 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Rachel
Date: 2004-02-06 00:21
I would like to know if the people here prefer to listen to/compose in a tonal idiom (tonal being given a very broad definition to include modality and anything that has a definite pitch centre, not just major/minor tonality) or an atonal idiom, and why?
I prefer tonality because I've always felt that it has more expressive potential. As we should all know, one of the ways music holds our interest and becomes expressive is by playing around with what we expect to hear. In atonal music, because any note or chord can follow from any other note or chord, there are less expectations, and thus less opportunity to play around with them.
That isn't to say that atonal music is bad; there is a lot of atonal music that I really like.
What are everyone else's preferences?
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Author: Bob Schwab
Date: 2004-02-06 00:59
I think most certainly atonal music is an acquired taste. Of course, so is tonal. But since tonal music has comprised the far majority of what we’ve been exposed to all our lives we’ve acquired a taste for it and haven’t even realized it.
Personally, I’m more than biased towards tonal music. To me, atonal music is just plain weird; kind of like those avant-garde black and white films from… Oh, this is an international bulletin board isn’t it. Never mind.
Bob Schwab
"The human brain, after all, is just a computer made of meat."
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Author: Joel Clifton
Date: 2004-02-06 02:27
I really enjoy GOOD atonal music. For example, The Rite of Spring, and a piece we played at Miami university last semester called Music for Prague, by Karel Husa (if you haven't heard it, you are missing a huge treat!). I can't stand anything by people like Shoenberg.
The difference is, The Rite of Spring and Music for Prague is atonal but at the same time it is well-thought out, very deliberate, and the music makes perfect sense. Even though the chords are very dissonant, it is a purposeful dissonance, and these dissonant chords follow certain progressions. The sound, and progression of sounds that is created by the instrumentation, dynamics, etc. play a huge part too. Instead of consonant chordal progression playing the leading role in portraying the musical story as with tonal music, the progression of tone color does.
Shoenberg, on the other hand, is pure randomness, with no purpose, no story to tell.
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"You have to play just right to make dissonant music sound wrong in the right way"
Post Edited (2004-02-06 02:34)
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Author: Brandon
Date: 2004-02-06 03:00
Joel, I think you are missing the point of atonality completely. Before my senior year of college, I would have never said that I loved anything 20th century that was atonal. My senior year I took an advanced theory class on 20th century theory. That class created in me a certain respect for atonal music. Ever since I got out of college, listening to atonal music has been a true passion of mine, and in fact I compose it as well as a hobby. Create a matrix and say that Schoenberg is pure randomness. Hardly! It is so sophisticated that it makes other compositional techniques seem a bit old fashioned. To top that off by saying no story to tell! Perhaps his Transfigured Night doesn't tell a story just by merely listening to it, but to know what the piece is about makes this a truly remarkable piece! Many people will disown atonal music for one reason. They do not understand it. Once you understand the background and techniques of serialism and atonal music, I find it hard not to like. Some of my greatest pieces are those of Gorecki, Part, Penderecki, Webern, Berg, and Schoenberg. The latter three were not called the Second Vienesse School for nothing.
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Author: Joel Clifton
Date: 2004-02-06 03:20
The fact is, lots of the Schoenberg style of atonal music, including his own of course, was written with mathmatical formulas, or based off of motifs created randomly, etc. That is the kind of atonal music that is meaningless to me, regardless of what amazing technique was used to compose it.
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2004-02-06 12:30
Joel wrote:
"Shoenberg, on the other hand, is pure randomness, with no purpose, no story to tell."
Schoenberg's mature, dodecaphonic style is certainly not pure randomness. It is highly structured. The structure is quite different from that of key-centred music, and may be much more difficult to hear, but it is structure none the less.
Brandon mentioned Transfigured Night (Verklaerte Nacht) as an example of Schoenberg's music. Indeed it is. But it is not "atonal". It is an early work, written in an idiom derived from Wagner, and not greatly different from contemporaries like Mahler, Zemlinsky, and Richard Strauss.
I am also not sure it is accurate to describe Gorecki and Part as "atonal".
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-02-06 13:58
Schwab said it quite well I think. We are not far removed from Pavlov's dogs after all. But, as my wife says it, "If you can't hum it, it ain't music."
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Author: Brandon
Date: 2004-02-06 16:40
David, I agree with you. I was associating "no story to tell" with the Transfigured Night. not that it was atonal. Quite the contrary, as I belive the piece opens in d minor.
As far as Part and Gorecki, of course some of their music is tonal, but some of it is also atonal. If memory serves, isn't the Symphony number 1 of Part atonal? Just as Schoenberg dabbled with everything, so did the composers I mentioned above.
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Author: wjk
Date: 2004-02-06 21:22
I'd listen to the autumnal pieces of Brahms and then listen to Mahler and Wagner and then tell me if Schoenberg, Berg and Webern don't make sense. I find Schoenberg extremely emotional. Study European history and you will realize that the Vienna of Schoenberg was not the Vienna of Brahms. Schoenberg's music may be a fascinating mirror of the times he lived in, and the horrors to befall Europe.
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2004-02-06 22:46
Joel- The Rite of Spring isn't atonal. Bi-tonal sometimes, but not atonal!
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Author: ChrisC
Date: 2004-02-06 23:01
Everything I have read about Schoenberg, as well as my experiences listening to his works and even analyzing some of his music, suggests that he was an extremely talented and meticulous artist who recognized the inherent problems with both tonality and atonality, and devoted his compositional energies to avoiding both, hence the evolution of his style from post-Wagner chromatic tonalism to free atonality to serialism. I do not agree with his forcefully stated opinion that dodecaphony represented the future of music, but I very much appreciate what he and his immediate disciples (Webern and Berg) were able to create.
IMO, dismissals of his music as either random chaos or overly predetermined mathematics masquerading as art, which have both been expressed on this thread, are immature and groundless. Not enjoying Schoenberg or any composer or style of music does not mean that is meaningless. There are plenty of composers whose music I do not enjoy but whom I nonetheless take seriously and would never put down in such a harsh and summary manner.
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Author: Rachel
Date: 2004-02-07 00:46
I agree with some of what Joel said about atonal music. I prefer it if it is thought out in terms of music, rather than in terms of a mathematical formula.
EEBaum- what is it about atonal music that makes it easier for you to write? I've always found tonal music much easier. When I write atonal music, I have to really concentrate, otherwise in about 3 seconds time, I'll look at what I've done and realise that I've just established a key.
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2004-02-07 01:53
I didn't say "good" atonal music
I personally find it takes a lot more care to make something tonal because there are a lot more expectations as a listener, and I am rarely satisfied with the sound because it falls into the realm of "supposed to."
As for atonal music, the "sounds tonal" restriction isn't there.
I'm also a computer science major, and the patterns upon which a large amount of atonal music is based (and upon which tonal music can "sound good" based on) are easier to come by for me.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: David Peacham
Date: 2004-02-07 10:21
If anyone still needs convincing that Schoenberg's music can be emotional, or that it can tell a story, they might care to listen to his late (1947) piece A Survivor from Warsaw.
See, for example, http://www.unitel.de/uhilites/1998/120198.htm for some idea of what you might be letting yourself in for.
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If there are so many people on this board unwilling or unable to have a civil and balanced discussion about important issues, then I shan't bother to post here any more.
To the great relief of many of you, no doubt.
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-08 12:16
Rachel said:
>In atonal music, because any note or chord can follow from any other note or chord, there are less expectations, and thus less opportunity to play around with them. <
To my opinion, the audience´s expectations are maximised thus, because "anything can happen" - tonal music is most limited in its ressources and structural settings, - to me it is exactly like J. Zorn said, if I know after a minute of listening how the piece is going to end, it doesn´t interest me anymore. In the contemporary, every concept of anticipational making certain what a piece of art is like, is shaken and circumvented, the very place of the performance, the instrumental techniques, the conception of beginning and ending, the intonation, harmonies and rhythms, etc. No other music can possibly be more thrilling to perform and to listen to as a music where from the utmost beginning on everything is questioned. (That in itself is not to guarantee the quality of the performance taking place, but the chances are way better).
One can hum anything, really. It seems strange to me that the distinction "tonal/atonal" is so prevalent still 'around here'; if not restricted to the first generation of dodecaphonic commpositon (where it is technically wrong, Schoenberg himself got very irritated by this attribution - there´s no such thing as "atonal music", if it´s music, then it´s tonal, it uses tones, what else?), it confuses more than it elucidates. And, pray, what´s the difference between a work of art come up with by using a calculation, a logarithm, or one´s fancy? Or, for that is what great J. Cage tought us, chance? The resulting work of art is the sole hermeneutical ground where analysis as well as judgement can argue about; a compositon is not one because its means of production are what the reception considers in any sense 'proper for the task'. Chance is as rigid a formatting rule as the interieur of a composer, with the benefit that the former is intersubjective, whereas the latter is a metapysical assumption. It is a purely didactical problem, that most contemporary music is not appealing to the mainstream audience, and not by any means a musical one. The experience of a musical piece of art is neither a result of my emotions triggered nor my comprehending of its generative calculus, but the performance justifies the audience to "what we heard was a musical composition"; a symbolic form, id est a function, E. Cassirer terms it.
"A Survivor from Warsaw"- I played it with an octett I had to arrange this shattering and beautiful composition for, we performed it in a cellar where during World War II corpses were laid out, literally stacked, and we used a projection of the Warsaw ghetto for the time-line of the performance and were accompanied by the narrative brutality on tapes, spoken in 6 languages. That was one of the deepest experiences I ever had during a concert, compared to which most tonal niceities are just fall embarrassingly short. It took Mozart to his deathbed to come up with his sole uncompromising and non-entertaining composition, the requiem; it is nothing more than a overrated clichee that music after let´s say 1945 doesn´t reach anyone´s heart - those who say so just don´t listen. As Cage has it, one finds the most beautiful music even amidst traffic roar, one just has to listen carefully enough. By the way, anyone heard Xenakis´ "Gmeeoorh" for organ solo ever? Even those "Carmina Burana"- guys who evidently hated it were staggering out after the concert, because the organ´s blast kicked them in their overeaten stomachs literally - I never heard anything like it before, it was incredible.
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Author: Rachel
Date: 2004-02-08 23:51
Markus Wenninger wrote:
> Rachel said:
> >In atonal music, because any note or chord can follow from any
> other note or chord, there are less expectations, and thus less
> opportunity to play around with them. <
> To my opinion, the audience´s expectations are maximised thus,
> because "anything can happen" - tonal music is most limited in
> its ressources and structural settings, etc
Good point. Could it be possible that the audience, seeing so many possibilities, gets overwhelmed and forgets about expectations?
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-02-09 02:31
I compose in an atonal frame of mind ... in that I never get stuck on a specific key (per se), but my themes (for want of better word) are quite tonal relationships with each other ... dunno, ask Brenda (Ontario) what she thinks - she's played my stuff.
I tend to think more in blocks of colour (rather like colours splashed on a piece of watercolour paper)
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-09 06:30
The 20ieth century is centered on the question of tone- colour, timbre, completely. This is perhaps the only unifying aim of nowadays music.
The sad thing about the vast majority today, as far as audience goes, is neither brought up and educated to contemporary music, their ways of comprehending, listening, their complete hermeneutical apparatus is locked in a frame of the 18th/19th century, in well-tempered-ness, harmony and melody concepts which end with Debussy and Ives. The point is, they expect something else completely when they go to the concert hall. On the other hand, the New Music´s audience is very reluctant to accept something like a tonal structure in a composition, as soon as an element out of the restricted set is to be heard, to which musical material and form were reduced to over centuries, their expectations are dissappointed. They are very few in the audience usually who 'switch scenes' so to say, and when, most get angry with New Music´s wide ambitus, the weird rests and glass-like timbres - but sometimes 'new to it'- people fall for it, and this is indeed a very touching moment then.
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-02-09 14:49
Good exposition Markus, couldn't have said it as well myself. Personally, when I go to an Italian restaurant and order my favorite dish I don't want the cook experimenting with it. If he wants me to take a taste of something new I usually accept the challenge.....and sometimes find that I like it. Like food, music is an acquired taste. (I must find out what hermeneutical means.)
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-02-09 20:24
I dissagree a little with Markus about audiences being "brought up" on 18/19th century music ... since when? Unless you've undertaken music in high school as an elective subject ... you tend to just gravitate to music you like, be it rock, country (erk), 18th century or "modern" ... audiences make up their own minds on what they like and then choose to listen to it.
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-10 07:56
A work of art is not at all like food, because food is entirely subject to taste, music isn´t. I can appreciate C.P.E. Bach´s (instead them other guys of this family) compositions as works of art, doubtlessly, and at the same time find them plain boring and 'not to my taste' at all. A work of art is nit judged the same way as we judge a dish. If it could be proven that music is categorically the same as food is, the distinction between art and what is not art would vanish (nothing against cuisine - experts out there, I was just talking about the effect something has on my osche, not about what makes a work of art stand for itself - an expertly prepared dish would remain a work of art just the same, whether I like it or not). (I hear J. Cage chuckling in the background somewheres here...).
I think it too unreflected to understand audiences as somehow "making up their minds on their own". They don´t, diz. Music doesn´t have to be a subject in school, which it is, and in which the parameters of 18th/19th century´s music are taught, not the 20ieth, in the most basic lessons, in sing-alongs, in clapping one´s hands to what teacher is singing/playing etc; "the music they like" is entirely made of those traditional dimensions, the instruments are tuned that way, the rhythms, the harmonies, all vectored according to well-temperednes; musical evolutions, style, develop out of revolutions against that stratum, be it the appearance of Bebop, the blues-scales, be it scratching or breakbeats, whatever. The vast majority people we face as performers are tuned to non-contemporary music, at least the plain style of different times, to them already Ives sounds modern, to say nothing about composers of my generation. The hermeneutical realm in which classical music takes place in the Western world is structured according to mostly bourgouis standards, the performers confronting the audience, both follwing a peculiar code (down to their clothing and manner of talking), and most important the programmes are composed in the way expected, 'it has to sound nice, beautiful', 'music has to touch one´s emotions', 'the performers have to be moved by what they are doing' etc - all things which New Music finds extremely blase and based on metaphysics. What we like and what we don´t is not fallen out of the blue, it is a matter of bringing up, of education.
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2004-02-10 13:39
Markus wrote: "The vast majority people we face as performers are tuned to non-contemporary music"
I don't think that's true. Judging by the Grammys the vast majority of people seem to be tuned to R&B. Isn't R&B contemporary? I think far more people are exposed to contemporary music than to 18th/19th century music.
"A work of art is not at all like food"
"an expertly prepared dish would remain a work of art just the same"
I think you just proved yourself wrong there, Markus?!
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-11 06:47
See, the distinction was between a work of art, be it a piece of music or even a dish, in itself being structured and wielded like any work of art, and on the other hand the effect something might have on our psyche, tase etc. These two are not the same. The latter is extremely often mistaken for being the nature of a work of art. This isn´t about content, but logical-hermeneutical form; this distinction is crucial. A dish and a performance may have the internal structure of a work of art, and this is so completely independent of the effect either of them may have on our liking.
Oh yes, sure, R&B is a major musical stratum nowadays, and not the worst one, but I was referring to the fuzzy field of classical music. (I was playing with an postrock-hardcore trio for 2 years, and their audience gets sick when being confronted with multiphonics just the same, it isn´t that much of a difference to Haydn-fans-.).
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Author: BobD
Date: 2004-02-11 11:37
Doesn't this concur with Captain Beefheart's conjecture?
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Author: Rachel
Date: 2004-02-12 00:12
About Markus Wenninger's comment about people thinking that music has to sound "nice, beautiful"- what is wrong with beauty? Also, there is a big difference between sounding "nice" and sounding beautiful. If someone calls one of my compositions beautiful, I am very happy. If someone calls one of my compositions "nice", I won't speak to them for a week. ("Likeable" and "agreeable" are ok, some of my work isn't meant to be anything more than that.)
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Author: Liquorice
Date: 2004-02-12 06:37
OK- I looked up "hermeneutical" in the dictionary (Oxford). I was hoping to provide a definition here so that we'd all be able to understand Markus's posts. The word doesn't appear in my dictionary.
Markus- did you make this word up? If not please let us all know what it means!
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-12 07:18
Rachel, absolutely nothing is wrong with beauty: It´s just that those who fall for modern classical music find it beautiful indeed whereas the others plainly don´t. "Nicety" and "beauty" as criteria to judge a work of art by are very unreliable because of their lack to work intersubjectively and objectively. Believe me, I hold Ferneyhough´s compositions stunningly beautiful, e.g,, but this has no value if the status and quality of this composition as a work of art is at stake.
I´d love to play one of Your compositions, Rachel, but I fear that they´re what is called "tonal" around here, aren´t they? As a composer I work solely on the "atonal" plateau, using algorithms, cell-automatons, time brackets, graphical notations, mainly spatial/2-dimensional structures to write music.
"Hermeneutical, hermeneutics": interpretative, explanatory, science of interpretation. (the "Webster´s" has it, of course) It´s a philosophical plateau comprised of logic, texttheory, semiotics, backed by works of Gadamer, Heidegger, Cassirer, Derrida, Deleuze, J. König; during medieval times it was a (not only) scholastic science of interpretation of sacred, mainly the Bibel´s, texts. There´s a radical stratum of it, called "destructuralist", fired by Deleuze and Derrida mostly, de Man as well, and a stratum titeled "philosophical hermeneutics", held up by Gadamer and Z. Baumann and their schools. (It wasn´t a neologism, back then hundreds of years ago, nobody 'made it up', stems from classical Greek, "to comprehend, to find out what it means").
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2004-02-12 07:54
As long as someone doesn't call my piece "interesting," I'm happy. Interesting, unless they say what in particular is interesting, is often a way of saying "I didn't much care for it, but I really like you as a person and am trying to be supportive."
Markus, you compose with cell automata? I'd be very interested to hear. I'm currently working on a project to that effect with my comp professor.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: Rachel
Date: 2004-02-12 23:41
Markus- yes, most of them are tonal. And a lot of the atonal ones sound tonal because I base my harmony on 3rds and 5ths.
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Author: ned
Date: 2004-02-13 03:40
I'm not familiar with most of the atonal offerings mentioned above - but - did Coltrane pioneer atonal jazz?
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-13 08:40
Yes, the late Coltrane propelled jazz beyond that theme-solo-theme-look what size mine is-deadlock, definitely. Musicology has this "sheets of sound"-thing of his, as well as simultaneous solo-play of the whole ensemble, the rule of pulse over rhythm, the deregulation of the distinction between rhythm- and melody-section and the abandon of well-temperedness as Coltrane´s achievements for the jazz-stratum, along with the musicians of his generation and character. The catastrophe of his death is unrivalled as far as the impediment of musical evolution is concerned, just to think what Coltrane would and could have played if he had lived on makes me incrdeibly frustrated...instead those "new lions" took over, and jazz took to swinging again. What a regradation, really. The loss of Coltrane to the world of music is unparalleled.
Alex, most of my cell- composing is along what Kyburz does, or Xenakis. Like the latter said, "it is a nice and simple method to fill a large area". Cell structures are as well one of Cage´s favorites, to get beyond that demarkation of rhythmic obligations without abandoning a more or less fixed time-structure. What compositions and literature do You use during those comp-classes? Is there a reader? For I´d like to cover more of this plateau, it interests me immensely.
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Author: ned
Date: 2004-02-13 23:47
''instead those "new lions" took over, and jazz took to swinging again.''
Thanks for the Coltrane comments - I guess you are probably right insofar as his contribution/creation of the ''new'' jazz - however I feel that ANY jazz should swing regardless of its genre.
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2004-02-14 00:54
Actually, this is a project I'm working on with my comp professor. We're making a real-time CA engine that takes input from the user and gives output. My prof. and I both hope to write/perform pieces with it. Will keep you posted; we should have something up and running in the next couple months. We really have no idea yet what it will sound like, especially since we've left the door wide open on where inputs come from and what the output becomes (e.g. pitches, midi values, keys, chords, rhythms, granular synthesis).
<grammar edit>
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
Post Edited (2004-02-15 21:22)
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-15 20:50
Alex-
-Please do so, under any circumstances, I am extremely interested in this interface zone between electronics and "acoustic" instruments. I am not much of a electronics brain myself, this idea of constructing a machine where you put material in and out comes music, structured sound, has always fascinated me (something like "inspiration" and "author-interieur" are incredibly overrated and most often nothing more than a metaphysical heap of wannabe). I envy You this work with Your professor, honestly I do.
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2004-02-15 21:09
I will most definitely keep you posted. We're making an external to work with Max/MSP, and will likely release it free to the public once we've used it a bit, and written a piece or two and probably an academic paper. We're going to test out the preliminary version this Friday and see if we can make sense of it.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-02-16 12:52
Good luck for the test! Please, let me read that paper You publish also, I have very rarely the opportunity to get such an first-hand access to the produdction of contemporary means, Alex...
Markus
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