Author: brycon
Date: 2020-07-03 05:45
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"Avant garde" = New, experimental, unusual, radical, unorthodox.
At what point does an "avant garde" work become a "mainstream" work? To what extent can 'Le Sacre', first performed (as I write this) over 107 years ago, still be considered "modern" or "contemporary"?
Very true. Ezra Pound's famous slogan "Make it New" points to the main issue with Modernism: its primary artistic impulse results in constant self destruction. But as a period of art and attitudes about art, we can bracket off Modernism from roughly the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century (and call what comes next Postmodernism).
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Brycon: if I remember right, Ligeti disowned his "Bagatelles". Maybe he considered the work as a tuneful concession to the Stalinist Hungarian regime of the age. I would say the flavour of the day for contemporary music is minimalist music and a sort of neo-romantic fare.
Well the bagatelles come from his Musica Ricercata. I wasn't aware of Ligeti disowning one or both the pieces. But admittedly, I know very little about him. Aside from the wind quintet, however, I remember Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre being the hottest ticket in NYC a few years ago. All my school friends and I scoured the NY Phil's website for a cheap ticket, but there weren't any seats at any price. So in New York, at least, there's an audience for modernist music.
If you haven't already read it, the recent translation of Pierre Boulez's lectures from the College de France, many of which address Modernism and modernist composition, might be something you'd be interested in.
Backing up a bit, in his insightful essay on Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno makes the point that the 12-tone method consumes the non-pitch parameters of music, leaving them largely impotent. Rhythm, for instance, is used simply to set off presentations of the row; Adorno uses the opening of Schoenberg's 4th quartet as an example.
And if all the musical parameters are going to serve the method, the next logical step becomes, as Boulez argues in one of the College de France lectures, submitting them to their own serial methods, i.e. total serialization. But for Boulez, total serialization wasn't just another step but rather an endpoint, or, as he said about his Structures, an "experiment that was absolutely necessary."
In a sense, modernist music had nowhere else to go once it reached the frontier of total serialization. Boulez, of course, later inserted the composer and the sonorous event (that is, music composed by the ear rather than by any strict method) back into music with his incredible Le Marteau sans maitre.
So maybe high modernist music isn't around as much because it doesn't have anything left to say beyond what Boulez, Babbitt, and a few others said. All that was left was for music's parameters to splinter off into their own isms--rhythm in minimalism, timbre in spectralism, harmony in neo-Romanticism--or for hack composers, such as Michele Mangani, to serve up kitsch for Clarinetfests.
Post Edited (2020-07-03 07:25)
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