Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Music or confusion!@#%?

Music or confusion?
Sitting in the class these past few weeks have been very interesting to my ears. I haven't really listened to much 'avant-garde' music in years. I remember when I was an undergraduate student in NC listening to composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Weber and really wondering what was happening to music??!! It was really different to my ears back then. Having grown up in a rural area, I was exposed to basically pop music, some country, and bluegrass. When I entered college my 'classical' exposure to music was greatly enhanced. And then I heard Schoenberg. Oh my goodness...what happened?! After being exposed to that music for a bit, then along came Cage. I remember listening to it with amusement, wondering what had happened. It was totally different from what I had listened to in the past. My inexperienced mind (and ears) couldn't quite comprehend it all. Being the introvert that I was back then, I kept quiet about it. After all, I was "from the hills!" :)Years later I have come to be more tolerant and willing to listen to different (or as our class indicates...innovative) music. Some of it can be quite challenging to listen to. Some of it I would even question whether to classify it as music or as experiments with sound. Back in high school I took an electronic music class. This was the time when synthesizers did not have labels such as "piano, bass, strings, etc." The synthesizers looked more like small scientific instruments with the labels "sine wave, algorhithm, frequency, etc." We also experimented with taped sounds, loops....very different from the Yahama DX7 synthesizers (I'm showing my age here). Anyway, I knew about experimenting with sounds. But did it make it music? I would say that during that particular class I was more of a noise maker (or creator) than that of an innovative music maker. I was really just in the stage of just trying to figure out different things. So I suppose that's what a lot of composers are doing, especially the experimenters whose 'musical' creations are just trying to expand the bounds of music and sound. I've been intrigued by their process, and with their thinking.So I suppose my whole purpose of writing this blog is to think aloud why/how some 'innovative' composers' musics sound like music and some composers' musics sound like 'sound.' It does help me to hear/read what the composer has to say about his/her piece of music. That bit of insight does help in the digesting and, hopefully, in the appreciation of his/her work. Knowing about the music and the composer's intent really helps me to understand what he/she is accomplishing. I may not love it, but at least I understand it better.

1 comment:

  1. Doug, I really like your thoughts on musical experimenters. It seems like music hit sort of a funny crossroads in the twentieth century between art and science. Many composers were thinking like scientists, working through many, many experiments in carefully controlled environments, and just like scientists, most of them had several "misses" for each "hit." However, the artistic community (and possibly the "artistic" side of these composers' psyches) insisted that, as these were the masters of their craft, everything they produced had to be put on a pedestal and worshipped as high art. (The total serialist works of Boulez come to mind here, for some reason. Despite everything I've learned, I still believe that the purpose behind total serialism was to try to unlock some sort of code, possibly revealing the location of the Holy Grail...call it a hunch :) )

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that even if a piece of music fails to strike me as "good" or "worthwhile" (and believe me, plenty of twentieth-century music fits into this category for me), I can still find value in it as a stepping stone that ultimately is leading the musical world toward other breakthroughs, just like a "failed" scientific experiment.

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