musical discoveries

[calimac]

In my current listening, I've just discovered a passage by Schubert - Schubert! - that sounds uncannily like Philip Glass. I couldn't be more astonished if I tried. The instrumentation is right too: strings and organ, with soft creepy voices. I think it's from Satyagraha or Koyaanisqatsi. Franz, you didn't tell me you were a minimalist.

Current musical reading is Music Downtown, a collection of Kyle Gann's Village Voice columns that came from the UC Press booksale. I don't like all the composers Gann praises (assuming I know their work at all, which I often don't) nor dislike all the ones he dismisses - I was sorry to see him lump Michael Torke as one of a list of composers writing for "little old ladies" (a rather Ivesian turn of phrase, no?) - but much of the time he is right on. I'm still burning enough at a lot of old serialist propaganda that I cheer robust three-point shots like this:

But while bad 17th-century music is merely dull and bad 19th-century music is tediously grandiose, the late 20th century's bad music was pervasively ugly, pretentious, and meaningless, yet backed up by a technical apparatus that justified it and even earned it prestigious awards. Twelve-tone technique - the South Sea Bubble of music history, to which hundreds and perhaps thousands of well-intended composers sacrificed their careers like lemmings, and all for nothing - brought music to the lowest point in the history of mankind. Twelve-tone music is now dead, everyone grudgingly admits, yet its pitch-set-manipulating habits survive in far-flung corners of our musical technique like residual viruses.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

And yet, and yet, in the hands of a core group, whom increasing numbers of people damn for their imitators, serial technique seemed for a while to be such a promising idea. I have no more time than you for the Milton Babbitts of this world, but the delicate tiny works of Webern make me cry with pleasure, when I am in the mood for them, and Pli selon pli touches me deeply in the right hands and I have liked the Stravinsky Movements for Piano and Orchestra since I bought it randomly when I was sixteen.

Yes, it was a delusion, and yes, it was often a tyranny - but there was some gorgeous stuff along the way nonetheless. And let's remember, posterity gets to decide these things and sometimes it takes a couple of centuries to sort it out. I mean, look how Bach's stock dipped and rose, and how Vivaldi's stock is rising.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

So who does Gann list as the bad serial composers? He's pretty eclectic in his taste and probably doesn't hate 'em all.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I like Carter selectively - his late orchestral music strikes me as a colossal breakthrough into instantly attractive beauty whereas the earlier quartets are music I admire at a distance but feel I will like one day when I am older and wiser.