8 ms·

Schoenberg: Why He Matters

78 points by tintinnabula 3y ago

jjgreen 3y ago
Long and quite dense review of Harvey Sachs' Schoenberg: Why He Matters, looks interesting if you like that sort of thing; I do, so added to my Christmas "hint dropping" list.
- dang 3y ago
  (Thanks - I've changed the title to that above. For book review articles, we've found it's usually best to use the title of the book.)
emptybits 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20231128002043/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/11/schoenberg-why-he-matters-review/676112/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231128002043/https://www.theat...
jancsika 3y ago
Challenging music is a tough sell because there has been about a hundred years of a critical mass of composers who took the metric of "challenging" and made it a target. That created a lot of noise that's not of the compelling type. And while it's not so pretentious that, say, the music accidentally sounds outside of the human frequency range, it's pretentious enough to make non-musickers question whether there's really any there there. Music cognition is still a young enough science to leave questions lingering about what is and isn't happening on a musical-perception level. Also-- not sure I've ever seen this talked about, but music perception shares sensory apparatus with one's general sense of hearing. So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. It's difficult to be open to new, unfamiliar musical forms, and probably impossibly so if one is grumpy because the delivery format makes one feel as if the music is actively hurting one's ears.
- munificent 3y ago
  > So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. That describes a lot of techno and heavy metal and a lot of people seem to really dig it.
  - dcsommer 3y ago
    Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. Sure, the instruments have massive distortion and new sounds, but the "big blocks" are completely familiar to the brain, unlike avant-garde classical music which can completely abandon recognizable rhythm and 12TET.
    - a-french-anon 3y ago
      Not all of it, obviously. Stuff like Blut Aus Nord's MoRT or Meshuggah's I come to mind when talking about the weirdest bits of metal.
    - munificent 3y ago
      > Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. This depends very heavily on which subgenre of techno you're talking about. Melodic techno tends to use functional harmony, yes. But there is a lot of techno out there that has no recognizable harmony at all. It may have a root note, but bass and/or melodic lines, if present at all, can be completely chromatic. Rhythm is almost always 4/4, of course, but it's hard to deviate too far from that with dance music. Within that, techno tends to do a lot of interesting polymeter stuff. Whether you consider that traditional or not is, I guess, open to interpretation.
  - anon291 3y ago
    Techno is mostly old school classical like melodies with novel timbres. It is extremely tonal and very rhythmic.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The case against serialism is easy. Tone rows are a pointless conceit. They turn composition into a crossword puzzle. It's a worthless constraint. There is nothing you can do with tone rows - retrogrades, inversions, permutations, all of it - that you can't do in free atonality. There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. As for popularity - you can find abstract expressionist paintings for sale on Etsy. You won't find much hard serial music on Bandcamp. And it's pretty easy to generate it with software now. But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations. Schoenberg desperately wanted to be remembered as a great innovator. He didn't care if audiences loved or hated the music, as long as his name was out there was an Important Composer.
- gnulinux 3y ago
  > There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes. You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows. Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient. Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed. I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.
atoav 3y ago
I think the question why contemporary music intimidates or infuriates people could be expanded to art as well. As someone who studied art and film I found that even extremely powerful experimental works of music, art or film will have critics like these. Don't get me wrong: One doesn't has to like every piece of art. But even without liking it one could still respect the expression, the craft, the energy and/or the thought contained within a work. There is a lot of great art that I don't like. The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning. So once you encounter unparseable art, chances are you will feel stupid. Or worse, you feel the artwork "calls" you stupid. But a lot of art simply is, while the intention is completely secondary. Nobody would look at a nice sunset and be upset at the fact that it doesn't have a clear meaning behind it. This lack of meaning is very easy to ignore with art which you think is nice (e.g. a painting of said sunset). For more art-headed people the same painting of a sunset would be boring, or even kitsch — what does the painting show, that I couldn't see better in real and nature? Then I'd rather see something completely unseen, a new painting technique, a motive I have never thought about etc.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least saw the most popular films one day and vaguely felt like I didn't get them, but there was nothing there I'd identify as bad filmmaking or anything. It just seemed like it was trying to say something and I wasn't getting it. I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is. There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.
benrutter 3y ago
> Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? I think that misses that a lot of "challenging" music that isn't Schoenberg is very widely accepted. Composers like Glass or Cage are popular enough to be used in film soundtracks. I don't think there's necessary anything about music over visyal arts that means people don't like "challenging" or "experimental" music, but Schoenberg for whatever reason hasn't ever reached a wide level of popularity.
- codeulike 3y ago
  Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? Music is different to other art forms. Not everyone likes dance, not everyone likes paintings, not everyone likes theatre, not everyone likes sculpture, not everyone likes poetry. But EVERYONE likes music. Its fundamental. So when its challenging music, its challenging in a more fundamental way than a painting can be challenging.
  - mostlylurks 3y ago
    No, not everyone likes music [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      The fact that it's a medical condition just proves GP's point
      - mostlylurks 3y ago
ghostpepper 3y ago
I was hoping this would be more about encouraging people to listen to music that is generally outside of what they usually listen to. For some this would be jazz, others heavy metal, or even country music (which many profess to hate).
- squidsoup 3y ago
  I've introduced a number of friends to American old time music, the progenitor of bluegrass and modern country music, who have discovered that there's in fact a lot of wonderful country music.
- jzb 3y ago
  Usually those types of pieces have an "eat your vegetables" vibe to them. While it may be good advice (and is, in the case of vegetables) people generally don't listen to music to be challenged. They're seeking familiarity, comfort, joy -- which are hard to find in "challenging" music, whether that's genres that they don't care for or more experimental music that defies conventions.
nullhole 3y ago
I'll take this opportunity to plug the movie "Untitled" (2009) by Jonathan Parker, a light comedy poking loving fun at contemporary art. The lead character is an avant-garde composer, with a strong belief in the importance of his work, ignoring (as best he can) the mockery of others, and resisting the calls from most of those who care about him to use some melody in his work.
freetime2 3y ago
Nahre Sol recently put out a video on contemporary classical music [1] that, while attempting to correct common misconceptions and generally promote it, basically reaffirmed my dislike of the genre. The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it. And while I don’t begrudge the individual composers and performers who do make this sort of music - they are of course free to follow their own curiosity and passions - it does upset me a bit that this where “classical” music has ended up. It feels like the academics have hijacked the genre to the detriment of casual listeners. [1] https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM
- squidsoup 3y ago
  If you consider Cage, Stockhausen and Glass part of the western classical music tradition, then I think we should consider composers like Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Richard Skelton and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith part of that continuum. There are people making interesting, innovative music that isn't academic or needlessly avant garde, that I think can appeal to everyone.
  - gnulinux 3y ago
    > needlessly avant garde I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music. Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena. So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.
jerf 3y ago
Music as a whole clearly decided to go in a direction deliberately away from what any "normal" person would like. They dress it up in plenty of other words, but it's clear by the way nothing will attract their disdain like anything that a normal person might like that this is certainly a core component of where academic music decided to go. I know this from personal experience. They don't even particularly hide it if it's not the direct topic of conversation, it is only denied when directly challenged, a sort of psychological motte & bailey ploy. That's fine. That's all their right, even the last bit. I'm hardly in a position to insist that disliking, or at the very least distrusting, something when the only thing I know about it is that it is popular is invalid myself. We take very different approaches to that, but I can't deny what I do is close enough that it would be hypocritical to criticize too much. But it is pretty stupid to write handwringing articles about "Why don't they like us?" You collectively wrote music that blares in every tone that you don't want normies to like you. You chased them away for decades. You collectively berated and mocked them in both words and music. What did you collectively expect? I suppose those who joined in the process late and learned the methods of disdain without the reason underlying them might be confused, but I can promise those people that there is no scenario where the common person suddenly acquires a taste for music that basically musically reads as "screw the common person and everything they stand for", in addition to whatever else it may be saying. If you want the normies to like you, you are going to have to at least inch closer to them first. Maybe the normies could use some mind-expansion, but right now you are so far away from where the normies are that you are barely on the same planet. You don't want to. You're not going to. That's fine. All I'm really asking for is for you to stop being surprised about the results. When you tell people to fuck off, they do.
standardUser 3y ago
> Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? I assume the wording "classical contemporary" is deliberate, but it sounds all wrong. Shouldn't it be "contemporary classical" aka "modern classical"? They also use it once in the article. Is this a widely used naming convention for this type of music?
- odyssey7 3y ago
  Although the general meanings of modern and contemporary are similar, in art they have different meanings. The production of modern art is considered to have ended in the 20th century, and contemporary art is being produced right now. For a similar historical nomenclature, see the musical style ars nova or "new art." Ars nova continues to be called ars nova, even though the music was written in the 14th century.
darkerside 3y ago
There's an art to making the challenging accessible. Before listening to Take Five by Dave Brubek, I think most people never would have guessed that a 5/4 time signature could sound so natural.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  It's mostly only Western European / American popular music that (for some reason thaf I don't quite understand) is obsessed with 4/4. In many other cultures (e.g. Eastern European folk music, but many others as well), irregular meters are quite common.
- handy2000 3y ago
  5/4 isn't that challenging of a time signature. I would argue it's just uncommon and so most people associate it with Take Five. 3/4 was extremely popular in Europe for centuries and is not perceived as challenging.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    5/4 is actually ambiguous because the "5" can be any of 3+2, 2+3, 2+1+2 etc. Similar issues for 7/4, etc. 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8 may have rhythmic variations too (e.g. the 3+3+2 tresillo rhythm common in rock-and-roll music) but these don't impact the metrical understanding of the music to anything near that extent.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    I'm not saying it's THAT challenging. It's not 13/2, but it is 5/2. Most 5/2 songs will sound unnatural to most people . It's ironic to make a comment like that in the context of an article like this one.
    - handy2000 3y ago
      How is it ironic? Not sure I follow. The article is making the case for challenging music. You pointed out that Brubeck made challenging music (i.e. 5/4) accessible to most people. My argument is that this is a poor example as 5/4 is not that of a challenging time signature, and most non-musicians who heard Take Five probably didn't even perceive the uncommon 5/4, and just enjoyed the tune. 5/4 is popular in progressive rock, post rock, and electronic music. In my experience most people do not pay attention to that. Similar to 3/4 - it's an uncommon but easy time signature that people in the Western world have no problem with. Basically, there is no challenge.
cushpush 3y ago
Is A440Hz or 432Hz? This to me is a larger question than composition styles.
- feoren 3y ago
  Literally pick one and then forget about it. Or split the difference and make it 436Hz if you want. It literally does not matter.
  - cushpush 3y ago
    It's bold to claim something does not matter without exhaustive evidence to back that up. That is not a scientific view nor a scientific statement.
    - vonjuice 3y ago
      It would be silly to assume otherwise, actually.
    - ink_13 3y ago
      Calling a certain frequency "A4" is also in no way scientific. It's completely arbitrary! Just agree with the other people you're playing with. That's what really matters. Musicality is in ratios, not absolute values.
    - feoren 3y ago
      You said a <2% difference in tuning is a larger question than composition styles. Like, the difference between 440 and 432 is more important than the difference between Baroque, Romantic, Atonal, Beebop Jazz, and Death Metal. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh literally any genre, as long as it's tuned to A4=440. If it's anything else I hate it." It's difficult for me to respond to such a statement and stay within the HN commenting guidelines. It's strange and surprising that this would be something anyone would ever argue with a straight face. It does not matter. Here's some reasons why: - You can change it at any point. Re-tune your orchestra. Pitch bend your mp3 file in Audacity. It's free to change your mind. Decisions which are free to change do not matter. - Most humans basically don't notice it. The very few that do have a good enough ear to notice it will forget about it within seconds unless your song is extremely boring. If your listeners are focusing on a 2% difference in tuning instead of the content of your song, your song sucks. - Written scores literally do not specify it; that's how little it matters. People do not have this in mind when they write music because it doesn't matter. They write the tempo, the key signature, the exact notes, but they don't write the exact tuning of A4. They don't care.
feoren 3y ago
Mike Verta is a Hollywood composer who has put out a lot of great videos on composition, and he makes great points on this (he has since become an insane alt-right nutjob, unfortunately, but his old videos are still up). He tells a story about stopping at a red light next to a woman who was absolutely jamming out to some hip-hop song. Her car is shaking, she's shouting the lyrics with a big smile on her face, just completely engrossed in this music that everyone who considers themself a "composer" would turn their nose up at; not "real music", of course. And he thought: I would be elated if I pulled up and saw someone connecting like that to my music. Isn't that why I got into composing in the first place? To bring about that in people? Why else would you want to be a composer? To join the circle-jerk and feel infinitely superior to all those stupid normies? Many of these composers write this way because they simply cannot write tonal music well. It's too hard. Writing music with original colors and style, but is still tonal and still resonates with actual human beings? That's tremendously difficult. Avant-garde composers avoid doing this because they can't. They write atonal shit because it's much, much easier. The idea is that you've failed as a composer if the "common man" can relate at all to your music is one of the most elitist attitudes a human can possibly hold. Normal listeners' brains are so far beneath yours that if they can recognize any form of structure, melody, or harmony at all in your music, then it must be trash normie music. It's the exact premise of the Emperor's New Clothes story and it's amazing how long this bubble has lasted. Shame on everyone who thinks this way. Imagine being the one who takes these "challenging" musical ideas and presents them in a way that listeners can actually intuitively understand. Imagine pulling in listeners with what they know, and then taking them on a journey into the previously unknown, and having them be with you the whole time. Now that's a damn-good modern composer! Of course, the vast majority of modern composers would wallow in despair if such a thing happened to their big-brained magnum opus -- normies understanding their music!?
- anon291 3y ago
  You put into words my exact feeling. These composers have no skill. They are compared to Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt but all those men were celebrities in their days... They made music people jammed to. Not anymore. It's part of a larger trend of artists embracing ugliness because industrialized arts education seems incapable of producing artists. Instead it's just credentialism and terrible creations.
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jdontillman 3y ago
Heh-heh, "challenging" is the polite term. 12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition. I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial. Which is what makes it... challenging. It's the same with Minimalism. But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique. Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context. And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  > for removing natural tonality from a composition Of course, nothing stops you from using the "removing natural tonality" trick in a way that's ultimately subordinate to broader tonal goals. For instance, a small tone row fragment can be used to set surprising tonal expectations and cleanly modulate to any key - even in a completely monophonic piece with no background harmony! It's just supposed to be a horizontal composing-out of some arbitrary set of notes, but this is also what makes it work within tonality as a pivot point. (And if the atonal fragment can be snuck in initially as a melodic "variation" of motivic material from the piece, it needn't even surprise the listener as such - until, that is, they find themselves listening in a completely different key area and have to wonder "wait, how did that twist work?")
  - grotted 3y ago
    Shostakovich did this a lot in his later work. His violin sonata starts with a long slow atonal dirge, then suddenly slinks into this little tonal waltz. It gives a “haunted music box” vibe that I absolutely love.
- Slow_Hand 3y ago
AlbertCory 3y ago
I went to this, once: https://cabrillomusic.org/2023-season/ https://cabrillomusic.org/2023-season/ Many of the composers were actually there in person. I figured you knew what you were getting into, so it's no fair rejecting it all: give it a fair hearing, because that's what you came for. About all I can say is, some of it wasn't too terrible. Novelty is, in itself, worth nothing at all. Is it beautiful, or isn't it? It's tired and trite to mention how audiences used to reject something and now they love it. That's called Survivor Bias. We don't talk about all the things they rejected and were never heard again, or that never got performed at all.
farmeroy 3y ago
I got turned on to Schoenberg as a teenager listening to his string quartets, though I never dug too deeply. As a punk rocker who was really into free jazz, his music spoke to me much more than other 'classical' composers. There's a great performance with Glen Gould and Yehudi Menuhin performing Phantasy for Violin and Piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABQYAPK_Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABQYAPK_Ek) Gould defends Schoenbergs compositions, Menuhin dislikes them for all the reasons most people do, and admits he is only playing it because he respects Gould so much. One of Gould's points is that the piece is specifically composed for violin - no other instrument could play it, whereas Bach pieces can be rearranged for any instrument. Bach is composing music in an abstract sense but Schoenberg is composing to the specific capabilities of the instrument. There's another great monologue from Gould enumerating why Mozart was a "bad" composer, which I love to cite whenever I have to defend my dislike for the child genius.
a-french-anon 3y ago
I think I'm not alone in being convinced that atonality, dissonance and the likes are "effects". Same way that noise can be used to great effect in almost all genres of music but pure noise (e.g. Merzbow) is at best treated relaxing background noise or conversation piece when it's not enshrined in the emperor's new clothes discussion club's room. Or like pepper or salt: using it with almost all food can improve it, but you're not daft and/or pretentious enough to serve a plate full of salt and call it an excellent dish that's just beyond the pleb's understanding, right?

78 points by tintinnabula 3y ago

Long and quite dense review of Harvey Sachs' Schoenberg: Why He Matters, looks interesting if you like that sort of thing; I do, so added to my Christmas "hint dropping" list.

dang 3y ago
(Thanks - I've changed the title to that above. For book review articles, we've found it's usually best to use the title of the book.)

emptybits 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20231128002043/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/11/schoenberg-why-he-matters-review/676112/ https://web.archive.org/web/20231128002043/https://www.theat...

jancsika 3y ago

Challenging music is a tough sell because there has been about a hundred years of a critical mass of composers who took the metric of "challenging" and made it a target. That created a lot of noise that's not of the compelling type. And while it's not so pretentious that, say, the music accidentally sounds outside of the human frequency range, it's pretentious enough to make non-musickers question whether there's really any there there. Music cognition is still a young enough science to leave questions lingering about what is and isn't happening on a musical-perception level. Also-- not sure I've ever seen this talked about, but music perception shares sensory apparatus with one's general sense of hearing. So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. It's difficult to be open to new, unfamiliar musical forms, and probably impossibly so if one is grumpy because the delivery format makes one feel as if the music is actively hurting one's ears.

munificent 3y ago
> So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. That describes a lot of techno and heavy metal and a lot of people seem to really dig it.
- dcsommer 3y ago
  Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. Sure, the instruments have massive distortion and new sounds, but the "big blocks" are completely familiar to the brain, unlike avant-garde classical music which can completely abandon recognizable rhythm and 12TET.
  - a-french-anon 3y ago
    Not all of it, obviously. Stuff like Blut Aus Nord's MoRT or Meshuggah's I come to mind when talking about the weirdest bits of metal.
  - munificent 3y ago
    > Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. This depends very heavily on which subgenre of techno you're talking about. Melodic techno tends to use functional harmony, yes. But there is a lot of techno out there that has no recognizable harmony at all. It may have a root note, but bass and/or melodic lines, if present at all, can be completely chromatic. Rhythm is almost always 4/4, of course, but it's hard to deviate too far from that with dance music. Within that, techno tends to do a lot of interesting polymeter stuff. Whether you consider that traditional or not is, I guess, open to interpretation.
- anon291 3y ago
  Techno is mostly old school classical like melodies with novel timbres. It is extremely tonal and very rhythmic.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

The case against serialism is easy. Tone rows are a pointless conceit. They turn composition into a crossword puzzle. It's a worthless constraint. There is nothing you can do with tone rows - retrogrades, inversions, permutations, all of it - that you can't do in free atonality. There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. As for popularity - you can find abstract expressionist paintings for sale on Etsy. You won't find much hard serial music on Bandcamp. And it's pretty easy to generate it with software now. But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations. Schoenberg desperately wanted to be remembered as a great innovator. He didn't care if audiences loved or hated the music, as long as his name was out there was an Important Composer.

gnulinux 3y ago
> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements. Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes. You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows. Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient. Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed. I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.

atoav 3y ago

I think the question why contemporary music intimidates or infuriates people could be expanded to art as well. As someone who studied art and film I found that even extremely powerful experimental works of music, art or film will have critics like these. Don't get me wrong: One doesn't has to like every piece of art. But even without liking it one could still respect the expression, the craft, the energy and/or the thought contained within a work. There is a lot of great art that I don't like. The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning. So once you encounter unparseable art, chances are you will feel stupid. Or worse, you feel the artwork "calls" you stupid. But a lot of art simply is, while the intention is completely secondary. Nobody would look at a nice sunset and be upset at the fact that it doesn't have a clear meaning behind it. This lack of meaning is very easy to ignore with art which you think is nice (e.g. a painting of said sunset). For more art-headed people the same painting of a sunset would be boring, or even kitsch — what does the painting show, that I couldn't see better in real and nature? Then I'd rather see something completely unseen, a new painting technique, a motive I have never thought about etc.

nonameiguess 3y ago
You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least saw the most popular films one day and vaguely felt like I didn't get them, but there was nothing there I'd identify as bad filmmaking or anything. It just seemed like it was trying to say something and I wasn't getting it. I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is. There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.

benrutter 3y ago

> Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? I think that misses that a lot of "challenging" music that isn't Schoenberg is very widely accepted. Composers like Glass or Cage are popular enough to be used in film soundtracks. I don't think there's necessary anything about music over visyal arts that means people don't like "challenging" or "experimental" music, but Schoenberg for whatever reason hasn't ever reached a wide level of popularity.

codeulike 3y ago
Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? Music is different to other art forms. Not everyone likes dance, not everyone likes paintings, not everyone likes theatre, not everyone likes sculpture, not everyone likes poetry. But EVERYONE likes music. Its fundamental. So when its challenging music, its challenging in a more fundamental way than a painting can be challenging.
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  No, not everyone likes music [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    The fact that it's a medical condition just proves GP's point
    - mostlylurks 3y ago

ghostpepper 3y ago

I was hoping this would be more about encouraging people to listen to music that is generally outside of what they usually listen to. For some this would be jazz, others heavy metal, or even country music (which many profess to hate).

squidsoup 3y ago
I've introduced a number of friends to American old time music, the progenitor of bluegrass and modern country music, who have discovered that there's in fact a lot of wonderful country music.
jzb 3y ago
Usually those types of pieces have an "eat your vegetables" vibe to them. While it may be good advice (and is, in the case of vegetables) people generally don't listen to music to be challenged. They're seeking familiarity, comfort, joy -- which are hard to find in "challenging" music, whether that's genres that they don't care for or more experimental music that defies conventions.

nullhole 3y ago

I'll take this opportunity to plug the movie "Untitled" (2009) by Jonathan Parker, a light comedy poking loving fun at contemporary art. The lead character is an avant-garde composer, with a strong belief in the importance of his work, ignoring (as best he can) the mockery of others, and resisting the calls from most of those who care about him to use some melody in his work.

freetime2 3y ago

Nahre Sol recently put out a video on contemporary classical music [1] that, while attempting to correct common misconceptions and generally promote it, basically reaffirmed my dislike of the genre. The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it. And while I don’t begrudge the individual composers and performers who do make this sort of music - they are of course free to follow their own curiosity and passions - it does upset me a bit that this where “classical” music has ended up. It feels like the academics have hijacked the genre to the detriment of casual listeners. [1] https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM

squidsoup 3y ago
If you consider Cage, Stockhausen and Glass part of the western classical music tradition, then I think we should consider composers like Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Richard Skelton and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith part of that continuum. There are people making interesting, innovative music that isn't academic or needlessly avant garde, that I think can appeal to everyone.
- gnulinux 3y ago
  > needlessly avant garde I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music. Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena. So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.

jerf 3y ago

Music as a whole clearly decided to go in a direction deliberately away from what any "normal" person would like. They dress it up in plenty of other words, but it's clear by the way nothing will attract their disdain like anything that a normal person might like that this is certainly a core component of where academic music decided to go. I know this from personal experience. They don't even particularly hide it if it's not the direct topic of conversation, it is only denied when directly challenged, a sort of psychological motte & bailey ploy. That's fine. That's all their right, even the last bit. I'm hardly in a position to insist that disliking, or at the very least distrusting, something when the only thing I know about it is that it is popular is invalid myself. We take very different approaches to that, but I can't deny what I do is close enough that it would be hypocritical to criticize too much. But it is pretty stupid to write handwringing articles about "Why don't they like us?" You collectively wrote music that blares in every tone that you don't want normies to like you. You chased them away for decades. You collectively berated and mocked them in both words and music. What did you collectively expect? I suppose those who joined in the process late and learned the methods of disdain without the reason underlying them might be confused, but I can promise those people that there is no scenario where the common person suddenly acquires a taste for music that basically musically reads as "screw the common person and everything they stand for", in addition to whatever else it may be saying. If you want the normies to like you, you are going to have to at least inch closer to them first. Maybe the normies could use some mind-expansion, but right now you are so far away from where the normies are that you are barely on the same planet. You don't want to. You're not going to. That's fine. All I'm really asking for is for you to stop being surprised about the results. When you tell people to fuck off, they do.

standardUser 3y ago

> Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating? I assume the wording "classical contemporary" is deliberate, but it sounds all wrong. Shouldn't it be "contemporary classical" aka "modern classical"? They also use it once in the article. Is this a widely used naming convention for this type of music?

odyssey7 3y ago
Although the general meanings of modern and contemporary are similar, in art they have different meanings. The production of modern art is considered to have ended in the 20th century, and contemporary art is being produced right now. For a similar historical nomenclature, see the musical style ars nova or "new art." Ars nova continues to be called ars nova, even though the music was written in the 14th century.

darkerside 3y ago

There's an art to making the challenging accessible. Before listening to Take Five by Dave Brubek, I think most people never would have guessed that a 5/4 time signature could sound so natural.

Tainnor 3y ago
It's mostly only Western European / American popular music that (for some reason thaf I don't quite understand) is obsessed with 4/4. In many other cultures (e.g. Eastern European folk music, but many others as well), irregular meters are quite common.
handy2000 3y ago
5/4 isn't that challenging of a time signature. I would argue it's just uncommon and so most people associate it with Take Five. 3/4 was extremely popular in Europe for centuries and is not perceived as challenging.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  5/4 is actually ambiguous because the "5" can be any of 3+2, 2+3, 2+1+2 etc. Similar issues for 7/4, etc. 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8 may have rhythmic variations too (e.g. the 3+3+2 tresillo rhythm common in rock-and-roll music) but these don't impact the metrical understanding of the music to anything near that extent.
- darkerside 3y ago
  I'm not saying it's THAT challenging. It's not 13/2, but it is 5/2. Most 5/2 songs will sound unnatural to most people . It's ironic to make a comment like that in the context of an article like this one.
  - handy2000 3y ago
    How is it ironic? Not sure I follow. The article is making the case for challenging music. You pointed out that Brubeck made challenging music (i.e. 5/4) accessible to most people. My argument is that this is a poor example as 5/4 is not that of a challenging time signature, and most non-musicians who heard Take Five probably didn't even perceive the uncommon 5/4, and just enjoyed the tune. 5/4 is popular in progressive rock, post rock, and electronic music. In my experience most people do not pay attention to that. Similar to 3/4 - it's an uncommon but easy time signature that people in the Western world have no problem with. Basically, there is no challenge.

cushpush 3y ago

Is A440Hz or 432Hz? This to me is a larger question than composition styles.

feoren 3y ago
Literally pick one and then forget about it. Or split the difference and make it 436Hz if you want. It literally does not matter.
- cushpush 3y ago
  It's bold to claim something does not matter without exhaustive evidence to back that up. That is not a scientific view nor a scientific statement.
  - vonjuice 3y ago
    It would be silly to assume otherwise, actually.
  - ink_13 3y ago
    Calling a certain frequency "A4" is also in no way scientific. It's completely arbitrary! Just agree with the other people you're playing with. That's what really matters. Musicality is in ratios, not absolute values.
  - feoren 3y ago
    You said a <2% difference in tuning is a larger question than composition styles. Like, the difference between 440 and 432 is more important than the difference between Baroque, Romantic, Atonal, Beebop Jazz, and Death Metal. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh literally any genre, as long as it's tuned to A4=440. If it's anything else I hate it." It's difficult for me to respond to such a statement and stay within the HN commenting guidelines. It's strange and surprising that this would be something anyone would ever argue with a straight face. It does not matter. Here's some reasons why: - You can change it at any point. Re-tune your orchestra. Pitch bend your mp3 file in Audacity. It's free to change your mind. Decisions which are free to change do not matter. - Most humans basically don't notice it. The very few that do have a good enough ear to notice it will forget about it within seconds unless your song is extremely boring. If your listeners are focusing on a 2% difference in tuning instead of the content of your song, your song sucks. - Written scores literally do not specify it; that's how little it matters. People do not have this in mind when they write music because it doesn't matter. They write the tempo, the key signature, the exact notes, but they don't write the exact tuning of A4. They don't care.

feoren 3y ago

Mike Verta is a Hollywood composer who has put out a lot of great videos on composition, and he makes great points on this (he has since become an insane alt-right nutjob, unfortunately, but his old videos are still up). He tells a story about stopping at a red light next to a woman who was absolutely jamming out to some hip-hop song. Her car is shaking, she's shouting the lyrics with a big smile on her face, just completely engrossed in this music that everyone who considers themself a "composer" would turn their nose up at; not "real music", of course. And he thought: I would be elated if I pulled up and saw someone connecting like that to my music. Isn't that why I got into composing in the first place? To bring about that in people? Why else would you want to be a composer? To join the circle-jerk and feel infinitely superior to all those stupid normies? Many of these composers write this way because they simply cannot write tonal music well. It's too hard. Writing music with original colors and style, but is still tonal and still resonates with actual human beings? That's tremendously difficult. Avant-garde composers avoid doing this because they can't. They write atonal shit because it's much, much easier. The idea is that you've failed as a composer if the "common man" can relate at all to your music is one of the most elitist attitudes a human can possibly hold. Normal listeners' brains are so far beneath yours that if they can recognize any form of structure, melody, or harmony at all in your music, then it must be trash normie music. It's the exact premise of the Emperor's New Clothes story and it's amazing how long this bubble has lasted. Shame on everyone who thinks this way. Imagine being the one who takes these "challenging" musical ideas and presents them in a way that listeners can actually intuitively understand. Imagine pulling in listeners with what they know, and then taking them on a journey into the previously unknown, and having them be with you the whole time. Now that's a damn-good modern composer! Of course, the vast majority of modern composers would wallow in despair if such a thing happened to their big-brained magnum opus -- normies understanding their music!?

anon291 3y ago
You put into words my exact feeling. These composers have no skill. They are compared to Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt but all those men were celebrities in their days... They made music people jammed to. Not anymore. It's part of a larger trend of artists embracing ugliness because industrialized arts education seems incapable of producing artists. Instead it's just credentialism and terrible creations.

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jdontillman 3y ago

Heh-heh, "challenging" is the polite term. 12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition. I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial. Which is what makes it... challenging. It's the same with Minimalism. But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique. Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context. And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.

zozbot234 3y ago
> for removing natural tonality from a composition Of course, nothing stops you from using the "removing natural tonality" trick in a way that's ultimately subordinate to broader tonal goals. For instance, a small tone row fragment can be used to set surprising tonal expectations and cleanly modulate to any key - even in a completely monophonic piece with no background harmony! It's just supposed to be a horizontal composing-out of some arbitrary set of notes, but this is also what makes it work within tonality as a pivot point. (And if the atonal fragment can be snuck in initially as a melodic "variation" of motivic material from the piece, it needn't even surprise the listener as such - until, that is, they find themselves listening in a completely different key area and have to wonder "wait, how did that twist work?")
- grotted 3y ago
  Shostakovich did this a lot in his later work. His violin sonata starts with a long slow atonal dirge, then suddenly slinks into this little tonal waltz. It gives a “haunted music box” vibe that I absolutely love.
Slow_Hand 3y ago

AlbertCory 3y ago

I went to this, once: https://cabrillomusic.org/2023-season/ https://cabrillomusic.org/2023-season/ Many of the composers were actually there in person. I figured you knew what you were getting into, so it's no fair rejecting it all: give it a fair hearing, because that's what you came for. About all I can say is, some of it wasn't too terrible. Novelty is, in itself, worth nothing at all. Is it beautiful, or isn't it? It's tired and trite to mention how audiences used to reject something and now they love it. That's called Survivor Bias. We don't talk about all the things they rejected and were never heard again, or that never got performed at all.

farmeroy 3y ago

I got turned on to Schoenberg as a teenager listening to his string quartets, though I never dug too deeply. As a punk rocker who was really into free jazz, his music spoke to me much more than other 'classical' composers. There's a great performance with Glen Gould and Yehudi Menuhin performing Phantasy for Violin and Piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABQYAPK_Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABQYAPK_Ek) Gould defends Schoenbergs compositions, Menuhin dislikes them for all the reasons most people do, and admits he is only playing it because he respects Gould so much. One of Gould's points is that the piece is specifically composed for violin - no other instrument could play it, whereas Bach pieces can be rearranged for any instrument. Bach is composing music in an abstract sense but Schoenberg is composing to the specific capabilities of the instrument. There's another great monologue from Gould enumerating why Mozart was a "bad" composer, which I love to cite whenever I have to defend my dislike for the child genius.

a-french-anon 3y ago

I think I'm not alone in being convinced that atonality, dissonance and the likes are "effects". Same way that noise can be used to great effect in almost all genres of music but pure noise (e.g. Merzbow) is at best treated relaxing background noise or conversation piece when it's not enshrined in the emperor's new clothes discussion club's room. Or like pepper or salt: using it with almost all food can improve it, but you're not daft and/or pretentious enough to serve a plate full of salt and call it an excellent dish that's just beyond the pleb's understanding, right?