Music Banter - View Single Post - Modernism - is demonstration the end of expressionism?
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Old 02-20-2012, 12:58 PM   #4 (permalink)
Rubato
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Ireland
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Pat View Post

How exactly can you make this assumption? What makes you so sure that they are making music purely to be innovative?
I'm not, there's every possibility I'm looking at this from the wrong angle, but from what I have heard trying to get into "avant-garde" I get the impression the artist is more concerned with breaking boundaries than using music as a tool of expression. I'm certainly not the only one who has made this assumption Salzer speaks out against it in the fist chapter of Structural Hearing

"we are constantly groping and experimenting, searching for a new language, a new idom, a new direction of musical thought. In this search for new, however, we somehow do not act as free agents; for instead of letting all creative forces come into play, our generation has entered upon a frantic struggle for originality. From the necessity of finding new means of expression arises a misconception of the new as an end in itself."

"Since he will or will not attain originality according to his own talent, this demand is a tremendous hadicap to him for it tends to force him to be new for the sake of new. This artificial incentive too often kills the last vestiges of spontaneous impulse and creative naivete and has led to creative self-consciousness."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Pat View Post

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.
In the sense he was expressing his views on music I put that under demonstration, probably not the best word for it but I'm not aware of any accepted term. I see at as him demonstrating his experiments rather than actually expressing himself, it's the difference between manipulating music to say something or just putting down a few musical facts.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Pat View Post

I hate to ask, but would you expound on this a bit more?
Tonality isn't a man made construct, it's an observation. If you put down two pitches they will relate to each other, you could say that the tonality is unclear but you can't see it doesn't exist.

"The word 'atonal' could only signify something entirely inconsistent with the nature of tone... to call any relation of tones atonal is just as farfetched as it would be to designate a relation of colors aspectral or acomplementary. There is no such antithesis" A. Schoenberg

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Pat View Post

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.
Then I'd be made to look a right fool. I have no issues with "avant-garde" or "atonal" music per se as you can see by my signature and I have said earlier that any sound (organised or not) has the ability to conjure up images, hence anything can be used as a tool for composition, as Ska pointed out before my issues lie with the composers approach to music.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack Pat View Post

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?
That's fine, it would be hopeless for me to even begin to define art.
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