Posted on 11/30/2010 1:33:53 PM PST by mojito
A full century after Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern unleashed their harsh chords on the world, modern classical music remains an unattractive proposition for many concertgoers. Last season at the New York Philharmonic, several dozen people walked out of a performance of Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra; about the same number exited Carnegie Hall before the Vienna Philharmonic struck up Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra.
The mildest 20th-century fare can cause audible gnashing of teeth. Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings is a more or less fully tonal score, yet in 2009 at Lincoln Centre, it failed to please a gentleman sitting behind me. When someone let out a "Bravo!" elsewhere in the hall, he growled: "I bet that was a plant." I resisted the temptation to swat him with my pocket score.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Hundreds of years hence, people will still listen to songs by the Beatles, just as some today still listen to songs by John Dowland, Schubert, and the Tin Pan Alley gang.
Thankfully, "academic music" is finally dying off.
Great "classical" music is possible. Some late 20th century pieces worth taking a gander at include Keith Emerson's Piano Concerto, the Piano Sonatas of Norman Dello Joio, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qse7P-hltM&feature=related from 5:04 on is pure joy with a bit of jazzy edge for contrast)
Chick Corea's Piano Concerto is a jazzy, copelandesque romp.
Arvo Pärt? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su4gGRcfKSk&feature=related
Morten Lauridsen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhfrG_AsbxQ&feature=related
It could be frankie, it could be a balloon, it could be very fresh and clean....
Yanni and Arkenstone, both very solid choices...I’ll add Jarre to that.
It's still around but I think we live in an age that just doesn't value it. And it's principle practitioners now produce dramatic movie scores rather than concert pieces. Living in Malibu and working for George Lucas beats being assistant professor of music at Podunk State. Way beats!
Why do we hate modern classical music?
Modern music, classical? How does that work? I thought classics have withstode the test of time.
Walk into any music academy anywhere and ask students and teachers who are the greatest composers of all times. I’d bet that not one will mention a modern composer.
Today’s classical music brings images to my mind of those elephants or monkeys who paint pictures and the world of art calls the results meaningful and important. And some of these paintings actually hang in modern art museums.
Jeez, give me a break!!!!!
For a mom with 3 young daughters, that piece is music to my ears!
I’ve performed quite a bit of modern classical music, both as a soloist and ensemble singer. There’s some that is really good and some that is really bad and some that is really mediocre. It takes time for the cream to rise to the top. What has been fun is being a part of it - helping to present something in its infancy. For every Mozart or Beethovan or Bach there were dozens of lousy composers who faded into history.
It would be nice if, as a musician, I could spell Beethoven. Yikes.
Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D Minor
Great!
Thanks
What are your favorite Schoenberg compositions? :)
I have always considered "modern classical music" to better resemble "modern classical noise."
Of course there was wretched music in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
But the primary difference between then and now is that no one pretended that the wretched stuff had even a morsel of value.
Today's classical music, which sounds like a cross between cats screeching and one hundred fingernails scraped across a blackboard, would have never been played in the classical equivalent of Carnegie Hall. It would have languished in the basement in which it was composed, or perhaps the local speakeasy. Never would it have received an publicity, or have idiot reviewers claiming it to be "bold!" or "dramatic!" or other such B.S.
If only Mapplethorpe could write music. ;)
Absolutely. See the movie Amadeus.
Holst’s The Planets is too ‘modern’? It’s downright old fashioned.
Most of the influential composers of the 20th century -- including ones that the intelligentsia has dubbed "important" -- worked in film scores. Copland's work for the film version of "Our Town" is among his best. Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Ralph Vaugan Wiliams, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Edward "Duke" Ellington all wrote film scores.
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