Music Banter - View Single Post - Modernism - is demonstration the end of expressionism?

TockTockTock · 02-20-2012, 11:51 AM

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Originally Posted by Rubato

While this has brought us much innovation it seems to have crippled the expressive nature of music as composers are now attempting to be innovative for the sake of being innovative; the goal of composition seems to have become a need for someone to make a name for them-selves rather than simply to express.

How exactly can you make this assumption? What makes you so sure that they are making music purely to be innovative?

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Any sound has the ability to conjure up images, this is fairly evident and while playing a cactus with a feather may be thinking outside the box, is a demonstration of that the be all and end all of it?

This must be a reference to John Cage... Cage was expressing himself... in a sense he was trying to express his views on sound and music. When he was doing studies in indeterminacy and chance music, he was attempting to elliminate the "self" and "ego" in musical composition. He wasn't doing it to be innovative, he was doing it to express ideas (like many other composers) and try to open people's minds when regarding the definition of music. So really, he was (by expressing his musical philosophy) and wasn't (by trying to eliminate himself from the compositional process entirely) expressing himself, haha.

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To make matters worse the over eagerness for innovation has brought with it some massive misconceptions. When Schoenberg seen the direction music was clearly taking and decided to hop the barrier with his emancipation of dissonance he created quite a stir, out of this we ended up with atonality - a term that makes no sense but somehow managed to become standardized through much use before anyone could argue the concept.

I hate to ask, but would you expound on this a bit more?

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If music was heading in a direction where all relationships from each note to each other was to become easily understood why force it? would the best method not have been to just let it come about naturally?

Sometimes, yes, the best way would be to allow it to come out naturally, but what if what comes out naturally ends up being something atonal or avant-garde? When Don Van Vliet was composing the material for his magnum opus, Trout Mask Replica (1969), he was letting it flow naturally. Essentially, what he did was sit at a piano (an instrument he did not know how to play) and play parts of music that he wanted incorporated into his songs (with John French writing it down on sheet music). The same goes for those in free improvisation such as Derek Bailey, Kaoru Abe, and AMM.

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Surely the point of art is to minimize subjectivity so you can get your point across (in my view anyway).

What? No, of course not. Well, I mean... not always. Art is often meant to challenge the observer and make him or her think. If this wasn't the case, then why did Dadaism and the works associated with it exist?