Posted on 04/02/2023 12:40:00 PM PDT by Mariner
Asking the question: Is twelve tone technique even music?
12-tone was originally "invented" by Arthur Schoenberg at the beginning of the 20th century and was later applied by multiple 20th century composers from Berg to Charlie Parker.
It became especially popular with Jazz musicians in the 40s, 50s and 60s, often integral to Be Bop.
It has no Key, no Harmony, no Melody.
And no discernible time signature or rhythm.
“I listened to 12-tone in college. I consider it music. But like Springsteen and most country music, I can’t stand it. “
What of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker doing Be Bop with 12 tone?
I’ve had several Jazz fans tell me it is genius.
I think it’s crap.
Some of them are called harpsichord players. đ
Atonal music political chaos mass suicide.
Is that what we want?
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/148b245e-d148-44b8-881a-43f6c134a7cf
Bebop? I hear no twelve-tone in stuff like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts”.
I find most “classical” music composed since Dmitri Shostakovich to be unlistenable, and the same goes for most post-WWII jazz and just about all pop music that came out after 1980. The only decent music being composed today is movie music.
Where do albums like Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Time Out” land on that list?
I consider myself to be genre-fluid.
“Where do albums like Miles Davisâ âKind of Blueâ and the Dave Brubeck Quartetâs âTime Outâ land on that list?”
That’s pinnacle Cool Jazz.
And not 12 tone.
Zimmerli: Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in G Major, second movement (Andante)
This movement features some of the piano playing by plucking the keys over a glass rod. At the premier in Seattle in 2006, the audience gasped at the effect.
I was part of a commissioning club that commissioned this work for the Seattle Chamber Music Society's summer festival. Patrick Zimmerli is best known for his jazz works.
Schoenberg thought of himself as the new Bach. A piece that could be used in reply is the Gavotte II of Bach's English Suite in D Minor. It is quite obviously based on the idea of a peasant bagpipe. Relevant in this regard, whether or not literally true, is Kurt Sach's observation that because of Roundhead suppression of peasant culture during the English Civil war, without the deep cultural loam of an active folk music practice among the peasantry, the desertification of culture filtered upwards, so that, a literal fact, between the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 and the rise of Sir Edward Elgar in 1898, there was a greater than 200 year gap in native English born fine art ("classical") composers, Thomas Arne ("Hail Britannia") and Charles Avison (orchestral arrangements of Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord works) notwithstanding.
While the proposition is subject to endless debates pro and con, the principle that there must be an interrelation, a circulation up, down and between folk, urban popular, progressive-popular and art ("classical") music remains a valid organizing principle.
My studies reveal that there is a hidden cultural mother-lode more than a century old, prior to the influences that revealed themselves with the rise of twelve-tone technique: In the decade prior to the First World War, there were ten sheet music releases per year with more than 1 million sheet music sales per year. There were 300 piano brands in the U.S. alone. In 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' the family is so poor the children's growth is stunted, yet they have a piano and can play a few pieces on it, instructed by equally poor piano teachers for whom they barter precious food. The real life example is an American Catholic Bishop, Rembert Weakland, whose father died in his childhood and whose family were desperately poor, yet he had access to a piano.
A vignette from a Sommerset Maugham story, about a Church of England baptismal registration official, a Bursar, who is discharged from service because of illiteracy, who becomes the owner of 20 tobacconist shops, shows the effect: In the clip, the man bypasses an engagement party of young people singing popular songs in the parlor, played by one of the buyers of those 10, million sellers of sheet music.
There's a party going on in that parlor. It was the entertainment life of people who had no radio or sound cinema, but who had a fabulous time entertaining themselves and their music partners. Virtually everyone who, today, would be described as liking music, would have expressed that enthusiasm, by directly singing the music themselves. If You Wanted Music, Before the Development of Radio in 1923 (though most families didn't have a radio even by the start of the Second World War, even as most people didn't have a television even ten years later), You Had to Make It Yourself.
Twelve-Tone Technique was the necrosis in art ("classical") music as the mechanization of culture overtook what had been only a precious few years prior the active practice of culture on a popular level.
Jazz, it has been theorized, having conveyed the impressionistic tonality through the music of Irving Berlin (a disputable proposition), is still, certainly a hybrid, conveying the vibrancy of African music through the externals of the dying European art music. But today, it's a surprise to Jazz enthusiasts to find that young people are turning away from Jazz. However, there is a world of progressive popular music beyond the dying bounds of Europe and its cultural colonies.
(Jeez!)
My point.
Good point. Handel and Mendelssohn were not British, even though they had a great influence on British music at the time.
Hmm, interesting.
Since I had no idea what 12-tone music is, I checked it out on YT. A song called Mr Brightside seemed to be the thing, so I listened to it.
It sounds like all the stuff my 20-something children listen to: loud, fuzzy, unmusical, and accompanied by loud drums and loud singing.
Is all that music 12-tone?
Sincerely,
And old fuddy-duddy who quit listening to music on the radio in the early 80s because it was Just. So. Bad.
I graduated college with a BA in music composition. I couldn’t touch a piano for a year after because of what they did to me. What I learned (NOT WHAT I WENT TO COLLEGE FOR) is the there are 2 kinds of music:
1. Commercial music: (pop-ular, tunes, songs, classical, folk, etc.) in other words music for listening to. College hid from me that they were exclusive to the other kind of music. This kind was verboten scholastically and defamed socially.
2. Art music or intellectual music: (avant-garde, 12 tone, etc.) in other words music NOT for listening to. Instead it it digested visually as only a savant could recognize random patterns audibly.
Thoughts on the purpose of music - listening to or looking at - go back to antiquity. There was Dionysian music after the god Dionysus which focused on pleasure. This was in opposition to Apollonian music which was focused on logic.
So there you go, you don’t have to go to college. Thank me. 12 tone music is intellectual logic based music for looking at, not enjoyable to the common public. It usually appeals to intellectuals who resent tradition and humanity - my college music professors (because musicians are notoriously jealous of the success of others, even if they’re dead composers.)
I’m ranting now. Really, I find progressive, anti-human music like this humiliating and insulting to listen to and consider it to be part of or at least contributing to an anti-human agenda. Imagine walking into a room with the portrait of Dorian Gray in it and asking yourself, “Why would someone make something so ugly?”
Is your proposition that once western music became popular with the masses, and their zeal to replicate it locally with little formal training...it was corrupted, with the ultimate poison being 12 tone?
Maybe a sociologist would see it that way.
Spot on.
I think Richard Wagner sucked all the remaining air out of the room with his Ring Cycle. All the pretty notes in world history were finally used up and the only way for a 20th century composer to find the sense of worth or importance was to start using the ugly notes.
The Ring cycle or “Tristan”?
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