Achim Breiling wrote:

>>What do they expect a contemporary or 20th century composer (as I have the
>>impression they like to mix all this music together as atonal) to compose?
>>Still in the classical style of Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven? Or, as
>>evertything that is musically possible in Mrs. Wangs and Mr.Heersinks
>>opinion apparently has been said composer should maybe just stop to write
>>music? Music as all other creative art develops.  Artists do not want to
>>repeat themselves, thus each of them is looking for new approaches.
>>action."

Bill Pirkle writes:

>My only complaint is that it is somehow obliged to evolve, especially
>past the point of becoming music in a traditional sense, and somehow that
>writing in traditional styles is forbidden as if the composer is taking a
>step backwards.  Even today's artists can and do paint traditionally.  If
>a painter gives an exhibition displaying painting in a traditional form it
>OK but if a composer wrote a set of Baroque Prelude and Fugues or two part
>inventions, etc he might be accused of not being very creative.

But there is still a good deal of twentieth century music which is
basically conservative and yet IMHO is not simply a rerun.  One example
is Franz Schmidt's Fourth Symphony, written in the late thirties.  To
my ears it is a powerful symphony which does not simply replicate the
late nineteenth century,although the style seems to partake little of
the twentieth.  Nonetheless I don't think thst it could have been written
forty or so years earlier.  Rachmaninoff extended the Tchiakovsky idiom
creatively.  If you liked the Warsaw, you should be in heaven with
Rachmaninoff.  Richard Strauss wrote some great stuff in his last years
after WW 2 - the Four Last Songs, the oboe concerto, metamorphosen among
them.  They are as far from avant garde as you can imagine.  Vaughn
Williams used modes, yet is very solidly of this century.  Going back to
Pirkles example of Preludes and Fugues, Shostakovich did it, but did it
in the manner of a twentieth century composer named Shostakovich.  Do
you really need a rerun of JSB perfection? That is there for the taking
already!!  It is a fascinating feature of contemporary music that older
and newer styles can coexist, although as Stirling points out the "newer"
styles most in use have been around a while.

>As I have said on other posts, Hollywood writes the closest thing to
>classical music for movie scores. Its amazing how your thinking changes when
>you have to make a profit and are not funded by the National Endowment for
>the Arts.

Much of film music is hollow ponderous derivative and, worst of all,
manipulative.  John Williams is a fine film composer, but does anyone
take him seriously as a classical composer?

Bernard Chasan