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Roadside_Picnic posted:Was going to effort post this, but will make it short: I have been a huge fan of Xenakis for probably about 6 years now. I've read most of his writings and am familiar with more or less all of his (huge) output. In my opinion, he, more than any other composer ever, distilled music theory down to the atomic level, and rebuilt it with a radical but perfectly logical new framework. His music, as alien as it sounds, unites in a certain way all of the musical idioms and possibilities of the world, establishing a system into which they all fit. He of course chose to eschew idioms entirely and invent stochastic music, but the building blocks are there, and could essentially be used to make Gagaku or Tango or Bach or African tribal music or Gregorian chant or Balinese gamelan music. A lot of people kind of just hand-wave him away as an obscurantist and elitist but I think he was one of the most insightful and sophisticated minds of the 20th century... and his music can be super emotional when he wanted it to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l18GwrKBvNY Kottos is a really interesting piece; I find his solo works and ensemble/orchestral works equally engaging but they bring totally different things to the table. As an aspiring cellist myself, Kottos (and of course Nomos Alpha) is super stimulating and a bit overwhelming. Speaking of which, have we talked about Helmut Lachenmann? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB-7gDcegEg Lachenmann is notorious for using extended techniques not as instrumental accoutrements, but as the primary and sometimes the ONLY musical material in his pieces. Another example is a piece for solo piano called "Guero", which calls for the pianist to tap, scrape, rub and brush the piano with their hands, never playing a single actual pitch with a key. His style is alternately austere and super-intense. He's still someone I'm working on 'getting' to a point that I'm comfortable with, but his works are always radical and interesting. Scelsi is someone I've been really beginning to feel lately. His music, for me, really REQUIRES intense focus; if I'm doing anything but sitting (usually with my eyes closed) and concentrating on the sound, it doesn't work. The only other composer that I've really felt like that with is Luciano Berio, although they are in totally different dimensions. Speaking of Berio, sitting down and INTENSELY concentrating on his Sinfonia is a supremely beautiful experience. Next I'll go into some composers I've been into lately that I don't believe have been brought up in this thread yet. Julius Eastman has been really blowing my mind lately. I'll go ahead and mention that he was a gay, black, drug-addicted New Yorker in the 1970s, although that has little relevance to his music, which is for the most part built out of his unique and monolithic vision. Terry Riley's and Steve Reich's brands of minimalism spring to mind, but Eastman definitely did his own thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkmJdNeWglo This piece runs about an hour long but it rules really hard. Galina Ustvolskaya is another person with what I would call a completely unique vision of music. Born in Russia in 1919, she was a contemporary of Shostakovich, who was awed by her music, which is raw, powerful, and at least for me, inspires more sheer dread than possibly anything else I've ever heard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZHca-9U6mo Leo Ornstein is another huge favorite of mine. He was a prodigy on the piano, capable of playing the most advanced that Liszt and Chopin had to offer while still a teen. With his immense skills he went on to say 'gently caress it, tonality is not the best way for me to express myself' and became one of the pioneers of extreme dissonances and tone clusters. Later on in life he mellowed out a bit and wrote mostly tonal, extremely expressive music, mostly for the piano. Almost all of his work is really really good. Here's an early, tense, brutal piano piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS0x3u6pH3w And here's one of my favorite examples of his later, 'prettier' stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u0QrKbCk2w I don't have time to go on, but I'll just mention some others real quick: I think Ligeti was one of the purest, most intuitively fluent composers of the 20th century. His piano etudes and his solo cello sonata are absolutely amazing. I think that Messiaen is overrated. He wrote a handful of great works and was incredibly musically sophisticated, but he compromised on his vision (which was based mostly on color-sound synaesthesia and nature sounds) a LOT, especially with his dedication to keyboard instruments. I view the Catalog of Birds as a really interesting work technically, but artistically a massive failure. Stockhausen is hard to judge because he's like 100 composers in one that are all some of the most radical composers of all time. But most of his stuff is incredibly rich. "Stimmung" is an extremely beautiful piece of music, and should be digestible even for people who can't do atonality. James Tenney deserves a mention and is criminally underappreciated, especially if you're into minimalism. "Having Never Written A Note For Percussion" is one of the most massive, all-encompassing sonic experiences you'll ever have, and it's incredibly simple. Gloria Coates' music is really beautiful and very odd. All of her symphonies are great. Names to check if you're not aware of them and want to get into this stuff: Horatiu Radulescu (drat I should've thought of him sooner), Beat Furrer, Tristan Murail, Kaija Saariaho, Per Norgard, Jonathan Harvey, ahh there are a lot more. If anyone wants to discuss any of these or wants explanations or recommendations, I'll be glad to expand upon these things. I'm really into this poo poo. silly mane fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 11:54
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 21:37 |
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You can search for music by melodic contour or rhythm here: http://meertens.musipedia.org/melodic_contour.0.html Melodic contour refers to whether a note is up or down in pitch from the last, or repeated. So for instance, happy birthday would look like: *rududdrududdruddddurddud The asterisk at the beginning is the first note. Maybe that'll help.
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Mar 19, 2013 04:03
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Yeah, that site has never been much help for me, but I thought with Chopin you might fare pretty well. Oh well. Anyway, I just tried that melody in that rhythm on my piano and don't recognize it. Sorry. My consolation gift to you/small contribution to the thread for now, though, is a weird, fun little piano piece by Ligeti: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-HPqXm3m4
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Mar 19, 2013 08:54
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