Wow, Evan! I didn't know you were Bill Evan's son? That's pretty cool!

Unfortunately, I can't agree with you about Phillip Glass. Sorry. To me, he's someone who hit upon something genuine back in the day, then hit on it again, and again, and again... I would like to see some true development in his recent (or somewhat recent) orchestral music, but I just find it kind of trite. This is only an opinion, though, so don't get too upset. Yes, his music will be around in 500 years, but I'm not sure it is in any way ahead of its time...(?) Come to think of it, I'm really not sure it was ever ahead of its time, but rather very much *of* its time. Mind you, I've always felt that this is much more important than place to be than "ahead", which is kind of an illusion anyway. (okay, I may be starting to convince myself that you're right about him... perhaps I just don't like it on a superficial level. hmmm...)

I'd imagine you'll feel inclined to prove me wrong, so hop to it!

J.

"How do you know who is reading these pages?" - drg

Are you kidding?

It is my fondest wish that the people I criticize read this but unfortunately they will probably miss it.

By the way Evan, thanks for doing a zoological study on me. You know sir, I've never had that done to me. Of course I've been to the doctor, had blood tests, etc., but never been the subject of zoological studies.

Also, Phillipp Glass is the most egregious example of pretentious minimalist claptrap in the history of that lamentable movement. Five hundred years from now he won't be understood? You must be attempting irony. He could have been understood five hundred years AGO.

He also is responsible for the most arrogant and disgusting act of artistic sabotage since Ted Turner instituted colorization. He removed the soundtrack to Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" by George Auric - a French composer who wrote individual works superior to all of Phillip Glass's output put together - and substituted his own piece of shit for the music. This is a criminal act that should be punished with significant jail time.

Don't pull your punches, Bill. How do you really feel. [[;)]]

..

@jbm said:

Unfortunately, I can't agree with you about Phillip Glass. Sorry. To me, he's someone who hit upon something genuine back in the day, then hit on it again, and again, and again...

I'd imagine you'll feel inclined to prove me wrong, so hop to it!

J.

No no no. I can't. Don't feel inclined to either. I respect people's personal choices. It's just something really personal I feel. believe me I know what it's like to try to convince someone that Philip Glass has merit. But alas, it's impossible. I think people are listening and feeling too much of his music. It's actually more of a mathematical masterpiece. Although it's true, I think it has some merit what Randy Newman said: "With Philip Glass, if a flea farts it's a huge deal!". And that's true. That's teh beauty of his musical genius. He's able to take the epic and reduce it to trivia. He's able to take the trival and make it Epic. It's a very NEW kind of music that I don't think the world is ready for yet.

Evan Evans

@Another User said:

He also is responsible for the most arrogant and disgusting act of artistic sabotage since Ted Turner instituted colorization. He removed the soundtrack to Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" by George Auric - a French composer who wrote individual works superior to all of Phillip Glass's output put together - and substituted his own piece of shit for the music. This is a criminal act that should be punished with significant jail time.

A purist idealist are ya?

LOL.

Evan Evans

@evanevans said:

It's not about the music ...

Correct, Glass is not about music. Good one.

@evanevans said:

It's not about the music ...

Correct, Glass is not about music. Good one.Right. I love all artforms too much to consider that just because something has a musical sound to it it means it fits in the artform called music. i've seen painter's transcend the art of fine art (painting). I've seen sculptures create music. I've seen musicians create a dance with nature. I like to see a person's foray into expression as something unique to them. I would never be so biased as to say, that's bad music because it's not as good as most music. Maybe it's not meant to be music. I respect each artist as just that ... an artist. I can't respect someone for instance who thinks my father was just a jazz pianist / composer, or that he was better than Bud Powell or Keith Jarrett. Each one has their own thing going for them, and some of what they have going is less about music and more about a unique presentation of expression.

On that note, Philip Glass is way ahead of his time, as I see it. Try experiencing something of his again, without hearing, but rather by thinking. His art is intellectual. Some people don't like new art though. Stravinsky was tomatoed offstage in 1911. I can't help that. I can't help those who must compare what is being presented to what they know. That is not being open minded though, and it is not being respectful either.

I am one who respects those on the new frontier most. The originals. The innovators. To say that Glass isn't an innovator is to pigeon hole him into the art of music. It's just not what it's all about. His mind is more expansive than to be limited like that. It takes being open minded to even have the opportunity to understand that. And even then, you might still not get it. So it's ok with me, anyone who doesn't like Glass. However, I understand him as being way ahead of his time. I'd bet you there'll come a point in our future where pop music or rock music becomes something very similar to Glass' music. Just as the early 90s went through an acoustic phase, so will electronic music someday in the future. Then all those minimalistic beats and arpeggios will be played on classical instruments, and the popular form of music will suddenly be something that someone thought of hundreds of years earlier, in the mid 20th century. And those in the 25th Century will go on a rampage for Glass' recordings and he will be looked at in high regards.

I don't expect people from this time to appreciate him now though. I have a hard time appreciating him myself. It's just not the right time. But if you know enough about music theory and history you might be able to deduce that the future holds a place for music like his ... not the past ... and not the present. Ives and Stravinsky, Debussy, DiVinci, Monet, Columbus, Magellan, Einstein, Newton ... history is full of examples of people sometimes as many as 500 years ahead of their time. I choose to respect these kinds of persons, while they are alive, and can fill me with excitement, NOW, not later.

Evan Evans

To be honest, my last statement was meant more ironically.

But anyway, interesting points of course. But I´m really surprised that you think Glass is the inventor of minimalism. I see Glass as a clever guy jumping on the train of real inventors like Terry Riley or Steve Reich. They are the ones who invented minimalism as a very strong and radical reaction to the European, especially French and German New Music (with capitals). I see Glass as the one who saw the commercial potential in these ideas but definetly not as an innovator.

Regarding the John Williams is a better composer than Jerry Goldsmith postulate (strictly musically speaking ignoring merits as far as film.) I think the opposite is true and obviously so. Williams is the traditionalist here with a very straightforward harmonic language. I don't know if I've ever strained much trying to understand what he was doing musically (as much as I may or may not have admired it.) Goldsmith has baffled me too many times to count. And I'm not alone because he has never been copied successfully. Williams has never written anything like Alien or Freud or Planet Of The Apes or Coma etc. These are not triadic harmonies (the hallmark of Williams music.)

I beg to differ and ad that I have never heard this suggested by anyone. David Raksin presented excerpts from the history of film music on KUSC which featured everyone from Steiner to Goldsmith. Williams was not even included on the program. This was a radio program which was about the music on it's own and spoken of in musical terms. Raksin would not of left anyone with superior compositional ability off the program.

This is not to disparage the immensely gifted John Williams who has been both criticized out of petty jealously and out of honest objective observation. But to simply say he in no way has ever had the chops of Jerry Goldsmith.

Dave Connor

@mathis said:

To be honest, my last statement was meant more ironically.

But anyway, interesting points of course. But I´m really surprised that you think Glass is the inventor of minimalism. I see Glass as a clever guy jumping on the train of real inventors like Terry Riley or Steve Reich. They are the ones who invented minimalism as a very strong and radical reaction to the European, especially French and German New Music (with capitals). I see Glass as the one who saw the commercial potential in these ideas but definetly not as an innovator.

I don't think of him as the inventor of minimalism. But he is an innovator. Thomas Edison may have invented the light bulb, but there were plenty of innovations in the same field since ... xeon bulbs, led, lcd, arc lights, etc. Anyway, innovator does not mean inventor here Mathis. Two different words.

Dave,

I'm not quite sure I understand. Are you saying John Williams is not as much of a composer because he is less original? Is that basically it?

[*-)]:

Evan Evans

I'm sorry Dave but I must disagree with your charge about Williams. Listen to his score for Sleepers. The main theme is built on 4ths, and the melody goes through a number of chromatic changes that take it out of a central key centre.

Or let us take something more contemporary like "Jazz Autographs" from The Terminal. There are some great substitutions in that track. I don't think Williams has ever present any of his themes in stripped down basic triadic form. Maybe Jurassic Park or some kiddy fare like that, but to discredit Williams without knowing his entire canon is a little narrow-minded. Have you heard IMAGES or CLose Encounters of the Third Kind? Most of the latter is texture based but somehow every forgets this and always remembers the last 10 minutes of overtly Romantic styled music.

For me, I can lift a Goldsmith theme within 20 minutes of hearing it. But then again, I have a really decent relative pitch. Williams' themes aren't to hard either but he composes/orchestrates vertically, moreso than Goldmsith who composed linearly- and he himself admitted this in a 1984 Keyboard magazine interview. And toward the late '90's, Goldsmith had settled into a very basic compositional form. Almost homophonic. John Barry has done away with most of his up-tempo writing in the same manner. Why do you think Brad Bird hired Michael Giacchino for THe Incredibles? Because Barry no longer writes like the John Barry of the '60's.

Anyhow, I love Goldsmith's music, but I'd have to say that I find it more challenging to try to lift Williams' music and represent it fully (melody and harmony) than Goldsmith, Planet of the Apes not withstanding.

Someone who I find wrote incredibley complex harmonic music was Alex North. I love his scores to 2001, Dragonslayer, Spartacus, even his underrated and sadly unreleased score to Good Morning Viet nam. What a lovely adagio he wrote for that. Sad, reflective, and the harmonies even evoke the time period that the film takes place in. Ahhh, I miss Mr. North.

Yes, Alex North is probably the most advanced musically of all of these composers. We discussed his great unused "2001" score on another thread.

That's true that John Barry doesn't write in his 60s style, but how could any person do that? It would be remaining frozen in time. Anyway he evolved far beyond that and became probably the best melodist of all film composers.

I don´t agree that harmonic (or any music theoretical) complexity makes for better music.

Well, to my ears, yes, that is the main criteria. But my backbround is in jazz so my ears like to hear extensions upon the basic chords (7ths, 9ths, 11ths, 13ths, etc.). But I don't think I'd declare that simpler music is necessarily bad. I think I'd be close-minded if I didn't listen and accept all types of music.

My Goldsmith comment wasn't to disparage his style of music to elevate Williams. Ultimately, even with all of our music knowledge on this board, what we listen to is basic preference. Objective analysis such as orchestration technique or harmonic language use can help to clarify our points but, as we've seen, there are even subjective debates about that.

I would like to retract my comment about Goldsmith being a more triadic composer. In his final years, he did seem to eschew the complexiy that was the hallmark of his style in the '60's, '70's and even early '80's. I think 1990's Total Recall was the last truly virtuosic score he wrote. For some reason that seemed to be a turning point for him, wherein he realised that writing "the equivelant of a Bruckner Symphony" didn't really matter in the end because of all the sound effects he had to compete with.

Williams always seemed less sensitive about how his music worked with the picture. In the '70's, you'd get these amazingly vibrant, colorful, big Romantic-styled symphonic scores that played so well on CD because they stood out like a sore thumb. Ironically, I think Williams has become a better "film composer" but somewhat diminished as a music composer. A lot of his scores nowadays (Harry Potter3 and parts of The Terminal) seem endemic to the film and are hard to enjoy out of the narrative context.

Which leads me BACK to the original topic on this post- Giacchino's Incredibles score is so much fun to listen to in and out of the film because it's very melodic but also has some great use of motives too. And who doesn't love that final Incredits where he uses that ascending 4 note motif in a 5/4 time signature? Damn that stuff sizzles! I also enjoy the drumming which harkens back to the days prior to drum machines where there would be dynamic fills, flams, accents, rolls, whatever, to compliment the music. Man, I hope this brings back a '70's renaissance.

I also have to disagree very strongly that simple harmony results in simple music.

OK, I will start to generalize now, too, since it´s a phenomenon I often recognize with people having a good education in one discipline. As soon as you (one) have aquired a really nice, well crafted and expensive hammer your eyes will automatically start looking out exclusively for nails which you possibly could hammer in.
So as soon as people learned all this great stuff about harmony and eartraining and counterpoint they will start judging music with exactly these criteria they put so much effort in to master. In the end the effect of the education is not widening the mind but limiting it to certain aspects. I think this is sad.

It´s actually very interesting to have this discussion at the same time with a discussion about minimalism, which is widely suspected as simple music. The material might be simple, however the cognition of an early Reich piece can be of amazing complexity.

B.t.w., Evan, OK, understood the differenciation between inventor and innovator. But still I have doubts calling Glass an innovator. I would prefer calling him an exploiter.

And, to close this with a personal preference, I´m not very fond of all these complex Jazz harmonies, simply because they reduce the amount of complexity in terms of contrast. The more you add additionals the more similar will be the perception of two chords.
But I´m not so concerned about harmony anyway.

But I totally agree about the fun listening to the incredibles score.

These are really interesting comments on complexity, mathis.

I think a point that deserves to be added to this discussion is that of the temporal arrangement of harmony. Because whether the chords, or harmonic structures (or whatever you want to call them), are complex in and of themselves really means very little to me. What concerns me is how they are arranged in time. This is where I find the vast majority of contemporary music, whether written for the concert hall or cinema, to be dreadfully dull. I don't think that two alternate spellings of a twelve-note chord following one another in succession are necessarily any more complex than a perfect cadence, except perhaps acoustically...
Maybe what I mean to say is that there's a difference between complexity and complication(?)

In "tonal" works, or works using functional harmony, I think the least sufficiently explored area is that of harmonic rhythm. In non-tonal works it's the fear of cadential gestures arising from the inherent narrowness implied by the task of trying to avoid functional relations between adjacent harmonic structures. In the former, every question seems to be answered with a "yes", while in the latter the same question must be answered with a "no" (if that makes any sense). But I think that in both cases the solution lies in the way a composers extends harmony over time. This, to me, is one of the most difficult aspects of composition. And I think the problem is being felt in all walks of musical life, from hip-hop to "high art" (very much in quotes). Not coincidentally, the result seems to have become a rejuvinated interest in drone. I hear drone everywhere, lately, and it's really quite exciting to me! Mind you, I don't think it's a solution, so much as an escape, but it is interesting that this form, which is perhaps the oldest of musical structures, has made such a triumphant return. Anyway, my position is that harmonic progression ("chord progression") needs a *serious* revision, or perhaps a serious visionary, to make it a productive form for contemporary expression again.

Evan. I hear what you're saying about "it not being about the music". This was also the case with much of what Cage did... Conceptual Art was big at the time, so it makes sense that there would be extra-musical interests and ideas involved. But, at least with Glass, it's the above ideas around harmony that render his music painfully dull to me... it's not the repetition, or any simplistic notion of complexity. The harmony, it's temporal structure as a sequence of chords, is totally banal, to me. And I understand that this is part of the (original) point, but I think that "point" only had power in the time that it was first made. Today, it's lost its relevance, and it needs something more -- something strictly musical to rejuvinate its power. I mean, I love a good deal of contemporary "electronica", and find it much more interesting, though it is largely drone-based, and tends to have a focus on colour, not harmony or melody. This music could even be said to be formally inspired by Glass, though i would argue that its form is tied much more closely to its mode of production (synthesis, software sequencing programs, etc.), than to the work of any particular school of composition.

Anyway, that's enough from me...

J.

The greatest harmonic complexity ever achieved was at the very end of the post Romantic era, when perceived harmonic structure and movement were being pushed to the ultimate limits by late Mahler and early Schoenberg. Even though an harmonic analysis of later works could reveal theoretical complexities beyond these, they are not heard. In fact, most modern music that is more "complex" is perceived in a very simple way, because the prior language has been discarded. And of course there was an extreme reaction against the increasing complexity of late 19th - early 20th century music, which gave birth to neo-classicism.

So anyway I agree completely with Mathis's statement that greater complexity does not result in better music. On the other hand pure simplicity does not either. I didn't earlier mean to reject all of minimalism, and Mathis is correct in pointing out how Glass has co-opted Reich and Riley and other far more artistic minimalists for one simple reason - money.

Also JBM has a point in mentioning how much of modern music is an attempt at avoidance. Almost desperate at times, in attempting to avoid straying anywhere near the deadly precipice of...


TONALITY

@mathis said:

B.t.w., Evan, OK, understood the differenciation between inventor and innovator. But still I have doubts calling Glass an innovator. I would prefer calling him an exploiter.

Ok, but I put Apple computer right in there with him as an expoiter then. Those jerks. All leeching off the concept of the transistor.

Evan Evans