--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@...> wrote: (snip) > And some of my serious composer friends say there were a > number of composers even earlier than that who dared to > break the rules and wrote modernist stuff centuries ago. > I think one might have been a nobleman who liked to write > music and the church didn't want to mess with him for > writing "songs of the devil."
You may be thinking of Carlo Gesualdo (late 16th-early 17th century), a nobleman who brutally murdered his wife and her lover *in flagrante* and subsequently went insane. He wrote choral music, both religious and secular (mostly in madrigal form), and some instrumental music as well, that was full of very modern dissonance and modulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AddtHVNpOKM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whx643DqAV8 Wikipedia's Gesualdo entry has a wonderful quote from Alduous Huxley about listening to some of the composer's madrigals: "...Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg. "'And yet,' I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, 'and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...'"
