 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Micaela
Date: 2004-04-14 02:56
Hey guys,
I'm currently a freshman in college. I'm writing a violin sonata as my final project for Music Theory II. I like writing it and I think it's coming along well. My theory teacher likes it a great deal and wants me to take composition lessons in the future. The composition teacher at my college is high-powered and it would be very good for me to study with him.
The problem: My idiom is, for the most part, late Romantic. I like some modern music but have never gotten used to atonality. I would never like to write atonal music. I wouldn't take composition for a while anyway (I have to finish Theory IV) so maybe I'll appreciate it more by then. But I know enough people who are taking composition now to know that most people who work with this professor (it's a small college- we only have one composition teacher) are encouraged to write atonal music. I'm not sure what to do. I have a long time to think about it, but it's confusing me. Have any of you encountered similar problems? I'm hoping to jump into the post-atonal universe, but I'm not sure if that's possible. (My subject line is not the traditional use of postmodern.)
Thanks for reading,
Micaela
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2004-04-14 04:29
Hmmm...
I took a composition class for non-composition majors when I was in college. It happened to be taught by Michael Daugherty who has made quite a name for himself in the last 15 years in the post-atonal/informed by pop culture musical world.
I don't think it's impossible to work with a teacher who thinks differently than you. When I got some individual help on my final composition for that class, he went in with a blue pencil and jotted down all kinds of ways I could use the main motive I had begun with. I wouldn't and didn't use all of them, but it did give me pause to think about different ways I could write based on that theme. And it got me out of a rut too...
I suspect you'd have to at least confront some "atonality" even in the form of a smaller composition, but I can't imagine any teacher to be so harsh as to forbid your use of tonality...
Talk to the composition prof and see what he/she says...
Katrina
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2004-04-14 04:39
Modern doesn't have to equal atonal. Atonality, beginning largely with 12-tone serialism, became popular near the beginning of the century and, since it introduced so many new colors and possibilities, continues to be very heavily used and explored by composers.
There's no reason that you, as a contemporary composer, have to write atonal. Granted, I'd recommend giving it a shot, and perhaps you can bring some element of it into your tonal music.
I'd recommend looking into a few pieces and composers that are very modern (OK, one of them is postmodern, which is quite different) that are not difficultly atonal. Most of them I've either heard in composition courses or played in a wind ensemble...
George Crumb: Vox Balaenae
John Corigliano: a good deal of his writing, incl. Clarinet Concerto, Tournaments Overture
Luciano Berio: Sinfonia (especially the 3rd movement. It's a delight of postmodernism)
Joseph Schwantner: ... and the Mountains Rising Nowhere
Karel Husa: Music for Prague 1968
Gorecki: Symphony #3
Michael Daugherty: Niagara Falls, Red Cape Tango
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
Post Edited (2004-04-14 04:40)
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-04-14 06:38
All you need to know about current (this will change in time) compositional trends is that "almost anything goes".
I like the fact that our immediate contemporary composers (at least the Aussie ones) use melody (shock horror) and harmony (more shock and horror) in their tonal pallets ... good on them.
Atonal and serial music happened and is now out of fashion somewhat - thank goodness, in my humble opinion.
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Author: msloss
Date: 2004-04-14 12:29
I do not believe, as a composer myself and a student of Amnon Wolman, that atonality and serialism have slipped out of fashion any more than the IV-V-I progression. They have been absorbed into our musical language along with polymeter, polyrhythm, (pollywantacracker), prepared instruments, multiphonics, jazz riffs and alternative pitch systems.
Micaela, don't think of atonality as a constraint; think of it as a liberation. You can slip in and out of "tonality" and explore progressions and sequences that would be verboten in the late Romantic tradition, but perhaps have more late 19th-century sensibility than banging on garbage cans and revving parked cars.
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Author: Markus Wenninger
Date: 2004-04-14 13:14
Thank You very much indeed for Your post, msloss, in all earnest - with all the esteem here pre-dodekaphonic concepts are held up to still, it is hard to believe we´re living in the 2004 by now. Fashion is not at all a reasonable angle to tackle the question of nowadays stratae of composition and performing. Indeed so-called atonality has been and still is a total liberation, an all-enbracing urge to encompass every technique and utterance possible on an instrument, every register, every aspect of sound. Music may be described quite adaequatedly by using 19th century terms and concepts like that music causes emotions, sound is colcoured, rendering a composition has something to do with a mysterious inner attitude and so on...but this is not music, it´s how we converse about it. This is now, and I, in all humbleness, suggest strongly that You, Michaela, arrive there, discover the incredible and inredibly beautiful possibilities of the so-called atonal, of the liberty to roam all styles and genres, of the phantasic results possible when You insert freejazz into a sonata form and write counterpoint against a speedpunk melody-line for violin solo et al...It is a misconception to think that melody, harmony and rhythm are passé in postmordern times - there not, but they changed considerably, it is no longer a straightjacket painted "this is how nature made music to be like"-white by blase authorities, but living dynamical forms and ever evolving content (orchestration, registers, spatial dimension, multiphonics etc), it is an openess, Michaela, a challenge to come up with Your very own sound instead of re-enacting times past (Boulez, enraged, called that "museum-director´s music"), today You can use so many forms, strict or not, so many and subtly differentiated sounds, one can even make possible to hear sounds no human ear could listen to before, by the use of amplification et al, - it is all up to You now.
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Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2004-04-14 14:02
How about something like the style of Alban Berg: modern tonality but using Romantic form and structure --- his Violin Concerto is my absolute favorite melding of the new and the old in one piece.....it has melodies, development, lyrical passages, counterpoint, tension-and-release --- in other words, many of the elements lacking in so much of 'modern' music --- but in terms of tonality, is sure ain't Mozart (thank goodness!).
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2004-04-14 16:51
Yeah, Alex...
A comp class with Michael Daugherty...It was in 1988 I think...
He is a very odd man...or was, at least! But he does have a certain brilliance...
'Twas only one semester long, but the class was a lot of fun.
Katrina
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Author: diz
Date: 2004-04-14 22:28
msloss you're right ... things haven't gone out of fashion ... it's now a melting pot (for better or worse)
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