An observation about "Modern" classical music.

Sorry I did not see this post until now. Great modern music is still being made and much of it is ascetic and atonal. Much of it, and just like all music 90%, is not very good, but that 10%....!

Technically playing modern classical is extremely demanding on both the listener and the players. For most people these days classical music is an acquired taste and modern classical music is even more of an acquired taste for both the players and the listner. But in the end it is highly subjective whether the ends justifies the means. I happened to believe it is well worth the effort. And most players do too, at least the ones I have talked with. Because in these cases, the composer and the musicians can talk about the performance together, and actually change things around if need be. It was quite informative talking with Gidon Kremer after his performance of Schnitke's 2nd Violin Sonata, and how the two made a few changes that would enhance the performance and enhance the piece aestetically. He showed me his score, with all the changes marked that the two had made. You cannot say that about a Beethoven or Schubert piece at all. Beethoven who was a great pianist never played his sonatas the same way twice, he did not follow his own markings! OK so who is say which way is correct, good question.

My moniker says I love Schubert, and I do! But I would rank some of the moderns as my favorites too, but after Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms, I would go see a Schnitke, Gorecki, Bartok or Penderecki piece before I would see something like Mozart or Bruckner. These guys are inventive, imaginative and just plain aestetically involving.

BTW, what radio station plays Modern classical music, I would love to know that one!!!

Robm321: hmmm....done right.....hmmm, what does that mean?An audience has nothing to do with it. Either music as art stands or falls on being autonomous. If it is a slave of fashion then it is not autonomous and therefore not art. In fact, there has been only one time in history that musical art and popularity coincided, the early 19th century. This also coincided with the rise of the middle class and its attitudes towards all art, the period of Beethoven(and only Beethoven)the first of the autonomous composers. And once the middle class made classical music...well... middle class, Classical music as art music had to become even more autonomous from the crudeness of the middle class. But it is more than alienation from the middle class, it had to do with what art itself sees, a metaphor for the human condition. If Beethoven was the voice of the rise of the middle class, then someone like Schnittke has to show the alienation of man in light of his conquering of nature itself through the processes developed in the Enlightenment. And boy can Schnittke show the aesthetics of alienation through his music.

The question of art is a valid one particularly in a post modern world where the aesthetics of art is blurred by the culture that surrounds us. That is culture and its definitions are no longer top-down arguments but bottom-up. We see now that quilting is art and not a cultural artifact even if it is pleasing or interesting. Art should never make us happy, in fact the opposite, it should be disquieting. Let's take Mozart, very inventive as far as his use of the materials at hand ( the diatonic scales, that is the forms at hand), but most of his works was and still is dinner music, pleasing to the ear and makes digestion of the food and wine very palpable for the royality he was serving. As court composer that was his job, no matter how creative he was and he was surely the best at it. However his operas and his very late string quartets and maybe his very last symphony were truly into the realm of high art. Here he truly expressed himself within the context of his millieu, the Spirit(Hegelian/Kant spirit) of the ages. He connected very well with the audience he intended, their situation in life, their concerns, using music to convey their Spirit.

Let me digress a little. The Enlightenment spawned a multitude of ideas, but principly two that were monumental: democracy and capitalism. The rise of both created the rise of the middle class, the age of Beethoven and beyond. But Capitalism has its price, it was and is still not a free ride. Capitalism in its attempt to conquer nature, which it has down quite successfully, has created a lifeless middle class, because man who is part of nature too has conquered itself. This conquered nature has created our alienation (I am just as guilty as the next) from the nature that we long for. We shallowly attempt to connect again within the confinds of what we have created, Capitalism. We have become the Great Consuming world, trying to come to grips of with our alienation. Since Schoenberg (at least musically) and maybe even Mahler, the great artists regard this alienation as what they are trying to express in their music. Not everybody and everything, but it surely is the underlying idea for many of them, and they surely get their point across. And not every musical piece should or can be as pleasing as a quilt. If not then what is the point of music in general??

Eldartford: Not all but 99% of modern classical music is structured. The notes are the same notes as Beethoven, that is C is still C (middle C is 256 hz). The stops are still the same. They use the same time signatures. It is just that they no longer use the diatonic scale strictly. Serialism of Berg and Webern though it sounds atonal is not per se. It uses all twelve notes equally, atonal works do not. Mahler and to some extent Wagner were chromatic, that is they went outside the diatonic system (major and minor scales) quite frequently. Liszt would sometimes use 11 different notes in the first 12 notes of one of his pieces, that surely is very chromatic and not very diatonic. One very interesting piece is Schnittke's Violin Sonata No.2, extremely atonal and extremely dissonant, but unbelievably emotional ( saw Gidon Kremer perform it in Philly two years ago), about 2/3rd's of the way through, the piano accompaniment loudly played the C chord from the C major scale.... it was so indescribly out of place...it seemed atonal!