Alex Ross - The Rest Is Noise

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.

the "theory" is noise.

i guess people will argue you need a narrative. i don't think a narrative helps much.

On the plus side, so nice to see Meredith Monk in there.

yeah i don't wanna moan about some of this footage getting airtime i just think the level of analytical sophistication - on a lot of Beeb 4 shows tbf - is pretty retrograde compared to Beeb arts programming of 30 plus years back

Ross is "senior consultant", so it would run quite closely alongside the book and festival.

Meredith Monk was gd, so was Schonberg's daughter Nuria. Possibly the best talking head.

yeah the interview with Nuria Schoenberg was the main bit that stuck for me on first viewing - so charming and honest and demystifying in a good way, not talking to the audience like they were shiftless sixth formers

If we get a good ten, fifteen minutes on Sibelius out of this in some future episode, I will stop whining for sure.

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

― OG requiem head (Call the Cops), Saturday, 16 February 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Added issue is that audience reaction isn't v well documented from middle ages up to the 19th century so you can't make a comparison as to what people thought of certain movements, if people other than church and courts were involved much then other than bowing to god every Sunday and going back to slave work in the first place.

The 2nd prog was an incoherent mess:

- Called "Free for All" yet goes on to describe total serialism where every parameter is defined.
- Dumbness in comments re: american funding. Even if it was true its hardly a triumph, I doubt some CIA pen pusher was ever pleased w/funding Nono's work.
- Boulez talks about "tensions" and yet the programme insists the early years were harmonious (no pun intended) before Ligeti breaks away.
- If the music was so tough why did it find a way onto film in the first place? Suggests it couldn't have been that challenging.
- They were hopeless on Stockahusen: the focus is on Boulez's music from the early 50s in Darmstadt. If you're going to talk about these two as a double act then you can't zig zag to the late 60s as they did w/Stock. In the 50s he wasn't yet the 'hippie' like figure, he wrote Gruppen and Kontakte (the classic example of how electronic music co-exists with acoustic music and provides a radically different experience in the recital hall).

Real miss was John Cage, who had as crucial a role as Boulez and Stouckhausen in those 'peak' years at Darmstadt. That he wasn't European isn't an excuse but it suits to talk about this stuff as an European phenomenon that will be saved by US commercial minimalism in the 3rd programme.

They could've talked about Elliott Carter instead of Copland as someone who made v challenging music that could be argued as a product of BOTH Schonberg and Stravinsky, and had a relationship w/Ives too.

Galina Ustvolskaya would've been a better example of a Soviet-era composer that wasn't Shostakovich...and an example of how a more challenging style was being written in those years...

Highlight was Birtwistle's "its their problem" comment, has that working class twang in it and actually points to the fact that Birtwistle, Maxwell Davis and Ferneyhough came from more humble backgrounds and had no problems moving in those circles.

There were lots of things scattered across: Boulez and Stockhausen teaching techniques at such a young age. These were YOUNG people who were excited and ran wild with ideas and who wrote their best music at that time, despite all the claims to lol maturity, although they never talked about how Nono the arch-serialist whose music changed the most out of anybody later on.

If the music was so tough why did it find a way onto film in the first place? Suggests it couldn't have been that challenging.

i was gonna make a similar point to this with regards to working class aversion to Classical music in another thread this week

Maybe audiences were more challenging back then, or more willing to be challenged.

the "CIA promoting radical art vs the stodgy old Soviets" is such a tired story now too, esp. since i've never seen any evidence of artists themselves having any direct involvement response to this. pretty sure Jackson Pollock never thought "fuck you socialist realism" while he was working.

Its hard to say how audiences change. I'd guess they are the same now as 50 years ago, i.e. far more dynamic and open to things.

When is this on, I keep missing it? And why don't they repeat it? Julio's keeping me up to speed with it and I'm sure his criticisms are all valid.

They do repeat it, can't remember when.

First broadcast is 9pm Tuesdays, last part next week.

oh god this broad with the assymetric haircut talking about metastasis is so dreadful

Ah, football's been on!

this is shit shit shit

Gillian Moore sadly doesn't get it. For all the formalised hard core maths bollocks in Xenakis there is a simplicity and directness to what he does a lot of the time and Metastasis is v much like that. Doesn't apply to the electronic music, which they didn't even bother with (so much for electronic music cast as "the avant-garde's greatest achievement", as in this could be understood and be utilised to make money in commercial pop!)

Even with a lot of complex music they bypassed the physicality of performance as a way of getting hold of the watching punter.

oh that fantastic John Cage clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U

can't find the right narrative to address this eh?

BBC Arts programming: 3 hours a year of getting modernist composition wrong, 20 hours a week of 70s rock

I can get on board with some of these critisisms, but tbh, I'm just enjoying seeing/hearing some music that's v dear to me on the TV mixed in with some stuff I feel like I should know more about. Also, most of this is new to my gf so it's been fun watching it together- bits have blown her mind "fuuuuuuuckkk that's some dark shit" re: a Shoenberg piece, ha :)

I guess I'm also enjoying this for the same reasons I enjoyed the book, it's covering stuff I'm less familar with and have always wanted to get in to. People on this thread have complained about a lack of Cage, Bartok, Conlon etc but I dunno, that's pretty much why I'm enjoying it, it's filling in some gaps for me.

Incidently, this is pretty much exactly how the 20th C was covered when I was at uni studying classical music a few years ago, and of course I would constantly be complaining "more Cage, more Nancarrow, omg you don't get Stockhausen at all, there was way more interesting stuff than this uptight concert hall bollocks, have you even HEARD of Tod Dokstader" haha, man, I was particularly annoying back then.

xposts

[I've always viewed Xenakis as hard core maths bollocks AND simplicity and directness. Like Wolfram's rules or summat.]

otm. The pieces played live have made me think "I really need to listen to more Messiaen" etc., which is a good thing for me at least.

i've said i'm happy to see/hear the clips. but y'know what? maybe back this shit up and devote some programmes to showing whole performances, or single composer documentaries, or just more more deeper deeper.

sure they could fit it in somewhere around Boney M: The Wilderness Years

btw, two EPs of more complete performances from the series on the iPlayer.

People on this thread have complained about a lack of Cage, Bartok, Conlon etc but I dunno, that's pretty much why I'm enjoying it, it's filling in some gaps for me.

What are your gaps: you've heard of Cage and Bartok but not Xenakis and Messiaen before?

Even with a lot of complex music they bypassed the physicality of performance as a way of getting hold of the watching punter.

For me, this made ALL the difference with Xenakis. Seeing a half dozen of his things performed completely transformed the music for me.

Can you paraphrase Birtwistle's 'their problem' comment? Just curious.

Birtwistle was asked about people who don't or won't get mdoern classical. He said that's 'their problem'.

ah. soundbites very much in character.

At that moment (and the bits where he talked about Marteau Sans Maitre) I had visions of Birtwistle presenting performances just calling it 'great' and 'frightening' with a smile and leaving it at that.

Would watch.