On 04/15/2013 10:06 AM, authfriend wrote: > --- 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...'"
Thanks. I believe that was the composer my friend was referring to. I see there was one TV movie based on him "Death for Five Voices" that I may have seen too. The "church" often banned the use of the flatted 5th or tritone which was referred to as the "devil's interval". Modern diesel train engines use it for their horns.
