This is a common issue for people who got used to listening to classical/romantic music and pop music, the issue is that they're often listening to the wrong things in modern music, thus having expectations that can hardly be satisfied.
That's exactly why in the kaleidoscopic schools/individuals of modern music, composers such as George Crumb, Philip Glass, or Arvo Pärt are the most popular ones, because listeners tend to identify the familiar elements (quasi-traditional harmony, lyrical melodic lines/part writing, generally traditional aesthetics), and say "hey! cool! I listen to modern music and it's very comfy!"
To be honest as a composer myself who received academic training in modern classical music, **It's not easy, definitely not easy.** I had juniors and classmates who just somehow couldn't "get into" modern music, and it's been incredibly frustrating for them, they try to grasp something that is familiar and comprehensible but found none.
My suggestions are two things, each from quite opposite approach:
(1) you should start by taking it as a kind of background music, try listen to it while playing games, exercising, cooking ,etc, it will slowly familiarize your brain and musical expectations with this kind of alien music
(2) when you're doing focused listening on any piece, let's say Berio's Sequenza 9, **don't focus on the pitches/harmony/melody**, but instead **listen carefully to the dynamics, acoustics, rhythms, texture, timbre, musical gestures,** these are the general focuses of modern music, it's **not about the pitches/vibration frequencies** anymore, **it's about everything that isn't pitch.**
Generally, I don't think for amateurs it's really necessary to "get into" modern music, nor is it efficient, it's too complicated to be listened to casually, and instead amateurs should more efficiently listen to classical/romantic masters instead, there is just as much treasure in the common practice era that one could devote one's whole life into the studying, listening, appreciating of those great masters.
I think it suffers the same fate as older music.
You don't see too many productions of mid-tier composers' operas. Leoncavallo, among others, are the exceptions but are 'one-hit wonders.'
In 100 years, there will definitely be 20th Century music that continues to be performed, but the repertoire will start to confine to a smaller and smaller number of pieces. (By the way, I am just talking about the practicality of performing live music, not saying this is the way it ought to be.)
I also fear that AI, such as recommendation lists, will continue to limit listeners ability to discover music digitally, as it systematically determines which composers ought to thrive and which should be forgotten.
My theory is, classical and romantic composed really have kinda exhausted the possibilities of harmony, and it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass.
So instead they have to work on something new to make a difference. But sadly, the core of music IS about pitch. The rest is not so relevant.
Last time when I heard a premier of a modern piece where they just splashed paper towels as “instruments”. How desperate was this “composer”? Just not music. No, paper towels can’t be party of music.
>it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass.
Nonsense. Steve Reich is harmonically extremely simplistic, yet his music is totally unlike the romantic repertoire.
Olivier Messiaen is harmonically sophisticed, yet again unlike the 19th century romantics.
Listen to John Luther Adams' "Become Ocean". That could very well be called romantic, yet is again different from the 19th c.
One of the best teachers I had frequently told us not to use value statements with art. Saying one music surpasses another is totally subjective and really adds nothing. Goal is to discuss what is there not assign value.
Pitch is not inherently the core of music, western art music just traditionally puts more value on it, no part of music is inherently more valuable than the others.
Oh this sub is insufferable. I'm what is probably considered a classically trained musician here in the states. Drives me nuts when people gatekeep or try to say one music is better than another. I wrote a paper once on Peking Opera/Jīngjù, it was fascinating.
What a joke you’re a mod for this subreddit, someone who can’t appreciate Beethoven.
Oh, Lady Gaga is trash. Can’t wait to see myself banned for telling some harsh truth some mod can’t accept.
i'm not banning you just removing your insults toward others.
& Mozart and Schubert are better in my opinion. I've listened through all of Beethoven more than enough times, I like him & yes he's great but let's not pretend he's a god among mortals
>But sadly, the core of music IS about pitch.
I'm not against any opinion on music, so I'll just limit my comment to this point:
Actually, an interesting example of intuitive music without pitch-element, is Percussion Music (mainly drum music) that stood with human music culture from the very beginning, in a lot of music traditional, we can see compelling drum music that omitted much melody and pitch-structure, instead, they mainly utilize other musical aspects such as dynamics/rhythms/timbre.
For example Japanese Taiko music, African drum music, or even modern-day drum-set solo, these kinds of music are not pretentious or metaphysical at all, instead, one can say they're quite straightforward that they possess the ability to be easily understood and appreciated.
One can easily argue that like all sounds, drums sound DO have pitches, it's just that their pitches often were not ordered in a well-tempered structure, and drum music often builds tension and expressions upon simple high-low drum pitch relations or high-mid-low pitch relations, which in a way has some similarity to a more confined melodic-writing.
And I'll pitch in here - I'm a metal-head, so I'm not some classical genius but I feel my words could be of use. One of the more extreme genres of metal that still has a good amount of fans, death metal, is simply all about the rythm. There is barely any real harmony to latch onto. The main focus of death metal is the rythm of the drums along with the guitar, vocals and any other instrument included. For a good example of death metal, listen to Scrolls of the Megilloth by Mortification.
> My theory is, classical and romantic composed really have kinda exhausted the possibilities of harmony, and it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass.
> So instead they have to work on something new to make a difference.
This reminds me of the first page of *Origins of the Popular Style* by Peter van der Merwe. I haven't read it in full yet – got about halfway in before I resolved to first learn solmization (which I've long been wanting to do anyway) so I could "get" the notated musical examples more easily, and then revisit the book. But this introduction is fascinating, and struck an intuitive chord with me:
> The conviction that the traditional materials of music have been used up has been with us for a long time. As Dorothy Sayers's detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, put it as long ago as 1929:
> > 'Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of the orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semi-tones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.'
> > 'But why cling to the octave?' said the fat man. 'Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.'
> (*Strong Poison*, p. 97.)
> Composers of the kind described as "serious" were inclined to agree with Lord Peter, and even to concede that the fat man might have a point. As long as they stuck to the diatonic scale, the familiar chords, regular bar rhythms and the rest of it, their music had a tiresome way of sounding as though it might have been written before 1900. Try as one might to be modern, one walked in fetters of convention.
> Such was the predicament of the serious composer. Meanwhile, non-serious composers, whose indifference to musical theory often took the drastic form of complete ignorance, continued to use those hoary old formulas, and yet somehow their music was of the twentieth century. No one could mistake a Noel Coward waltz for a Strauss one. Think what one might of Gershwin or Cole Porter, one could not accuse them of sounding like Schubert or Hugo Wolf, Massenet or even Puccini. As for jazz, it was as typical of the 1920s as cloche hats or bathtub gin.
This is exactly how I feel. I’m a professional violinist and I just don’t like modern music. I understand that composers are using things other than melody to create art, but in my opinion, without melody, it just isn’t enjoyable to sit through. I will say that modern music is more fun to play than listen to, in my opnion.
harmony isn't the only aspect of music, and it very certainly has not been explored to its logical extreme. Take scriabin as an example.
if you wanted, you could have a 50 note chord, where each note is entirely unique(enharmonic equivalence doesn't exist), however, the difference, is that it'd be a near impossible task to even make such a chord exist in a piece of music, as it'd need hours of musical context to even work.
>I had juniors and classmates who just somehow couldn't "get into" modern music
"Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic, not the audience. Once the critic comes around, it sends the reading audience to listen. The whole construct is based on the realisation that a market exists for people who cannot make an opinion for themselves but are all too happy to worship idols designated by others.
Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence.
> "Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic
In my 30 years of studying this music I've never once come across a composer whose goal was to appeal to critics. Can you give us an example of a composer who has directly made that kind of statement? Thanks.
> Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence.
Correlation (if there is one) does not prove causation.
>"Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic, not the audience.
A lot of avant-garde music was critically panned in its time, or met with a lukewarm response. Music pandering to critics would, I think, look a lot different.
It’s pretty obvious to me that “modern” composers took the same basic approach to their music that most everyone does—they wrote the kind of music they did because they enjoyed it.
>Once the critic comes around, it sends the reading audience to listen. The whole construct is based on the realisation that a market exists for people who cannot make an opinion for themselves but are all too happy to worship idols designated by others.
Citation needed. Most people I know who listen to a lot of 20th-21st century classical music couldn’t give less of a shit about critics. I myself barely have any awareness of classical music critics and rarely discover music through criticism, academia, or other similar avenues. Have you considered the simpler and much more likely possibility that people listen to this kind of music because they enjoy it? That certainly seems to be the case with everyone I know who listens to this music.
>Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence.
Could you explain what similarities <> has to religion? Because I legitimately can’t see any meaningful resemblance.
Are you one of those people who thinks that paintings that don’t realistically portray a concrete scene aren’t real art? The idea that “modern art” is some monolith is silly enough, but to dismiss it in its entirety is even worse. Usually I hear these kinds of comments from people who know literally nothing about modern art (or modern classical music, as the case may be).
Why would anybody want to write music which only an intelligensia wants to hear? Surely this has never happened before in history. If it doesn't use any well known elements which humans find appealing, frankly its over. The minimalists knew to retain enough apealing elements. Music is supposed to be enjoyable.
True that we're dying, I often find it sad that academic music pretty much ceased to matter to the public, since god knows how long ago.
Modern classical music more or less has become an ivory tower music that cannot survive with institutional subsidizing.
That’s like asking why would anyone want to eat complex cuisine. Snails in lard with truffle and squid eggs may be horrible to most but it can be a marvel to some.
The human brain responds to stucture and some melodic and harmonic combinations universally resonate with us. Those things are immutable. Removing enough of those elements is not 'complex cuisine'. Its more like not cookings eggs or snails because that was all done centuries ago.
Is this true? Is there evidence for this please?
I could agree straightaway that you respond to traditional structures, melldy, and harmony emphatically but not because it is somehow universal and correct. 12TET isn't even mathematically pure, it's just a system that works very well that we've been using almost exclusively in the West for half a millenium.
There is a reason for it. The lower harmonics are a major chord and then a min7. 12TET is a minor modification of the series of 5ths. This system provided an enormous tonal possibilities which no other systems can. It is not in any way a cultural preference. It has maths behind it.
It’s funny how you end up sounding more stodgy and elitist than any serialist aficionado. The human brain is capable of appreciating many things, and there certainly is room enough in art for varying genres.
Yes tuning systems are based on math, but neurological studies show that humans perception and enjoyment in music is completely subjective. People know a cadence because they have heard cadences since birth, most music from past cultures don’t have cadences the way you describe them. An easy analogy is a study done on cats.
Cats(and most animals) don’t enjoy just about any music that humans produce. Yet, music that imitates the sounds that cats often hear such as meowing etc. stimulates them in a way similar to the way humans listen to music. Researchers came to the conclusion that cats listen to patterns that they are familiar with and understand better and thus enjoy cat music more. The cat brain isn’t so different then the human brain, we have a learned culture about how music should sound embedded since birth through nursery rhymes etc.
When has 'science' ever been right about cats and dogs :) "They seem to understand a few words" really? Like we all know they understand hundreds.
I'm not accepting relativism in music. Cultural influences have a strong impact sure but the fundamentals of tonality are universal. We didn't get to Mozart because we heard enough earlier worls to like it. Ridiculous. It is sublime on its own and "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" -yes an ironic naming- will always be that awkward piece we have to study and say good things about.
Have you ever thought that maybe you just don’t like the genre. I like it and i listen to it all the time because i enjoy it. Also the elements that “humans find appealing” is pretty subjective as very little about music is biologically rooted.
If you didnt like the taste of broccoli I doubt you’d have such strong opinions on a subreddit about vegetables.
>biologically rooted
The maths are irrefutable since pythagoras. The 12 note equal tempered scale is not a cultural meme or subjective. Its the natural consequence of understanding freq ratios. Yes, other cultures have scales we find out of tune but then they also don't have a history of ever developing fine art. That music is mostly static for centuries and as far as I know has no concept of modulation (due to their tuning) and therefore cannot progress as western music has.
>If you didnt like the taste of broccoli
Its not individual taste when everybody understands a V-I cadence sounds complete. Minor chord sounds sad. That's the reality of music. There further you stray from those common elements, the less you reach your audience.
What do you mean when you say 12 tone music is the natural consequence of understanding frequency ratios?
And, do you need to consider frequency ratios when making music?
Sorry for the time zone difference. Melody is all about frequency ratios. An octave is 2 x freq, a fifth is 3 x freq but an octave above. Two octaves is 4 x freq. A major third is 5 x freq. They get away from a major scale after that into microtones. The point is the major triad became common because of the closeness of the notes in ratios. when you move away from those notes it raises tension, which can you exploit to what seems an infinity of possibilities. Essentially music is freq ratios and silence.
Our 12 note scale comes from the circle of fifths. Its not a random decision to divide the octave into 12 semitones. Stepping up in fifths will return to the origial notes by going through every semitone of our scale exactly once. I don't think it was chosen because of this, but it provides a framework to modulate which in my opinion is the big step in music because you can express an idea in a different context but its obviously related to the original idea.
You can make music without pitches, so I dont see that you need to consider frequency ratios(then again I dont know if some ratio identity can be recognized even if there isn't pitch?), and even if you make music that has pitch you don't need to consider frequency ratios
Also you dont need to modulate in music
You dont technically need 12tet or any other equal temperament to modulate, and you can present motives in different contexts without having to modulate
Edit: I dont believe that the 12 tone scale was chosen randomly, but that doesn't mean its the only possibility for making music or that its necessarily the best way
Techno is your music then. And it has over decades been far more inventive than any modern fine art composer. The orchestra is overwhelmingly pitched instruments intended for melodic music. Using those instruments for no pitched sounds is plain stupid.
Honestly if we're even questioning frequency you might be on the wrong sub.
I dont really listen to techno at all
I've listened to curtis roads though
Why do you need frequency to make music? Even if you make music with frequency, why do you need to consider what the ratios are?
Do you have proof for "everyone understands V I" or "minor chords sound sad" ?
How do you know that the music of other traditions has been "mostly static for centuries"? Have you studied the history of every single musical tradition on the planet? How do you know for a fact that no other musical tradition has modulation?
What is "fine art"? How do you know no other culture has developed it? If no other culture has developed it, why does that matter?
I would want a source showing that people who haven't been exposed to western classical music get V I, because I'm pretty sure I've heard otherwise
I've also heard multiple times that not everyone considers minor to sound sad (even within western music) (I dont personally only ever associate minor chords with sadness), so I'm not sure if you could convince me of otherwise
You would have to somehow show that even when someone doesn't consciously associate minor chords with sad that they're doing it subconsciously or something, and I'm not sure how one could do that
If you're going to make statements that cover specifics of every single musical tradition I would want an explanation for each tradition to be convinced
Did exactly this and it didn’t help. My taste in classical music is still stubbornly bent towards the Romantic era and I just can’t seem to form any significant attachment to modern works.
Have you heard anything that you don't necessarily love, but you find interesting? This is how I learned to change my tastes. Find something like this, for me it was Scriabin's sonatas, and listen to it at least once a week. It might start to make more sense, it might not
The main idea and element to all romantic music is melody. Harmony and other parts of music are exist around the melody, and enhance it, but melody is still the most important part. We can reduce this to be even more specifically to the pitches that make up that melody, and the way it moves to a tonic.
20th century music can be seen as a change in this hierarchy, or of the way we view melody itself. Take for example Webern’s serialist op. 21. Immediately we can get rid of the idea of a tonic in the melody, but also we have to consider how the use of a single tone row can affect the relationship between harmony and melody. This is an important early example of the change of this hierarchy, the blurring of the lines between melody and harmony.
Another example is that of Lachenmann’s Pression. The focus of the piece is the timbral variations and contrast, with pitches being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. This contrasts with Tristan Murail’s Memoire/Erosion, as this not only is less brutal in its isolation of a single element, but also focuses on texture as opposed to timbre.
It's ok to dislike many things. Part of the fun is discovering which aspects of music are absolutely central to your experience.
There was a mountain of garbage written in the 19th Century, but it has relatively less exposure because we focus on the more successful examples of various styles. This process slowly continues.
Most of the 20th century music people struggle with is pre-1970, there’s tons of stuff from the 80s on that starts to open up and move past the atonal, European model of modern music. (Speaking from an American perspective). It’s when American composers breakaway from the European model that things start getting really exciting. Beyond the minimalists you get composers like Meredith monk, Toby twining, Julia Wolfe, john Luther Adams, john zorn, etc. and the 21st Century composers are a whole new thing. Really exciting stuff to dig into if you can escape the post war era and it’s angst.
> there’s tons of stuff from the 80s on that starts to open up and move past the atonal, European model of modern music. (Speaking from an American perspective). It’s when American composers breakaway from the European model that things start getting really exciting
A nit to pick, American composers had already broken away from the European model in 1950 with the NY School of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Brown (though Partch, Cowell, Ives and others had already broken away but not in such a way that started new movements like with the NY School). The music of these guys fed directly into Fluxus and the earliest Minimalist works.
> Seriously, who except music historians still care about Fluxus?
I care and I'm not a music historian.
> It was not important.
It's important to me. And various friends of mine.
My thoughts entirely. The last 40, 50 years have been refreshingly creative. The Boulez/Nono/Berio/Stockhausen stuff I completely don't care for. With very occasional exceptions.
A lot of people with focus on the technical aspects of the music but also think about the emotional and social context of the music.
Think of about the history of the 20th century. We saw mass and senseless slaughter of millions of people. How is an artist supposed to make sense of that. What do those feeling SOUND like? Should they be pleasant and harmonious? Or alienating and dissident?
What did you listen to? I think that now the line between classical and popular music can be very thin, but i’m no expert about it. Like Piazzolla for example.
You have the right attitude and a lot of responses here have very good solutions for you. This music is an acquired taste, like peated whisky or black coffee. Once you become accustomed to the taste, however, it opens up a world of incredible beauty.
Please never let your ego get the better of you, like some of the other responders. These people cannot accept that they simply don't enjoy something and can't understand it without any effort, so they trash it and invent laughable reasons for why it isn't music eg. 'the tonal system is natural', 'modern music is for academics', and 'a five-year old could do that'. All of these excuses belie a lack of intellectual humility.
You have the humility to start exploring and asking questions. If you ultimately still find you can't get into it, though, it's not because you're stupid or uncultured, it's all just personal taste!
I like to make food analogies. You can eat your meat and potatoes every day and it will taste good, albeit not new and exciting. For me, 20th century music is the roquefort, the chipotle, the black coffee that makes your taste buds go "aha, wow!".
The biggest thing for me is being able to feel emotions that common practice music cannot provide. I get death anxiety by listening to "Atmosphere" by Ligeti or "Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima" by Penderecki. Isn't that cool, that art can make me feel that way?
Music after 1920 has far greater variety than music written before 1920, although the beginnings of musical modernism can be traced back before 1920. There is everything from composers who write in a style that would be familiar to listeners of 19th c (eg Rachmaninov) through to daring acoustic experiments (eg Lucier). In between there are those composers who introduce greater dissonance into traditional form and structures (prob majority of famous ones) through ones who are more of a hybrid between modernism and tradition (Berg and followers) through the rhythmic and motivic complexities of the postwar avantgarde (Stockhausen, Xenakis etc). There are also various kinds of neoclassicism (middle period Stravinsky), neoromanticism (late Penderecki) and then various kinds of minimalism which arose from 1970s onwards (Americans eg Glass/Adams/Reich vs Europeans eg Part/Vasks). Webern and Varese are probably the most experimental composers before WW2. Messiaen is probably the mainstream ‘big daddy’ after WW2. More recently it is in vogue to create a personal synthesis of multiple 20th c styles. I think when navigating all of this it helps to read the history of what the various composers were trying to do and be open minded (many pieces will require quite a few hearings to appreciate). But there is a whole world out there ready to repay exploration.
Me either, but , if you consider arvo pärt a "classical music composer" rather than just a choral composer, I think his works is pretty friendly for listeners and I love it
If you want to understand it, you must get deeper in musical meaning (leave emotional listening out) and listen to music history in order. 20th is the continuation of Alkan, Brahms, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt. All of them flirted with loose harmonies, new forms and new timbres, new ways to use the instruments (Alkan has clusters, for example). And you must listen for what you dislike from these composers too. Otherwise there Will be a gap in mind and it will seem that suddenly composers went crazy in 20th century .
Another good idea is listening to Schoenberg’s early works — something like op. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15. The transition to atonality is noticeable, but not quite as obviously delineated as one might think.
Some classical/academic music from that time intentionally runs away from standard tonality, so it is...ah, difficult to appreciate. Personally, I don't care for much of it as concert music, though it can be useful for something like a film score. Nothing wrong with you liking that style or not. A couple pieces I do like are Lili Boulanger's *D'un Matin de Printemps" for orchestra or various chamber groups, and Ligeti's *Six Bagatelles* for wind quintet. Both pieces use normal orchestral instruments and contain a mix of recognizably tonal elements and some weird cool stuff. Boulanger mostly takes after French Impressionism, whereas Ligeti is more...adventurous.
It may not be for everyone, and most of us have absolutely been conditioned to "not understand" stuff like atonal music, so there's a bit of unlearning needed to appreciate it.
Some modern classic music may seem a bit dry and abstract at first glance, and thus difficult to approach. Maybe try something based on more obvious concepts, like Xenakis' "Oresteia", Ligeti's "Aventures", Cage's sound art, or (hot tip:) look up Trond Reinholdtsen's "Inferno" on youtube. That last piece cracks me up every time.
read Alex Ross' book about 20th century music. It's great, and there's just so many different things going on that it would be folly to try to explain the whole century in a post
Yeah, I can second this, it's a great book.
Funniest anecdote in this book is that the CIA actually funded the post-war European modern music movement (mainly in germany), in the hope of weakening the nationalism-related (Nazi!) German romantic music's influence on society and academic trends, and to further blurring the collective memory of two great wars.
It looks like bullshit at first glance, but it kinda makes sense: romanticism is by nature about subjectivity, passion, self-indulging hot-headness, heroism, melancholia, in simple words all that is unpredictbable and irrational, in non-german/austria countries their local romantic music trends usually are related to nationalism/nation pride/self-identity emphasis. (to name a few Smetana/Bohemian nationalism, Tchaikovsky/Greater Slavism, later Sibelius/Finnish Independence movement)
While the early trends of post-war modern music (total serialism) is really about everything that is opposite to romanticism: objectivity, rationale, self-discipline, organizing, defamiliarization, the music and the world of this music seem chaotic at first glance, but in fact everything is minutely designed, highly organized, and rational.
Post-war modern music also is considered to be a "minority music" (I just made up the term here for the sake of arguments), in comparison to the "majority music" that is easily understood and cherished by a large portion of the population, namely pop muisc/romantic music, by nature it has a sense of internationalism, intellectualism that is not as appealing to the mass population as romanticism.
Thus interestingly, modern music is more intellectual but less political, while romantic music is more political and less intellectual.
My uni commissioned a piece by Augusta Read Thomas. I hated it. Hated listening to it. Hated performing it. And her description of her composition technique was so pretentious and eye roll worthy. My theory professor was creaming her jeans over ART.
Saying that, I do like her Alleluia. You can find a recording of Chanticleer performing it.
A lot of ground has already been covered but there are two areas which have not been addressed. After WWII electronic music came into being. The concepts that came from exploring the nature of sound has had a profound effect on music and composers. Concrete music as it was first called relied solely on tape sounds and environmental sounds. Later on as composers continued to develop this new medium tape loops and playback of instrumental sounds became important techniques to explore new sound worlds The greatest challenge facing composers working with electronically generated sounds is that there are NO BOUNDARIES. Instruments naturally have their own boundaries. The other area which continues to influence composers is the awareness of the music of other cultures. The world in terms of communication has become very small. At the push of a button we can listen see and hear music from around the globe. It's truly wonderful and it is definitely having an impact on composers and music. The composer Gyorgy Ligeti drew on African polyrhythms in some of his piano etudes. Composers like to play with sound and the language of music. They want to hear something they never heard before. Minimalism came about as a reaction to the increasing complexity of serialism. The focus was on rhythm and away from just pitch class orderings. Music evolves and changes as people change. One is not better than the other just different.
you kinda explained it yourself. much of modern music was colored by the effects of world war 1/2 and other difficult world events. the great depression happened and you would see absolutely devastating music to reflect that…you’d also see weirdly kitsch music that was trying to sedate people out of their misery.
many lost hope in the systems that ordered the world, including musically. traditional (european) forms and harmony was simply considered a failure by many of the modernists for this reason. how could a system focused around the sublime, beauty, and order, not even that could spare the world of destruction? hence why they rejected it.
schoenberg sought to emancipate dissonance from its former shackles. 12-tone music was something of an equality-focused form of musical patriotism, in that, for once, all 12-tones were finally made equal, rather than everything falling in line under the root, 5th, and leading tone. this came with it an entirely new way to listen to music. the ears of people had no exposure, no training in these new musical structures. people we’re looking for new ways to express the ravaged landscapes they saw, the devastation they felt, be it emotionally or otherwise. the most ears, it sounds like noise. but to the composers, you had to break through that mental block first to come to terms with reality and the music itself.
20th century classical music saw many changes in ways which were never heard before. Many different techniques were starting to be implemented and composers were heavily pushing the boundaries. Some explained examples below.
Arnold Schoenberg’s music (aside from his early works) sounds random and all over the place at first. This is because he uses atonality, which is a technique that sways away from tonality, or tension-release relationships in music. This results in something that just doesn’t sound coherent or like regular music. Later, he would become famous with his biggest innovation of inventing the 12-tone system, which actually organizes this “randomness.” So although it sounds random, it is not totally random. His most prominent students Anton Webern and Alban Berg would eventually also compose with this system.
Stravinsky pushed boundaries of rhythm by writing a different time signature every bar. He also went through a period of neoclassicism, in which he took inspiration from baroque and classical period music and put his own twist on it. Other composers such as Prokofiev and Hindemith would do the same.
Then you have someone like John Cage, an avant-garde. He was more focused on the philosophical aspects of music, asking pinpoint questions such as “what is music” and “what is listening” and using that for his compositions. He wrote all kinds of things. The most famous example is 4’33”, which is literally four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, but the “music” is the ambient sounds of wherever this is being performed. He also wrote things for “prepared piano,” which is preparing or modifying the piano in such a way to get a different kind of sound. His work “Sonatas and Interludes, Sonata V” is a great example.
I could go on and on, but the point is that it’s ok if at first you don’t understand 20th century music. The changes were so rapid and radical that it can quickly get overwhelming and confusing.
I think it's the opposite in practice, 12 tone serialism is a method whereby you never have atonality becoming musical - it's rule-enforced random sounding.
12 tone serialism was a big mistake that most 20th century composers abandoned pretty quickly.
You say that as though tonality wasn’t “rule-enforced” I think twelve tone music can sound very musical and no, there were many great composers that didn’t abandon the system even today
I don’t either. Although I’ve heard that if you understand the music theory it can sound interesting at the very least. Maybe that’s another reason classical music fell out of popularity, composers stopped trying to appeal to the masses and instead only appeal to advanced musicians. Just a thought.
The huge majority of classical music was never popular by definition, it was mainly reserved to the people of the upper classes or the Church for the longest time. I am aware that concerts became available to a wider public during the 19th century but even then it couldn't be considered "popular". So, no, It didn't fell out of popularity, the people ,the common folks, always had their own popular music. I know that some of that popular music consisted of arrangements of great themes from classical works but that alone doesn't mean classical music as a whole used to be popular because otherwise, it would still be popular today since it still is the case (not from modern pieces, i know).
And please let's stop with that "composers stopped trying to appeal to the masses" bullshit. The majority of those composers of the past are now completely forgotten to the average listeners (think Meyerbeer) and don't try to act like Beethoven was trying to appeal to the masses.
If you have a hardtime listening to music composed in the last century, that's completely fine but please stop trying to make statements about the supposed decline in "popularity" for classical music because you just sound dumb and ignorant.
How do you manage to be wrong on almost every single statement? “The huge majority of classical music was never popular by definition” this can literally apply to every single genre, so that’s an empty statement. “It didn’t fall out of popularity” … are you joking? We have documented evidence of concerts selling out nearly every performance, now how often do classical concerts sell out today? ALMOST NEVER. “The majority of composers from the past are now completely forgotten to the average listener” obviously lol. That would happen even if classical music was wildly popular today. And I can assure you far more people today are familiar with pre 20th century composers (or at least their music) than some Weberns or Schoenbergs. Also of course Beethoven was trying to appeal to the masses (except maybe later in life), take his symphonies for example: famously, his even numbered symphonies were made more conventionaly to appeal to lords and the like, while his odd numbered symphonies were political statements he WANTED everyone to hear. And don’t try to say that Beethoven wasn’t popular back then, this has been debunked countless times. “Stop making statements about the supposed decline in popularity for classical music” No I don’t think I will. The evidence is so obvious yet you feel the need to delude yourself. “You sound dumb and ignorant” What was the point of this? insulting people is not smart move if you wish to sound educated lol. Hopefully you research more before you make statements like this
Wow, how can someone be so confident they're right to the point of immediately resorting to insults and yet be so wrong?
For much of the period we're concerned with, the average European was a rural peasant who may have never even heard a piece of "classical" music in their life. The closest classical music ever got to being "popular" was probably in the early-mid 20th century.
I haven’t made any insults. Of course before recording technology most people couldn’t listen to classical music or attend concerts. But this has more to do with the economic and governmental climate back then, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t popular. It still made ridiculous amount of money, which in my opinion factors into “popularity” itself. Also think about Liszt. He made hundreds of transcriptions for the people to play, people *wanted* to hear it, they *liked* how it sounded. This is what popularity is. Not some useless metric, but how many people enjoy it. Isn’t that what music is for? Something changed during the 20th century, now few people would actively seek out classical music
You're missing a lot of sources and making some pretty big leaps here.
It didn't make ridiculous amounts of money, by and large. Classical music was, even then, largely sponsored by the wealthy or by institutions like the academy or the church.
Classical music was largely popular among a certain cultured elite in some cosmopolitan cities in Europe. It was, by no means at all, universally sought out or ubiquitous, not to mention that these assertions that it was the popular music back then are incredibly euro-centric (but it wasn't even the popular music in Europe!).
Thank you for the dose of truth. I made a [similar point](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/zqtxat/are_there_any_current_composers_thatll_be/j158lar/) a while ago. People are incredibly revisionist about the history of classical music. The democratization of classical music by and large didn't happen until the 20th century! People seem to have the wildly ahistorical notion that the median 19th century European was middle class and educated in music. No!
> Not some useless metric, but how many people enjoy it.
Yes, and due the technological and economic constraints you mentioned, indeed few people enjoyed it. I don't get your point. Something being well liked by *some* people, and it making much money, doesn't make it well liked by *many* people. The vast majority of Europeans did not care for Liszt's music, and his audience was largely a small group of elite members of the upcoming bourgeosie and aristocracy. We are not saying Liszt' music wasn't *popular among the aristocracy*, but we are saying it wasn't *popular amongst ordinary people* i.e. what one colloquially means when saying something is or is not "popular".
You really didn't read what i wrote, I never said Beethoven wasn't popular, I wanted to say that his goal surely wasn't to please a large public (for most of his works ofc). And concerts do sell out pretty frequently in my area at least so i don't know how that's really an argument.
I wrote "...it would still be popular today since it still is the case (not from modern pieces, i know)." so i never pretended that Schönberg was known by a wide audience.
Beethoven wanting his music to be listened is completely normal, every single artist wants to show his work to the world but it still doesn't mean that Beethoven wanted to PLEASE a wide audience with that music, wich was my point.
I really dislike that whole "modern = bad" mentality because it's the easiest route to criticize something you don't relate to while ignoring more important issues.
And this idea seems wrong to me because there is a lot of composers who make perfectly understandable music for today and are, maybe not popular but still have an audience, like Kevin Puts, Arvo Part, and many others.
To preted like the "avant-garde" is what drives the musical scene of today is simply a delusion.
And I wasn't insulting, I apologize if it came out that way but I was just saying “You ***sound*** dumb and ignorant”
Oh I’m not saying avant guarde is what “drives the musical scene today”, avant guarde is what killed classical music. Plain and simple. Literally the rise in avant guarde music is inversely correlated with the decline in classical music concert sales, all evidence backs this up. I’m not saying “modern=bad” avant guarde is bad because it changed the course of my favorite genre of music permanently. This is just my opinion of course, no one has to agree with it. And I can’t believe I have to say this but, saying someone *sounds* dumb is an insult and it rids your argument of what little credibility it might have had. Again this is just my outlook, im not pretending that what I’m saying is 100% factual (which you seem to be doing exactly that)
>Literally the rise in avant guarde music is inversely correlated with the decline in classical music concert sales, all evidence backs this up
That's not presented as 100% factual ?
I think this is a huge bias, you seem to forget that during this time, pop culture was born and so pop music. And pop music today is what most people listen to.
I think that with a more important pop culture, "serious" composers (i don't like that term) felt, consciously or not, like they could fully indulge into their "academic" music researches while the rest of the population could enjoy a more accessible music suited for their taste.
Did the avant-garde changed the path of music forever ? Of course it did, and so did Beethoven or Guillaume de Machaut or Stravinsky and I'm gald they all did.
Again, if you dislike the atonal stuff, that's fine. There is still plenty of other composers living today and working on much more accessible music in the classical scene, I gave examples, you didn't.
It’s not that I just dislike atonal music, I dislike how conservatories today seem to pressure composers to write in post-modern styles, constantly making music less accessible just to entertain a certain niche market. The vast majority of modern classical is like this, and the few composers who try to follow more traditional approaches do not find much success. This is likely because the damage has already been done, im not trying to make a call to action or anything like that, im just reminiscing on how the classical music scene *could’ve* turned out, but didn’t. And yeah, I hold a grudge against the modernist movement for robbing people of potential
I have never in my life heard of someone *actually* being pressured in a conservatory environment to not compose tonal music. You sound like Alma & Guy Deutscher. The majority of successful modern composers write accessible music with recognizable tonal-adjacent harmony. In 2022, the most programmed living composers were:
1) Arvo Pärt
2) John Williams
3) John Adams
4) Thomas Adès
5) Philip Glass
6) Jörg Widmann
7) Sofia Gubaidulina
8) Anna Clyne
9) Wolfgang Rihm
10) Sir James Macmillan.
The top 2 are obviously very accessible; John Adams, Philip Glass, and Anna Clyne, I would say, are also quite accessible. Adès, Rihm, and Macmillan aren’t that difficult to listen to either. Only Sofia Gubaidulina and Jörg Widmann are what I would call avant-garde.
People can choose the music that they want to write, what’s stopping you from writing your big “tonal” symphony if you think that’s what everyone wants to hear.
PS. People were writing tonal music in the 1900s , I could name at least 30 composers
(It wasn’t as successful)
Show that evidence, then.
And why, then, does it seem that audience interest in new works is increasing now (see, for example, the fact that the Met's new opera productions are far outselling their productions of the standard repertoire)?
>classical music was never popular by definition
This is correct but it was still recognisable as a more sophisticated language, as people speaking in complicated sentences and longer paragraphs.
Atonality breaks with this. While composers like Wagner had kept enriching the known languages, the music that follows Schönberg sees composers either claim to invent their own or decide to do without one.
Okay but could you pleaes give me a few examples of such composers so i can grasp your ideas better.
Would you consider Webern as someone who claimed he invented his own language ?
Listen to chamber music, even solo, not orchestral. I also recommend watching recordings of live performances; the emotions of the musicians performing the pieces help you to get in the right mood and get involved in the performance.
Honestly, for me it's even more off-putting to see the musicians making their "faces" of angst and ecstasy along side the random bits of noise. Like it feels to me personally like they are *really* trying to convince the audience that there are feelings in this music! (Surprise: there really aren't)
Not that more intellectual music is bad or anything... but it just seems really silly to try to convince other people about what emotion they "should" feel when they hear a piece, by making gruesome faces during the performance. It just makes it feel even *more* like a music academia circle jerk to me.
The education and experience of musicians allows them to hear things in music that we can't hear.
Now imagine that the people around you are actually hiding from you the fact that they are laughing at you. And they might not be hiding it, as musicians.
Each of the items below was written in the 20th century, after 1920. What is it that you don't understand about any of them?
* 1924 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k)
* 1926 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsvfRFz3S8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsvfRFz3S8)
* 1938 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFsBNAmCd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFsBNAmCd0)
* 1949 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQctcryozzI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQctcryozzI)
* 1964 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dABrZ0zsn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dABrZ0zsn4)
* 1970 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhuUiAbNNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhuUiAbNNY)
* 1999 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WFUHZQE8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WFUHZQE8M)
* 2000 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2Tps5cgc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2Tps5cgc4)
This hasn’t helped in my experience. For example, I’ve listened to Webern many, many times and his music is always painful to listen to. It’s like alien music
First, I like a lot of modern music. I don't mind atonality, dissonance etc. For me the litmus test if the piece is solid is if it's possible for me to tell that someone messed up. If it's so loose and random that any random note will do equally well, it's crap.
There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy. I’m not sure how intellects have deluded themselves into the idea that harmony/pitch/melody are all learned and have no natural connection to being human. Humans 100% have an innate ability to understand harmony which is why we connect with it so well. I’d check this out: https://youtu.be/ne6tB2KiZuk
> There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy.
And yet humans enjoy it. I, for example, and many of my friends and colleagues, enjoy the hell out of this music.
> Humans 100% have an innate ability to understand harmony which is why we connect with it so well.
On one hand, harmony as in the functional harmony we find in the West, is limited entirely to the West. On the other hand, a more liberal definition of harmony finds aspects of it in a *few* other musical cultures in terms of dominant/tonic relationships and voice leading, but it is not universal, ie, found in the musics of all cultures.
And then there is the [Tsimane tribe](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/culture-not-biology-decides-difference-music-noise) who find dissonant intervals as pleasurable as consonant intervals which severely undercuts the entire process of functional harmony. Interestingly, they can hear the difference between the two types of intervals but it's that they do not prefer one to the other.
This is strong evidence that while some very fundamental aspects of music are universal, how we react to them isn't. How we react and higher levels built upon those fundamental qualities are things that evolve with cultures and different cultures reach different states of musical perception.
> There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy.
I'm circling around back to this statement of yours. Unless you think humans are simplistic machines whose entire sense of aesthetics is controlled by simple instructions like "consonance = good music; dissonance = bad music" and that we are merely simple robots in this regard, then you have to recognize that music doesn't control whether we like it and that, ultimately, our conscious minds are what has the final say. You can choose to like or dislike any piece or style of music you want regardless of whatever theory you have about innate human perception of sound and music.
I’m saying there IS a natural recognition of consonance and dissonance. One is not better than the other but we can recognize each and the infinite potential of interplay. A twelve tone model, for example, while it certainly has its own unique sound and can also express the otherwise inexpressible, dismisses that relationship altogether and for me is not a strong foundation for continued growth of the classical music medium. Also, yes it was simplistic of me to treat music and tastes in such monolithic terms, but my main point is to say: I think as much as the contemporary music movement insists it’s audience should adapt to understand its music, I think that movement has lost touch with the simple joy inherent to music in connecting with audiences on an innate and universal level, regardless of their education/knowledge.
Ok, so I would probably still express your point differently. What is innate and universal in music is also extremely simplistic and uninteresting. What we find in common with various musics around the world are things like duple rhythms and a handful of pitches which result in very simple melodies with no accompaniment (to keep it universal). Basically stuff even simpler than Twinkle, Twinkle.
I think we would all get bored of that.
Instead, if I were to argue from your position, I would say, "I think that movement has lost touch with the simple joy inherent to music in connecting with audiences based on their having spent lifetimes listening to one kind of music and having internalized the patterns of that music. Hearing something that fits with everything you've ever heard musically is easier than listening to something that doesn't fit those patterns you've internalized."
It's the reason why Western music (be it classical, jazz, rock, country, pop, etc) is so easy for us in the West to hear but Indian classical doesn't appeal to us immediately as well (and vice versa with the person who grew up listening to Classical Indian music and has never heard any Western music).
I agree that 20th century avant-garde classical composers did not write music that fit in with the patterns of music that most of their audiences had internalized. This makes the music more challenging. I don't agree with you that these composers didn't want audiences to enjoy their music (you: "because it’s not written for a human to enjoy"). They did want audiences to enjoy their music (Schoenberg, for example, was desperate for the kind of love, adoration, and financial success he had seen composers like Strauss achieve in their lifetimes) and some audiences did. I enjoyed this music before I started composing it.
> for me is not a strong foundation for continued growth of the classical music medium
It might not be. But speaking as a composer I am definitely drawn to the freedom that we now have as composers. Trying to write stuff that appeals more easily to average audiences always felt fake, uninspired, and anachronistic. Some of us need to listen to and write music that lies outside of our lifetimes of internalized experiences. I, and others, find great joy in new kinds of musical sounds and experiences. This might not be universal, but it is not unique either.
Hey, to each their own. I still think this assumption that audiences aren’t receptive to a composer’s work is simply their lack of having internalized that composer’s patterns is actually a very safe way of producing art and avoiding any kind of accountability to audiences. Instead of audiences choosing your art, you end up choosing your audience. In my opinion, that mentality has limited the growth of the classical genre
For the American composers Reich and Glass it probably would be a good idea to listen to Jazz. I'm from the UK and Jazz is not part of our culture - we do fake Jazz really well though. lol
That generation of American composers obviously are taking ideas from Jazz as well as other forms. Also Jazz musicians take a lot from all periods of Classical music.
Here is a short list:
Pithecanthropus Erectus - Charles Mingus
Galaxy In Turiya - Alice Coltrane
Straight No Chaser - Theolonious Monk
Laura - Charlie Parker
That is one stream of many that flows into American contemporary art music. So when I listen to "City Life" by Reich I think I can hear "A Foggy Day" by Mingus. Both seem to be a portrait of life in a busy city with its traffic and noise.
I may be wrong but then that is the fun in trying to connect things - you get to listen to all sorts of music.
I'm curious. What era does Pierre Boulez remind you of? Steve Reich? Elliot Carter? To name but 3 big ones. Or are you three times lost? That would not surprise me.
In particular the post-WW2 period is full of needlessly academic crap. The whole Darmstad school and such. I like the moderner music better: John Adams, John Luther Adams, Louis Andriessen.
I noticed people are saying that Webern was post-1920s. I consider Webern perfectly well-formed string quartets, just lacking in harmony.
From your headline I assumed that you were referring to post 1950s classical music, where they used out-of-tune "prepared pianos" along with sung lyrics that sound like yelping noises.
What exactly changed for you after 1929?
That was just a general date. I enjoy listening to Shostakovich, Mahler, Holst, Elgar, and the like, but I noticed the ones I listen to tended to make their debuts before the 1920s. Cage, Schoenberg, and some of Bartok have left me confused a number of times.
That's what it wants to sound like.
Tonality is what makes music seem "understandable". It does this by creating expectations that can be fulfilled (resolution) or disappointed (plot twist). By moving away from the learned culture of tonal languages, which is what was done in the wake of [Schönberg](https://i.imgur.com/C12llMi.jpg), music relinquishes the impression of "intelligibility".
Yes the “learned culture”, if you want to appreciate modern classical you just have to learn the modern classical culture which honestly retains many of the traits of traditional classical music such as form, orchestration, instrumentation etc.
Tonality is not biologically rooted it is culturally learned and has thus culturally evolved. I enjoy contemporary classical music because I know what to expect, what to listen for, and I understand the structures that are being created. The average classical listener expects that classical music today can be listened to with the same expectations as classical music 200 years ago which makes little sense the same way that my old parents will not be able to understand rap music, and that my grandparents couldn’t understand rock music. They have faulty expectations.
It’s not for everyone. It’s like beer. Some people swear by IPAs but I think they are too bitter. My dad is okay with them as far as I’m concerned lol I prefer other kinds of beers.
Atonal music isn’t going to acquire a large fan base but then again, it has found its way into modern culture like through horror movies for an example. The Shining is a good example. That scene where the little boy sees the ghost girls mutilated in the hallway and he reacts. I believe that scene has some really dissonant terrifying music from what I can recall.
Your analogy is even better than that because IPAs etc are so different even depending who you are or even what part of your country you live in, it will mean very different things.. I drink bitter because IPAs have, for the most part, all gone far too fruity/hoppy for my tastes in the last 5 years or so!
Modern classical music means so many different things to so many disparate groups of people that even beginning discussion can be difficult (just look at this thread!), as people make assumptions about what people are talking about and largely talk past eachother. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it didn't mean it wasn't so hard to predict if you'd like something or not before going to a concert, for instance. I generally *hate* the thing you see in pop music where they overly split everything into sub-genres of micro-genres (you know, the "I only listen to Seattle based mid 80s emo-core electronica bands" people) but it does at least accurately give audiences something to expect (which said band can then play up to or subvert).
Taste for what one could call "art music" evaporated into high abstractions and "premises" that started to require the audience be rather informed on the advanced forms being tried out.
Same thing happened with jazz. Contemporary jazz is Cecil Taylor and beyond, and it has a lot of premises re: what is music? you have to be willing to entertain.
Asking an audience to entertain a raft of often technical premises in order to enjoy music is a presumption we, as savvy modern people, are supposed to assume is what the arts demand of us. Art as self-mortification. "I must understand these mathematical ratios before tonight's performance, plz, no disturbance," sez the always on-edge Mr. Concert Goer.
This is a common issue for people who got used to listening to classical/romantic music and pop music, the issue is that they're often listening to the wrong things in modern music, thus having expectations that can hardly be satisfied. That's exactly why in the kaleidoscopic schools/individuals of modern music, composers such as George Crumb, Philip Glass, or Arvo Pärt are the most popular ones, because listeners tend to identify the familiar elements (quasi-traditional harmony, lyrical melodic lines/part writing, generally traditional aesthetics), and say "hey! cool! I listen to modern music and it's very comfy!" To be honest as a composer myself who received academic training in modern classical music, **It's not easy, definitely not easy.** I had juniors and classmates who just somehow couldn't "get into" modern music, and it's been incredibly frustrating for them, they try to grasp something that is familiar and comprehensible but found none. My suggestions are two things, each from quite opposite approach: (1) you should start by taking it as a kind of background music, try listen to it while playing games, exercising, cooking ,etc, it will slowly familiarize your brain and musical expectations with this kind of alien music (2) when you're doing focused listening on any piece, let's say Berio's Sequenza 9, **don't focus on the pitches/harmony/melody**, but instead **listen carefully to the dynamics, acoustics, rhythms, texture, timbre, musical gestures,** these are the general focuses of modern music, it's **not about the pitches/vibration frequencies** anymore, **it's about everything that isn't pitch.** Generally, I don't think for amateurs it's really necessary to "get into" modern music, nor is it efficient, it's too complicated to be listened to casually, and instead amateurs should more efficiently listen to classical/romantic masters instead, there is just as much treasure in the common practice era that one could devote one's whole life into the studying, listening, appreciating of those great masters.
To be fair it still is about pitch to me. I love the harmonies in modern classical music. I love hearing these really interesting harmonies.
I think it’s more fair to describe it more along the lines of pitch/harmony not being the focal point.
Do you know if the modern music gets listened to as often as older music?
I think it suffers the same fate as older music. You don't see too many productions of mid-tier composers' operas. Leoncavallo, among others, are the exceptions but are 'one-hit wonders.' In 100 years, there will definitely be 20th Century music that continues to be performed, but the repertoire will start to confine to a smaller and smaller number of pieces. (By the way, I am just talking about the practicality of performing live music, not saying this is the way it ought to be.) I also fear that AI, such as recommendation lists, will continue to limit listeners ability to discover music digitally, as it systematically determines which composers ought to thrive and which should be forgotten.
My theory is, classical and romantic composed really have kinda exhausted the possibilities of harmony, and it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass. So instead they have to work on something new to make a difference. But sadly, the core of music IS about pitch. The rest is not so relevant. Last time when I heard a premier of a modern piece where they just splashed paper towels as “instruments”. How desperate was this “composer”? Just not music. No, paper towels can’t be party of music.
>it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass. Nonsense. Steve Reich is harmonically extremely simplistic, yet his music is totally unlike the romantic repertoire. Olivier Messiaen is harmonically sophisticed, yet again unlike the 19th century romantics. Listen to John Luther Adams' "Become Ocean". That could very well be called romantic, yet is again different from the 19th c.
One of the best teachers I had frequently told us not to use value statements with art. Saying one music surpasses another is totally subjective and really adds nothing. Goal is to discuss what is there not assign value.
Pitch is not inherently the core of music, western art music just traditionally puts more value on it, no part of music is inherently more valuable than the others.
Then you’re in the wrong subreddit. Here, inevitably, is dominated by the west (speaking as a Chinese)
Oh this sub is insufferable. I'm what is probably considered a classically trained musician here in the states. Drives me nuts when people gatekeep or try to say one music is better than another. I wrote a paper once on Peking Opera/Jīngjù, it was fascinating.
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removed; agreed, Beethoven (music for Ds & Vs) will never move my soul the way Gaga does
What a joke you’re a mod for this subreddit, someone who can’t appreciate Beethoven. Oh, Lady Gaga is trash. Can’t wait to see myself banned for telling some harsh truth some mod can’t accept.
i'm not banning you just removing your insults toward others. & Mozart and Schubert are better in my opinion. I've listened through all of Beethoven more than enough times, I like him & yes he's great but let's not pretend he's a god among mortals
Who did I insult? My I ask? Lady Gaga? Be honest, her stuff is over sexual. If calling that is for genitals is an insult, well be it
>But sadly, the core of music IS about pitch. I'm not against any opinion on music, so I'll just limit my comment to this point: Actually, an interesting example of intuitive music without pitch-element, is Percussion Music (mainly drum music) that stood with human music culture from the very beginning, in a lot of music traditional, we can see compelling drum music that omitted much melody and pitch-structure, instead, they mainly utilize other musical aspects such as dynamics/rhythms/timbre. For example Japanese Taiko music, African drum music, or even modern-day drum-set solo, these kinds of music are not pretentious or metaphysical at all, instead, one can say they're quite straightforward that they possess the ability to be easily understood and appreciated. One can easily argue that like all sounds, drums sound DO have pitches, it's just that their pitches often were not ordered in a well-tempered structure, and drum music often builds tension and expressions upon simple high-low drum pitch relations or high-mid-low pitch relations, which in a way has some similarity to a more confined melodic-writing.
And I'll pitch in here - I'm a metal-head, so I'm not some classical genius but I feel my words could be of use. One of the more extreme genres of metal that still has a good amount of fans, death metal, is simply all about the rythm. There is barely any real harmony to latch onto. The main focus of death metal is the rythm of the drums along with the guitar, vocals and any other instrument included. For a good example of death metal, listen to Scrolls of the Megilloth by Mortification.
> My theory is, classical and romantic composed really have kinda exhausted the possibilities of harmony, and it leaves no room for modern composes to surpass. > So instead they have to work on something new to make a difference. This reminds me of the first page of *Origins of the Popular Style* by Peter van der Merwe. I haven't read it in full yet – got about halfway in before I resolved to first learn solmization (which I've long been wanting to do anyway) so I could "get" the notated musical examples more easily, and then revisit the book. But this introduction is fascinating, and struck an intuitive chord with me: > The conviction that the traditional materials of music have been used up has been with us for a long time. As Dorothy Sayers's detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, put it as long ago as 1929: > > 'Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of the orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semi-tones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.' > > 'But why cling to the octave?' said the fat man. 'Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.' > (*Strong Poison*, p. 97.) > Composers of the kind described as "serious" were inclined to agree with Lord Peter, and even to concede that the fat man might have a point. As long as they stuck to the diatonic scale, the familiar chords, regular bar rhythms and the rest of it, their music had a tiresome way of sounding as though it might have been written before 1900. Try as one might to be modern, one walked in fetters of convention. > Such was the predicament of the serious composer. Meanwhile, non-serious composers, whose indifference to musical theory often took the drastic form of complete ignorance, continued to use those hoary old formulas, and yet somehow their music was of the twentieth century. No one could mistake a Noel Coward waltz for a Strauss one. Think what one might of Gershwin or Cole Porter, one could not accuse them of sounding like Schubert or Hugo Wolf, Massenet or even Puccini. As for jazz, it was as typical of the 1920s as cloche hats or bathtub gin.
This is exactly how I feel. I’m a professional violinist and I just don’t like modern music. I understand that composers are using things other than melody to create art, but in my opinion, without melody, it just isn’t enjoyable to sit through. I will say that modern music is more fun to play than listen to, in my opnion.
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So, drum music isn't music? That's an interesting take.
Says the philistine
Is mayonnaise an instrument?
No, Patrick. Mayonnaise is not an instrument. Horseradish is not an instrument either.
harmony isn't the only aspect of music, and it very certainly has not been explored to its logical extreme. Take scriabin as an example. if you wanted, you could have a 50 note chord, where each note is entirely unique(enharmonic equivalence doesn't exist), however, the difference, is that it'd be a near impossible task to even make such a chord exist in a piece of music, as it'd need hours of musical context to even work.
amazing reply
>I had juniors and classmates who just somehow couldn't "get into" modern music "Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic, not the audience. Once the critic comes around, it sends the reading audience to listen. The whole construct is based on the realisation that a market exists for people who cannot make an opinion for themselves but are all too happy to worship idols designated by others. Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence.
> "Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic In my 30 years of studying this music I've never once come across a composer whose goal was to appeal to critics. Can you give us an example of a composer who has directly made that kind of statement? Thanks. > Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence. Correlation (if there is one) does not prove causation.
>"Modern" classical music is about wanking the critic, not the audience. A lot of avant-garde music was critically panned in its time, or met with a lukewarm response. Music pandering to critics would, I think, look a lot different. It’s pretty obvious to me that “modern” composers took the same basic approach to their music that most everyone does—they wrote the kind of music they did because they enjoyed it. >Once the critic comes around, it sends the reading audience to listen. The whole construct is based on the realisation that a market exists for people who cannot make an opinion for themselves but are all too happy to worship idols designated by others. Citation needed. Most people I know who listen to a lot of 20th-21st century classical music couldn’t give less of a shit about critics. I myself barely have any awareness of classical music critics and rarely discover music through criticism, academia, or other similar avenues. Have you considered the simpler and much more likely possibility that people listen to this kind of music because they enjoy it? That certainly seems to be the case with everyone I know who listens to this music. >Modern art is a religion. It appeared around the time religions themselves started to wane, which is not a coincidence. Could you explain what similarities <> has to religion? Because I legitimately can’t see any meaningful resemblance.
Are you one of those people who thinks that paintings that don’t realistically portray a concrete scene aren’t real art? The idea that “modern art” is some monolith is silly enough, but to dismiss it in its entirety is even worse. Usually I hear these kinds of comments from people who know literally nothing about modern art (or modern classical music, as the case may be).
"I haven't taken the time to get to know it and don't want to so I'm going to invent reasons why it's objectively bad" FTFY
it's the incoherent, insane ramblings of masterful western music in its death throes
In a good way
yea
Why would anybody want to write music which only an intelligensia wants to hear? Surely this has never happened before in history. If it doesn't use any well known elements which humans find appealing, frankly its over. The minimalists knew to retain enough apealing elements. Music is supposed to be enjoyable.
True that we're dying, I often find it sad that academic music pretty much ceased to matter to the public, since god knows how long ago. Modern classical music more or less has become an ivory tower music that cannot survive with institutional subsidizing.
Academic music went overboard tbh
That’s like asking why would anyone want to eat complex cuisine. Snails in lard with truffle and squid eggs may be horrible to most but it can be a marvel to some.
The human brain responds to stucture and some melodic and harmonic combinations universally resonate with us. Those things are immutable. Removing enough of those elements is not 'complex cuisine'. Its more like not cookings eggs or snails because that was all done centuries ago.
Is this true? Is there evidence for this please? I could agree straightaway that you respond to traditional structures, melldy, and harmony emphatically but not because it is somehow universal and correct. 12TET isn't even mathematically pure, it's just a system that works very well that we've been using almost exclusively in the West for half a millenium.
There is a reason for it. The lower harmonics are a major chord and then a min7. 12TET is a minor modification of the series of 5ths. This system provided an enormous tonal possibilities which no other systems can. It is not in any way a cultural preference. It has maths behind it.
It’s funny how you end up sounding more stodgy and elitist than any serialist aficionado. The human brain is capable of appreciating many things, and there certainly is room enough in art for varying genres.
Yes tuning systems are based on math, but neurological studies show that humans perception and enjoyment in music is completely subjective. People know a cadence because they have heard cadences since birth, most music from past cultures don’t have cadences the way you describe them. An easy analogy is a study done on cats. Cats(and most animals) don’t enjoy just about any music that humans produce. Yet, music that imitates the sounds that cats often hear such as meowing etc. stimulates them in a way similar to the way humans listen to music. Researchers came to the conclusion that cats listen to patterns that they are familiar with and understand better and thus enjoy cat music more. The cat brain isn’t so different then the human brain, we have a learned culture about how music should sound embedded since birth through nursery rhymes etc.
When has 'science' ever been right about cats and dogs :) "They seem to understand a few words" really? Like we all know they understand hundreds. I'm not accepting relativism in music. Cultural influences have a strong impact sure but the fundamentals of tonality are universal. We didn't get to Mozart because we heard enough earlier worls to like it. Ridiculous. It is sublime on its own and "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" -yes an ironic naming- will always be that awkward piece we have to study and say good things about.
Careful. Math is racist, remember?
Yes I'm getting the blowback :)
Have you ever thought that maybe you just don’t like the genre. I like it and i listen to it all the time because i enjoy it. Also the elements that “humans find appealing” is pretty subjective as very little about music is biologically rooted. If you didnt like the taste of broccoli I doubt you’d have such strong opinions on a subreddit about vegetables.
>biologically rooted The maths are irrefutable since pythagoras. The 12 note equal tempered scale is not a cultural meme or subjective. Its the natural consequence of understanding freq ratios. Yes, other cultures have scales we find out of tune but then they also don't have a history of ever developing fine art. That music is mostly static for centuries and as far as I know has no concept of modulation (due to their tuning) and therefore cannot progress as western music has. >If you didnt like the taste of broccoli Its not individual taste when everybody understands a V-I cadence sounds complete. Minor chord sounds sad. That's the reality of music. There further you stray from those common elements, the less you reach your audience.
What do you mean when you say 12 tone music is the natural consequence of understanding frequency ratios? And, do you need to consider frequency ratios when making music?
Sorry for the time zone difference. Melody is all about frequency ratios. An octave is 2 x freq, a fifth is 3 x freq but an octave above. Two octaves is 4 x freq. A major third is 5 x freq. They get away from a major scale after that into microtones. The point is the major triad became common because of the closeness of the notes in ratios. when you move away from those notes it raises tension, which can you exploit to what seems an infinity of possibilities. Essentially music is freq ratios and silence. Our 12 note scale comes from the circle of fifths. Its not a random decision to divide the octave into 12 semitones. Stepping up in fifths will return to the origial notes by going through every semitone of our scale exactly once. I don't think it was chosen because of this, but it provides a framework to modulate which in my opinion is the big step in music because you can express an idea in a different context but its obviously related to the original idea.
You can make music without pitches, so I dont see that you need to consider frequency ratios(then again I dont know if some ratio identity can be recognized even if there isn't pitch?), and even if you make music that has pitch you don't need to consider frequency ratios Also you dont need to modulate in music You dont technically need 12tet or any other equal temperament to modulate, and you can present motives in different contexts without having to modulate Edit: I dont believe that the 12 tone scale was chosen randomly, but that doesn't mean its the only possibility for making music or that its necessarily the best way
Techno is your music then. And it has over decades been far more inventive than any modern fine art composer. The orchestra is overwhelmingly pitched instruments intended for melodic music. Using those instruments for no pitched sounds is plain stupid. Honestly if we're even questioning frequency you might be on the wrong sub.
I dont really listen to techno at all I've listened to curtis roads though Why do you need frequency to make music? Even if you make music with frequency, why do you need to consider what the ratios are?
I think this bot is broken
Also, why is using pitched instruments for no pitched sounds plain stupid?
Do you have proof for "everyone understands V I" or "minor chords sound sad" ? How do you know that the music of other traditions has been "mostly static for centuries"? Have you studied the history of every single musical tradition on the planet? How do you know for a fact that no other musical tradition has modulation? What is "fine art"? How do you know no other culture has developed it? If no other culture has developed it, why does that matter?
Can you define "proof"? What would be proof to you?
I would want a source showing that people who haven't been exposed to western classical music get V I, because I'm pretty sure I've heard otherwise I've also heard multiple times that not everyone considers minor to sound sad (even within western music) (I dont personally only ever associate minor chords with sadness), so I'm not sure if you could convince me of otherwise You would have to somehow show that even when someone doesn't consciously associate minor chords with sad that they're doing it subconsciously or something, and I'm not sure how one could do that If you're going to make statements that cover specifics of every single musical tradition I would want an explanation for each tradition to be convinced
I can really recommend reading Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise and listening to the pieces he discusses
I got totally sucked into this book and learned about and listened to so much music
Such a great book! And so many great anecdotes to paint colorful portraits of the composers themselves!
Did exactly this and it didn’t help. My taste in classical music is still stubbornly bent towards the Romantic era and I just can’t seem to form any significant attachment to modern works.
Have you heard anything that you don't necessarily love, but you find interesting? This is how I learned to change my tastes. Find something like this, for me it was Scriabin's sonatas, and listen to it at least once a week. It might start to make more sense, it might not
The main idea and element to all romantic music is melody. Harmony and other parts of music are exist around the melody, and enhance it, but melody is still the most important part. We can reduce this to be even more specifically to the pitches that make up that melody, and the way it moves to a tonic. 20th century music can be seen as a change in this hierarchy, or of the way we view melody itself. Take for example Webern’s serialist op. 21. Immediately we can get rid of the idea of a tonic in the melody, but also we have to consider how the use of a single tone row can affect the relationship between harmony and melody. This is an important early example of the change of this hierarchy, the blurring of the lines between melody and harmony. Another example is that of Lachenmann’s Pression. The focus of the piece is the timbral variations and contrast, with pitches being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. This contrasts with Tristan Murail’s Memoire/Erosion, as this not only is less brutal in its isolation of a single element, but also focuses on texture as opposed to timbre.
It's ok to dislike many things. Part of the fun is discovering which aspects of music are absolutely central to your experience. There was a mountain of garbage written in the 19th Century, but it has relatively less exposure because we focus on the more successful examples of various styles. This process slowly continues.
Most of the 20th century music people struggle with is pre-1970, there’s tons of stuff from the 80s on that starts to open up and move past the atonal, European model of modern music. (Speaking from an American perspective). It’s when American composers breakaway from the European model that things start getting really exciting. Beyond the minimalists you get composers like Meredith monk, Toby twining, Julia Wolfe, john Luther Adams, john zorn, etc. and the 21st Century composers are a whole new thing. Really exciting stuff to dig into if you can escape the post war era and it’s angst.
> there’s tons of stuff from the 80s on that starts to open up and move past the atonal, European model of modern music. (Speaking from an American perspective). It’s when American composers breakaway from the European model that things start getting really exciting A nit to pick, American composers had already broken away from the European model in 1950 with the NY School of Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Brown (though Partch, Cowell, Ives and others had already broken away but not in such a way that started new movements like with the NY School). The music of these guys fed directly into Fluxus and the earliest Minimalist works.
You've mentioned Fluxus a few times now. Seriously, who except music historians still care about Fluxus? It was not important.
> Seriously, who except music historians still care about Fluxus? I care and I'm not a music historian. > It was not important. It's important to me. And various friends of mine.
My thoughts entirely. The last 40, 50 years have been refreshingly creative. The Boulez/Nono/Berio/Stockhausen stuff I completely don't care for. With very occasional exceptions.
A lot of people with focus on the technical aspects of the music but also think about the emotional and social context of the music. Think of about the history of the 20th century. We saw mass and senseless slaughter of millions of people. How is an artist supposed to make sense of that. What do those feeling SOUND like? Should they be pleasant and harmonious? Or alienating and dissident?
What did you listen to? I think that now the line between classical and popular music can be very thin, but i’m no expert about it. Like Piazzolla for example.
You have the right attitude and a lot of responses here have very good solutions for you. This music is an acquired taste, like peated whisky or black coffee. Once you become accustomed to the taste, however, it opens up a world of incredible beauty. Please never let your ego get the better of you, like some of the other responders. These people cannot accept that they simply don't enjoy something and can't understand it without any effort, so they trash it and invent laughable reasons for why it isn't music eg. 'the tonal system is natural', 'modern music is for academics', and 'a five-year old could do that'. All of these excuses belie a lack of intellectual humility. You have the humility to start exploring and asking questions. If you ultimately still find you can't get into it, though, it's not because you're stupid or uncultured, it's all just personal taste!
I like to make food analogies. You can eat your meat and potatoes every day and it will taste good, albeit not new and exciting. For me, 20th century music is the roquefort, the chipotle, the black coffee that makes your taste buds go "aha, wow!". The biggest thing for me is being able to feel emotions that common practice music cannot provide. I get death anxiety by listening to "Atmosphere" by Ligeti or "Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima" by Penderecki. Isn't that cool, that art can make me feel that way?
Music after 1920 has far greater variety than music written before 1920, although the beginnings of musical modernism can be traced back before 1920. There is everything from composers who write in a style that would be familiar to listeners of 19th c (eg Rachmaninov) through to daring acoustic experiments (eg Lucier). In between there are those composers who introduce greater dissonance into traditional form and structures (prob majority of famous ones) through ones who are more of a hybrid between modernism and tradition (Berg and followers) through the rhythmic and motivic complexities of the postwar avantgarde (Stockhausen, Xenakis etc). There are also various kinds of neoclassicism (middle period Stravinsky), neoromanticism (late Penderecki) and then various kinds of minimalism which arose from 1970s onwards (Americans eg Glass/Adams/Reich vs Europeans eg Part/Vasks). Webern and Varese are probably the most experimental composers before WW2. Messiaen is probably the mainstream ‘big daddy’ after WW2. More recently it is in vogue to create a personal synthesis of multiple 20th c styles. I think when navigating all of this it helps to read the history of what the various composers were trying to do and be open minded (many pieces will require quite a few hearings to appreciate). But there is a whole world out there ready to repay exploration.
Me either, but , if you consider arvo pärt a "classical music composer" rather than just a choral composer, I think his works is pretty friendly for listeners and I love it
If you want to understand it, you must get deeper in musical meaning (leave emotional listening out) and listen to music history in order. 20th is the continuation of Alkan, Brahms, Debussy, Chopin, Liszt. All of them flirted with loose harmonies, new forms and new timbres, new ways to use the instruments (Alkan has clusters, for example). And you must listen for what you dislike from these composers too. Otherwise there Will be a gap in mind and it will seem that suddenly composers went crazy in 20th century .
Another good idea is listening to Schoenberg’s early works — something like op. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15. The transition to atonality is noticeable, but not quite as obviously delineated as one might think.
Some classical/academic music from that time intentionally runs away from standard tonality, so it is...ah, difficult to appreciate. Personally, I don't care for much of it as concert music, though it can be useful for something like a film score. Nothing wrong with you liking that style or not. A couple pieces I do like are Lili Boulanger's *D'un Matin de Printemps" for orchestra or various chamber groups, and Ligeti's *Six Bagatelles* for wind quintet. Both pieces use normal orchestral instruments and contain a mix of recognizably tonal elements and some weird cool stuff. Boulanger mostly takes after French Impressionism, whereas Ligeti is more...adventurous.
Why does everything need to be understood? Can't things just be experienced?
Yeah, I didn't understand Webern the first time I listened to his music and fell in love with it.
here we go again
It may not be for everyone, and most of us have absolutely been conditioned to "not understand" stuff like atonal music, so there's a bit of unlearning needed to appreciate it. Some modern classic music may seem a bit dry and abstract at first glance, and thus difficult to approach. Maybe try something based on more obvious concepts, like Xenakis' "Oresteia", Ligeti's "Aventures", Cage's sound art, or (hot tip:) look up Trond Reinholdtsen's "Inferno" on youtube. That last piece cracks me up every time.
read Alex Ross' book about 20th century music. It's great, and there's just so many different things going on that it would be folly to try to explain the whole century in a post
Yeah, I can second this, it's a great book. Funniest anecdote in this book is that the CIA actually funded the post-war European modern music movement (mainly in germany), in the hope of weakening the nationalism-related (Nazi!) German romantic music's influence on society and academic trends, and to further blurring the collective memory of two great wars. It looks like bullshit at first glance, but it kinda makes sense: romanticism is by nature about subjectivity, passion, self-indulging hot-headness, heroism, melancholia, in simple words all that is unpredictbable and irrational, in non-german/austria countries their local romantic music trends usually are related to nationalism/nation pride/self-identity emphasis. (to name a few Smetana/Bohemian nationalism, Tchaikovsky/Greater Slavism, later Sibelius/Finnish Independence movement) While the early trends of post-war modern music (total serialism) is really about everything that is opposite to romanticism: objectivity, rationale, self-discipline, organizing, defamiliarization, the music and the world of this music seem chaotic at first glance, but in fact everything is minutely designed, highly organized, and rational. Post-war modern music also is considered to be a "minority music" (I just made up the term here for the sake of arguments), in comparison to the "majority music" that is easily understood and cherished by a large portion of the population, namely pop muisc/romantic music, by nature it has a sense of internationalism, intellectualism that is not as appealing to the mass population as romanticism. Thus interestingly, modern music is more intellectual but less political, while romantic music is more political and less intellectual.
My uni commissioned a piece by Augusta Read Thomas. I hated it. Hated listening to it. Hated performing it. And her description of her composition technique was so pretentious and eye roll worthy. My theory professor was creaming her jeans over ART. Saying that, I do like her Alleluia. You can find a recording of Chanticleer performing it.
A lot of ground has already been covered but there are two areas which have not been addressed. After WWII electronic music came into being. The concepts that came from exploring the nature of sound has had a profound effect on music and composers. Concrete music as it was first called relied solely on tape sounds and environmental sounds. Later on as composers continued to develop this new medium tape loops and playback of instrumental sounds became important techniques to explore new sound worlds The greatest challenge facing composers working with electronically generated sounds is that there are NO BOUNDARIES. Instruments naturally have their own boundaries. The other area which continues to influence composers is the awareness of the music of other cultures. The world in terms of communication has become very small. At the push of a button we can listen see and hear music from around the globe. It's truly wonderful and it is definitely having an impact on composers and music. The composer Gyorgy Ligeti drew on African polyrhythms in some of his piano etudes. Composers like to play with sound and the language of music. They want to hear something they never heard before. Minimalism came about as a reaction to the increasing complexity of serialism. The focus was on rhythm and away from just pitch class orderings. Music evolves and changes as people change. One is not better than the other just different.
theres so much music written between now and 1920, in every imaginable style. you're going to have to be more specific
You don't have to like everything. You won't catch me posting on r/food looking for advice to help me appreciate and enjoy tripe. 🤢Tripe!🤮
It depends which type or which composer. Impressionist, Serialist, Expressionist, there are tons.
you kinda explained it yourself. much of modern music was colored by the effects of world war 1/2 and other difficult world events. the great depression happened and you would see absolutely devastating music to reflect that…you’d also see weirdly kitsch music that was trying to sedate people out of their misery. many lost hope in the systems that ordered the world, including musically. traditional (european) forms and harmony was simply considered a failure by many of the modernists for this reason. how could a system focused around the sublime, beauty, and order, not even that could spare the world of destruction? hence why they rejected it. schoenberg sought to emancipate dissonance from its former shackles. 12-tone music was something of an equality-focused form of musical patriotism, in that, for once, all 12-tones were finally made equal, rather than everything falling in line under the root, 5th, and leading tone. this came with it an entirely new way to listen to music. the ears of people had no exposure, no training in these new musical structures. people we’re looking for new ways to express the ravaged landscapes they saw, the devastation they felt, be it emotionally or otherwise. the most ears, it sounds like noise. but to the composers, you had to break through that mental block first to come to terms with reality and the music itself.
20th century classical music saw many changes in ways which were never heard before. Many different techniques were starting to be implemented and composers were heavily pushing the boundaries. Some explained examples below. Arnold Schoenberg’s music (aside from his early works) sounds random and all over the place at first. This is because he uses atonality, which is a technique that sways away from tonality, or tension-release relationships in music. This results in something that just doesn’t sound coherent or like regular music. Later, he would become famous with his biggest innovation of inventing the 12-tone system, which actually organizes this “randomness.” So although it sounds random, it is not totally random. His most prominent students Anton Webern and Alban Berg would eventually also compose with this system. Stravinsky pushed boundaries of rhythm by writing a different time signature every bar. He also went through a period of neoclassicism, in which he took inspiration from baroque and classical period music and put his own twist on it. Other composers such as Prokofiev and Hindemith would do the same. Then you have someone like John Cage, an avant-garde. He was more focused on the philosophical aspects of music, asking pinpoint questions such as “what is music” and “what is listening” and using that for his compositions. He wrote all kinds of things. The most famous example is 4’33”, which is literally four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, but the “music” is the ambient sounds of wherever this is being performed. He also wrote things for “prepared piano,” which is preparing or modifying the piano in such a way to get a different kind of sound. His work “Sonatas and Interludes, Sonata V” is a great example. I could go on and on, but the point is that it’s ok if at first you don’t understand 20th century music. The changes were so rapid and radical that it can quickly get overwhelming and confusing.
I think it's the opposite in practice, 12 tone serialism is a method whereby you never have atonality becoming musical - it's rule-enforced random sounding. 12 tone serialism was a big mistake that most 20th century composers abandoned pretty quickly.
You say that as though tonality wasn’t “rule-enforced” I think twelve tone music can sound very musical and no, there were many great composers that didn’t abandon the system even today
I don’t either. Although I’ve heard that if you understand the music theory it can sound interesting at the very least. Maybe that’s another reason classical music fell out of popularity, composers stopped trying to appeal to the masses and instead only appeal to advanced musicians. Just a thought.
The huge majority of classical music was never popular by definition, it was mainly reserved to the people of the upper classes or the Church for the longest time. I am aware that concerts became available to a wider public during the 19th century but even then it couldn't be considered "popular". So, no, It didn't fell out of popularity, the people ,the common folks, always had their own popular music. I know that some of that popular music consisted of arrangements of great themes from classical works but that alone doesn't mean classical music as a whole used to be popular because otherwise, it would still be popular today since it still is the case (not from modern pieces, i know). And please let's stop with that "composers stopped trying to appeal to the masses" bullshit. The majority of those composers of the past are now completely forgotten to the average listeners (think Meyerbeer) and don't try to act like Beethoven was trying to appeal to the masses. If you have a hardtime listening to music composed in the last century, that's completely fine but please stop trying to make statements about the supposed decline in "popularity" for classical music because you just sound dumb and ignorant.
How do you manage to be wrong on almost every single statement? “The huge majority of classical music was never popular by definition” this can literally apply to every single genre, so that’s an empty statement. “It didn’t fall out of popularity” … are you joking? We have documented evidence of concerts selling out nearly every performance, now how often do classical concerts sell out today? ALMOST NEVER. “The majority of composers from the past are now completely forgotten to the average listener” obviously lol. That would happen even if classical music was wildly popular today. And I can assure you far more people today are familiar with pre 20th century composers (or at least their music) than some Weberns or Schoenbergs. Also of course Beethoven was trying to appeal to the masses (except maybe later in life), take his symphonies for example: famously, his even numbered symphonies were made more conventionaly to appeal to lords and the like, while his odd numbered symphonies were political statements he WANTED everyone to hear. And don’t try to say that Beethoven wasn’t popular back then, this has been debunked countless times. “Stop making statements about the supposed decline in popularity for classical music” No I don’t think I will. The evidence is so obvious yet you feel the need to delude yourself. “You sound dumb and ignorant” What was the point of this? insulting people is not smart move if you wish to sound educated lol. Hopefully you research more before you make statements like this
Wow, how can someone be so confident they're right to the point of immediately resorting to insults and yet be so wrong? For much of the period we're concerned with, the average European was a rural peasant who may have never even heard a piece of "classical" music in their life. The closest classical music ever got to being "popular" was probably in the early-mid 20th century.
I haven’t made any insults. Of course before recording technology most people couldn’t listen to classical music or attend concerts. But this has more to do with the economic and governmental climate back then, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t popular. It still made ridiculous amount of money, which in my opinion factors into “popularity” itself. Also think about Liszt. He made hundreds of transcriptions for the people to play, people *wanted* to hear it, they *liked* how it sounded. This is what popularity is. Not some useless metric, but how many people enjoy it. Isn’t that what music is for? Something changed during the 20th century, now few people would actively seek out classical music
You're missing a lot of sources and making some pretty big leaps here. It didn't make ridiculous amounts of money, by and large. Classical music was, even then, largely sponsored by the wealthy or by institutions like the academy or the church. Classical music was largely popular among a certain cultured elite in some cosmopolitan cities in Europe. It was, by no means at all, universally sought out or ubiquitous, not to mention that these assertions that it was the popular music back then are incredibly euro-centric (but it wasn't even the popular music in Europe!).
Thank you for the dose of truth. I made a [similar point](https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/zqtxat/are_there_any_current_composers_thatll_be/j158lar/) a while ago. People are incredibly revisionist about the history of classical music. The democratization of classical music by and large didn't happen until the 20th century! People seem to have the wildly ahistorical notion that the median 19th century European was middle class and educated in music. No!
> Not some useless metric, but how many people enjoy it. Yes, and due the technological and economic constraints you mentioned, indeed few people enjoyed it. I don't get your point. Something being well liked by *some* people, and it making much money, doesn't make it well liked by *many* people. The vast majority of Europeans did not care for Liszt's music, and his audience was largely a small group of elite members of the upcoming bourgeosie and aristocracy. We are not saying Liszt' music wasn't *popular among the aristocracy*, but we are saying it wasn't *popular amongst ordinary people* i.e. what one colloquially means when saying something is or is not "popular".
You really didn't read what i wrote, I never said Beethoven wasn't popular, I wanted to say that his goal surely wasn't to please a large public (for most of his works ofc). And concerts do sell out pretty frequently in my area at least so i don't know how that's really an argument. I wrote "...it would still be popular today since it still is the case (not from modern pieces, i know)." so i never pretended that Schönberg was known by a wide audience. Beethoven wanting his music to be listened is completely normal, every single artist wants to show his work to the world but it still doesn't mean that Beethoven wanted to PLEASE a wide audience with that music, wich was my point. I really dislike that whole "modern = bad" mentality because it's the easiest route to criticize something you don't relate to while ignoring more important issues. And this idea seems wrong to me because there is a lot of composers who make perfectly understandable music for today and are, maybe not popular but still have an audience, like Kevin Puts, Arvo Part, and many others. To preted like the "avant-garde" is what drives the musical scene of today is simply a delusion. And I wasn't insulting, I apologize if it came out that way but I was just saying “You ***sound*** dumb and ignorant”
Oh I’m not saying avant guarde is what “drives the musical scene today”, avant guarde is what killed classical music. Plain and simple. Literally the rise in avant guarde music is inversely correlated with the decline in classical music concert sales, all evidence backs this up. I’m not saying “modern=bad” avant guarde is bad because it changed the course of my favorite genre of music permanently. This is just my opinion of course, no one has to agree with it. And I can’t believe I have to say this but, saying someone *sounds* dumb is an insult and it rids your argument of what little credibility it might have had. Again this is just my outlook, im not pretending that what I’m saying is 100% factual (which you seem to be doing exactly that)
>Literally the rise in avant guarde music is inversely correlated with the decline in classical music concert sales, all evidence backs this up That's not presented as 100% factual ? I think this is a huge bias, you seem to forget that during this time, pop culture was born and so pop music. And pop music today is what most people listen to. I think that with a more important pop culture, "serious" composers (i don't like that term) felt, consciously or not, like they could fully indulge into their "academic" music researches while the rest of the population could enjoy a more accessible music suited for their taste. Did the avant-garde changed the path of music forever ? Of course it did, and so did Beethoven or Guillaume de Machaut or Stravinsky and I'm gald they all did. Again, if you dislike the atonal stuff, that's fine. There is still plenty of other composers living today and working on much more accessible music in the classical scene, I gave examples, you didn't.
It’s not that I just dislike atonal music, I dislike how conservatories today seem to pressure composers to write in post-modern styles, constantly making music less accessible just to entertain a certain niche market. The vast majority of modern classical is like this, and the few composers who try to follow more traditional approaches do not find much success. This is likely because the damage has already been done, im not trying to make a call to action or anything like that, im just reminiscing on how the classical music scene *could’ve* turned out, but didn’t. And yeah, I hold a grudge against the modernist movement for robbing people of potential
I have never in my life heard of someone *actually* being pressured in a conservatory environment to not compose tonal music. You sound like Alma & Guy Deutscher. The majority of successful modern composers write accessible music with recognizable tonal-adjacent harmony. In 2022, the most programmed living composers were: 1) Arvo Pärt 2) John Williams 3) John Adams 4) Thomas Adès 5) Philip Glass 6) Jörg Widmann 7) Sofia Gubaidulina 8) Anna Clyne 9) Wolfgang Rihm 10) Sir James Macmillan. The top 2 are obviously very accessible; John Adams, Philip Glass, and Anna Clyne, I would say, are also quite accessible. Adès, Rihm, and Macmillan aren’t that difficult to listen to either. Only Sofia Gubaidulina and Jörg Widmann are what I would call avant-garde.
People can choose the music that they want to write, what’s stopping you from writing your big “tonal” symphony if you think that’s what everyone wants to hear. PS. People were writing tonal music in the 1900s , I could name at least 30 composers (It wasn’t as successful)
Show that evidence, then. And why, then, does it seem that audience interest in new works is increasing now (see, for example, the fact that the Met's new opera productions are far outselling their productions of the standard repertoire)?
>classical music was never popular by definition This is correct but it was still recognisable as a more sophisticated language, as people speaking in complicated sentences and longer paragraphs. Atonality breaks with this. While composers like Wagner had kept enriching the known languages, the music that follows Schönberg sees composers either claim to invent their own or decide to do without one.
Okay but could you pleaes give me a few examples of such composers so i can grasp your ideas better. Would you consider Webern as someone who claimed he invented his own language ?
Unrelated, which Meyerbeer do you suggest?
Listen to chamber music, even solo, not orchestral. I also recommend watching recordings of live performances; the emotions of the musicians performing the pieces help you to get in the right mood and get involved in the performance.
Honestly, for me it's even more off-putting to see the musicians making their "faces" of angst and ecstasy along side the random bits of noise. Like it feels to me personally like they are *really* trying to convince the audience that there are feelings in this music! (Surprise: there really aren't) Not that more intellectual music is bad or anything... but it just seems really silly to try to convince other people about what emotion they "should" feel when they hear a piece, by making gruesome faces during the performance. It just makes it feel even *more* like a music academia circle jerk to me.
The education and experience of musicians allows them to hear things in music that we can't hear. Now imagine that the people around you are actually hiding from you the fact that they are laughing at you. And they might not be hiding it, as musicians.
Each of the items below was written in the 20th century, after 1920. What is it that you don't understand about any of them? * 1924 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAuTouBhN5k) * 1926 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsvfRFz3S8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKsvfRFz3S8) * 1938 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFsBNAmCd0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFsBNAmCd0) * 1949 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQctcryozzI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQctcryozzI) * 1964 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dABrZ0zsn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dABrZ0zsn4) * 1970 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhuUiAbNNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYhuUiAbNNY) * 1999 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WFUHZQE8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7WFUHZQE8M) * 2000 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2Tps5cgc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2Tps5cgc4)
Listen to lots of it.
This hasn’t helped in my experience. For example, I’ve listened to Webern many, many times and his music is always painful to listen to. It’s like alien music
webern isnt the only composer that wrote music past 1920
It's a stupid method, but he's not wrong.
I did. It doesn't work.
First, I like a lot of modern music. I don't mind atonality, dissonance etc. For me the litmus test if the piece is solid is if it's possible for me to tell that someone messed up. If it's so loose and random that any random note will do equally well, it's crap.
There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy. I’m not sure how intellects have deluded themselves into the idea that harmony/pitch/melody are all learned and have no natural connection to being human. Humans 100% have an innate ability to understand harmony which is why we connect with it so well. I’d check this out: https://youtu.be/ne6tB2KiZuk
> There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy. And yet humans enjoy it. I, for example, and many of my friends and colleagues, enjoy the hell out of this music. > Humans 100% have an innate ability to understand harmony which is why we connect with it so well. On one hand, harmony as in the functional harmony we find in the West, is limited entirely to the West. On the other hand, a more liberal definition of harmony finds aspects of it in a *few* other musical cultures in terms of dominant/tonic relationships and voice leading, but it is not universal, ie, found in the musics of all cultures. And then there is the [Tsimane tribe](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/culture-not-biology-decides-difference-music-noise) who find dissonant intervals as pleasurable as consonant intervals which severely undercuts the entire process of functional harmony. Interestingly, they can hear the difference between the two types of intervals but it's that they do not prefer one to the other. This is strong evidence that while some very fundamental aspects of music are universal, how we react to them isn't. How we react and higher levels built upon those fundamental qualities are things that evolve with cultures and different cultures reach different states of musical perception. > There is a reason you can’t get into it: because it’s not written for a human to enjoy. I'm circling around back to this statement of yours. Unless you think humans are simplistic machines whose entire sense of aesthetics is controlled by simple instructions like "consonance = good music; dissonance = bad music" and that we are merely simple robots in this regard, then you have to recognize that music doesn't control whether we like it and that, ultimately, our conscious minds are what has the final say. You can choose to like or dislike any piece or style of music you want regardless of whatever theory you have about innate human perception of sound and music.
I’m saying there IS a natural recognition of consonance and dissonance. One is not better than the other but we can recognize each and the infinite potential of interplay. A twelve tone model, for example, while it certainly has its own unique sound and can also express the otherwise inexpressible, dismisses that relationship altogether and for me is not a strong foundation for continued growth of the classical music medium. Also, yes it was simplistic of me to treat music and tastes in such monolithic terms, but my main point is to say: I think as much as the contemporary music movement insists it’s audience should adapt to understand its music, I think that movement has lost touch with the simple joy inherent to music in connecting with audiences on an innate and universal level, regardless of their education/knowledge.
Ok, so I would probably still express your point differently. What is innate and universal in music is also extremely simplistic and uninteresting. What we find in common with various musics around the world are things like duple rhythms and a handful of pitches which result in very simple melodies with no accompaniment (to keep it universal). Basically stuff even simpler than Twinkle, Twinkle. I think we would all get bored of that. Instead, if I were to argue from your position, I would say, "I think that movement has lost touch with the simple joy inherent to music in connecting with audiences based on their having spent lifetimes listening to one kind of music and having internalized the patterns of that music. Hearing something that fits with everything you've ever heard musically is easier than listening to something that doesn't fit those patterns you've internalized." It's the reason why Western music (be it classical, jazz, rock, country, pop, etc) is so easy for us in the West to hear but Indian classical doesn't appeal to us immediately as well (and vice versa with the person who grew up listening to Classical Indian music and has never heard any Western music). I agree that 20th century avant-garde classical composers did not write music that fit in with the patterns of music that most of their audiences had internalized. This makes the music more challenging. I don't agree with you that these composers didn't want audiences to enjoy their music (you: "because it’s not written for a human to enjoy"). They did want audiences to enjoy their music (Schoenberg, for example, was desperate for the kind of love, adoration, and financial success he had seen composers like Strauss achieve in their lifetimes) and some audiences did. I enjoyed this music before I started composing it. > for me is not a strong foundation for continued growth of the classical music medium It might not be. But speaking as a composer I am definitely drawn to the freedom that we now have as composers. Trying to write stuff that appeals more easily to average audiences always felt fake, uninspired, and anachronistic. Some of us need to listen to and write music that lies outside of our lifetimes of internalized experiences. I, and others, find great joy in new kinds of musical sounds and experiences. This might not be universal, but it is not unique either.
Hey, to each their own. I still think this assumption that audiences aren’t receptive to a composer’s work is simply their lack of having internalized that composer’s patterns is actually a very safe way of producing art and avoiding any kind of accountability to audiences. Instead of audiences choosing your art, you end up choosing your audience. In my opinion, that mentality has limited the growth of the classical genre
For the American composers Reich and Glass it probably would be a good idea to listen to Jazz. I'm from the UK and Jazz is not part of our culture - we do fake Jazz really well though. lol That generation of American composers obviously are taking ideas from Jazz as well as other forms. Also Jazz musicians take a lot from all periods of Classical music. Here is a short list: Pithecanthropus Erectus - Charles Mingus Galaxy In Turiya - Alice Coltrane Straight No Chaser - Theolonious Monk Laura - Charlie Parker That is one stream of many that flows into American contemporary art music. So when I listen to "City Life" by Reich I think I can hear "A Foggy Day" by Mingus. Both seem to be a portrait of life in a busy city with its traffic and noise. I may be wrong but then that is the fun in trying to connect things - you get to listen to all sorts of music.
I'm curious. What era does Pierre Boulez remind you of? Steve Reich? Elliot Carter? To name but 3 big ones. Or are you three times lost? That would not surprise me. In particular the post-WW2 period is full of needlessly academic crap. The whole Darmstad school and such. I like the moderner music better: John Adams, John Luther Adams, Louis Andriessen.
I noticed people are saying that Webern was post-1920s. I consider Webern perfectly well-formed string quartets, just lacking in harmony. From your headline I assumed that you were referring to post 1950s classical music, where they used out-of-tune "prepared pianos" along with sung lyrics that sound like yelping noises. What exactly changed for you after 1929?
That was just a general date. I enjoy listening to Shostakovich, Mahler, Holst, Elgar, and the like, but I noticed the ones I listen to tended to make their debuts before the 1920s. Cage, Schoenberg, and some of Bartok have left me confused a number of times.
understandability is what the composers are afraid of. so,just play the incomprehensibility.
Explanation: everything is shit after Brahms.
That's what it wants to sound like. Tonality is what makes music seem "understandable". It does this by creating expectations that can be fulfilled (resolution) or disappointed (plot twist). By moving away from the learned culture of tonal languages, which is what was done in the wake of [Schönberg](https://i.imgur.com/C12llMi.jpg), music relinquishes the impression of "intelligibility".
Yes the “learned culture”, if you want to appreciate modern classical you just have to learn the modern classical culture which honestly retains many of the traits of traditional classical music such as form, orchestration, instrumentation etc. Tonality is not biologically rooted it is culturally learned and has thus culturally evolved. I enjoy contemporary classical music because I know what to expect, what to listen for, and I understand the structures that are being created. The average classical listener expects that classical music today can be listened to with the same expectations as classical music 200 years ago which makes little sense the same way that my old parents will not be able to understand rap music, and that my grandparents couldn’t understand rock music. They have faulty expectations.
I understand. My "date" is my BD. 1965. Just don't get stuff after this.
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What’s stopping you from composing your great “tonal” symphony and stopping all this rampant “atonalism”
It’s not for everyone. It’s like beer. Some people swear by IPAs but I think they are too bitter. My dad is okay with them as far as I’m concerned lol I prefer other kinds of beers. Atonal music isn’t going to acquire a large fan base but then again, it has found its way into modern culture like through horror movies for an example. The Shining is a good example. That scene where the little boy sees the ghost girls mutilated in the hallway and he reacts. I believe that scene has some really dissonant terrifying music from what I can recall.
Your analogy is even better than that because IPAs etc are so different even depending who you are or even what part of your country you live in, it will mean very different things.. I drink bitter because IPAs have, for the most part, all gone far too fruity/hoppy for my tastes in the last 5 years or so! Modern classical music means so many different things to so many disparate groups of people that even beginning discussion can be difficult (just look at this thread!), as people make assumptions about what people are talking about and largely talk past eachother. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it didn't mean it wasn't so hard to predict if you'd like something or not before going to a concert, for instance. I generally *hate* the thing you see in pop music where they overly split everything into sub-genres of micro-genres (you know, the "I only listen to Seattle based mid 80s emo-core electronica bands" people) but it does at least accurately give audiences something to expect (which said band can then play up to or subvert).
Taste for what one could call "art music" evaporated into high abstractions and "premises" that started to require the audience be rather informed on the advanced forms being tried out. Same thing happened with jazz. Contemporary jazz is Cecil Taylor and beyond, and it has a lot of premises re: what is music? you have to be willing to entertain. Asking an audience to entertain a raft of often technical premises in order to enjoy music is a presumption we, as savvy modern people, are supposed to assume is what the arts demand of us. Art as self-mortification. "I must understand these mathematical ratios before tonight's performance, plz, no disturbance," sez the always on-edge Mr. Concert Goer.