What are your thoughts?
Arnold Schoenberg, not Arthur.
No politics...Free the Animus!
I prefer not to think about 12 tone music or attend its performance.
12 tone “music” deserves the same amount of respect as those piano “players” who take their solos by plucking the strings instead of using the piano keys.
It’s an academic exercise, not music. And I like some pretty wild 20th century classical like Bartok and Hindemith.
But serialists like Schoenberg, Webern, Berg….unlistenable, imo. With a few exceptions.
Here is my take : people who lack talent and produce nothing of value become academics.
What other method could be used for ‘Concerto for Untuned Piano and Bowling Ball’?
Of course it’s music.
Just not music I like.
Another example is the “singing” of Yoko Ono. Is it singing?
Technically yes, just not singing that I like.
Do you play a musical instrument?
Not music is my vote. Possibly interesting noise. ( to some people, not me) It could just as well be generated by a random number generator converting numbers to harmonic vibrations.
There is no order, no beauty, it evokes no emotions ( except extreme annoyance the couple of times I heard it and a desire to throw something at whatever is making the obnoxious sounds).
I would rather listen to the cement trucks grinding and banging a few streets away in the new housing development, or maybe fingernails on a chalkboard, than listen to that.
Hmmmm! No key, no melody, no harmony and no time signature? I’m sorry but that sounds like either party these days. I didn’t want to to political but........ 😁👍
I just recently learned about and listened to 12-tone music. I don’t like it. There’s a lot of music I don’t like and can admit it is because I don’t understand it. But I don’t like 12-tone and don’t think it is music.
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.
I consider myself to be genre-fluid.
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?”
“It has no Key, no Harmony, no Melody. And no discernible time signature or rhythm.”
Sounds like jazz to me.
