Post a controversial music opinion

Cecil Taylor is not only God, but better than just about every pumped up "genius" of the entire 20th century!

^^
probably doing it wrong, in every sense!

I like to think that, sooner or later, we all end up craving something other than conventional sounds and structures. But these other styles occasionally require a fair amount of acclimatisation. And yes, it really is worth it.

Out of curiosity, is this more or less 'unlistenable' than Cecil Taylor?

Doesn't seem to have worked. Here's the URL: https://vimeo.com/49655738

The whole "I don't get anything out of this so it must be bullshit" thing is not good

the ustwolskaja was ok but it was no "winnsboro cotton mill blues" imo

"free jazz is just a bunch of unlistenable noise" is not a controversial opinion but a tedious one, also imo

The Diarrhea song should be in the Library of Congress

Ustvolskaya >>> Rzewski (possibly a controversial opinion). Hideous black holes bereft of hope are my jam. Late Liszt utterly eclipses early Liszt for the exact same reason.

"free jazz is just a bunch of unlistenable noise" is not a controversial opinion but a tedious one, also imo

I said nothing about free jazz and enjoy Ayler and Ornette (the latter being one of my all time favorite artists) as well as David S Ware, Brotzmann, etc

I just can't deal with atonal / dissonant piano, I guess. Come to think of it, I don't love Shipp in this mode, ether, or Dave Burrell, et al

In fact, Ornette's decision to (mostly) never work with a piano is one of the many things that made him a genius imo

Here’s a controversial opinion (not mine!) from an interview I read last night, with Mike Johnson of Thinking Plague:

It seems that for so many people now, music is just a background thing. It needs to keep a certain part of their brain busy, so they have it going in their ear buds as background all the time and it’s on shuffle, and they don’t really care what it is. And they listen to MP3s; they don’t care about high fidelity. They don’t care about really in-depth audio detail. It’s much less about what’s going on with the notes. It’s just a little hook melody and this over-processed drum groove and some pitch-corrected vocal parts.

The last three Suede albums are as good as the first three.

xxp
for me you can trash Shipp, but Dave Burrell ..nooo! His jelly Roll Morton alb isn't atonal/dissonant ftr, and rather lovely!

I dislike almost all solo piano music. The piano on its own bores me pretty quickly.

MAYBE some Saint-Saens piano stuff.

^^
not controversial, just ILM!

for me you can trash Shipp, but Dave Burrell ..nooo! His jelly Roll Morton alb isn't atonal/dissonant ftr, and rather lovely!

― calzino, Sunday, October 14, 2018 12:49 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would listen to this. My total experience with Burrell is his two albums as a leader on BYG

I dislike almost all solo piano music. The piano on its own bores me pretty quickly.

I like solo piano; it's piano trios that mostly bore the fuck out of me. I'm always waiting for the horn player(s) to show up. Shipp's trio work is exceptional, as is Taylor's, and I enjoy both. But 90 percent of the piano trio albums I get sent, I never listen to.

I don't have a controversial opinion about one of my favourite-ever composers Ustvolskaya
But I think Cecil Taylor and Rzewski had boats that were pointing in somewhat the same direction
And Ustvolskaya's boat was pointing in a different direction, somewhat the same direction as Ligeti when he was writing for piano

In the vein of Ustvolskaya/Ligeti and their solo piano work-- which I think is different from the other composers/musicians mentioned-- because the work is about discipline, not freedom-- it's about work, not play-- aero turned me on a few years ago to Michael Hersch, whose "Vanishing Pavilions" is some of the most awesome solo piano stuff (in this particular vein of spectacular disciplined dissonance):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-YKjiBsiow

I wish I had an elegant way of describing how this kind of music makes me feel, and what I feel that it is for. A lot of religious and quasi-religious absolute music seems designed to inspire a state of "grace" while contemplating the idea of a benevolent supreme being. Ustvolskaya/Ligeti/et al. is music that aims for the same effect, but more designed to inspire a state of acceptance and well-being when contemplating the idea that 'god' is merely time, and matter, and energy, and it is not benevolent, but is uncaring and spinning around us, and that in embracing the terror that such a realization can instil within us, one can achieve a similar but non-theistic state of "grace", one that accesses an acceptance of the annihilation that awaits us all as individuals and as a society

thinking plague are cool and "high fidelity" is a fetish

I've never heard Thinking Plague. That guy's argument has been made almost verbatim by about 500,000 other people, many of whom are or have been convinced that a download service that sells ultra-high-fidelity tracks will be the salvation of the music industry, while the counterpoint argument - "What about transistor radios, man? Those sounded like dogshit!" - is guaranteed to pop up as the second or third comment.

Back in the 90s, I used to hate buying ultra-clean, super-well-produced modern jazz albums on labels like Telarc or Verve, because they didn't have the fuzzy human dudes-in-a-room intimacy of classic Blue Note or Prestige titles. Even the somewhat crunchy digital reissues - the "Original Jazz Classics" CDs and the like - of those two- or four-track recordings still sounded better to me than music recorded in pristine new studios with total instrumental separation. They still do.

I also think people should start mixing pop records in mono again, because they'll sound better coming out of a smartphone that way.

I like his description of pop music as “just a little hook melody and this over-processed drum groove and some pitch-corrected vocal parts.”

the piano sonata (wasn't previously familiar with ustvolskaya) reminded me a little too much of carl ruggles, who's not a composer i find congenial. i could be reading him wrong but "sun-treader" in particular sounds to me like an exercise in just making the ugliest chords imaginable. i don't find beauty or meaning in that. it sounds to me like wallowing.

i wouldn't say i "accept" terror and annihilation, as such - more compartmentalize it, place it out of scope. certain sorts of music bring those things back into scope for me, and i don't avoid them entirely but i don't enjoy such works and limit my exposure to them.

i'm digging the hersch, though.

Telarc, wow...I remember for a period of time they were a label a lot of blues guys gravitated towards as well and even as a teenager I recognized how antiseptic the sound was. I think maybe Junior Wells had an album out w/them and it was both well-performed and stripped of all grit and life.

I've never heard Thinking Plague. That guy's argument has been made almost verbatim by about 500,000 other people, many of whom are or have been convinced that a download service that sells ultra-high-fidelity tracks will be the salvation of the music industry, while the counterpoint argument - "What about transistor radios, man? Those sounded like dogshit!" - is guaranteed to pop up as the second or third comment.

― grawlix (unperson)

the early stuff is pretty good avant-prog. "in this life" in particular is a classic. as time has gone on i've found johnson's work to be increasingly bleak and nihilistic (he's strongly concerned with the environment), and as such it's more of that music i limit my exposure to. i'm sure what's going on with the notes is really cool, though.

I also think people should start mixing pop records in mono again, because they'll sound better coming out of a smartphone that way.

― grawlix (unperson), Sunday, October 14, 2018 1:39 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

the resonars remixed their first album into mono in 2014. it's not bad but i haven't tried listening to it through my smartphone speakers.

Some phones play stereo in landscape (using the earpiece speaker). Anyway, I would think most smartphone listening involves headphones or car speakers.

most classic example of the emperor has no clothes:

Taylor Freakin Swift

My probably-not-controversial music opinion is that "emperor's new clothes' arguments are usually patronising nonsense.

[patronising nonsense] unfortunately for Taylor, and her lovely twelve-year-old fanbase, a lot of scientific research and objective reasoning went into that opinion [/patronising nonsense]

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/de/43/0cde43393ddfff46e8605ab514177113.jpg

The production on a lot of Bowie's Berlin-era output (and Scary Monsters) is absolutely horrible and ruins any semblance of what might have been good music. Station To Station (apart from 'Stay', which is all-time) is a sludgy, unlistenable mess

ouch

A lot of religious and quasi-religious absolute music seems designed to inspire a state of "grace" while contemplating the idea of a benevolent supreme being. Ustvolskaya/Ligeti/et al. is music that aims for the same effect, but more designed to inspire a state of acceptance and well-being when contemplating the idea that 'god' is merely time, and matter, and energy, and it is not benevolent, but is uncaring and spinning around us, and that in embracing the terror that such a realization can instil within us, one can achieve a similar but non-theistic state of "grace", one that accesses an acceptance of the annihilation that awaits us all as individuals and as a society

I think mid-period Ligeti and Ustvolskaya still operate within a Romantic paradigm according to which the Sublime names the experience of an ultimately finite, apathetic universe. Insofar as you can project anything you like unto cosmic neutrality, 'it' cannot be rendered as such, in and of itself, which is why disagreements as to its 'nature' are inevitable. What's interesting to me is that, of all the arts, music appears to be both the least and most ill-suited to representing this non-human indifference (hence the dissensus). Take Ligeti's Lux aeterna, for instance, or his Requiem, both of which bear titles that explicitly refer to Roman Catholicism, yet feature none of the holy consolation or human lamentation we've come to expect from the genre – its sounds are a lot more alien, a lot more 'other' than that. Likewise, Ustvolskaya draws upon Christian texts, especially in her late works, but they are set in such a way that solely the despair at there being no divinity to reach out to remains.

And yet… how much of this reading is derived from what we know about the two composers? Conversely, some of Messiaen's more terrifying ('awful' in the obsolete sense) moments or Ștefan Niculescu's final works inhabit a strikingly similar sound world. Niculescu, in particular, appends subtitles to his symphonies that subvert the notion of 'absolute music', so the 4th, Deisis and the 5th, Litanies, limpidly bid us to seek God in spite (or via?) a structural and harmonic language that your average deist would probably deem horrifying. Even its echoes of Eastern Orthodox plainchant are subjected to incremental distortions that Xenakis wouldn't have disavowed. So why not conceive of Ligeti's Requiem as the genre's theological nec plus ultra, i.e. the aptest at translating the Old Testament terror – most apparent in the 'Dies irae' – that the mass for the dead has always sought to make audible? What's to stop one from taking the 'Jesus Messiah, save us!' repeated throughout Ustvolskaya's 3rd at face value instead of as a stoic remark on its own impossibility? I am thus fascinated with the fact that these four composers (among many) heard such radically different intimations and inflections in sounds that, although hardly identical, can be said to have far more in common than what distinguishes them.

A final example: Mark Andre, a Helmut Lachenmann pupil, as well as a self-professed Lutheran intent on seeking the fragmentary traces he believes Christ left behind, writes music that sounds very much like that of his teacher, whose titles are never suggestive of overt religiosity. Post-Schoenbergian music lends itself quite easily to these misunderstandings, I think, and especially so-called 'absolute' music, which goes to show how difficult it is to guide the listener into accepting our annihilation to come in a theistic or atheistic way, respectively, without falling back on language. I don't think this renders musical intent null and void, by the way, just trickier still.

My apologies for the wall of text, it's just something I've been pondering of late. And thanks for the M. Hersch link – sounds (and looks) intriguing.

I have fond memories of Van Halen's "OU812," even if I haven't listened to it in decades.

pomenitul, that is an amazing post thank you!

You're articulating ideas and connections that I've felt intuitively but have been unable to adequately verbalize and you're doing so very well

Thank you very much, fgti!

pomenitul, I don't know anything about Ustvolskaya's music. There's a bunch of it on Spotify, though. Can you recommend any specific pieces (or even specific recordings, as I am a person who still buys physical music)? I'm more interested in large ensemble works than chamber music right now, generally (the opposite used to be true).

I didn't realize I was interrupting an ongoing smart discussion. Sorry for stinking up the place.

unperson, the Megadisc series with Oleg Malov is suitably austere, and was my introduction to her music. Earlier orchestral scores (the 1st symphony, the piano concerto), for all their eccentricities, tend to be conventional in that they exhibit a relatively maximalist understanding of the orchestra, so you can clearly hear the influence of Shostakovich (this goes both ways, incidentally, as his late style is very much informed by her first compositions). I'd suggest starting with symphonies 2-5, as long as you're willing to accept that 'symphony' is a bit of a misnomer here (the 4th, for instance, lasts approximately six minutes and features nothing but voice, trumpet, piano and tam-tam, but the 2nd and 3rd mostly match your criteria). If you want to go bigger (and assuming you're not familiar with her work), I also strongly recommend checking out Sofia Gubaidulina's sole symphony (only one recording, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting, is freely available as far as I can tell) and, of course, the understung Ștefan Niculescu's, though physical copies of his music are almost impossible to locate.

'undersung' rather than 'understung', of course. He committed no unforgivable crimes against bees in his lifetime.

The production on a lot of Bowie's Berlin-era output (and Scary Monsters) is absolutely horrible and ruins any semblance of what might have been good music. Station To Station (apart from 'Stay', which is all-time) is a sludgy, unlistenable mess

― Scritti Vanilli - The Word Girl You Know It's True (dog latin), Monday, October 15, 2018 8:25 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

noooooooooo

I goddamn love early Ustvolskaya

And the "sludgy" production of Berlin-era Bowie (which I would myself describe as "brittle") is part of its appeal. "Station To Station" (the song) sounded like oh no David what are you doing on first listen and is now my favourite Bowie track by a long shot

I was at a friend's house once and they put on Station to Station, dropping the needle about 1 minute into the first track, they said they always did this. Maybe I should take this to the 'irrationally angry' thread.

Nothing irrational about such anger tbf.

Saying someone is otm is just a way to wax your own ego and say "i feel the same, therefore you are right" - is it not?

Seems unfairly cynical

Haha - Ross, you say "___ OTM" on here all the time!

Ross otm, Moodles otm, morrisp otm