Sonority

[Ed C]

Stockhausen has always been a deterrent for me because I'm generally wary of anything avant-garde, though these days I suspect he wouldn't be so considered.

Nah - he's still pretty crazy! But I find him extremely interesting, much more so than most of the avant-garde crowd. The thing about KS is he's not just interested in "concepts" (looking at you 4'33'') but in new sonorities. Some of his ideas have hit modern film music, but I have a feeling it was more of a reinventing the wheel kind of thing. Ex: Matrix soundtrack has that swelling brass fanfare - same thing in Stockhausen's "Gruppen" from the 50s.

However - and here's my acid-test - could a live performance of a piece be stuck into a Saturday Night Live comedy skit without modification and work (at being funny)? If it would come off as ridiculous - well then it probably is ridiculous. In general, KS's work wouldn't be that funny.
However...(sideways glance at 4'33'')

The helicopter string quartet is a bit...wacky - but the music is exquisite IMHO. Sure, there's a bit of "we need a good tag line for the press release" strategy there.

[jamesofedinburgh]

Nah - he's still pretty crazy! But I find him extremely interesting, much more so than most of the avant-garde crowd. The thing about KS is he's not just interested in "concepts" (looking at you 4'33'') but in new sonorities. Some of his ideas have hit modern film music, but I have a feeling it was more of a reinventing the wheel kind of thing. Ex: Matrix soundtrack has that swelling brass fanfare - same thing in Stockhausen's "Gruppen" from the 50s.

However - and here's my acid-test - could a live performance of a piece be stuck into a Saturday Night Live comedy skit without modification and work (at being funny)? If it would come off as ridiculous - well then it probably is ridiculous. In general, KS's work wouldn't be that funny.
However...(sideways glance at 4'33'')

The helicopter string quartet is a bit...wacky - but the music is exquisite IMHO. Sure, there's a bit of "we need a good tag line for the press release" strategy there.

Ah, you replied yourself about Stockhausen - sorry if I was presumptuous in doing so

[jamesofedinburgh]

Ex: Matrix soundtrack has that swelling brass fanfare - same thing in Stockhausen's "Gruppen" from the 50s.

That's one I know of, but I do not know. Can you let me know where I'd hear the brass fanfare in Gruppen please? Then I can download the appropriate part from Amazon (unless it's a one movement work). I liked The Matrix a lot and the soundtrack made, I thought, a good match with the action.

[Ed C]

That's one I know of, but I do not know. Can you let me know where I'd hear the brass fanfare in Gruppen please? Then I can download the appropriate part from Amazon (unless it's a one movement work). I liked The Matrix a lot and the soundtrack made, I thought, a good match with the action.

Stockhausen "Gruppen" Matrix part at 6:40, but start it earlier for full impact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4QwA6MuhSY

Matrix / Stockhausen-ey swelling brass sonority at 3:36, but pretty much all over. It's kind of a Matrix "leitmotif".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1v207xlOw

Other parts of Gruppen can be reflected in Matrix cue "Unable to speak"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4QwA6MuhSY

I do LOVE the Matrix scores tho and think they are an achievement in film music. Don Davis is the composer and despite what I said earlier I'm sure he's heard Stockhausen, tho I've only heard him admit to "stealing" from Mahler for the Matrix score.

[jamesofedinburgh]

Thank you, I will check those links out tomorrow.

[Bonn1827]

Yes, "JoE", at what point does a composition simply become an academic exercise? You raise an interesting issue, remembering Bach's "musical point" with the "48" - never less than profoundly musical!! But I think that last ingredient - musicality - seems to have become lost more recently. In light of post-modernism in both literature and painting, music has naturally taken the ball and run with it to the extent we have today.

But at a certain point audiences will play catch up with much of it. At the recent concert here with the Berliner Philharmoniker/Rattle they played Berg's "Three Pieces for Orchestra". The orchestra itself was augmented and the platform was standing-room only. One could see restive audience members because it was Berg, but I was (sitting virtually on top of a timpanist at the back of the orchestra, in the 'choir' section) simply amazed by the sound of that orchestra producing that work. Fabulous playing, which conferred the piece a level of musicality and dignity I didn't think it had (having seldom experienced Berg). I'm keen to hear more now, though I know I'm dragging the chain since this music is decades old, and so last-century!! But when I looked at a music-stand from my proximity to it I could see clearly written, "Berliner Philharmoniker" and "Rattle material". This was a buzz!!! Clearly he's moving the orchestra in a new direction. They also played a new composition by Australian Brett Deans, and this started with 3 timpanists shaking aluminium foil (at which point the audience quietly laughed - they were Australians!!!). What amazed me was the level of musicality of that conductor and orchestra that they could strike a beat at the start of the piece when there didn't appear to be one. I looked over a saw the foot tapping of a tall, young timpanist and I found this compellingly touching and it gave me a flash of insight into musicianship at the very highest level.

Thanks for your insights into KS and I agree with your comments about Debussy and Ravel, whose music I absolutely adore. CD and his sonorities, thanks to technological developments in the piano and "Impressionism".

As a closing anecdote, when I was in 3rd year Musicology one of the staff played a composition of hers called "Views of the Dead Sea". It was as you describe: plink, plonk, plunk. I said to one of my fellow (mature-age) students just before she played it: "Don't you dare look at me Ian, for I know we will both start laughing". We didn't and remained serious and respectful. However, when she left the room I got up to the piano and started to play wildly random notes, which sounded just as good as the work she had produced. When I finished I said I called the piece "De Pussy" because the random notes I had selected in its composition were a consequence of the cat walking across my keyboard on the piano at home.
(Lies, lies, lies!)

[Bonn1827]

You have made me very sad, relating that anecdote from the BBC3 interview about the present state of art music for professional musicians. Very depressing, if true.

Your comments, more generally, on composition: again, when I was still an undergraduate in Musicology I befriended a modernist "composer" contracted by the music department specificially for lectures on music post-1950 - and I still remember fondly our very long conversations about music (and my challenges to his comments during a particular lecture!). He bragged to me that he'd had "no musical training" and that his experience had been "working in a record shop in London"!!! His "pieces" (for piano) were played at the Contemporary Music Festival that year in Sydney, and sometimes on our national FM "classical" radio station. I was, and remain, skeptical since he seems to have disappeared from the musical horizon.

I get the feeling, with modernist music, that "sonority" for its own sake is more important than anything else!