Hi.

I'm joining this discussion rather late in the day, so sorry in advance if I go over old ground.

I love Stravinsky and I mostly loathe "Romantic" music, so I'm trying to get used to this idea that my most loved composer is really part of my most loathed stylistic movement.

Ever since childhood I've known I like music starting from the primordial swamp up to about 1750, then almost nothing until about 1900. So Perotin, Machaut, Josquin, Bach, Reich, Ligeti yes, but Wagner no. Sorry - this is just who I am.

I'm very resistant to schmaltz in music. I have an aversion to heavy-handed surface sentimentality. I hate operatic vocals. I hate "trill on every note" vibrato vocals. I love folk singers, I love early music singers, I love Indian Drupad singers. But I hate - with almost physical revulsion - the Pavarotti style, and I have done since I was tiny. My favourite singers would include the Hilliard Ensemble singers, June Tabor, Stina Nordenstam, Robert Wyatt, even the "robot" vocalist from Kraftwerk (Ralf or Florian?); but would exclude virtually the entire classical mainstream.

Stravinsky said that music is incapable of expressing anything except itself. I don't really agree with him, but I know why he might have wanted to say that. He was rejecting the Wagnerian Romantic tradition. What I think he means is that great music can have a completely impersonal surface - it can have no more overt personal subjectivity than a ticking clock - and, precisely by transcending the "look at me" self-obsession of its composer and performers, actually achieve greater resonance, greater meaning. The Symphonies Of Wind Instruments is an example. It's so important simply to play the right notes, with the right articulation, in the right tempo proportions. But a player who tries to subjectivize their line (say with a mannered rubato) may actually diminish the music. Stravinsky loathes what he calls "The performance of performance", by which he means the tortured histrionics of the celebrity conductor (he doesn't mention names, but Leonard Bernstein seems to be the particular object of his disaffection).

Stravinsky likes ritual (hence the "Rite" of Spring). Lots of his music has a ritualized quality. The performance becomes a kind of ceremony. Listen to the end of the Requiem Canticles, with its clock-like chiming bells. It's a complete rejection of Wagnerian Romanticism, with its determination to smother, to overwhelm, the listener. And it's incredibly moving to listen to, even though it's so impersonal.

I'm not an expert on Balinese Gamelan music, but I imagine there's something similar going on there. Renaissance polyphony, a Bach fugue, neither should be performed completely deadpan, both need inflection, but both seem to be aiming at a kind of objectivity - exactly the opposite of what's needed to play a Chopin nocturne or sing Isolde's Liebestod.

Laters

Guy

You don't like Pavarotti? O.K....

You apparently don't like singing.

You like no composers from the Romantic Era? O.K....

You apparently don't like music.

Anyone who does not like Mahler, Bruckner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Chopin, Lizst, Strauss, Franck, Berlioz... to name but a few -

that person does not like music. End of discussion.

Well, Bill, sorry to be harsh, but this is pretty ... I´m loosing words. Please say that you don´t mean that. You´re kidding, right?

[...

Well, it´s sad for me to see both of you (I love you both, bear in mind) can´t accept musical taste differing from yours. You both form a kind of music police here. For me it´s perfectly acceptable that Bill is admiring the romantics, but why should someone be a musical cretin if he doesn´t like it? That´s so much out of my system of values, that´s where I´m losing words.

[...

@William said:

You don't like Pavarotti? O.K....

You apparently don't like singing.

I think that this statement is a bit harsh. I happen to think that Pavarotti was over-rated when he was in his prime, compared with other singers that I could mention, and certainly in these days is not worth hearing (IMO), but I wouldn't say that I didn't like singing based on these opinions.

DG

[...

Mathis,

I am not the person who is saying other kinds of music are crap. The previous post stated this direcltly and I was reacting to that. I am saying that a judgement which condemns music that you personally don't like - that judgement is crap. I had a longer version of this post, and this is the toned down version.

I was going to add - why do people have to disparage music that they just plain don't like? Simply as a matter of taste? Or why can't they accept different kinds of music - open their minds just a little? I always notice that modernists MUST hate Romanticism, as part of their code of honor. This simplistic equation "Romanticism = Schmaltz" is garbage. It is a straw man. The fact is "Bad Romanticism = Schmaltz." But the disparagers always pick something lousy and then generalize for everything else. I suppose you think Schubert's "Ave Maria" is Schmaltz? Or Brahms' 4rth Symphony? It is a joke and a sham, this attitude, and I am sick of it.

I am not acting like music police - what the hell have I been saying about Varese and Ligetti for crying out loud? I like different kinds of music without feeling the need to HATE anything different from one form I embrace. I do not and will never accept the narrow minded mentality that is stated in this rejection of two hundred years of music.

I hear you. More clear now.

Still I disagree with your notion that someone who´s not loving the romantics is not loving music. That´s absurd.

Mathis, I don't give a damn if someone listens only to Kazoo-Rap music. That is just fine. I'm sure the sounds of sewage flowing through a pipe are beautiful to someone. Whatever turns you on is just fine with me.

But what I don't like is when somebody says kinds of music other than what HE likes are worthless in a contemptuous, arrogant way. That is what was done here. So this person wanted a reaction. Well he got one. If he doesn't like it then he shouldn't show utter contempt for things that other people like.

Hey All,

First off, if you look at Guy's opening statement, he's actually telling you how uncomfortable he is with previous statements made about Stravinksy (a composer he admires), and generalisations about modernists being 'loathsome'... So, go easy on him, as he's basically just responding to the negativity he's already observed. Also, he continues to make it very clear that he's only stating his personal opinions and tastes. (BTW, I agree about singers, Guy. It's not so much that I "hate" the 'LFO' on the big Operatic Voice, but rather that I adore a simpler, cleaner production -- check out Sister Marie Keyrouz sometime (I hope I spelled it right!), she's breath-taking.)

Anyway... I've become very interested (once again) in this famous quote of Stravinsky's, since the original posting of this thread. From what I've been able to understand of him, over a long period of interest in his work and thought (a period which ended several years ago, I should add), Stravinsky was really most annoyed by the idea of 'Kunstreligion', epitomized by the worship of Wagner. It was not just the music itself (although he obviously had little time for it), but rather the ideology which arose around the obsession with its Maker, bestowing upon him a God-like status. So in stating that music expresses only itself, I think he was really just trying to extract the physical phenomenon of music from the interpretive influence of the listener, and more specifically, from the emotional relationship the listener might have with the individual "Genius" who composed it (or, in the case of Bernstein, who was currently performing it). So, this does not necessarily need to be seen as a blanket statement about music, per se, but rather as one composer's way of paring down a wild infinitude of almost supernatural influences to get at the central problem of composition: how to arrange notes and sounds in time.

If I remember some of our discussions from previous posts correctly, many of us were in agreement that the actual ACT of composition is basically a highly demanding process of problem solving -- we are largely occupied with what happens next, or with how to make a passage "work". At the actual moment we are composing, this is often our biggest question: "how does this work?". So, with such a statement, Stravinsky really did nothing more than switch chronological positions between composition and listening, between the question and the answer. That is, if the central question of a composer is "how does this work?", then the answer to that question, as expressed in the music itself is just "like this!" Obviously, there are social, ideological, and political influences at play in resolution of this question -- resulting in the fact that Stravinsky sounds different from Mahler -- but the question itself remains essentially the same. So if the question stays the same, but the answers appear markedly different, something must be happening in between -- something we have little control over. And THAT, I suspect, is the music "expressing itself", which is to express the social, ideological, and political influences of its time. [edit: and yes, of course, personal influences too! [:)]]

I certainly know that I'm often suprised by the emotional "drift" of a passage of music I've composed. If the affect is not what I'm after, I simply scrap it and try again. But that doesn't mean there was anything wrong with the first draft -- that it didn't "work", internally -- but simply that my relationship to the result was not what I was after. I twisted and tweaked until everything fell into place. The music spoke. And it wasn't what I wanted to hear! :-0

More often, however, I accept the outcome. Because I know by now that it is generally more honest than I would ever care to be, if I thought over the emotional content of every phrase before committing it to paper!

cheers,

J.

@Guy Sigsworth said:

I like music starting from the primordial swamp up to about 1750, then almost nothing until about 1900. So Perotin, Machaut, Josquin, Bach, Reich, Ligeti yes, but Wagner no. Sorry - this is just who I am.

I can understand all the sentiments regarding aversion to any style. I must confess I've never met an accomplished musician that didn't thrill at Mozart, Beethoven, or Haydn. I mean these are the cats so - to - speak. It's like a sax player not liking Coltrane or something - it's just hard to understand. I'm not offended by it, just baffled.

Perhaps since I am a composer myself and am affected, excited and pleased by music on more than just the listening level. Beethoven gives me no end of joy in just looking at his scores without any listening at all. I thrill at the mastery that is apparent on several levels whether it's form, phrase, rhythm, modulation, orchestration, on and on. Then I can forget about that ten tons of genius of creativity and then listen as if I had never heard of Middle C and listen to another ten tons of wonder that might as well be unrelated. Just listen to a gush of expression.

My point is: I can understand some one not liking anyone's music (including Beethoven's.) But a practitioner of the same art disliking someone who seems to sum up all the best elements of all western musical styles (which Beethoven does more than any other) mystifies me indeed. In fact I listened at a friends house to some Ligeti string quartets the other day and found them incredible. I immediately said, "You should hear the late Beethoven quartets, they're just as radical and use the same principals of composition." He purchased them on line before I left (he is a novice at composition.)

My two cents,

Dave Connor

@dpcon said:

I immediately said, "You should hear the late Beethoven quartets, they're just as radical and use the same principals of composition."

This is so true. Isn´t late Beethoven simply A-M-A-Z-I-N-G?

However, "liking" is such a bitch. I mean admiring, yes, but liking? I certainly don´t LIKE Wagner, I never hear him for my enjoyment, but I admire him for his composing. I suggest making a distiction.

Mathis,

I actually was trying to make a distinction between admiring and liking. But if a sax player doesn't like Coltrane or Jazz pianist doesn't like Bill Evans or a trumpet player doesn't like Miles Davis, I just don't understand it. Because it seems to me that they are the definition of all that is good in Jazz. Even if one prefers Louis Armstrong or Wynton Marsalis and doesn't really "like" Miles Davis - I can understand that, but not a total rejection and ceasing of even listening to Miles. His music is totally unique from the others and a major part of the history of music - not to mention gorgeous beautiful stuff.

It's the wholesale rejection of an entire era of indisputably great music that just baffles me - by a musician anyway. I suppose one feels what one feels.

Dave Connor

Jazz and Romantics - that reminds me to Uri Caine. Does anybody know his recording of Wagner excerpts with chamber ensemble and jazz musicians (he himself is famous as a free jazz piano player) live in the streets of Venice? It´s probably the cutest interpretation of the Ride of the wellcures I ever heard. He brought it down to a viennese coffeehouse compatible version but full of swing. I loved it! [:D]