NewMusicBox provides a space for those engaged with new music to communicate their experiences and ideas in their own words. Assignments Students are expected to write two texts during the semester: But composers who take general music lovers as their prime audience remain either in niche areas like film music or cultivate special audiences like Ennio Morricone or some of the Finnish composers. etc. I am not surprised that composers are perplexed that new music performances in the better venues are at an all-time low. Audiences want artists to share part of themselves, something authentic rather than something put on. But even if Karkowski and Amacher never become as popular as Chopin, so what? Bad bad bad. Their response to my proposal was that said composer’s music was “too audience-friendly” for them! Electronic instruments appeared, both amplified versions of older ones (guitar, piano, and even some woodwinds) and instruments with fundamentally electronic means of tone production (electronic pianos and organs, the theremin and Ondes Martenot, sound synthesizers, and still later developments). Join now. Never mind that every composer has an audience that thoroughly enjoys what he or she is doing, which even enjoys being challenged by things so new that they cannot be enjoyed right at first. Answers: 2 on a question: Explain the performance practice(setting, composition, role of composers/performers, and audience) of 20th century music. Only problem with this view is that audiences had started to turn their backs on “modern” music over a hundred years before Schoenberg and Stravinsky, over a hundred years before “atonality,” that mighty misnomer. But comparing Cage’s 4.33″ with Bach’s Goldberg Variations is misplaced, and shows how out of touch the contemporary music establishment is with not only audiences, but the very concept of music. If today won’t deliver good music, the past certainly can! Favor must be earned and not curried. music that ordinary music lovers “really really like” then there’s really no difference between “assimilable composition” and microtonal music, music patterned after the I Ching, atonalism, etc etc. Counterstream Radio is your online home for exploring the music of America’s composers. Innovation for its own sake, imitating serialist, minimalist and Darmstadtian ideals or mind-games turned out by composers to please themselves and a few groupies has not worked for composers of academic contemporary music. Composers of this time period were more willing to experiment with new music forms and used technology to enhance their compositions.. You mentioned Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis and I would add Boulez to that group as being emblematic of a language that is not only alien to audiences, but to many musicians who perform at a very high level. Speaking from a vantage point of an orchestral player on the artistic advisory committee that chooses repertoire, I hope I can supply a little bit more to what has already been said. It is serving your musical community. When I wrote “We”, I only meant my own orchestra and patrons, who number four concerts a week with 1700 at each. I do like the practice of “New Music Festivals” that provide the segment of very adventurous listeners a great display of the previously unheard coupled with a community experience of like-minded people. Listens perceptively to selected 20th century music. That’s the great thing about being an American composer today. The players often engage in a kind of competition not unlike that of Western jazz groups. That’s I think what a lot of traducers simply don’t understand or at least refuse to acknowledge, that being able to enjoy a classic like 4’33” means that one is antipathetic to a classic like the German Requiem or Don Giovanni. But this they are not being taught in music programs at colleges and universities, where serial-Darmstadtian-gong-and-tonecluster compositions from graduating students still abound. 11-14) Notable 20th Century Composers and Musicians . Unbelievable. It won’t do to try and resolve the paradox by claiming that we don’t care if our music is heard, engaged with, and deeply felt, thus absolving ourselves of our responsibilities to others as well as ourselves. Gamelan playing, particularly of the softer type, often accompanies solo and unison choral singing of classical poetry (music is connected with most of Indonesian literature). 3. What their experience has taught them is that they will suffer tedium, disorientation and witness “The Emperors New Clothes” paraded in front of them. I recently worked with a student who put on a performance art piece involving self-mummification in duct-tape, melting guitar strings with torch lighter, and long periods of stasis where the performers appeared to take naps. They are not interested in challenging the establishment. Wow. Perhaps in part as defense of these perfectly valid points (and in reaction to the eager-to-please tone of so much current music from all genres), somewhere along the way much of the contemporary music community has overstated the alternative to the point where an urge to connect with audiences is seen as a sign of weakness, commercialization, and “softness”—as if softness was always a bad thing, and inflexibility and lack of willingness to compromise always surefire signs of nobility. Things that Herbert Brün insisted in proposing as themes for composition. Identify the performance practice of the selected composers in terms of (setting, composition, role of composers/performers, and audience) of 20th century music; 2. ), We need second of all a sense of history. I look forward to reading this site as it continues to grow and evolve like any good piece of music. [43] Contemporary composers of our days: Feel free to compose unintelligible and thoroughly assonant music as much as you want. He is now my favorite composer. If that is true, then it’s not some chimerical “beautiful, newish work”–with beauty being silently (and mendaciously) defined as “what the majority of classical audiences will find to be pretty”–that will turn this situation around. There is evidence that even organizations that have anointed contemporary music obscurantists with awards in the past, such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, might be surprisingly open to composers who identify themselves with tonal music, for example Paul Moravec. Is this a possible description of a distinction between note paradigm (serialism) and sound paradigm (spectralism)? To update this idea to a mantra that composers can call their own, it’s worth remembering that the most worthy and challenging instrument of all to master is the inner experience of the listeners themselves: of all the tools in the composer’s arsenal, the audience is the most important instrument. If you identify as a member of Mr. Manheim’s chimerical “general audience,” you might pretend to feel put out that creators aren’t making what you want them to make. We must begin by looking at what is, from a Marxist perspective, the most sophisticated analysis of this crisis of musical meaning so far attempted: the work of the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno.6 His work contains many penetrating insights, but as an analytic paradigm it is elitist, pessimistic and overly formalist. All these are not simply artistic concerns, just because there are no such a thing as an artistic question isolated from life, from society and politics. Composer X disregards the audience for symphonic music. Log in. But that appreciation for me is clouded by another variant of musical correctness that cooled the rage for baroque music in the 1970s and early eighties: period performance. Chopin, for instance. Southeast Asian vocal performance—like that of a great deal of non-Western art music—is characterized by tense, high, often nasal voice production; this is one of many alternatives explored by the more experimental 20th-century Western composers and performers. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. We can take that with a grain of salt. That is, this attitude doesn’t need atonality or “noise bombs” (what a provocative accusation that is, to be sure!) Many defenders of contemporary music have intellectual rather than musical motivations. I literally do not consider, 2013 - an article role of audience in 20th century music arthurlloyd.co.uk sorry... Players often engage in a way that other music doesn ’ t two texts during the semester: history constituency. Continuo parts ( cello and double bass ) often come out as rough grunts 1850 just! Social values number of actual public performing events may decrease as private musical performance closely... 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