible squawks. Still, I've managed to figure out some Japanese Gagaku, so I know I can do it. If I wasn't so lazy

[Brendan]

Curiously, the Galilei family were in dispute with Kepler (a student of Galileo's father, Vincenzo) about the nature of music and order - and Kepler was right (following Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's conception of the unverse that led to Copernicus' reworking of the calendar and astronomy). They were not trying to overturn the old order, but to show it's glory and truth in full.

Newton was a mystic and alchemist very traditional in his views (loved a good persecution), and trying to find the old alchemical order in the universe, not radical new ideas (see White's biography Newton - The Last Sorcerer). See also Joceyln Godwin's marvellous Harmonies of Heaven and Earth - Mysticism in Music for a fuller account, including tone-zodiacs and planetary scales.

Far from arbitrary, music followed the natural order of breath, pulse and motion (dance, for instance. Who dances to modern atonal stuff?) as well as how sounds and their relationships are actually heard by human beings on earth, not an abstract realm such as we have today.

Like most things today, it has more to do with opposition to Christianity and Christian (Western) thought and theology than science. Modern atonality is about destroying any and every notion of prayer and divinity, of the sacred, in music - from whence it originally came. Medieval chant was hardly that way inclined, nor was Bach etc etc.

From http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009 ... acred-time

The tonal music of the West began with a teleology learned from Christianity, though, to be sure, the ­compositional ­techniques invented to evoke the sacred were employed later for secular purposes. Possibly the most astonishing example of a supervening rhythm occurs in the last movement of Robert Schumann’s piano collection Kreisleriana. Schumann moved within a musical culture whose spiritual mission was taken for granted (he composed a Mass and a Requiem).

The ordering of musical time by tonal teleology broke down with the so-called new German music of Liszt and Wagner. Writing in 1919, Franz Rosenzweig admonished the musicians to return to the Church and to the demarcation of time by revelation and redemption. In the chapter on Christianity (“The Eternal Rays”) in The Star of Redemption, he wrote: “What is sacrilegious in music is idealized time, with which it subverts real time. If it is to be made clean of its willful sacrilege, it must be removed from the Beyond, and brought to this side of time, and its ideal time must be made real. For music, that would mean to make the transition from the concert hall to the church.”

Revelation, he continues, “makes fast its point of reference in the middle of time.” Humanity can best understand it in the Church year, particularly in “the festivals of revelation,” which, “pointing backward toward the creation of revelation and forward toward revealed redemption, incorporate the immeasurable eternity of the day of God into the annual cycle of the Church year.”

By integrating itself into these festivals and in the Church year as a whole, the individual piece of music alights from the artificial frame of its ideal time and becomes wholly alive. . . . He who joins in singing a chorale, or who listens to the mass, the Christmas oratorio, the passion . . . wants to make his soul stand with both feet in time, in the most real time of all, in the time of the one day of the world of which all individual days of the world are but a part. Music is supposed to escort him there.

Western composers abandoned teleology in music at the same time they turned away from Christianity. Tonality enabled music to create deep expectations about the future. With the abandonment of tonality, listeners lost their map of the musical future, and found themselves trapped in a sort of Blind Man’s Bluff of a perpetual musical present. Churchgoers shunned twentieth-century composers as resolutely as they had embraced Bach or Mozart. As in other venues, churchgoers turned to popular music, the last bastion of the old tonality.

[Sator]

BTW plainchant too doesn't have a tonal centre either. It is pre-tonal, even if it is modal. It is for all practical purposes atonal music. So too is the music of Josquin, Gesualdo or for that matter Palestrina. Trying to equate a lack of tonality with the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah merely translates to saying that everyone who fails to share one's own musical taste should burn in hell.

[barney]

Those in the anti-modernist brigade (like me) suspect that people who declare a love of atonal music are in fact, in many cases, pretending to enjoy it in order to appear sophisticated.


I[/i]

This sort of statement always tickles me. We are so sure we know what people are thinking better than they know. I don't deny that it's a phenomenon that can happen, but there really aren't many kudos in saying "I simply adore John Cage". I don't listen to a great deal of atonal music, but I like quite a lot of the stuff I do, especially Stravinsky. I found Lulu incredibly powerful when Opera Australia staged it a few years back.

But I'd just like to say this, categorically, indubitably, ineluctably and without fear of contradiction (well, not the latter, perhaps): Compared with me, none of you has really good taste in music, because good taste is defined by what I like!!!

(The only problem is, some of you think the same about yourselves.)

[barney]

Thanks, Brendan. That post was fascinating. I had never heard of that distinction about sacral and subverted time.

[Jack Kelso]

You mean you haven't seen our thoughts on this dozens of times before?

I can't speak for Karl, of course, but I can say for myself that the umpteenth poorly worded and not at all thought out vaporings of yet another anti-modernist post doesn't sound like tea at all to me. More like poison.

Poison ain't my cuppa tea!!

I wonder what's your problem?

I don't believe that you would have ever thought or looked about this subject in this way...so if you want to make fun of someone's intelligence, you would be a good start.

Saul, you may not have seen this subject brought up here before, it always causes huge fights, Michael has defended himself against the naysayers way too often and has finally decided not to bother arguing his case (which he does passionately) anymore...I cannot think of a more contentious issue, Brendan, (amongst others) has used every derogatory word imaginable, for once you and he agree on something...

There should not be fighting when it boils down to personal taste---or a philosophical position...or both. I enjoy quite a lot of serial music, but there should be musical ideas in it. I knew a guy who loved the older masters, but referred to atonal works as "fear music".

Hindemith, Schostakowitsch, Britten and many other great 20th-century masters believed the 12-tone technique was a cover-up for lack of talent. That was their standpoint---just as Wagner's standpoint was that after Beethoven the symphony was pretty much "a dead form".

Tschüß,
Jack

[Brendan]

BTW plainchant too doesn't have a tonal centre either. It is pre-tonal, even if it is modal. It is for all practical purposes atonal music. So too is the music of Josquin, Gesualdo or for that matter Palestrina. Trying to equate a lack of tonality with the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah merely translates to saying that everyone who fails to share one's own musical taste should burn in hell.

But plainchant was most definately concerned with the sacred - and Western music developed over time to accomodate more sophisticated techniques of invoking the sacred within music. Wagner and later composers mostly (not all) worked hard to eliminate this sense of the sacred, particularly the Christian, from music. See Begbie's Theology, Music and Time.

No one said anything about burning in hell (until you did) for not sharing musical taste. Nevertheless, the attempted elimination of the sacred from music may have consequences for how the music sounds. I certainly do not bother with modern atonality, but am enamoured of medieval and renaissance music. Why is that, do you think, if both are similarly atonal?

Also from http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009 ... acred-time

We know almost nothing about the music that so deeply moved Augustine in Milan, so much so that he feared that its beauty might distract him from devotion. But ideas that seem obscure, for example his rhythmic hierarchy, do not suffer from transposition into the framework of modern music theory. On the contrary, they become clearer. Augustine’s hierarchical theory of rhythm fits uncannily well into the musical world that emerged in the fifteenth-century West.

Starting in Paris during the fourteenth century, and coming to full realization during the fifteenth, Western musicians found means to create tonal expectations so compelling that the hearer’s perception of the flow of musical time is guided by a sense of the musical future. Tonality—the system in which the horizontal unfolding of melody in time integrates with vertical consonance—has the unique capacity to generate a sense of the future.

Once musicians discovered how to link musical rhythm to the resolution of dissonance into consonance, Western music acquired a teleology. Every tonal work has a goal, the resolution of tonal tension in the return to the tonic by way of a final cadence from the dominant. The Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker identified a fundamental structure underlying each movement of a classical composition that guides a great passage away from and back to the tonic. All the elements of composition are there to fulfill this journey. Once the composer has created an expectation, it is possible to create tension by prolonging it, or create surprise and even humor by leading in an unexpected direction. Deep expectations of the future act upon memory through the judgment of our mind’s ear. Thus, for instance, the Schenkerian theorist Carl Schachter introduced the distinction between durational and tonal, and identified higher-order rhythms in tonal music—work consistent with Augustine’s teaching in the De Musica.

The two kinds of rhythm in Western music—durational and tonal—arise from a practice first described explicitly by the Flemish contrapuntalist Johannes Tinctoris in 1477, although (as musicologist Sarah Fuller has shown) the embryo of the idea can be found in the treatise De Mensurabili Musica, attributed to John of Garland at Paris in the late thirteenth century. All Western theory had taught that music was founded upon consonance, the intervals that nature had provided in simple proportions that created a sense of stability for the ear. To sound two melodies together in counterpoint, the pitches intoned simultaneously must be at consonant intervals. But the musicians of Paris learned that not all notes had to be sung in consonant relation, only those that sounded at points of rhythmic stability. Dissonances were permitted so long as they occurred at points of rhythmic instability and led to a consonance.

[karlhenning]

This discussion comes up often but no resolution emerges.

I started participating in internet music discussion since about 1999. It has been going around and around in circles on the internet like a stuck record.

Yes. I've said pretty much what I feel it is necessary to say on the subject, more than once.

So, no thank you very much, I shan't repeat my ideas, and have them ignored or misunderstood or misrepresented in response, all over again.

I am just going to continue writing my own music, some of which will be some distance from Common Practice.

Cheers,
~Karl

[rogch]

If 20th century "atonal" music is bad, a number of conductors must have misunderstood many works, they have all concucted many of them:

Claudio Abbado, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Eugene Ormandy, Lorin Maazel, Simon Rattle, Serge Koussevitzky, Valery Gergiev, Nikolaus Harnoncourt (loves both Berg and Bartok), Richardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Rafael Kubelik. Not to mention villains like Pierre Boulez and Michael Gielen...

And Mstislav Rostropovich must have been an ignorant musician. He not only played, but also commisioned works from many useless contemporary composers.

[karlhenning]

. . . Not to mention villains like Pierre Boulez . . . .

Well, obviously Boulez is reprehensible, because he was one of those dastardly 20th-century composers, himself; so it's no surprise that he was going to foist upon the innocent, Bach-loving public all manner of mean, heartless, non-triadic music.

Cheers,
~Karl

[johnQpublic]

Wozzeck has been performed with great success at opera houses all over the world since its Berlin premiere in 1925, and such great conductors as Karl Boehm,Pierre Boulez, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Dimitri Mitropoulos and Claudio Abbado have made outstanding recordings of it.
James Levine has conducted many acclaimed performances of both Wozzeck and Lulu at the Met, and would have led Lulu later this season there if not for his
unfortunate health problems , although for some reason he has yet to record them, which is also unfortunate.
Many great 20th century opera singers,such as Fischer-Dieskau, Walter Berry,
Evelyn Lear ,Hans Hotter, Anja Silja,to name only a few, have been in the recordings I mentioned and sung these operas all over.
I've seen Wozzeck twice at the Met, conducted by Sir Colin Davis and Levine.
Unfortunately, some members of the audience left early because they don't like it, but the rest cheered loudly.
And several years ago, when I heard a Met broadcast of Moses& Aron, which is probably more difficult to listen to than the Berg operas, I heard bravos at the end.

Now take that a step further which is that many truly great conductors & performers love playing "modern" music and it crushes the idea that atonal music is phony.

[Sator]

But plainchant was most definately concerned with the sacred - and Western music developed over time to accomodate more sophisticated techniques of invoking the sacred within music.

Just because plainchant is spiritual doesn't make it triadic/tonal

Wagner and later composers mostly (not all) worked hard to eliminate this sense of the sacred, particularly the Christian, from music. See Begbie's Theology, Music and Time.

I suppose you mean like Wagner's Parsifal - his least tonal work.

Additionally, the first work that Stravinsky included a fully 12 tone movement was his Canticum Sacrum . Schoenberg wrote Moses and Aaron as well as his sacred cantata Jacob's Ladder. If you read anything about Stockhausen, you will find that took a deeply spiritual view of music - arguably even more so than Scriabin, whose mystical yearnings lead him to transcend tonality way before Schoenberg. The whole of the Licht cycle and its struggles between the Archangel Michael, Eve and the Devil is a deeply spiritual work.

[Lance]

Parsifal, Wagner's least tonal work? For yours truly, it remains the most tonal - and in fact, my favourite of all of Wagner's operas, despite its compositional date, composed in 1857 (height of Romanticism) but completed by 1882 (still high Romantic period, but changing into the New School rather rapidly).

But plainchant was most definately concerned with the sacred - and Western music developed over time to accomodate more sophisticated techniques of invoking the sacred within music.

Just because plainchant is spiritual doesn't make it triadic/tonal

Wagner and later composers mostly (not all) worked hard to eliminate this sense of the sacred, particularly the Christian, from music. See Begbie's Theology, Music and Time.

I suppose you mean like Wagner's Parsifal - his least tonal work.

Additionally, the first work that Stravinsky included a fully 12 tone movement was his Canticum Sacrum . Schoenberg wrote Moses and Aaron as well as his sacred cantata Jacob's Ladder. If you read anything about Stockhausen, you will find that took a deeply spiritual view of music - arguably even more so than Scriabin, whose mystical yearnings lead him to transcend tonality way before Schoenberg. The whole of the Licht cycle and its struggles between the Archangel Michael, Eve and the Devil is a deeply spiritual work.

[some guy]

But Lance, the tonality of a piece (or the lack thereof), is not a personal thing. Parsifal either is or is not Wagner's least tonal work. Nothing to do with you, with any listener.*

One thing is clear. Parsifal is an extremely chromatic work, one that's kind of a poster child, I've been given to understand, for the difficulties of analyzing late nineteen century chromaticism.

*Not, that is, unless you're using "tonal" as many people use "atonal," to mean music to which you respond in a certain way!

[Lance]

Michael:

What I had in mind was the Copland piece being atonal, quite the opposite of some of his famous earlier works {Billy the Kid; Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, etc.}. So Parsifal would be considered tonal in comparison. I guess that's what I was alluding to since the Copland piece was still in my inner ear. Anyway, it's great to be here and communicate with you here! I am hoping to make the CMG Meet-Up this year and trust if it happens that you will be there as well. [Afterthought: It was also interesting to me that Copland took Stravinsky's lead in Connotations rather than deciding on his own to go the other route.]

But Lance, the tonality of a piece (or the lack thereof), is not a personal thing. Parsifal either is or is not Wagner's least tonal work. Nothing to do with you, with any listener.*

One thing is clear. Parsifal is an extremely chromatic work, one that's kind of a poster child, I've been given to understand, for the difficulties of analyzing late nineteen century chromaticism.

*Not, that is, unless you're using "tonal" as many people use "atonal," to mean music to which you respond in a certain way!