Radio Three's Halloween concert, which you can listen to for a week on line here, supports David's assertion about the limitations of modern musical forms. Or at least some of them... It's called "Disturbia". Pretty spooky, huh? As described:
The BBC Concert Orchestra present a spine-chilling Halloween alternative. Poulenc's La Voix Humaine is a classic psychodrama based on the play of the same name by Jean Cocteau. Soprano Ilona Domnich performs the role of a fragile young woman, thrown into a nightmare as she makes an agonizing last attempt to establish contact with her ex-lover over the telephone.Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments is famed for its use in films 'The Exorcist' and 'The Shining' and evokes nameless terrors. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood presents a 21st-century spin on the work in the UK premiere of his 48 Responses to Polymorphia.
The edgy world of contemporary electronica comes into focus with Aphex Twin's Nannou, as orchestrated by Patrick Nunn, before the audience faces the extreme emotions of Berio's spine-tingling electro-acoustic fantasy Visage. This iconic recording features the disturbing and erotically charged vocal improvisations of Cathy Berberian and was originally banned from the airwaves in Italy.
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I was quoting someone long forgotten, and the comment referred only to atonal music. What little Poulenc I've heard I rather liked, especially the opera "Dialogues of the Carmelites," which has a heavy thump in the final scene each time another nun is beheaded.
You won't be surprised that Pierre Boulez disdains Poulenc (and Shostakovich, Copland, Britten, Prokofiev...)
These are distinctions that used to matter quite a bit more than they do now, thank goodness.
I don't know enough about Boulez to know what it means for him to disdain someone. Probably just as well.
I think so... Basically means, with respect to composers active within the last hundred years or so, that the music is overly melodic, and sentimental.
Predictable.
Or, as I said, "You won't be surprised"...
Scope for an essay on The Fear of Music -- along the lines of Kael's famous Fear of Movies.
Harking back to the notion we absorbed at SJC, when we were dividing and re-dividing strings and marvelling at the rationaility of the relationships: music as a natural/mathematical phenomenon that works directly on the human nervous system, in ways we can't always control.
Except, of course, the relationships are not entirely rational -- hence, the need for tempering to make it sound "right."
There are lots of interesting things about Boulez, not least of which is that he is, in his day job, a highly-regarded conductor of older music.
The disdain that the serial music purists felt for the tonal humanists was pretty intense and kept a lot of composers from having the kind of reputations they should have had. Alex Ross has chapter and verse, if you're interested -- and Ross loves Boulez and a lot of less difficult composers as well.
What's particularly amusing is that Ellington and Monk (or x and y, your choice) will probably outlast them all.
Ellington, yes, from what I've heard, admittedly not as much as I should have. Music that's made by people to communicate with other people.
Ross has a book about this issue? Could be cool. Realistically, though...
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