I was just at the LA Phil and two Messian piano pieces of birds were the first half. The second was Beethoven's 3rd "Eroica". Second half was much more satisfying and really radical for its day.

I think this just illustrates George's comment that music can create tension and then resolve it. Wagner does the same, he builds and builds and builds then resolves in incredible ways. It took me a long time to appreciate Wagner.

I find new music tends to be aggressive and analytical in the first movement to show what can be done or prove some point. Then the rest seem to relax and carry me thru different stages.

I don't think jazz will be as important tho it's an area unto it's own. Quincy Jones took composing lessons from Nadia Boulanger and invited her to an improvisational jazz concert. He said there were some great changes and shifts in the music and she declined saying that there would also be some awkward moments and she just couldn't allow that to her ear.

Another aspect of this is musical education of composers. I am talking about the preference to teach the 2nd Viennese school of composing as critical theory and previous eras dismissed.

Many composers get out and end up looking back to tonal music and doing amazing things. I'm thinking about John Adams who studied Stockhausen and serial theory, and yet heard jazz, rock and pop coming from the dorms and he played swing in his father's band. He moved to the west coast to get away from that rigid influence of serialism.

I've heard Esa-pekka Salonen interviewed several times and said he had all that atonal theory and tried writing in it. But on conducting Stravinsky he had an epiphany and just loved the tonal music so he changed course. He does use a bit of atonal flavorings, but his work is tonal and wonderfully radical. He is taking off from the Phil and going to compose some bigger works and considering an opera. Hold on to your seats when he does that. Later this month I get to hear his west coast premiere of a piano concerto, I'm looking forward to that. He has a unique sound I like.

Dear Wolf,

Isn't music [with hindsight] always something to bring on philosophical connections! I think we live in times of unprecedented uncertainty, and it seems that the old certainties in music became modern and uncertain, and now that no one accepts the plot at all, post-modern.

This will settle, but a whole new order is going to come in the next generation or perhaps two. No longer shall we assume we can fly across the Atlantic at will, or even assume that we shall run an Internal Combustion Engined Vehicle! The visit to a town 100 miles away will be a once in a lifetime experience for many in the future, I suspect.

But from the inevitable changes that are coming perhaps the great music will survive, and we can once again see a direction to it. I suspect that Nadia Boulanger would have been a better judge than most of us today at picking what is truly significant among this "post modern" music that we have, and what will seem ephemera in fifty or one hundred years [if the human race is still extant in a century].

It is a pleasure to read your words once again. George

Thanks, I certainly enjoy your posts since you've played music and have a keener ear than mine from R&R.

Lots of changes in the future indeed. From what I understand Nadia was probably the most influential person in education anyway of the 20th C. she taught EVERYONE!!!

I told a documentarian about her in Santa Barbara who is French and he thought it interesting, but hasn't done anything in that direction. It's a shame, she must have been a remarkable woman. He has no real knowledge of music and I think the best person would be someone with that insight.

Reminds me when I was in Italy with a study group 13 years ago. Most of the kids were 20 and I was 42. They didn't seem to be impressed by much. We toured the Medici tombs with Michelangelo's sculptures with a passionate Italian teacher. He ended up focusing on a Madonna and child statue. But I couldn't hear much with so many other tours at the same time.

Next day he asked if there were any questions so I asked about the Madonna and child. He went into the most amazing rant about M's involvement with leading thinkers of the day and their questioning science, religion and everything so it was an unsettling time in the Medici court. When he carved teh pair he had her looking left and the child twisting and turning off her knee about to fall instead of a stable triangular shape with Christ child firmly planted facing out. Just a subtle hint at what was going on. This all took 45 minutes of Paulo parading around the stage and really blew the group away. My teacher smiled at me when I got to lunch and said he'd heard I'd asked the $64,000 question. Paulo was something else, ripping the church and state apart.

Unstable times makes for unstable exploration of the arts and some dark thoughts. No one wanted to paint a regular figure after WW2, everything was strange and tormented. Thinking of Dubuffet sp? and other figurative expressionist painters.

quote:

Originally posted by munch:
OMD did a very good album.
Architecture & Morality.

Architecture And Morality, Ted And Alice