Dave Lampson to Edson Tadeu Ortolan:

>>Debussy researched new sonorities and he is a pioneer at
>>end-19th/begin-20th centuries.  His music is significative in the
>>History of Western Music.
>
>Easy to write, easy to believe, harder to prove.

Why is it harder to prove?.  One may read this on books, but one can also
prove it easily just listening.  The fact that he researched new sonorities
is evident when one listen to his orchestration or his use of the timbric
resources of the piano, and compare this with the music of some of his
contemporaries.  Of course, he was not the only one:  by the same time
(more or less), Alois Haba was making much more "radical" experiments, but
one may say that Debussy reached better results...  The fact that his work
was significative in the History of Western Music hardly needs an evidence:
the "historic importance" given to anything is mainly a matter of
agreement.  However, the written testimony of the subsequent composers
is there to proof it.

>>The New Age Music is a mix of (...):
>>b) non-tensioned, tenuous harmony (modal scales, non-conclusive candences,
>>repetitions etc.)
>
>Seems to apply to 80% of the music written this century.

If you mean "this" century, that may be true (actually, who can "scan"
all the music written in the past two years?).  However, the New Age music
was born in the past century, and I suppose that the distinction was a
bit (just a bit) more clear then than today.  I mean:  applied to the XX
century that percentage is too much, if one reminds that perhaps the entire
music of Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Webern, Berg, Stockhausen,
Schaeffer, Boulez, Lutoslawski and Ligeti doesn't has any of these
characteristics, and the music of Strawinsky, Varese, Bartok, Ives, Kodaly,
Messiaen, Feldman and Cage has *some* of these characteristics in *some*
works.  Instead, much of "New Age" music shares (or shared) *very often*
these characteristics.  Of course, this is not enough for tracing a clear
distinction.

>>c) minimalist repetitions
>
>You mean like Reich, Glass, Young, Riley, Adams, Monk, Nyman, Andriessen,
>Part, ....

In fact, there are some people who thinks that Nyman, Glass and Part
should be catalogued as "New Age" composers.  I don't know exactly why,
but I heard often that it's because some "minimalist" works of Glass,
Nyman and Part are considered too "easy" to listen.  They use the
minimalist technique, but they reduce the process of "minimal variation"
to just 20 or 30 minutes, a "reasonable" duration, i.e:  a "concession to
the comfort of the listener".  Supposedly, the process of minimal variation
should be used "till its last consequences", which often gives as a result
works of 3 hours of duration.  Some people find suspicious the fact that
Part finds his "last consequences" always before the half hour, which leads
to this people to say that he employs a "reduced" version of minimalism, or
a "minimalism apt for fools".  All that is stupid, of course, but shows how
the line between "Contemporary classical" and "New Age" is traced often:
if it's "easy to hear for the middle listener", then it's "New Age".

>>This music is a NOTHING MUSICAL because it is a dilution of the avant-gard
>>conquests.
>
>Now we've hit on the root of this description.  One could just as easily
>make the counter claim that new age composers elevated the music above
>the artifice, methods, and techniques that so infatuate the avant garde.
>
>But does such political slogan-slinging really raise the level of
discourse?

Of course it will, if you and Edson gives detailed arguments for both
statements.  This is a great subject for a thread, and I would like to read
those arguments.

Pablo Massa
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