Author: ruben
Date: 2020-07-03 09:46
What I feel doomed the avant-garde, just to be the devil's advocate:
1. Its ideological tabula rasa position: making a clean break with music of the past.
2. Its lack of accessibility: try singing Boulez or Luigi Nono in the shower! I'm not just being frivolous-though, admittedly, I am a bit. The Rite of Spring, on the other hand, is one of the most tuneful works you could imagine. Modernist music is deemed too cerebral; lacking in any emotion and feeling in music came to be regarded as a maudlin value of the past by avant-gardists of the 60s and 70s.
3. The fact that members of the avant-garde began to wield a lot of power and received a lot of funding: the revolutionaries became the new potentates and orthodoxy,as so often happens. Things come full circle. I am French and for a long time, it was hard to take a decision regarding the musical life here in France without getting Pierre Boulez's approval.
4. It being horrendously difficult to play and the fact we played it basically because we had to "take our medicine", more than as a form of musical enjoyment.
I'm probably one of the first people that was exposed to the Darmstadt school plus Cage, etc as of childhood, because my first teacher was Phil Rehfeldt and then I studied with Cornetti in Italy who was one of the developers of multiphonics. It is not because I was exposed to this meta-music that I developed a taste for it. So much for the argument that one's reaction to it is simply a question of what you are exposed to.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
Post Edited (2020-07-03 10:05)
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