Just sign me up for the next Karlheinz Stockhausen / Leroy Anderson
marathon -- the best of both worlds.
Alan Cole, rank amateur
McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At 03:05 PM 4/20/2006, you wrote:
I can't quite decide if this message is trolling or not, but I'm
going to bite whether it's flame-bait or not....
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message: 1
date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 22:00:28 -0400
from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
subject: [Hornlist] New Newsletter
You are invited to examine the premiere issue of the Audience-
friendly Contemporary Art Music Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 1 =96 April
2006. =
Audience-friendly contemporary art music consists of modern
compositions written by living composers that are based in tonality,
that contain a recognizable melodic idea, that use dissonance with
discretion, that exhibit craftmanship in keeping with the art music
tradition, and are acoustic rather than electronic.
If you're look ing for audience-friendly, I suggest you visit the pop
music isle of your local record store -- even with an acoustic bias,
I'm sure you'll find lots of singer/songwriter albums to choose from.
If that's not bourgeois enough for you, you can move on to the film- score
section as well; it's designed as background music, so any
thought-provoking moments will be purely accidental.
Art music is audience-unfriendly by nature. Really listening to a
Schubert song or a Mahler symphony is a truly exhausting activity --
it's to listening what the Boston Marathon is to jogging. Sure, one
can just let the surface details wash over you, ignoring the depths
and structures that make it art music, but one can also put ketchup
on filet mignon. At that point, the music is as much art music as the
drowned filet mignon is gourmet.
I also don't understand this obsession with tonality. Debussy, Satie,
Copland -- these composer rarely write tonal music. Strauss and Liszt
often wrote post-tonal (and Strauss sometimes even achieved full
Semusic. Their music is pretty (though that's not related to their
depth, importance, or meaning as art), but that's has nothing to do
with tonality.
Valuing art because it's pretty is also frustrating. There are a lot
of people who just glance at a Van Gough or a Monet and think "how
nice" before moving on. In doing so they miss the inherent power of
the works and often the point of them. Van Gough's Starry Night isn't
a "nice" painting -- it's very dark if you pay attention.
Dissonance is not a bad thing. To a large extent, it's what
distinguishes Bach from his forgotten contemporaries and certainly
from his predecessors. Dissonance is what pulls the heart strings in
a Puccini aria. I'd even argue that at our point in history,
dissonance is a complete misnomer -- something isn't dissonant (a
tonal/pre-tonal which implies a mandatory resolution; unresolved
dissonances disqualify a piece from being labeled as tonal), it's
harmonically complex.
Go back and listen to some more Wagner. He's usually structurally
tonal, resolving the dissonances, but does the beauty of the music
lie in the resolution of those dissonances (ie. tonal treatment of),
or is it the richness of the colors while he sustains them?
Limiting one's repertoire by a criteria that's irrelevant to the
quality of the music seems silly to me. That's how one ends up at
Disney films all the time, ignoring Bergman, Kurosawa, and Wells.
This probably qualifies as a flame, but I just couldn't let that one
pass.
_______________________________________________
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