Almost Too Beautiful (2003)

Wow, that is just so well put. As an (at best) amateur musician and listener, I've never been able to quite identify what bothers me about (some) "modern" music. I actually like a lot of it, but as you point out, some of it seems guided more by arbitrary formalism than by what actually sounds good.

I'm sure this is opening an off-topic pandora's box, but the evolution of semi-mechanical compositional methods and (to me) seemingly arbitrary formalisms like 12-tone serialism strikes me as aping mathematics, science, or -- these days -- programming. Except with math, proofs have to, well, prove things; science is about empirical discovery; programs actually have to work.

I guess my malaise with 20th century compositional formalisms stems from the fact that there's no similar constraint for the musical outcomes -- when confronted with bafflement or derision from the audience, the composer can simply shrug and say, "it works for me"

Composers like Feldman (and, IMO Carter) seem to have used formal methods to produce some, at least, interesting and, at best, fascinating and beautiful work. And more intuitive 20th century composers like Charles Ives, Ned Rorem and Havergal Brian (to name three fascinating examples of many) really, to me, pushed the boundaries of beauty in music in seemingly less arbitrary ways.

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

is the recording available online, either youtube or for sale?

It's Béla Bartók all over again. I wonder if there's an unwritten rule in nature that truly creative composers have to die before people recognize the value of their work?

A counterexample to this pattern is Philip Glass, who is receiving some recognition, but by virtue of being recognized in his own lifetime, may undercut his own reputation.

Define quality.

If you mean "you get much more to stomp your feet in the beat to", then OK.

www.earbox.com

My favorite piece of his is Harmonielehre, but there is lots of great stuff there.

I mean, I'm a fair amateur bassoon and piano player. I've played bassoon on four Beethoven symphonies over the years, and technically they were easily within my grasp. His piano sonatas push me, but back when I was actively playing piano I could make them sound like music.

I've played some more modern music which was much harder, and while I quite like some of it, I sure don't think it was "better" than Beethoven.

I think the exact same thing has happened to jazz, too, it's just a few decades behind "classical" music in the transition...

One was the disengagement of general audiences from "classical" (for lack of a better term) music. The other was the disengagement of composers from general audiences.

Each group did this, largely for its own reasons, but each side's disengagement only sped up the other's. The result of this is that you have a general audience who is largely ignorant of what was going on in music, and a world of composers who became more and more insular, writing largely for each other and to make increasingly-arcane points about music theory.

This means that when you listen to contemporary classical music, you're A) listening to something that was not written with you in mind as an audience, and B) utterly lacking the background -- the traditions, the movements, the reactions and counter-reactions -- to understand what's going on in the music.

In a broader sense, this happened in basically all the arts, but music is one of the areas where we seem to notice it more often.

If you have truly never experienced something that jolted you suddenly and thoroughly into recognizing yourself as a small person in the wake of something large and vast, that's a shame. But I assure you that such experiences exist, and that they are indeed magical.