Re: Musical languistics - Mass Reply

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> > [...] Stravinsky is just too "atonal" for my friend's
> > mother, and to my own mother-in-law.  I went to someone's house
> > last week where we listened to his compositions on Sonar.  He
> > was very fond of using musical patches and microtones like free-
> > form brush strokes and combining them.  He also had the volume
> > cranked up way too high.  It was almost unbearable.  I felt like
> > those Asians listening to Bach.
>
> Are you speaking about Stravinsky here?
I think "his compositions" refers rather to the someone whose house
Sally went to rather than to Stravinsky.

> Well, Dvorak died in 1904, IIRC, so his music can hardly be considered 20th
> century. In general, a composer born in 1850 who died in 1930 would rather be
> considered 19th century than 20th century.
ObDigression: In 1892, Dvorak moved into a house a little more than a
kilometer from where I live when he was appointed music director of the
National Conservatory of Music.  He wrote the New World Symphony there.
A statue of him stands in a nearby park.  Unfortunately, the house was
demolished in 1992 despite a last-ditch attempt to have it declared a
cultural landmark.

> In my choral works, I try to treat the text as naturally as possible, without
> creating extremely difficult rhythmic patterns. After all, no spoken text
> follows a strict 4/4 or even 3/4, and only a tiny part of all poetry would. The
> result as a high level of metric irregularity (say, 2/4|5/8|7/8|3/4|6/8|etc.),
> but nevertheless I do my best to keep it natural.
In his sf novels of the 60s and 70s, the English novelist John Brunner
foresaw a 21st century music based heavily on polyrhythms too complex
to be accurately performed by human beings (11 against 13, e.g.), and
only possible through computer performance.  AFAIK this has not happened,
but I think it would be interesting to listen to!

> but IMO a much more astounding effect can be achieved when the music is
> in complete opposition to the scene you see (like, for example, in the final
> scene of Dr. Strangelove).
Or the final scene of _Monty Python's Life of Brian_!

> But if a composer has a musical language that *could* also have
> existed in the past, does that automatically disqualify him? In my opinion, as
> long as he develops his own recognisable style of writing, he can be as a great
> as composer as anyone else.
As an occasional writer of sonnets (as opposed to a writer of occasional
sonnets), I sympathize greatly with this viewpoint.

> Does a great composer necessarily need to be a revolutionary?
No, but that's the way to get the grant money.  :-)

Raymond Smullyan tells the story of Schoenberg saying in an interview,
"Music, to be great, must be cold and unemotional."  The next day, a
friend of Stravinsky's said to him, "Can you believe Schoenberg saying
that great music must be cold and unemotional?"  Stravinsky immediately
became furious, shouting "I said that first!"

--
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:                       John Cowan
"Never in the field of human computing          jcowan@reutershealth.com
has so much been paid by so many                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to so few!" (pace Winston Churchill)            http://www.reutershealth.com

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