Okay so basically… Yeah. This is really cool. I used to not understand Atonal music, but this just… works. It makes sense. It forms a complete picture. It’s sort of like staring at a Pollock for hours and suddenly the picture just falls into place. It works. It just works.
I dunno what there is to discuss here. I just kinda wanted to share that I really like this piece. I think I’m developing a soft spot for well-composed atonal music. Also, accepting that that’s not an oxymoron. That’s weird.
BTW, I don’t find most of these movements to be atonal. (I’ve never heard this piece before, but on first listen, I’m really enjoying it.) It seems to go in and out of tonality.
I chime in as well: This is not atonal. Every part I listened to, anyway (I skipped around, no time for the whole thing), had a clear tonal center, with resolving chord progressions and everything.
But don’t let that ruin it for you. I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I’ve been a fan of Messiaen’s music since I was in high school (when Messiaen was alive and writing - he died in the early nineties).
*Turangalila *isn’t atonal (although Messiaen did write serial music).
Turangalila is wonderful, but check out his smaller-scale works. Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, for solo piano, is one of my favorites. For truly huge works, there’s La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ, which is performed by a choir, an orchestra and a bunch of solists. You’ll notice a theme here – Messiaen was very Catholic, and a lot of his music was inspired by his faith.
About midpoint in his composing life, he started to be inspired by birdsong, and wrote a bunch of lovely music. For example, Catalogue d’oiseaux.
Hmmmm, I went through a big Messiaen phase 3-4 years ago but I don’t really care much for his music anymore.
I still listen to the Turangalila-Symphonie from time to time but apart from that, the only piece that I like is Concert à quatre for piano, cello, oboe, flute and orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocztL5Kso_M). *Des Canyons aux Etoiles… * is also worth a listen although it’s more uneven and extremely long (100+ minutes).
As far as French composers after Ravel are concerned, I clearly prefer Dutilleux.
Maaaan I don’t know Atonal music to save my life. Although in retrospect it does sound more like a logical extension of the kinds of themes explored in Le Sacre Du Printemps or L’Ouiseau de Feu than anything truly atonal.
(On a side note: I am very very okay with Stravinsky. Like, I’d have his babies.)
(Or…is this where Futurama got the name in the first place?)
Anyway, I tried listening for a couple of minutes, but bounced. This isn’t “music” as far as I can tell, but random notes. (I don’t like Jackson Pollack either.)
Just the other day, I was listening (with no joy) to some George Crumb. Sam problem: it’s too random. I can’t discern the structure. There’s nothing I can recognize as melody.
There’s clearly a question of personal taste, but I think that it’s a taste that can, and it most case is acquired. It has all to with expectations. If you’re looking for 19th century-style melodies, well, yeah, a lot of modern classical music isn’t going to deliver. Neither is Perotin, or even Beethoven at times.
Modern composers have their own vocabulary and it takes a bit of listening to get used to the language and pick out the structure. A lot if people don’t get jazz for the same reason.
That being said, there are plenty of recognizable melodies in Turangalila-symphonie, for instance, the finale is eminently hummable: http://youtu.be/8PjyCpRKDrk
Son of a gun: the Futurama character is named for the piece of music!
I’m sure you’re right, and “expectations” is the key in another sense. When one is familiar with a genre of music, one can “predict” the next note. I can hear a progression, and have a strong sense of what I’m about to hear.
With a new or unfamiliar genre, I don’t have the training to know what to expect, and so I feel at a loss, and unsatisfied.
(By this reasoning, I would probably never be happy with truly random music – computer generated random tones or chords – because I could never learn to predict what I’ll hear next.)
Another comforting thing is that there are “blends” of genres, such as the classical/jazz mixture of the Claude Bolling suites. He was my “gateway drug” to real jazz.
Exactly. Even trying to predict the next note is a kind of expectation. There are plenty of musical genres that don’t even have notes! I like both Chopin and Autechre but I have to put myself in a very different state of mind when listening to either.
I like that you mentioned gateways because, I very much needed one to get into Modern Classical music. For a long time I just didn’t get it and certainly didn’t enjoy it. My particular progression went like this:
The gateway was Takemitsu, and to a lesser extent Messiaen, because they bridged Modernist aesthetics with French Impressionism that I loved. From then on, once I learned to listen for shapes and colours rather than melodies and rhythms, I could move on to more “challenging” composers like Ligeti, and then serialists like Boulez.
Just an interjection: this is the same thing I’ve written about various types of heavy metal music. It can take some time to become educated about the structure, voicings, tone, etc. of certain genres of metal. It takes familiarity through exposure before most people can appreciate CMVs and blast beats and atonal riffing, etc. But once you are educated and familiar, whooo boy there’s a whole shitload of great music waiting for you.
Same for jazz, especially, IMO.
In fact, some day I’ll make the case here on the Dope for my belief that much of what is called punk rock is really jazz.
Anyway, just agreeing with y’all and offering up another example of the what y’all were talking about.
Bo - it’s pretty clear you like music where rules are broken, and atonality is just one dimension of rule that can be swept aside.
I totally get and respect the exploration, but rarely listen to stuff that gets too far out in any dimension.
A worthy thread unto itself that we have explored a variety of ways on the SDMB: What defines music and separates it from noise? Or lack of / only incidental noise, in the case of 4’33"
Would a “Sokal hoax” approach work? Could a work be composed by computer, clearly not a work of “creative art” in any way, which would deceive a subset of listeners into giving their admiration? A sort of Turing test.
This has happened, if memory serves, with abstract painting, in more than one way. Not only have people put cans of paint in front of canvases and shot them with guns, but, also, computer programs exist that can turn out neo-Mondrian compositions that no non-Mondrian expert can tell apart from at least some of Mondrian’s paintings. Also, computer programs have churned out some remarkable poetry, very difficult, in some cases, to distinguish from some of the abstract poetry one can find in actual publication.
This isn’t a sure-fire way of saying the resulting work is “bad.” Computer generalizations of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” exist, and the music is actually quite good. More than anything, it’s an indication of the sheer power of computing.
That would miss the point. There is a composer by the name of David Cope who has been developing AI music composition systems for many years. By now, his programs are quite good at imitating the style of many famous composers, and I’m sure they’d fool many if not most people. Judge for yourself: AI Vivaldi AI Bach AI Beethoven AI Mahler
On one hand there are machines producing music that is virtually indistinguishable from human output. On the other hand, there are composers like John Cage, or Tom Johnson who took extreme means to try to erase the human presence from their music. A lot of Cage’s music is literally random structures and Johnson’s music is entirely relatively simple mathematical patterns mapped to notes. I’m sure if I gave a random person a sample of that pseudo-Mahler above and a sample of Tom Johnson and asked them to guess which one was composed by a machine, they’d pick the later.
The key point, I think is intent. It’s one thing that even the most complex AI systems lack. Cope’s EMI program, or IBM’s Watson may do incredible things but they only do what they’re taught and instructed. Cope uses AI, Cage used the I-Ching, and Johnson Fibonacci series to remove themselves from the actual process of composing music. However, what they did is still music because they are the source of intent. They decided they were going to make music and merely delegated some of the decisions.
You can look at it the same way from a listener’s perspective. If you listen to the fake Bach chorale above without knowing what it is and are moved, have you been fooled? No. Your feelings are genuine. You listened to something with a certain intent and that’s what makes the experience musical, regardless of whether a human was involved. That’s one of the points that 3’44’’ tries to get across.
Any attempt at defining music by a set of attributes is bound to fail. You invariably end up with people arguing that atonal music isn’t music, or rap isn’t music, or polka isn’t music or adult contemporary is music or other such nonsense. We all have our expectations and when something doesn’t meet them it’s easy to dismiss it but then you’re talking more about yourself than about the nature of music. There’s no real opposition between noise and music. Noise IS music.
Whenever someone believes that something is music, then to them at least, that thing is music.
Like in Pollack, there actually are themes and patterns in this music. Wikipedia actually enumarates and notates four of them. I think that’s part of the reason why the OP likes this (and says almost as much): it’s a good bit outside the standard melodies and harmonies of pre-1920 (or so) music, but maintains a sense of structure and general tonality, so it’s not completely “out there” and inaccessible. Now, whether you can hear or appreciate the structure and patterns will depend a lot on your musical experience, and perhaps your personality. To me–I know this is going to sound weird–but a lot of my appreciation for jazz and contemporary classical like this came from watching Tom & Jerry cartoons. There were some pretty weird, far-out scores, and those kind of prepped me musically for this type of music.
That makes perfect sense. True story: I attended a piano recital featuring Dvorak’s works. The woman I attended with commented that she didn’t particularly like or get Dvorak. I said “just imagine Bugs Bunny getting chased down the stairs.” A few minutes into one piece, she gave me this big elbow and a smile.
Again, I respect the right of artists to frame their art from the ideas out. So organized noise - or a lack thereof - can be a form of music. But I don’t care to spend much time in that part of the musical space.
To me, Music is a happy byproduct of our evolution. We evolved the ability to listen and for pattern recognition in horizontal sound (in music terms, Melody), vertical(Harmony) and percussive (rhythm). Music “tickles our instincts” by using those evolutionary capabilities to fire off our neurons.
I have no neurological training, so leave me be with my little fantasy, okay?
I’m glad you enjoyed it.
