Thanks for this much needed change in topic!  I would be curious as to Stove’s views on Bruckner, Olivier Messiaen, Steve Reich, and John Adams.

One afternoon about 35 years ago, while still living with my parents, I placed a Steve Reich LP, “Music for 18 Musicians,” on the turntable in our living room.  Within three minutes my mother, who had been doing something in the kitchen, came striding out, hurriedly and excitably.  “I can’t stand this, it’s driving me crazy!” she shouted, as she ripped the tonearm from the record.

shoenberg’s composition method was obviously contrived, but it’s still pretty enjoyable if only for it’s uniqueness.  It’s what;s not there!!!  seriusly, it is refreshing to hear music that doesn’t do the standard ups and downs and predictable things most classical music does.  If you like Bartok I don’t know that there is all that much difference between that and schoenberg.

michigander- your mom should check out richard youngs “Advent”.  3 songs, the first is two piano notes with a brief wimpy sounding vocal.  the second is the same two notes with some oboa over it. the third is the same or similar notes with some messed up sounding guitar over it.  about a half hour in total.

Professor Gottfried asks a very important question at the end of this fine review.

Piatak is right in asserting Prof. Gottfried asks an important question.

I’m not fully convinced that it is a case of the “communal context no longer existing”. The communal context is alive and well in the U.S.. In fact there is a kind of balkanized tyranny of the communal context and the detestable Political Correct cadres are proof enough of this. Lamenting the loss of traditional community is less important to the debate than is an understanding of the real nemesis :our surrender to the simulacrum of community that has been foisted on us by a mainstream media and entertainment that is , at heart, only a vicarious agora.  A lot of this comes to us “free” on radio and TV and it is worth less than it costs. This collective grab ass is accepted as our “culture” despite near universal contempt for it (sure , it is watched but it is watched as much to mine contempt and expectant angst as it is to inspire awe).

One thing you can bet your bottom dollar on (no sub-prime pun intended) is that the classical, in music, learning, art, poetry, architecture AND Religion will remain long after this interlude of loud convenience has passed. Change is hoped for, comes in spades and is therefor inflated before crashing.

While it is interesting and entertaining to confront the music of Harry Partch say or the deconstructionist architecture of Frank Gehry, it can only be done with a suspension of one’s informed instinct that it is far more moving to listen to , say Musique Byzantine by the Lycourgos Angeloppoulos Et Le Choeur Byzantin De Grace on the one hand or Beethovens Seventh on the other or a passionate jam by Miles Davis or lament by Coltrane on the other.  The mania for deconstructionist architecture, like deconstructionist music will pass once people recall their love of being moved in the classical sublime as opposed to the fleeting excitements of the stridently different. We’ve surrendered an unfortunately large portion of our consciousness to the “stridently different” and it will no doubt inform the classical in the years to come but we have not yet lost our literacy in things classical or communal.

After all, it is not required, in people attuned to insight and who possess fresh eyes, that the “modern” or defiantly different be either shunned or feared because the classical has attained it’s lofty status for good reason. Even crazed punks are moved by a poetic Leonard Cohen lyric or the Goldberg variations played by Glen Gould

Just because the idiots fest of current popular culture seems to prevail in it’s house organ, the modern Media and entertainment industry, does not mean classical art or religious “truths” are lost to us. They clearly are not.

Somehow, we must find a way to breach the rampart of noise surrounding popular culture. Perhaps we need to adopt the modes of the enemy....equalize the rules of engagement. It may be a little idiotic to say we could do this by sending out some skateboarding punk Jesuits or Derida toting Nuns but there is some merit in embracing the noise and what the noise surounds, in oder to re-capture the intellect of this thoroughly besieged generation....a generation inundated by a noisy emptiness.

The classical is not lost, it’s staggering impact is just diminished by the noise and we simply have to find a way to cut through that noise better than we have. If anything, this current sad plaint for “change” is the best illustration yet that change has been over-rated. At least change for change sake. After all, one needs a grounding in classical modes of thinking to actually sense change when and if it actually occurs.

Change and modernity have had a great run but if my chicken entrails are correct, the parody is not going unnoticed.....finally.

To follow Mr. Piatak’s wise suggestion:
But what does one do when the communal context that nurtured earlier composition, written for the ages, no longer exists?
Answer: Find a new communal context, go back to a distant earlier one, or like Aeneas, establish a new one.

All four of the composers that I mentioned in my first post are working in a cultural context – and have found a new one.  Let’s start with Reich and list the clichés:

1. Cliché #1 “Steve Reich’s music sounds like it’s stuck in the groove.” (With that comparison I may have lost some of you youngsters there.) Bruckner is a formidable contrapuntalist.  Wagner’s prelude to Die Meistersänger may be the best piece of counterpoint since the Baroque.  Yet with these composers, Beethoven’s Grosser Fuge, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (last mvt), and Brahm’s 4th (last mvt), one has the feeling that it’s all somehow been done before, by Bach.  Reich instead pole vaults over the entire history of Western music and comes down to the beginning of couterpoint, to Pérotin, a precursor whom Reich acknowledges. He goes back to Pérotin, and then he goes in a new direction. 

Do this experiment.  Listen to the Gregorian chant viderunt omnes.  Then hear Pérotin’s viderunt omnes, the first piece of four part music in Western history.  Then take a work of Reich’s.  I recommend his Octet (a bit more approachable than his Music for Eighteen Musicians).  You will immediately hear the debt to Pérotin.  You will also hear a piece of genius that expands the very idea of music – music without melody (except maybe the entry of the flute); music with rhythm so complex that you can’t tap your foot to it, yet you hear that it’s very much rhythm; – and music (for the first time since Pérotin) that’s fast and slow at the same time!

2.  Cliché #2 “Reich uses for his ‘cultural context’ banal pop mass music.” Stick with the Octet.  Reich builds upon pop music. Reich (and Adams) indeed starts out with the music of our time – superficial and with a thumping moronic beat – only to take it to places pop musicians and Mass Man never considered. And thus his music is redemptive. Another tired cliché: “You have to meet people where they are”.  And where they are (pop) is, more often than not, the wrong place to be.  Most 20 C composers just scorned pop.  Reich meet us where we are, and he (and Adams) take us to a new world, both formally and thematically. 

First formally.  Pop music obliges neither concentration nor the following of a long development.  Reich’s (and Adams’) music demands the most intense concentration. Using the Beethovenian concept of development in free variations, Reich, by slow, gradual shifting and subtle changes of a pattern that never stays the same, with music in and out of phase, takes us to a place un-imagined.  When you listen to Reich’s Octet, when finished, go back and listen to the first few measures of the beginning.  You will see that, almost hypnotically, you were taken somewhere. 

3. Cliché #3 “Reich’s music is more soothing than compelling.” Again, the Octet , now thematically.  I imagine this music about a superficial modern man, starting out sitting in McDonald’s with his Big Mac and fries, who has five epiphanies: 1. He suddenly discovers that he has a soul; 2. he discovers that soul is deep; 3. he discovers that that soul is empty, and 4. he yearns for something.  Indeed, listening to the string parts of the Octet , I have never heard such a subtle yet profound feeling of yearning since Tristan or Schumann’s Fantasy in C<i> – but unlike those works the <i>Octet’s yearning isn’t romantic but spiritual Our modern lives are so full of clutter, so lacking of the sublime, that this yearning comes upon us softly, through a process of slow excavation.  5. At the end of the Octet, our subject has a final epiphany, he finds “something” that gives joy.  Adams explores further what that “something” is.

I’m told Reich redid the Octet and named it Eight Lines.  I haven’t heard this version.

It’s easy to dismiss a composer by only hearing the surface.  Louis Couperin’s harpsichord suites sound overly ornamental.  Only by careful and intensely does one discover his deep structure.  Adams and Reich sound overly “casual”, unbuttoned, Reich more the urban “cool”, Adams the rustic or the boy at the beach.  But listen carefully. 

Time permitting, I’ll write about Adams, Messiaen, and Bruckner – prayerfully before this article becomes stale.

dirk sabin- but the line between classical and modern can be very thin.  Have you ever heard hildegaard von bingens stuff?  It has a lot more in common with john cage than lawrence welk or whatever guys like gottfried and Raimondo listen to

Paul Gottfried has asked THE question concerning classicalmusic composition, and it is one that perhaps does not has a really easy answer in our post-modern age. If we posit that what we call classical music has always
appeared as a kind of organic outgrowth of a culture, and out of a cultural context, plus the ability on the part of the composer to transform his ideas into music, then the next observation I would make is this: certainly since Schoenberg and Alban Berg and the Dodecaphonic Vienna School there has been a movement to divorce what we call classical music from the cultural context, that is, to intellectualize it; but also, as Sid and others have pointed out, the cultural contexts themselves have radically changed in Europe and the United States, so that the “popular” and “folk” traditions that once inspired Josef Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Bruckner, no longer exist. Perhaps even more significantly, if we consider the history of Western/European music as deeply intertwined with Christianity, the decline and decay of Christianity has most assuredly had an effect. The Progressivist de-emphasis of Gregorian chant since Vatican II, for instance, has had a disastrous effect liturgically, and there has most certainly been a ripple effect. The calculated decision by the major broadcasting companies (ABC, NBC, and CBS)in the early 1960s to de-emphasize classical music programming (e.g. Voice of Firestone, Bell Telephone Hour, et, athe end of commercial radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, New York Phil, etc.)
has certainly had an effect. From the general view that classical music was something to be offered to all the people, a view that existed up until the 1960s, we now live in a society where it is considered “elitist” or worse to listen to classical music.

When I was in what is now called “junior high,” we had courses in “musucic appreciation.” My nephews, both of whom went to superior sxholls, had none (or very little) of that. What they did get they got in choir; but nothing gnereal, nothing directed at ALL students.

I do think Sid is correct, however, in that there are still composers who attempt to “connect” to a traditional and “popular” culture, although such culture is under quite a bit stress. One can point to the success in the 20th century of Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, and more recently, Carlisle Floyd whose operas all drink from the traditional culture of Americana.

Still, the tendency which predominates in a lot of music schools, I fear, is to “intellectualize.” Perhaps not as far as John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, but still, disconnected. This is even more radically apparent in opera. Few contemporary operas can hold a billing for any length of time. Yet, Giacomo Puccini was “contemporary” in the 1920s, and Richard Strauss in the 1940s (when he wrote his scintillating ARABELLA!). Such composers, in addition to being geniuses, also absorbed inspiration from their culture (which was still present) and from the traditions that had inspired hundreds of other
composers previously.

I remember a symposium I attended a few years ago, where the question was posed if our age could ever produce another Anton Bruckner (my favorite symphonist). The response was mixed, but the question, I think,remains quite topical. I thank Paul for the essay, and like Sid, I think it’s good to range out in such issues.

Please pardon the numerous typos--I’ll blame them on my new glasses.

Lester,
The line between the classical and modern is thin and usually, modern architecture is better when the line is most thin. The architecture of Mies and his heir Meier is , at root classical in it’s pure form and attention to craft....albeit modern craft expressing modern materials. The landscape architect Dan Kiley was essentially a classicist more than a modernist even though he is described s a modernist. His heir , the Spanish L.A., Fernando Caruncho is equally informed by the Classical idiom. Modern architecture, ....originally the outgrowth of a return to chaste and disciplined classical forms in reaction to the florid qualities of romanticism..... was corrupted by the marketplace and this era of cheap oil coming to a close. I do not know why deconstructionism in the arts, aside from being an expression of the chaos of the age is so trendy now. The buildings of Zaha Hadid and Gehry are compelling but too much of it is brutalistic, confusing, impervious to any notions of comfort at a pedestrian scale along the street and always anti-context. Admittedly, being contextual with alot of todays built landscape is like joining a mob of toothless brigands but ..........an urban area should be like a piece of fine music and so some lyrical and narrative qulaity is demanded. Much technological skill goes into these buildings but it is skill in service to chaos, much like the skill of the arms manufacturer. Perhaps this is their context.

Not sure where my mind is today! When I mentioned Richard Strauss, I should have said for the 1940s, CAPRICCIO (composed in 1941). ARABELLA actually was composed in 1932. Just to be correct. The point remains, nevertheless.