Not trying to be arrogant here, but who listens to this?

[JaMaSt]

I don't know this group, but it seems to be a rock band. I don't see any connection to Messiaen or other apologists of contemporary classical music. Or any other avant-garde approach.

Throughout this post, I've been a strong defender of atonality, polytonality, dissonance, complex time signature changes, key changes, innovative harmonic progressions, etc. - none of which follow pre-Modern conceptions of Classical music. Much of RUSH's works would not have been accepted as conceivably "musical" had not Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, etc. done what they did. This is true of most of the "Progressive" rock bands since the '70's. Its also filtered its way into Movie and Video Game soundtracks, Jazz, Pop music, Rock, etc.

And this brings to light a MUCH larger and more important point to those who have reacted negatively to the early Modernist examples of music posted to this thread - MUCH of the contemporary music that they like has, in fact, incorporated many of the musical explorations of the early Modernist which they claim to hate. They are just blindly unaware of the fact.

Edit: RUSH used a lot of MOOG gear.

 

[EJ3]

Topic for attention

One of the main reasons I got into Roon was music discovery. Both genres I listen to already, but also new genres/artists. I fell over this music (on the radio but still) one day, and I’m presumable just not smart or sophisticated enough to understand the music. It sounds like some random guy sitting down just hammering aimless away on the piano

Are any of you listening to this kind of music (what (sub)genre is it?), and what exactly are you enjoying in the music? I’m serious and don’t want to put anyone down, I’m just very curious, as I don’t understand it and want to learn how and why other people listen to this kind of music.

Thanks!

Direct link to YouTube video

This is part of Rock-n-Roll's affair with this style of music: Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: Music Video for Final Project of Harvard's Neuroaesthetics course. The song is Frownland by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band off their album Trout Mask Replica

 

[computer-audiophile]

There is none, it's just a Rush fan being a Rush fan. If anything, the picture you posted of that 2011 Moog brings Keith Emerson to mind, not Rush, from the rock world.

Synthesiser pioneer Jean Michel Jarre should also be mentioned. He stands somewhere between laser harp and electropop.

Composer, producer and performer Jean Michel Jarre is another one of the pioneers of electronic music. With his debut "Oxygène", he created a classic of electronic music history 40 years ago. I have to pay tribute to that, no doubt, even if I am not a particular fan of his music and the style of his shows.

 

[computer-audiophile]

Throughout this post, I've been a strong defender of atonality, polytonality, dissonance, complex time signature changes, key changes, innovative harmonic progressions, etc. - none of which follow pre-Modern conceptions of Classical music. Much of RUSH's works would not have been accepted as conceivably "musical" had not Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, etc. done what they did. This is true of most of the "Progressive" rock bands since the '70's. Its also filtered its way into Movie and Video Game soundtracks, Jazz, Pop music, Rock, etc.

And this brings to light a MUCH larger and more important point to those who have reacted negatively to the early Modernist examples of music posted to this thread - MUCH of the contemporary music that they like has, in fact, incorporated many of the musical explorations of the early Modernist which they claim to hate. They are just blindly unaware of the fact.

Edit: RUSH used a lot of MOOG gear.

Thank you for the explanation. It makes it clearer how you arrived at it. And of course you are absolutely right.

 

[Shorty]

Nancarrow's compositions are astonishing and wonderful. They were created by someone completely disconnected from the cloisters and temples of Neue Musik, as though from a hermetic heretical prophet in the desert. (Iirc Nancarrow exiled himnself to Mexico from the USA for political reasons.) His works had a big influence on Ligeti's solo piano compositions (which are very good) and, I'm not sure I remember this right but..., Ligeti did not at first know that they were player piano rolls and they therefore presented quite a challenge!


This is very interesting. Anders Thidell, the music theory specialist and guitar builder who recently died and was involved in developing the True Temperament guitar fretboards, made a guitar with 31 tones. Not practical for most people to play and you really need to understand the tuning theory and corresponding systems of harmony to compose and play for it. Perhaps his 31 tone guitar relates to the system of Huygens.

Fascinating! I searched (in vain) for Thidell’s name in the very long list of links on the website of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation (https://www.huygens-fokker.org/links.html#instr), and it turns out the 31-tone system for guitar was also implemented by other luthiers. My search eventually led me to Ivor Darreg, whose life story is as fascinating as the instruments he built (see https://www.huygens-fokker.org/whoswho/darreg.html). Among those: an Electronic Keyboard Oboe (in 1937!). An organ with ‘elastic tuning’; and the Megalyra, an eight feet long contrabass slide guitar, strung on both sides...

 

[computer-audiophile]

@Shorty

Thank you for the link to Ivor Darrek. The term 'Xenharmonic' was new to me. On YouTube I found a video containing sound examples. Now I have a rough idea of what it means.

 

[EJ3]

I saw Rush at the time he was touring with this rig. I don't remember the music very well but they were tight. Handling that much gear when you're the bass player in a rock trio is not easy. And that guitar must weigh 8 kg or more.

And this must weigh a bit more?:​

The Hydra is a many faceted creature with two-headstocks, three-necks that host 7 and 12-string guitars; a 4-string ¾ scale length bass; 13 sympathetic harp strings; half-fretless necks; single-coil, humbucking, piezo, MIDI and sustainer pickups; floating and hardtail tremolo bridges and phase splitters.​

 

[computer-audiophile]

Mostly I listen to classical music, I should probably mention that.

New contemporary classical or sound art is a special case that challenges me more and in a different way. The main thing is that I am always close to the music. My wife loves it too.

I don't like mass events at all, and I don't like many hyped concert halls. I prefer chamber concerts. I also appreciate the opportunity to talk to musicians or composers. The next one is on Monday. Here, in a music school in our small town, the pianist Álvaro Baltanás Meliveo will play pieces by Claude Debussy and Modest Mussorgsky.

Álvaro Baltanás Meliveo

alvarobaltanasmeliveo-pianist.com

My photo snapshot is from a concert at the Mendelssohn House in Leipzig. This is a place where the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy actually lived. The performance took place in his intimate former private chamber music room. We were there recently and have attended the concert.

 

[computer-audiophile]

And this must weigh a bit more?:

The Hydra is a many faceted creature with two-headstocks, three-necks that host 7 and 12-string guitars; a 4-string ¾ scale length bass; 13 sympathetic harp strings; half-fretless necks; single-coil, humbucking, piezo, MIDI and sustainer pickups; floating and hardtail tremolo bridges and phase splitters.

This is not a beautifully designed instrument, for example, I would say. I like the look of my 'Jim Triggs Signature' guitar better.

 

[Shorty]

More appropriate in this thread: guitars with a ‘True Temperament’ neck. Like this one, for a Telecaster:

True Temperament - revolutionary design of the guitar’s fretboard

TT-frets are the best thing that ever happened to the guitar. I believe you should have invented the frets before you invented the string. Once you tried it, there is no going back.

www.truetemperament.com

Co-founder of True Temperament is Paul Guy, who developed these necks together with the aforementioned Anders Thidell, whose Just Temperament guitar had 31 curved frets per octave (and 52 frets on a 30 inch scale!). To quote the True Temperament website:

On the web, I [Paul Guy] found Dr. Bradley Lehman, an authority on J.S. Bach and the harpsichord. He claimed to have discovered the temperament which Bach himself used for the ”Well Tempered Clavier”. His demo videos with harpsichord and organ sounded so harmonically pleasing that I was completely won over. I had always felt that the harpsichord sounded like an overgrown banjo, but with his tuning it sounded more like a large, expensive, acoustic guitar.
What was Anders' reaction to this?
– I said, ”If you can do that with 31 frets to the octave, you can do it with 12!” I then told him about the ”Bach/Lehman” temperament, and suggested implementing it on the guitar. His jaw dropped! It was like a flashbulb going off in his brain. He had been so fixated on Just intonation that it had never occurred to him to apply his Curved Frets and Dynamic Intonation to a fingerboard with 12 frets to the octave, that any guitar player could use without having to start from scratch, learn a whole lot of esoteric harmonic theory, or adapt their technique.

 

[computer-audiophile]

There are not only the so-called extended playing techniques on conventional acoustic musical instruments, as we mentioned above with the composer Lachenmann. There are also new tools and inventions to support that.

For example, an old acquaintance of mine, the cellist Michael Bach Batischa, invented the Bach bow. You can read about it on his website.

Michael Bach Bachtischa – Cellist . Composer . Visual Artist

 

[computer-audiophile]

@Shorty

Please allow me to ask a question. Are you a musician?

 

[Multicore]

More appropriate in this thread: guitars with a ‘True Temperament’ neck. Like this one, for a Telecaster:

True Temperament - revolutionary design of the guitar’s fretboard

TT-frets are the best thing that ever happened to the guitar. I believe you should have invented the frets before you invented the string. Once you tried it, there is no going back.

www.truetemperament.com

Co-founder of True Temperament is Paul Guy, who developed these necks together with the aforementioned Anders Thidell, whose Just Temperament guitar had 31 curved frets per octave (and 52 frets on a 30 inch scale!). To quote the True Temperament website:

On the web, I [Paul Guy] found Dr. Bradley Lehman, an authority on J.S. Bach and the harpsichord. He claimed to have discovered the temperament which Bach himself used for the ”Well Tempered Clavier”. His demo videos with harpsichord and organ sounded so harmonically pleasing that I was completely won over. I had always felt that the harpsichord sounded like an overgrown banjo, but with his tuning it sounded more like a large, expensive, acoustic guitar.
What was Anders' reaction to this?
– I said, ”If you can do that with 31 frets to the octave, you can do it with 12!” I then told him about the ”Bach/Lehman” temperament, and suggested implementing it on the guitar. His jaw dropped! It was like a flashbulb going off in his brain. He had been so fixated on Just intonation that it had never occurred to him to apply his Curved Frets and Dynamic Intonation to a fingerboard with 12 frets to the octave, that any guitar player could use without having to start from scratch, learn a whole lot of esoteric harmonic theory, or adapt their technique.

I mentioned True Temperament guitar necks yesterday and I've been wanting to try it for ages. For other reasons I've been planning to build a Warmoth and wonder if using a TT necks is a practical way to try TT. Otherwise it's about $3k+ for a Caparison or Strandberg instrument that is otherwise unappealing. But it's one thing for an amateur to do spot-leveling and re-crowning on standard frets and another on those wonky things. My professional guitar tech might even refuse to work on it. So I sent them an email asking about these things and got no answer. With Thidell's death last year I am not surprised. I should just go ahead, get the parts and see how far I can get.

I think guitars are uniquely difficult to play in tune. I have joked about this recently in another discussion forum. And my use of CG3 tuning was primarily motivated by the impossibility of finding an acceptable set of compromises in standard tuning. So I really want to try a TT fretboard.

 

[Multicore]

Throughout this post, I've been a strong defender of atonality, polytonality, dissonance, complex time signature changes, key changes, innovative harmonic progressions, etc. - none of which follow pre-Modern conceptions of Classical music. Much of RUSH's works would not have been accepted as conceivably "musical" had not Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, etc. done what they did. This is true of most of the "Progressive" rock bands since the '70's. Its also filtered its way into Movie and Video Game soundtracks, Jazz, Pop music, Rock, etc.

Do you know examples of Boulez and Berio getting into the bombastic prog rock of the 70s? The others are clear, also Bartók, Debussy, Scriabin, Varese.

And this brings to light a MUCH larger and more important point to those who have reacted negatively to the early Modernist examples of music posted to this thread - MUCH of the contemporary music that they like has, in fact, incorporated many of the musical explorations of the early Modernist which they claim to hate. They are just blindly unaware of the fact.

Well, there's another dimension here. Artistic innovators with bold ideas and a confrontational stance often turn into conservative old romantics as time passes. It's normal. There are many examples in both prog and in the European fine art cloisters. Even the American "minimalists" ended up writing maximalist works for opera houses and symphony halls and mugging like Beethoven for cameras. Fans may follow. What's the alternative? No wonder they end up defense and maybe even repudiating what they might have been open to at a younger age or had life turned out differently.

 

[Shorty]

@Shorty

Please allow me to ask a question. Are you a musician?

Of course. No, I’m not a musician, although a long time ago I played some electric bass guitar. My Fender Jazz is still somewhere in the attic, where it looks at me reproachfully when I’m up there…
But in my working life I wrote about popular music for a newspaper, mainly americana and country, two types of music to which I now seldom listen anymore.

 

[JaMaSt]

Do you know examples of Boulez and Berio getting into the bombastic prog rock of the 70s?

It was more just a comment regarding how what is acceptable as "music" today - across all genera - has been greatly expanded due to the impact of the early- and mid-Century Modernists.

 

[Shorty]

I mentioned True Temperament guitar necks yesterday and I've been wanting to try it for ages. For other reasons I've been planning to build a Warmoth and wonder if using a TT necks is a practical way to try TT. Otherwise it's about $3k+ for a Caparison or Strandberg instrument that is otherwise unappealing. But it's one thing for an amateur to do spot-leveling and re-crowning on standard frets and another on those wonky things. My professional guitar tech might even refuse to work on it. So I sent them an email asking about these things and got no answer. With Thidell's death last year I am not surprised. I should just go ahead, get the parts and see how far I can get.

I think guitars are uniquely difficult to play in tune. I have joked about this recently in another discussion forum. And my use of CG3 tuning was primarily motivated by the impossibility of finding an acceptable set of compromises in standard tuning. So I really want to try a TT fretboard.

Yes, I can imagine you're itching to get one of your hands around a TT neck! Give temptation no chance and buy one now!
Alternatively, do until your guitar what Jaco Pastorius did to his bass: get a pair of pliers and rip out those frets.
I know of only one guitarist who plays fretless and have no idea why there aren’t more like him.

 

[JaMaSt]

Well, there's another dimension here. Artistic innovators with bold ideas and a confrontational stance often turn into conservative old romantics as time passes.

My comment was aimed at persons posting here about how the music sounds like something falling down a flight of stairs - and yet, how many movie soundtracks might they have listened to - and enjoyed - that incorporate atonality, polytonality, dissonance, etc. without their being aware? What was new back in the day is just part of the cannon now.

 

[RayDunzl]

Saw microtonal music mentioned earlier in the thread:

"I composed the Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media in 1979 and 1980 as illustrations of a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with Webster College, St. Louis. The project was to explore the tonal and modal behavior of all the equal tunings of 13 through 24 notes (to the octave), devise a notation for each tuning, and write a composition in each tuning to illustrate good chord progressions and the practical application of the notation."

00:00 Fanfare in 19-Note Equal Tuning, Op. 28a
02:31 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Andantino
06:24 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Allegro volando
09:03 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Suite in four movements
13:57 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Allegro moderato 17:20 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Sostenuto 20:38 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Lento
24:20 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Con moto
27:18 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Andante ma non troppo
32:00 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Moderato
35:08 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Allegramente
37:58 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Comodo
41:59 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, Op. 28: Allegro moderato
46:14 Suite for Guitar in 15-Note Equal Tuning, Op. 33: I. Prelude
49:06 Suite for Guitar in 15-Note Equal Tuning, Op. 33: II. Sarabande
51:55 Suite for Guitar in 15-Note Equal Tuning, Op. 33: III. Gavotte (Tempo di gavotta)
53:01 Suite for Guitar in 15-Note Equal Tuning, Op. 33: IV. Gigue

Easley Blackwood: Microtonal | Classical Music | Cedille Records

Easley Blackwood's Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, a landmark exploration that drew widespread critical praise upon its release in 1980

www.cedillerecords.org

 

[JaMaSt]

"I composed the Twelve Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media in 1979 and 1980 as illustrations of a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with Webster College, St. Louis. The project was to explore the tonal and modal behavior of all the equal tunings of 13 through 24 notes (to the octave), devise a notation for each tuning, and write a composition in each tuning to illustrate good chord progressions and the practical application of the notation."

Nice post.
My mind made a direct link to Kandinsky's paintings. You're seeing something recognizable, but you're just not sure what it is....

I should give it a "thumbs down" for killing any chance of getting work done before I head home.