Peter Varley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>However, it does irritate me when I see atonal music being described as
>"advanced", with the obvious implication that anyone who prefers tonal
>music is retarded.  There probably weren't really any more bad composers
>in the mid- 20th century than at any other time, but it seems like there
>were, because they had rather a neat trick which got their music performed
>- if the audience didn't like the music, it was because the music was too
>"advanced" ...
>
>Even so, I'd be wary of dismissing it as noise.  There's plenty of music
>outside the CM tradition - according to my dictionary, anything musicians
>play is music.  It's difficult to see how something without rhythm, melody,
>counterpoint or symphonic development (for some reason, Berio Sequenzas
>spring to mind) can be thought of as part of the same tradition as
>Beethoven and Sibelius, but even so, however unpleasant it is, it's still
>music.

The goal in using expressions like advanced is to give an aesthetic a
moral force...  who wouldn't immediately assume that advanced is better
than backward, after all? Totally dishonest for such reactionary music (&
this is reactionary rather than truly radical music; with an aesthetics
based on a rejection of fully fledged Romanticism), of course; but art &
honesty seldom go together well.

Mind you:  i've always had an affection for any art which really gets in
people's faces; & have no problem in describing some extreme modernist
music as noise...  i'm listening to one of the classics of this form right
now:  De Natura Sonoris no.2 by the harcore legend Mick Foley...  i mean:
Krzysztof Penderecki.  Even though Antoni Wit in the stunning new Naxos
recording (8.554491) accentuates the romantic in the three hardcore
classics (Sonoris no.2; Threnody & Flourescences) to the point where the
apparent discontinuities between the modernist Penderecki of the 60s & the
craggy neoRomantic of the 70s & 80s rather vanish; the score is still
basically a study in the power of massed noise (or sound; if you consider
the word noise to have too many negative connotations).  As such, this
unreconstructed punk considers De Natura Sonoris no.2 right up there with
the Sex Pistols's God Save the Queen....

(By the way:  the Penderecki set unfolding on Naxos is extremely exciting;
& is strongly recommended for anyone interested in the composer...  &
doubly so for Penderecki skeptics who are prepared to give Penderecki
one last try.  Wit structures these often apparently formless scores very
persuasively; & gains real power from his ability to achieve dramatic
contrast in works most commonly derided as unrelieved.  It's hard to
believe that one could seriosuly suggest that composer-helmed recordings
could be superceded - even by a student of Penderecki, which Wit is - but
in this case, i think this has happened...  the old EMI/Matrix recordings
simply aren't competitive with the budget upstart.  Mind you, Wit is
probably the only musicain around who's interpretations i actively seek
out nowadays...  he does such suprising things within the postRomantic
repetroire...)

All the best,
Robert Clements <[log in to unmask]>