‘The War on Music’ Review: Songs Without Listeners
wsj.com
wsj.com
I mean sure, I get that your atonal poem breaks with traditional tonality etc etc, and maybe on some intellectual level that is (was) a fresh move, but I don't _enjoy_ it, no matter how hard I've tried.
Which is particularly surprising considering that there appear to be like twenty contemporary artists whose paintings are neither random paint splatters, nor monocolor canvases, so you don't even have to spend that much time looking!
That said, when seen on a screen on a computer, I think it can be the opposite way around. I guess a lot of modern art only feels right in person, since many of them have 3D elements or are very contextual.
I couldn’t disagree more, but as it’s said, there is no accounting for taste. My problem - and I get that it’s my problem - is that I don’t see the crushed up car as art. It’s a gimmick, a sideshow, a lark.
Within the visual arts I want to see something which both demonstrates the mastery of a technique and captures the artist’s understanding of the world, the human condition, etc. With the crushed up car, if I squint my eyes I get the second part, but as to the first part, the only mastery I see displayed is hucksterism.
There are many honorable exceptions, and they are well worth talking to when you find them (you'll disagree but you will learn something) but many more who claim to like it because they fear what they might be seen as if they don't.
I'll note that IME those who know most about art and genuinely love it are least willing to put up a facade.
Also if you are an artist, you are self employed. So you are not just artist, you are CEO, CFO and everything too.
What I complain about is the decline of the trumpet. Modern music has completely abandoned it in favor of terrible synthesized horns.
If you want to hear how incredibly good horn playing can be, Maurice Andre and Herb Alpert's horn playing are just sublime.
Chicago was a horn band, and I like their tunes, but the horn skill was rather pedestrian.
Classical purists might argue that it's made for visual entertainment and for that reason doesn't count. But if music written for opera and ballet are a legitimate part of the classical canon - and indeed religious music, Bach's masses etc., which equally had a function beyond just existing for their own sake - excluding music from the movies on those grounds feels like little more than snobbery.
The same can be said even of the best video game soundtracks. Not really my world, but I can see the love, skill and artistry that goes in to it.
If you're looking for horns, Mark Ronson's band are worth a listen, they don't have the solo skill of the great jazz players but they hang together well as a band. Solo trumpet wise, Erik Truffaz is worth listening to. Still going strong AFAIK.
Yeah, probably because it's more bound to follow popular tastes than classical music meant to be played only in concert halls. I also like mostly anything by John Williams (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park etc.), but I'm sure that would be too "pedestrian" for many classic music aficionados (quote from the article "Some of them, such as Korngold and Franz Waxman, were writing film music in Hollywood—a sure way to be dismissed by the anointed"). If you like the Game of Thrones soundtrack, you should also check out the Westworld soundtrack, which is also by Ramin Djawadi - because it's set on Earth, he got to play with reinterpreting pop/rock songs with classical instruments, e.g. "Black Hole Sun" on a (slightly out of tune) player piano or "Seven Nation Army" played with Indian instruments.
It's why movie music is a relatively mediocre artform. It's mostly reheated 19th/early 20th century cliches and borrowings with none of the fluency or genius of the originals.
People forget that being able to write for an orchestra isn't proof of genius. The bar is higher than that.
Ravel, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov - and others - absolutely kill all of the Hollywood guys.
More interesting are recent TV scores that have been all-electronic and abstract. Chernobyl seems to have broken the trend into the mainstream, but I'm hearing examples on shows like The Mandalorian and Dr Who. They sound a lot fresher than the orchestral blobbery that's more usual, because they're more about evocative sound design than trad synth/sampler sounds.
For classical music, I have a theory that instead of splitting into two, it split into three. To overly generalize, there's the mainstream classical music everybody loves to listen to, mostly game/movie/tv soundtracks. There's the classical music that fans and critics of classical music loves (the subject of the article, the avante garde, the neoclassical, etc.). And then the classical music that classical musicians like, which is mostly stuff written by the old great composers (my impression is that classical musicians aspire to play famous old pieces more than they get excited over new pieces).
Depends what style of music you are listening to I guess. Natural instruments will always retain their space, but not in pop music. Also there is really, really good synthie guys as well, but they do typically more than just imitate a horn like in the 80s.
The problem is that the larger the band, the less chance they have of actually earning enough money to be worthwhile.
Consequently, anything that requires multiple musicians is out: string sections, horn sections, etc.
“Beethoven’s compositions more and more assume the character of studied eccentricity. He does not write much now, but most of what he produces is so impenetrably obscure in design and so full of unaccountable and often repulsive harmonies, that he puzzles the critic as much as he perplexes the performer.” (The Harmonicon, London, April 1824)
“Beethoven mystified his passages by a new treatment of the resolution of discords, which can only be described in words by the term, ‘resolution by ellipsis,’ or the omission of the chord upon which the discordant notes should descend.... Many of his passages also appear confused and unintelligible, by a singular freedom in the use of diatonic discords or discords of transition; many instances appear of passages by contrary motion, each carrying their harmonies with them.” (Musical World, London, March 1836)
Source: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time by Nicolas Slonimsky (1953)
The quotations, are critics close to the "release" date of the work. Let's say it was "jarring" back then as a fresh listen.
In our case, it's been 60+ years, and in some cases 80 or 100 from unlistenable "contemporary classical" music and listeners didn't come around as they did with Beethoven.
>The difficulty of understanding Beethoven is well known: even at the end of the nineteenth century the late works were still contested, and the most famous piano teacher in Vienna, Leschetizky, advised his pupil Artur Schnabel not to play the last sonatas. In fact, I doubt if the enemies of contemporary music would sit through the Grosse Fuge if they did not know that Beethoven wrote it. Even as recently as the 1930s and 1940s, chamber music societies in smaller American cities would threaten to cancel concerts by the Budapest Quartet if they insisted on playing a late Beethoven quartet.
And in Beethoven's case we also know that he did churn out perfectly catchy stuff a plenty, even for the most "untrained" listener.
>There is some truth to these attacks, of course, but they all overlook the essentially artificial nature of a system that makes music depend principally on the listener. The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing. Public concerts are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind, dating largely from the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were a way of enabling musicians to make a living doing what they like to do after much of the patronage of church and court had been withdrawn. Musicians need and want an audience from time to time, but the public concert is only a small part of the making of music, not the whole of it: playing for a few friends, playing with other musicians, and even playing for oneself still provide the foundation of musical life. Making the public concert the economic basis of music has somewhat obscured the reason that music exists.
Of course, musicians being answerable to noone but themselves is a dangerous state of affairs which led to what the common man considers to be unlistenable music in the 20th century and beyond. Richard Taruskin delivered a scathing criticism of this in his essay "The Poietic Fallacy" in the collection "The Dangers of Music and other Utopian Essays".
So the question is not "why is modern classical music so unlistenable" but rather "why does 19th century music have such a large audience".
Here in Europe, in many countries like Italy, Germany, Austria, and so on, it did exist. Concerts, operas, etc, were popular affairs, at least from middle class and above.
And in the 19th century and early 20th century, many illiterate people could also follow popular "literate" tunes, and sing arias and such.
>The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing. Public concerts are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of mankind, dating largely from the latter half of the eighteenth century.
He got it backwards. Public music, in festivals, churches, rituals, celebrations and so on, was the norm throughout history. And folk musicians has been a job since forever - even in rural areas. Here in Southern Europe, for example, its a tradition lost in time...
Precisely, the mass consumption of literate (i.e. notated music) was created in the 19th century. Only two of Beethoven's piano sonatas were played _in public_ during his lifetime; the piano recital as we know today was invented by Liszt. Orchestral concerts and Opera also enormously expanded in popularity in the 19th century with the rise of the middle class and their cultural aspirations. Previously Opera has been the only truly "popular" art, and even then it has to be heavily subsidised as it can never survive on the support of the population at large.
The 19th century is a tiny slice in history for notated music in the West which stretches back to the Carolingian empire in the 9th century! Throughout vast swathes of history notated music was limited to chant and then polyphony which was cultivated by the musicians and their circle. Even the hugely democratising effect of printed music only brought in amateurs, who need to learn the notation and play or sing for themselves. This is not comparable with the situation from the invention of the recording when any person can access a large slice of the entire repertory of notated music at leisure.
>Public music, in festivals, churches, rituals, celebrations and so on, was the norm throughout history. And folk musicians has been a job since forever - even in rural areas. Here in Southern Europe, for example, its a tradition lost in time...
Precisely, and because they were not notated, it's very difficult to get an idea of what was played. We have the notation for literate music and we still debate endlessly on how they should be played! Those ephemereal music played in the taverns and markets are the true predecessors of "popular" music made for and by the people, not music for musicians like Mozart or Bach; Notated and unotated music form parallel traditions which intersect but remain distinct. You will note how I painstakingly repeat the terms "literate music" and "notated music" because that is the one distinguishing factor that unites everything from Perotin to Poulenc, and is a coherent topic on which discussion is possible rather than the much more amorphous idea of just "music". A lot of confusion surrounding this topic arose in the first place because no such distinction was made.
(Note that Fidelio did indeed receive an unenthusiastic reception in 1806 and only became successful when performed after a thorough revision in 1814.)
It also means if you're creating music with profits in mind, you're better off aiming at something other than the local symphony, such as accompaniment to other media (film, video games), or selling albums, concert tickets, etc. (If you want melodic, harmonic orchestral music more in the vein of "classical" music, I think it's today primarily found in film music, where there is a rich abundance of it.)
In other words, technology changed the entire cultural experience and business of music. I think the advent of photography perhaps had similar effects in the visual arts, as perhaps did automobiles with architecture (although maybe that one's a bit more of a stretch).
The internet is continuing to change it, and the advent of AI will likely continue to morph it further.
ETA: Whenever I see twelve-tone music mentioned, I can't help but think of this classic commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACCAF04wSs
Perhaps consider that a concert hall filled with a couple of hundred instruments built to a standard tuning, the materials and techniques involved, and the sheet music notation system used to reproduce works and train the players, was absolute pinnacle, state-of-the-art technology in the early 18th century.
As in, only the military had greater ability to deploy the latest materials, precision manufacturing techniques and information technology etc. at the scale required.
The symphony orchestra and the music written for it was a product of the social and technological circumstances of its time, every bit as much as the LP & CD album format (which is also, sadly, looking increasingly obsolescent this last decade or so).
Schoenberg writes in one of his essays, that the general audience at an orchestra concert in Vienna in the late 19th century, had a fairly sophisticated set of expectations about music -- they understood sonata form, e.g. and could follow along, could recall and even sing or whistle the themes a few days later.
Did radio and recordings change this because now you don't have to listen quite as closely -- rewind or wait for the next broadcast? Or does it simply become something you don't really listen to at all, but rather take as a drug to get ready for the night out or get into a work groove? I don't deny my bias towards listening to music, nor do I reject other modalities.
A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Presumably most working musicians were more interested in continuing with the keyboard-ready music they have been playing their entire lives, so here the technology clearly followed.
On the other hand, I've wondered whether the duration of popular music songs was pegged to 2-3 minutes by convention due to an early popular record format that could support 2-3 minutes a side. I'm sure someone's written convincingly one way or the other on the matter, but I don't know, so take it with a grain of salt.
BTW, hadn't seen that "commercial" for the second Viennese school and got a kick out of it. Has anyone done the same schtick for be-bop? (Love them both)
EDIT: just recalling the other half of that MIDI critique -- it was commercial interest in following a market that lead to the technology, rather than being artistically-driven à la a Verèse.
Isn't that true of any instrument? They're all limited by the nature of their interface to the musician.
Shame its behind a paywall, this is an interesting sounding article.
Modern classical music needed to distinguish itself from popular music and the only way to do that was to go ultra snobbish.
Like fashion and modern art and other areas with a high bullshit ratio, 'distinction' remains very important and increasingly the only way to achieve that it to head categorically in the opposite direction to 'popular'. Fashion is able to achieve 'distinction' but just making really expensive stuff, but you can't do that for music. You could try charging £1000 for a ticket to a concert but then you'd look silly when no-one turned up. Fashion doesn't have that problem because it they dont actually sell any £10000 dresses nobody knows. Damien Hirst can cut a cow in half and put it in a tank (admittedly, an impressive concept and execution of an idea that genuinely feels like art to me) and because its a single artifact it has cachet and can sell for $5m. Music doesn't have that option.
The better way to do modern classical properly is to make music that sounds good, but only sounds good from about the third time you hear it. Experimental but still likeable. Thats really hard though so not many people try. Autechre can do this. Philip Glass also.
Check out Arvo Part (eg “Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britain” or “Fur Alina” or “Tabula Rasa”)
Mark Anthony Turnage eg “Coraline”.
Judith Weir “We are Shadows”
I could go on and on. There are lots of great 21st century and late 20th century works in the Classical tradition
There's a point at which a medium becomes stale no matter what you do with it. No one declaims epic poetry from memory or writes complex medieval polyphonic vocal music now, and IMO orchestral/classical music is going the same way.
Bach to (roughly) Berg's opera Wozzeck will keep being played, and perhaps Reich and Glass from the 60s/70s. But I'm not hearing much else that has broad non-niche impact and appeal.
Er, what? If that's the author's opinion of one of the most thrilling pieces of music of the 20th century then I'll take the rest of their opinions with a pinch of salt.
> When first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation. Many have called the first-night reaction a "riot" or "near-riot", though this wording did not come about until reviews of later performances in 1924, over a decade later.
What is the ultimate reason for creating art that the average "consumer" doesn't enjoy? Maybe it's because creators want to push boundaries, but the "consumers" don't educate themselves? Or should popularity and enjoyability be the only thing that decides if new art is good? Then really, just stick to Spotify algorithm and get more of the same, over and over.
My mother teaches music history and theory at the music academy. I remember the first I played Daft Punk "Around the World" to her. Her reaction was "who could listen to this???"
I think an artist's job is to translate beauty from their imagination to other people's perception. If an artist wants to "push boundaries" and complains that people don't "educate themselves", that just means they're a bad translator - a bad artist.
Classical music suffers from this phenomenon I think. There are just some stunning orchestral works out there which aren't ever going to sound dated. Nothing is going to make Mahler's 9th symphony irrelevant or incomprehensible in the next couple of centuries. There isn't enough oxygen in these rarefied atmospheres for more masterworks to breathe.
Is it possible that post-peak you kind of lose the audience? I.e. it becomes just for nerds. I suspect you see the same thing for e.g. classic rock. Noone sane listens to 2022 “classic rock”.
It also explains why the actual best art and content for discovery has been at all time lows for a long time.
There is so much amazing music out there that will never see the light of day and it's appalling. I've been sharing rare new music finds, but I don't want to pay to promote content I'm already working hard to curate. Sharing indie artists and content from friends and family now is more important than ever. Buying music is more important than ever, we need to realize this because it's the reasons why our favorite artists haven't been releasing anything for years too, the playing field is skewed, and the reward for hard work is nonexistent in music right now...
Even popular and influencer-level artists are being ripped off by bad industry contracts, it threatens the entire future of the music industry, that's why they're pushing to make AI driven music popular... So they can hopefully eliminate needing artists.
The ugly truth is that the best musicians can't be emulated, so all we'll have if they succeed is derivative soulless computer generated music in our future, from computer keyboards... Bot music...
> they're pushing to make AI driven music popular... So they can hopefully eliminate needing artists.
do not mistake that statement with “the place for actual artists will disappear” because frankly, that just isn’t going to happen. ever.
If you at all understand art, you’ll understand why this isn’t a concern.
There are several game makers and multimedia producers that are using AI generated music now though, and that is costing musicians opportunities that would make that brand of entertainment and experiences better. Even though human composed music will likely be better, the cost cuts often end up being taken more often over time as independent music and arts become more and more undervalued over time by algorithms.
In some ways, I think popularity in art is a signal of mediocrity. I like the Beatles fine, and sure I see the genius, but the music is also very inoffensive. But yeah, like many have said. New 'Classical' music just isn't going to find an audience. It's either too polarizing or not for the 'kids these days' But with the overwhelming quantity of music available, niche music is great. I love Steve Reich, I imagine my dad would hate it.
It's also an amusing trope in depictions of brooding artists that popularity cheapens a work. I guess I just think social acceptance or virality is a weird measure of the quality of a work, even though in some ways it's all we have.
If it's the former, then certainly someone should have told him that the genre passed its peak more than two centuries ago. If it's the latter, I'm surprised that he hasn't visited a theater recently, or any of the concert halls that are frequently sold out when they play popular successes such as Williams.
To be honest, I suspect the real issue with the author is that his main line of business is to write about politics, and that this article is no exception.
So there is no ambiguity in the article’s terminology.
Anyway, music changes. To me, someone very obviously classically influenced like Igorrr (Gautier Serre) is a genius. Classical music has morphed into something new and interesting, which is the way it should be.
Here are some examples of mostly extant classical composers whose works that require either the human voice or few instruments beyond it. I think that these are both appreciated by classical music aficionados and music critics, and I have sung every one of them in a "recent" (mostly pre-covid) concert:
– Ēriks Ešenvalds, a Latvian composer – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh09QDoJMMg
– Tõnu Kõrvits, an Estonian composer – in this piece of music he echoes another famous Estonian composer, Cyrillus Kreek (d. 1962) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yETJdX5r80U
– Franz Biebl (died 2001), a German composer – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41KBZsdC2dw
– Rihards Dubra, a(nother) lovely Latvian composer – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28NzGYAvsoQ
– Vytautas Miškinis, an excellent Lithuanian composer (b. 1954) – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBGoPpebOkA
– Andrej Makor, a Slovenian composer – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYsMU_tc7uU
– Moses Hogan (died 2003), a composer from the southern US, where gospel stretches the definition of "classical" a little bit but to excellent results – e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b-d-JsQhzI
– Vaclovas Augustinas, yet another excellent Lithuanian composer – I LOVE Tykus Tykus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G8DZD7IFZs)
I think I'll stop here, but this is just a list of the lesser known contemporary famous classical composers in the variety of classical music that I like. The "actually famous" ones – Eric Whitacre, John Rutter, Arvo Pärt, Gabriel Jackson, Cecilla McDowell, Ola Gjeilo etc., or even people like Christopher Tin (who wrote the excellent Baba Yetu, which I think many HN readers / fans of Civ 4 might recall [1]) – have massive followings and, to my ear at least, compose interesting, harmonic and often frankly beautiful music.
I am not plugged into a community of musicians these days, but in college and the decade afterwards we were hearing, performing music written by contemporary composers. Choral music, mostly. But cello concertos, crazy harpsichord binges, and banging on drums were there, too.
A "Classical vernacular" these days would be blockbuster movie soundtracks! Are you (the article, its author) telling me that doesn't matter?
To say nothing of new venues and art forms. I learned about Christopher Tin's song cycles via a soundtrack bundle marketed to video gamers. I am not a gamer, but I think I was shopping for a gift for my kids and holy cow I love his work.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IJiHDmyhE1A
Eric Whitacre! Arvo Pärt!
These are not obscure artists.
Symphonies and opera houses perform fun and popular works during the summer season in the US. So now would be a good time to find stuff you might not expect.
So happy I got to sing, as a student, along in a huge group anchored by Tõnu Kaljuste's Estonian Chaber Chorus. Popular conductor Eri Klas was very patient, loved working with students, and I am forever grateful.
The "classical" orchestra (if there is even such a thing) was the instrument of its day, nowadays the instruments changed.
Music split into a gazillion genres ranging from gabber to black metal, from jazz to hiphop and so on...
All of which have their audience.
I would assume the average christian zealot of the renaissance just connects to Bach and his strict and highly religious music. So while Bach made stupidly awesome music the people of today are just not living in the renaissance anymore.
The world being much more diverse and culturally fragmented is represented in the music as well and the "classical" music is just a fragment like everything else.
Nobody cares about the snobbish critic and their idiotic views, lots of art derided by critics became a classic and a lot they praised got forgotten.
As someone who grew up with techno i could listen to Venetian Snares or Aphex Twin all day but i think the likes of Stockhausen are just annoying and dull.
Only rarely do actual greatness and humanity cross paths, for example Frank Lloyd Wright or Heitor Villa-Lobos.
All those greats were writing in the popular forms of their days which constantly changed. There were not that many great "pure" fugues after Bach, not that many great piano sonatas after Beethoven. So why should there be so many great symphonies or string quartets now? Every form has it's time and it's place.
There will be a couple of great composers with similar skill as the "classics" left from the 20th century but just as all the great composers before them, they will have taken the popular forms of their time and enriched them with layers upon layers of musical complexity to be discovered (and enjoyed!!) by the generations to come. I believe McCartney/Lennon will be one example of that. Maybe Radiohead. It's usually for the future generations to decide.
I noticed, one typical trait of great composers is natural skill which often means unbelievable speed and quality at the same time. Bach produced a 20 minute cantata (i.e. a 20 minute opera) EVER WEEK for YEARS (while still doing lots of other stuff). Schubert produced lieder like a machine, many of them the best of the genre. One has to contend with the fact, that there are only a couple of people in a generation with that ability and it probably cannot be taught and is to a high degree inate. As can be seen in many documentaries now, the Beatles came up with some of the musically best songs of the 20th century in hours or few days.
So lets enjoy the great works in the forms of the past and the great works in the forms of the present and lets not try to force past forms on todays audiences.
If one wanted to check those, what are some of those horrific modern compositions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adfpLuk0-MY (Klavierstueck ix by Stockhausen)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceXWHdFZdqA (Pli selon pli by Boulez)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWlwCRlVh7M (Athmosphere by Ligeti)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1XSmiGO3XE (Sinfonia by Berio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI (Metastasis by Xenakis)
And a more recent work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TKoN_HYJBg (La commedia by Andriessen)
Sinfonia by Berio, though, is what I will now spend half an hour listening to, because the glimpses I got were amazing.
Thanks!
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqrJmxy4q3A
About his technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolyphony
I don't play or sing any music, so sometimes I'm in awe of a piece but I can't figure out how it works.
At first I thought I was hearing something that required instruments with access to arbitrary pitches within their range, such as voice, violin, or trombone, but then I saw the flutes and that guess had to be rejected.
This 'Requiem' is amazing.
Edit to add: a technical problem on my end had me finally hearing the audio at about 5:00, not realizing how the piece had played out prior to that. In case anyone is puzzled.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL7DCiqr-NKC1Ok9mBQICCl...
I got really into this technique for a while, and now the kids these days think it's a joke. Oh well. It was different and fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkjc-WqFo5I
(fwiw, I really liked Blackwood's Microtonal Etudes)
Richard Wright and Rick Wakeman were the new Beethoven or Mozart or whoever famed composer.
A most interesting question from an old fart: who are the _actual_ classic composers? Hope not k-pop.