Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise

For the earliest part of that timespan, Rosen's The Romantic Generation, my friend! You won't regret it.

the one that I'm most in line with that was written in the 60's is Peter Yates' "Twentieth Century Music": http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Music-Peter-Yates/dp/0047810041

I still like Paul Griffiths a lot, especially on the first half of the 20th century. The fact that the subtitles of nearly all of his books include the word 'Boulez' gives you a hint with the lens through which he sees everything that happens after 1950, but this one is still wonderful: http://www.amazon.com/Concise-History-Avant-Garde-Music-Debussy/dp/0195200454/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357341718&sr=1-1&keywords=paul+griffiths+avant+garde

The Stuckenschmidt book is still good too, lotza great pitchers of operas & scores: http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-century-music-university-library/dp/B0007FND02

And my favorite recent book focusing on my favorite offshoot of all of this: http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Experimental-Music-Technology-Culture/dp/0415957826

But my favorite is Yates, he's the only one who really saw the turn towards music-as-sound rather than notes / serialism, and who talks about pop music & recordings in an integrated way instead of an alien strain to be feared or regretted

Ross' book in many ways comes across like a one-man antidote to Griffiths, slighting everything difficult he loves, lovingly going over everything he passed over as regressive or too mainstream. It was overdue, and I really enjoyed it despite not liking too much of the music he does, but I saw it as redressing the imbalance of the histories of 20th century that were written while it was still a contemporary music more than too much of a fresh reappraisal of the whole mess

thanks guys, i will explore. i think music-as-sound is definitely my own instinctive attitude but this year i really want to engage with other ways of thinking and try to get deeper into what i love in music and what i want from it

if music-as-sound is your instinctive attitude I recommend these as well

A History of 'Consonance' and 'Dissonance' - http://www.plainsound.org/pdfs/HCD.pdf

Meta / Hodos - http://www.fileden.com/files/2009/12/26/2703030//MetaHodos.pdf

I've heard of the Yates for years, never seen it around. $5 huh?

A book that takes account of the research on how Darmstadt came to be what it was; a book that not only talks about the role of John Cage as a Duchamp type artist-philosopher but tackles his central importance to the central European music of the likes of Lachenmann and Spahlinger (this requres the US-Europe divide to be dispensed with); a book that treats complexity like Rosen does, intelligently and seriously and playfully, as a facet present in all of classcal music, so this would look at the complexity in simplicity too; a book of approaches to opera and ethnic musics from the likes of Kagel and Schnebel and Finnissy, and finally a book that is not scared to talk about politics and what is outside the concert hall, that doesn't set the scene as in a fucking landscape painting. And finally...

That book is yet to be written. In the meantime there are articles and if you piece them together there are hints of what that could look like.

So I'm pretty much tearing through Taruskin's 'Late Twentieth Century' volume. I think it's just about ideal to prep yourself with that review/takedown just so's to have your BS detector on, but that said I'm enjoying it greatly. He certainly sees a moral perniciousness in the OG wave of total serialists, aleatorists etc but it's also abundantly clear that he admires Cage, Babbitt et al for their sheer firepower. Maybe he will become an intolerable scold as he continues (right now I am up to the Babbitt/Princeton math music chapter) but that hasn't happened yet.

In the first chapter he lets you know that as far as he's concerned the Cold War is THE prism through which to interpret everyone's activities in the post WWII arts. Fine, dude, I appreciate the disclaimer.

Anyone psyched for The Rest os Noise fest at the Southbank? Can't say I am, but some of the concerts are interesting.

But Pierrot Lunaire is on next Sunday.

And this is the best its gonna get. I see the season is based on The Rest is Noise, wonder what that means...if Webern was given "one page" I guess he shouldn't have been programmed. Then again you know its bullsht to ignore him. The composer of the century, easily.

Op.6 was just one of those 'life will never be the same' kind of things. Shame I probably won't be able to make that.

There is also a 'beginnings' of minimalism with a couple of pieces by La Monte Young.

Anyone psyched for The Rest os Noise fest at the Southbank? Can't say I am, but some of the concerts are interesting.

The website annoyed me so much that I gave up looking, but guy I know gave me a programme of events, agree that it's not that exciting really. Won't be here for the Second Viennese School concert either :((((

The website annoyed me so much that I gave up looking

yeah i just went looking for info on the LaMonte Young performances that xyzzz mentioned, to see if I might be down in London at the time, and it seemed impossible to find details anywhere. what a fucking disaster the SouthBank is these days (useless website, unadventurous programming posing as the cutting edge, dreary run of meltdown fests)

google "La Monte Young rfh" and you come up with the details.

thanks xyzzz - i can't go, anyway :-(

Alex Ross's talks from the weekend are online.

http://therestisnoise.southbankcentre.co.uk/explore/here-comes-the-20th-century#1

I went to the Aurora Orchestra's concert on the Sunday night. Two things in particular stood out. Firstly, that the audience were sat on the stage and in the choir and the orchestra faced 'backwards' (with their backs to the empty auditorium). This meant we were much closer to the orchestra than normal, and it was odd to think that the orchestra could actually see everyone in the audience for once.

Secondly, they had Edmund de Waal act as a sort of narrator during the concert (which was programmed to show the sort of music the Viennese listened to around the time Schoenberg composed Chamber Symphony No. 1. It really set the context of the piece. That was such a great idea (and completely in line with the idea behind the book), as I always wished I knew more about the history of the era when listening to classical music. Apparently they are doing this for other concerts during the season as well.

The South Bank website is still a disaster but I managed to find this press release with full details of what's happening this year (hope the link works):

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:FqTB-MVaMJsJ:ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/sites/default/files/press_releases/southbank_centres_2013-2014_classical_music_season_release.pdf+&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiGn1sgOvE_cTlzelsCqyIlvRI5zT4VyZjrfJvk17jPikp-uaW71sx_j5yY3hMcX6sdeElsYwPnn0R-BFc2tG7innY7wI8tM8unVbhcLCCnzfwGu30TIFFegaZhDXiCznidoHje&sig=AHIEtbSCR7b6azhVN86-6sJDGYPzQtS6WA

Very excited about the Glass/Reich weekend in November.

Thx Jill. Listening to the first lecture:

Now years ago Howard Goddall, a conservative-type who writes music for TV and has agreeable mannerisms that TV commissioning editors like (hes doing a History of Music I am going to laugh at if I ever get round to seeing an ep from), made a series on C4 on modern classical in several parts by focusing on four key figures (not gonna bother to look right now), one of whom ws Bernard Herrmann, which he made up this tangent to castigate serialism and said it was better at conveying certain dark emotions through film and THAT'S IT. It wasn't a symptom that it was actually perfectly ok to listen to in its own terms and maybe you should give it a go OH NO!

So years later you find pretty much the same thing: lets start from film. It was in Kubrick, etc. Later on (while looking at Debussy's atonality) he cites that it comes w/out the 'stereotypical harshness' but he's already implying there is one by citing those examples from film, really playing up to that. Instead of doing this he could've perhaps talked about Boulez and Debussy in terms of not only their affinity for Gamelan (apparent in Marteau..) but also how that lightness of touch is apparent in not only both these but in so much other French music. So the 20th century is like any other century but that would possibly kill the book.

Man oh man the bit @25 mins "Listen to the flute" should've been Schonberg --> Boulez --> Chris Dench or Ferneyhough. Opportunity miseed, as I knew it would be.

unreasonable, etc.

gaaah I didn't know about the LMY etc thing and now it's sold out. Looking through the website for The Rest is Noise fest back when it was announced was a bit of an uninspiring trudge, but I will be going to quite a few things, including that Second Viennese School event.

this concert hall is a "shrine to the past" thing is some bullshit. As oposed to picking up a book or seeing paintings in a gallery now? People can't walk out of a concert if they don't like it?!

The "riots" seemed like a bunch of spoilt children acting out.

48 mins - lol@ "music giving way to noise", more like hey composers have actually bothered to write something meaty for percussion for a change.

Or we should read the "riots" dfferently. What happens when people's expectations in art aren't fulfilled? Isn't that what artists should be doing? On dance threads you read about people figuring out a track by learning to dance to it: how can we do this in a concert hall? :)

More lols at Feldman/Takemitsu anecdote at the Darmstadt bar asking for Sibelius to be kept on. Yes unlce Morty saw the error of his ways years after walking out of Rachmaninoff w/John cage as they decided Webern was all they needed.

Ends by quoting Wagner's "love for mankind". Does that include jews?

The interview has a germ of an interesting discussion of black american composers writing music applying say ragtime dynamics to orchestra but then they all went away shut out and created jazz, which perhaps mis-reads jazz history ("oh jazz might have happened anyway"...er well of course it would have!) but then they both turn out clueless about whether such a vision of musical fusion across barriers of race would happen now. I think they were coming from a more inclusionistic sense (how Israeli and Palestinian musicians might collaborate now, say) but musically you have an entire history of jazz's engagement w/its history and composition (Braxton, Taylor) and the gift of improvisation as a compositional strategy adopted in the 70s and 80s to begin with and beyond. That wasn't even talked about.

Think the wars as precursor to re-making music in Darmstadt is overplayed. The early concerts at D were Bartok, Hindemith, Copland, i.e. beginning again from the past and not breaking entirely from it. And then elsewhere the troubling fact is that Schonberg theorised the new methods before the war, and a few works were composed and played before a gun was fired...really seems like a with interruptions development that occurs anyway, and is applied to new technologies when they come into being via a network of radio stations in Europe and Varese's dreams are realised. And then his thinking of noises and music always seemed to me to run a lot deeper than something he saw in the war etc. He loved the sound of sirens...this is important because it reinforces the opinion that serialism was a result of carnage. However Xenakis (who was in the thick of the war) didn't exactly toe the line w/serialism, nor did Cage (who wasn't in the war). Of course it does dramatise things, which Ross is fond of doing.

Funnily enough it was the bits on Glass that were closer to my thinking: a composer and his small-ish ensemble, making the music he wants to make and "disappearing into the night". That has been how a lot of great modernist European music has been conceived as chamber or solo works, many of those composers weren't given orchestral resources often at all, and that stuff is pretty much the reason I listen to classical at all. But because it has yet to achieve any visibility, unlike Glass or Reich, its not written about much.

i never read Feldman saying he was wrong, just a kind of "i won't be so mean any more to composers i don't like" in later years. i love his early dismissiveness of music he didn't care about

The woman in the Q&A who talked about Britten as a 'radical' because of his activism was a total joker. Did he use his works to mouth off on issues; Nono battered people with his politics, which is why we can't deny the role they played in his music (and why Ross cited it in the follow-up when it came to 'politics and music').

Oh yeah Noodle totally, that was sarcasm - he probably always liked Sibelius but Ross talks of composers who did their own like Rachmaninoff and Sibelius. Just irritates me how Ross uses these fucking anecdotes.

I think Feldman was a meanie throughout his life and v v funny but wrong on Stockhausen and Boulez.

They all lked Webern of course.

yeah i was going to add "i like his meanness even when i vigorously disagree with it"

the worst thing about "anti-intellectualism" is maybe that it ascribes all these characteristics that aren't really there to the art it seeks to decry, and denies a lot of characteristics that are present to make its case - so you get this bollocks about serious, unmusical, dry serialism with no visceral impact on an audience and no connection to emotion, and then add insult to injury by psychoanalysing some bullshit about the War and particle physics into it. all the while blissfully ignorant of the artificial dividing lines you're drawing all over the musical map to create your case

and of course putting every quality of the music in the score and denying any agency to listeners

Secondly, they had Edmund de Waal act as a sort of narrator during the concert (which was programmed to show the sort of music the Viennese listened to around the time Schoenberg composed Chamber Symphony No. 1. It really set the context of the piece. That was such a great idea (and completely in line with the idea behind the book), as I always wished I knew more about the history of the era when listening to classical music. Apparently they are doing this for other concerts during the season as well.

Probably be at Tuesday's concert so I'll see how that works.

And thanks for that press release way upthread: they are still confirming things for the 2d half of the year. In the Q&A a perf of Stockhausen's Gruppen was mentioned.

Can't wait for tonight.

Found this awesome series of blog posts on atonality over the weekend. Interesting stuff to keep in mind ahead of tonight.

(the URL says page 6, so if you wander back to mid-way through to page 11, it was done over a month)

The concert tonight was the most marvellous thing in the world. Hadn't that piece by Berg before, .mp3 hunt to begin shortly.

Theere was a screen behing with some animated video artwork, photographs and quotes. Again taking the cue from 'this music is to be digested via a film'. I was too far back and will probably need glasses one day so could not read it although this should've been reproduced in the booklet.

The talk and Q&A after was reasonable until the question was asked as to whether Webern would have enjoyed what Boulez and the like made of it in their own music. This was answered by saying that he possibly would not as the music had become a technique.

This was the wrong answer. He might have improved upon it but I could not hang around to let him finish that sentence. Shame.

talk and Q&A? Oops I did not know about that. I was too tired to really appreciate I think (sorry for those microsleeps, Schoenberg), and generally I'm probably a few big steps away from really being able to appreciate serialism in general, but that Berg piece was pretty striking. The Webern Symphony and Concerto for nine instruments I liked too.

also I saw Will from TFI Friday there. Will from TFI Friday!!!!

Yeah, it was in the programme - there should've been an announcement before the 2nd half started, I was nearly out of the door before someone actually said there would a 25 min discussion. Nothing too heavy, few questions from the audience after a few remarks from the artist who made the graphics, a musician, the conductor and a guy who wrote a book on the 2nd Viennese school. Few biographical details come out: how much of the music was driven by the death of his mother but also his love of mountains so his use of space in the hall -- the distance between the piano and perc in Op.9, for example -- yeah, you can see it. I didn't know he wrote a thesis on Early/Renaissance music and so you go 'but of course'!

Very struck by the Berg, the sequencing was really good - it showed how Schonberg was working off Wagner or Bruckner or what have you in that first piece and then when you get to Webern its striking how that tradition is tackled from another angle and yet its never just hardened diamond geometrics at all either.

xp: lol, that's some past past 'celeb' spotting there.

The most prominent speaker wrote this book and the agenda is def to wrest Webern from the "absract" crowd that took his ideas at the end of WWII and place him in the context of the romantics (to position this in the canon, finally). This is so much easier to with Schonberg and Berg given that the former - despite polemics - wrote music with more easily identifiable 'romanticisms' and Berg wrote two operas that work as drama and spectacle (the filmic aspect).

See how the arg has shifted from when the Viennese were up in arms about this -- "no way this is a follow-up to Mozart and Haydn, let the Darmstadt crowd have it" -- to now a "we can save this from where it got to in the 50s and 60s" (Johnson) by finallly acknowleging its legacy to the music of Mozart, Strauss and Haydn.

Which is what Schonberg et al., were saying in the first place!

While I can see this position as a corrective to a lot of further polemics by Boulez et al. the problem with the args last night is that they rested on a view of 'technique' I couldn't agree with. Because tech is a thing always used by classical composers (and everybody in any type of music (or whatever we do in life) has a technique, develops one after a while by questioning and thought and practice and refinement). That is their bread and butter, to establish their own and work with this as a way to help them articulate their movements and ideas in music.

They would reply 'where does that leave emotion?' but for many in classical emotion must be a 'jolly' happy thing, there must be obvious nods to 'pleasure' which surely restricts the range and complexity of emotion.

That would be ok EXCEPT for them (and I repeat this, for them) classical is an art music that is BETTER AND DEEPER THAN POP and surely the function of an art music should be to incorporate differing layers of articulation, thought and feeling, not just to be happy and have facile emotions, but to strive at a mirroring nature. Art music cannot be just be reduced to such a simple infantile thing.

Now I have been aware of the gap between where the music got to and the people who listened to it was as wide as the Grand Canyon but last night's music, while incredible and great (exhilarating to finally hear Webern in the concert hall) came with an agenda -- via this bloody festival -- that I can't get on with AT ALL. This music is too good to gain acceptance with these fucking caveats being placed on it.

Never any question for me that Webern was a Romantic. As many things as I disagree with Taruskin about, I think he is OTM that basically everything up to post-modernism was really late-late Romanticism. (For Taruskin that is a bad thing; for me, it's not at all).

He's in line with history, certainly not an unbridgeable break from it as perhaps some of the first detractors would paint the 2nd Viennese school as being. Ditto Boulez and so on until maybe some of the work that Cage and Stockhausen are doing with electronic music, but that is technology driven change.

Don't get much out of modernism an post-modernism args in music myself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/07/sound-and-the-fury-ep1.html

so this is happening. i'll probly miss it, but i don't know that i'll be missing much.

yeah a friend of a friend worked on it, the word is really as you'd expect - interesting enough and well made, but in that short run (three episodes) not long enough to go into the necessary depth.

yeah. i don't think i'm going to be near a TV for the next couple of weeks so I'll see how inspired i feel to chase it up on iPlayer, but the tenor of the introduction there makes me feel like i'll disagree with the argument. even tho any chance to see cool archive footage is a good thing.

From that intro I wouldn't say it was 'deliberate', just that er...it was going that way, seemed like a good idea to explore, why re-make Beethoven or Strauss, etc etc.

This is a basic thing. Just a blurb so ok not gonna judge.

Depends who is on and how much space is given argument - if its someone like Ian Pace, say, I'll watch. If it comes with explanation and examples, the better.

Otherwise I can see ep1 modernism -> ep3 a return to normality with minimalism. Fuck that don't need.

well the argument isn't the programme and i can tune it out to an extent - see Mark Cousins' Story of Film where the visual elements more or less made up for my virulent disagreement with his ideas about movies - but yeah "deliberate" plus the alienation of the audience as if previous musics hadn't alienated the traditionalists within their own audiences - Squire Weston in Tom Jones treating Handel like the Sex Pistols - or the oncoming "composers responding to butchery and tyranny" theme because pre-20th century the world was a peaceful and democratic place etc

Funny bcz what you are saying (and I agree with) is how this stuff is what music and the arts (popular or otherwise) always does -- challenges pre-conceptions, engages with different views, all set in new contexts (Marxism lol) -- but then you'd have a perhaps more boring programme bcz you're ironing out some made up tension.

the task of communicating understanding of some actual works is the main challenge.

Simon Rattle did a nice series on 20C music some years back. It wasn't too forceful or didactic; I rather enjoyed it. (The musical examples were great, as you'd expect.)

this was great!

Bartok was a huge miss (great to see a thread on the str quartets, nice coincidence) in the first programme.

Talking heads were terrible. John Adams was cast as the old fogey but clueless when criticising Webern for attempting to unify science and art, but (as above) he loved the Renaissance, a time when both disciplines seemed to co-exist a lot more then. A remark on how composers were often looking down on the public is something you could surely say about many composers or artists most of the time in most eras. In fact, so much of this was a set of attitudes that have always been present in a time of continuous violence (numbers aside was the 20th century more violent than the 16th?) Not that history repeats itself: the music of the 20th could not been made in the 16th but how does it build on the prev era? Why is it always always seen in relation to the 19th century?

What are other ways of reading this history?

Boulez was rocking those shades tho'.

So I'm nearly all the way throughthis series on improvisation and it is the way a music doc should be conducted on TV.

- See how there is NO heavy lifting on concepts (they are there but really underneath): of course Ross can't do it, but the need is for less baggage is greater than ever. Improvisation is as old if not older and I like how the various participants - whether they come from Hindutani classical, Flamenco etc - are so relaxed when talking about what they do and don't bother with their place in it which lets face it is as boutique as classical.

- I would have had practioners talking about their music, whether Ferneyhough about complex music, Boulez on himself and maybe the 2nd Viennese school, Reich about minimalism, Pisaro about Cage etc etc and not about anything else, or where the composer is dead have a knowledgeable performer doing that.

- Lots of space for performnaces.

Note that Max Roach on the 3rd programme talks about blacks denied access to classical and inventing jazz as a result, which is what Ross talked about in his lecture in that link.

Of course my approach would be perhaps less fractious and bitchy and while I like fighting my battles it would allow for people who don't know much to see everything: new minimalism, Nancarrow, Elliott Carter, electronic music, Oboes from Mars.

I had no idea that The Sound and the Fury was going to be so closely modelled around The Rest Is Noise - the first episode at least.

Have to say, as well as the convenient overlooking of every epic period of plague and slaughter in previous ages, I'm not comfortable with the characterisation of all music pre-1895 as exquisite, melodic, etc. No violence in Beethoven?

Also the latent premise that dissonance is the only musical property that has ever had the potential to disorient or shock listeners.