Steven Schwartz <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>Leighton Gill rides his particular hobby horses at full gallop:

The clomping of any hobby horse would be far more melifluous than any work
of Stockhausen's I've come across.

>What's so simple about writing a string quartet?

Who said it was simple?

>By the way, what about string quartets with the addition of voice or
>some obbligato instrument? Are those theatrical gimmicks as well?

Of course not.  The most obvious answer is that, say, a clarinet quintet
has the addition of a clarinet, which is a musical instrument, whereas a
helicopter is not.  Of course, there is more to it than that.  I am
assuming that when Mozart, for example, wrote his Clarinet Quintet, he
heard the piece in those terms in his mind's ear, which is to say as a
clarinet quintet, not as a quartet with obbligato clarinet, any more than
a piano concerto is a symphony with obbligato piano.

And later claims that Beethoven could not master quartet writing:

>Talk to a string player.  His parts get rewritten all the time.

Yeah, right.  His quartets are probably the most revered chamber works ever
composed, yet they are so shoddily written that string players have to redo
Beethoven's work for him? This is laughably implausible.

>Neither Beethoven nor Brahms - as opposed to Dvorak - were string players,
>but pianists.

Well, here's the danger of not knowing what you are talking about.  Anyone
who has read his Thayer knows that Beethoven was a violist in the Court
Orchestra in Bonn before leaving for Vienna, and there are accounts of him
playing the viola part with the cellist Schuppanzigh in his duo "Mit zwei
Obligaten Augenglasern."

Oh, poor, Beethoven!  You managed to compose masterpiece after masterpiece,
but hang your head in shame because you have failed to impress Schwatrzo.
If only you could rise to the musicianship of the great Stockhausen!  But,
then, it's not entirely Beethoven's fault because aircraft with rotating
blades were not yet invented in his day.

Donald Satz <[log in to unmask]> replies to me:

>Leighton Gill Wrote:
>
>>As for Stockhausen being music, I've heard it, and I've heard music, and
>>the two have little in common.
>
>Leighton evidently will continue to state that Stockhausen's works do not
>constitute music.  That's a relatively extreme statement to make, and
>Leighton states it in a definitive manner.  Now, I'm assuming that
>Leighton possesses an overall definition of music which necessarily
>excludes the works of Stockhausen; otherwise he could not logically arrive
>at his conclusion.  Is Leighton willing to share his definition with us?

Conversely, I could argue that you must have some definition of music that
justifies your conclusion that Stockhausen's works ARE music.  But that is
not my position.

Of course I don't have a definition of music, at least not a verbal one.

As Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and many other non brain-damaged composers have
observed, music begins where words end.  Therefore, no verbal definition is
possible.

There are, however, some criteria that can be established, and I will
discuss a couple of them here.  One comes from Mozart, who declared that
a fundamental rule of music is that it should never offend the ear.  You
might argue that, while Stockhausen's works offend my ears, they do not
offend yours, and who would I or anyone else be to contest that? But I
would contend that if Stockhausen does not offend your ears, there is
probably very little that does.  He and the other screeching atonalists
produce works that are even worse than the shoddy musicianship Mozart
satired in his "Musical Joke," or, for that matter, PDQ Bach at his most
inept.  (The sounds that modern composers present as "serious music" get
howls of laughter at PDQ concerts.  Perhaps the idea is that anyone who
presents such sounds as actual music must surely be kidding.)

Secondly, a "composition" fails to be music if it cannot be ruined by a
musician's failure to carry out the composer's instructions.  If a musician
were to do a shoddy job of playing a Stockhausen work, how on Earth would
anyone know? If I were listening to, say, a Haydn Quartet for the first
time, and one of the musicians, instead of playing his part, began to play
notes at random, few would fail to notice that something was going
horribly awry.  But if a musician were to do that in an atonal quartet
(Stockhausen's or anyone else's), not only would few, if, if anyone,
notice, but all four of them could do it and the result might even be an
improvement.  I've read that some of Stockhausen's works (as well as those
of other 20th century hacks), are, in fact, mere random notes.  Why do the
players even bother tuning their instruments?

>If he does not, I can only conclude that Leighton simply wants to "get
>a rise" from some folks by making extreme statements of no merit.

Not that I concur with your biased evaluation of my statement, but it would
certainly be preferable to Stockhausen continuing to create compositions of
no merit.

Deryk Barker <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>I notice no-one has addressed my point of being able to recognise a piece
>by Stockhausen after not hearing it in three decades.

I had a really bad case of gastroenteritis in the late 60s.  I still
remember it, but that doesn't make it music.  Come to think of it,
though, some of the resulting sounds DID seem rather Stockhausenesque.

--Leigh