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

Dismayed

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Messiaen wrote some beautiful pieces. This isn’t my favorite.

The less tonal the music, the more acquired the taste, generally speaking. I once brought some friends to a see Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie. The whole second half was Schoenberg and Stockhausen. They didn’t speak to me for a while. I’ve never really acquired the taste for strict serialists (you can look up that term if interested).

I think the gateway drug to appreciating some more modern stuff may be listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I didn’t like it first time through, but now I think it rocks.

Another gateway composer is Hindemith. My wife performed Der Schwanendreher. The second movement is among my favorite bits of music now.

Messiaen’s predecessors are among my favorites as well-Ravel, Debussy, Satie. So much contemporary pop and show music is built on their elegant harmonic ideas (along with plagiarizing Chopin).

I guess I’m saying it’s a journey. I still don’t like a lot of modern music, but there are some gems.
Messiaen was interned for 9 months in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. Certainly his surroundings affected his compositions.
 

Multicore

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Here is another anecdote about how contemporary music can work. Yesterday we had a visit from a friend who has been living in our small town for some time now after living around the world. He is an academically trained artist, painter and photographer. We also talked about music, my audio hobby, and I thought about what I could play for him. He would know jazz or classical music, but definitely not contemporary experimental music from Japan. I was curious to see his reaction. I played him this record:

Short sound sample here: http://xsvxdiscott.xsrv.jp/organicmusic/samplemp3/mp3/20230206/OMH23010086_a.mp3
That was a good selection. The sound sample sounds like an improvisation.

Years ago we got the 4CD reissue of Toshi Ichiyanagi - Opera "From The Works Of Tadanori Yokoo" at the radio station and I loved it. I still do. It's on youtube...


What was the result? He was so impressed that he spontaneously wanted a good turntable I had left over from a former test. It is the Pro-Ject 'The Classic' in my picture. On Monday I will bring him the turntable and set it up.
So this was the lesson learned by the academically trained artist, painter and photographer: Vinyl. <SIGH />
 

Multicore

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Messiaen was interned for 9 months in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. Certainly his surroundings affected his compositions.
That also explains the unusual instruments used in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps. It's what he could get.

1280px-Quatuor_pour_la_fin_du_Temps.jpg
 

computer-audiophile

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Messiaen was interned for 9 months in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. Certainly his surroundings affected his compositions.
It was his way of surviving. I have studied this history intensively. As it happens, I now live very close to this terrible historical site.

In my opinion, it is also worthwhile to look at his other works. He has a very extensive oeuvre.
 

computer-audiophile

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That was a good selection. The sound sample sounds like an improvisation.
I also hear Musique Concrete echoes, and have images of Japanese Noh Theater in my head, which is also sometimes performed in modernized form today. But you have to listen to the whole recording. There is a lot of movement on the soundstage, jumping and pattering as if by dancers.
 

computer-audiophile

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ears ago we got the 4CD reissue of Toshi Ichiyanagi - Opera "From The Works Of Tadanori Yokoo" at the radio station and I loved it. I still do. It's on youtube...
Thanks for the example, Tom.

This recording is already very challenging, even if you love such music. It would have been too demanding for our friend, even for me. The other one from my example is comparatively rather calm, the flow is structured by bells, flute, wood, percussion, natural sounds on the stage - rather meditative.
 

Dismayed

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One of my favorite Messian works is: visions de l'amen. It could only have been written in the 20th century.

 

computer-audiophile

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In my CD collection, I still have a lot that I would not even have to buy today. Also some vinyl records. Because at Deezer I find even more interpretations.

Own photo:

messiaen-17cd-1280.jpg
 

computer-audiophile

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One of my favorite Messian works is: visions de l'amen. It could only have been written in the 20th century.
Thanks for the great example.

I would have loved to be there live at that concert. But it may well be that I have already experienced it somewhere.
 

Dismayed

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Thanks for the great example.

I would have loved to be there live at that concert. But it may well be that I have already experienced it somewhere.
Unfortunately, they don't seem to have recorded it, other than on YouTube. I also like the performance by the Double Edge duo. It's hard to find new, but there are CDs for sale on discogs.
 

Multicore

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Thanks for the example, Tom.

This recording is already very challenging, even if you love such music. It would have been too demanding for our friend, even for me. The other one from my example is comparatively rather calm, the flow is structured by bells, flute, wood, percussion, natural sounds on the stage - rather meditative.
I said you made a good selection. Yours is clearly more suitable for someone unused to listening to weird noise music. I was just following up on the name Toshi Ichiyanagi which was immediately familiar to me from the old Opera, which I had mentioned long ago in my short salvo Compact Disks make you immoral.
 

JaMaSt

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First, and glaringly obviously, why would anyone think that changing the notes on the score would fix these problems in the existing systems of art production?
It was believed at the time that the enforcement by the State funded Academies of the Classical major/minor modes in music, the Classical Orders in architecture and the subject matter and composition in painting and sculpture - were a means of oppression by the Ruling Class. The Classical aesthetic modalities were held to be arbitrary "social constructs" not capable of meeting the Verificationism Theory of Truth of the Vienna Circle's Logical Positivists. And it was also believed (incorrectly) that the mind was infinitely plastic and could be "conditioned" to accept any new modalities (Behaviorism was starting to dominate Physiological Psychology) .

Modernists sought to create - across all aesthetic disciplines - new modalities that were devoid of any historical references which appeared to to support and justify the Ruling Class's right to rule.

It's much more complex than I can state in a forum - largely because there were many currents, and undercurrents, of social, philosophical and political thought in Europe in the pre- and interwar years. But as Comte said, "To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history." The same is true of aesthetics.
 
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JaMaSt

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So what's going on in European composition that it should have exploded and taken over progressive though so thoroughly right after ww2?

Frankfurt School

Excerpt:

Their emphasis on the critical component of social theory derived from their attempts to overcome the ideological limitations of positivism, materialism, and determinism by returning to the critical philosophy of Kant and his successors in German idealism—principally the philosophy of Hegel, which emphasized dialectic and contradiction as intellectual properties inherent to the human grasp of material reality.
 

computer-audiophile

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What you have written here about the disposable quality of CD cases is of course true. Could have been done better. Nevertheless, the CD was an important intermediate step in the storage media for computer data and music.

What I think is even more important: It also enabled the artists themselves to release small editions of their music made in their kitchen or home studio. Often you could take them with you at the end of a live concert. A vinyl record, which has higher substantial value and durability, can only be produced by the industry. Today, all this is more or less obsolete. YouTube or similar is the appropriate medium for it. Or streaming in general.

The resource consumption here is also enormous, even if not obvious. Will everything remain 'immoral', to use Tom's words?
 

computer-audiophile

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I'm obviously on a Stockhausen kick at the moment, going through various vinyl records I have. With the limitations that come with it. Much of Stockhausen would require a multi-channel loudspeaker arrangement to better represent the spatial events. Especially the "Gruppen Carré" piece as well. I may have heard it the last time 20 years ago. I like it much better today than I did then.

It is a composition for three orchestras, written between 1955 and 1957. In this work, Stockhausen employs various techniques of serialism, including the use of twelve-tone rows and the organization of musical material into "formulas." The composition is divided into three orchestras, each with its own conductor, who perform simultaneously but independently of each other, with the orchestras positioned in a Carré-formation around the audience. Gruppen is considered one of Stockhausen's most important works.

gruppen.jpg



gruppen.jpg
 

computer-audiophile

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Frankfurt School

Excerpt:

Their emphasis on the critical component of social theory derived from their attempts to overcome the ideological limitations of positivism, materialism, and determinism by returning to the critical philosophy of Kant and his successors in German idealism—principally the philosophy of Hegel, which emphasized dialectic and contradiction as intellectual properties inherent to the human grasp of material reality.
Hi JaMaSt (sorry I don't know your first name),

apparently you are deep in theory. I appreciate that, because I'm also the thorough type myself. But here in the forum you can only touch on such topics superficially.
 

Multicore

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What you have written here about the disposable quality of CD cases is of course true. Could have been done better. Nevertheless, the CD was an important intermediate step in the storage media for computer data and music.

What I think is even more important: It also enabled the artists themselves to release small editions of their music made in their kitchen or home studio. Often you could take them with you at the end of a live concert. A vinyl record, which has higher substantial value and durability, can only be produced by the industry. Today, all this is more or less obsolete. YouTube or similar is the appropriate medium for it. Or streaming in general.
As an engineer who spent many years involved in standardization negotiations, most of which were failures, I admire the CD standard very much. It's even more impressive from today's perspective. I prefer the sound from a CD to that of an LP. And I agree , digital network distribution has removed the channel bottleneck. Now the bottleneck is audience attention, which is the name of the game in commerce and social control.

The resource consumption here is also enormous, even if not obvious. Will everything remain 'immoral', to use Tom's words?
It's a consumer economy. We could change that and I would like to but it doesn't seem likely. I for one expect to continue with my gloomy Compensatory consumerism as we service The Man until I've used up what I can and depart.
 

computer-audiophile

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I prefer the sound from a CD to that of an LP
From a purely technical or audiophile point of view, I find even higher bit resolutions than CD-quality better. But I'm still glad that I have some LPs from Stockhausen and other contemporary composers. It's a lot of fun to celebrate them with old-fashioned technology. The friend whose visit I mentioned recently was amazed at how good my 211 triode amps sounded with tubes that go back to the ancient days of Western Electric cinema amps. He could hardly believe it.
 
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Multicore

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It's much more complex than I can state in a forum - largely because there were many currents, and undercurrents, of social, philosophical and political thought in Europe in the pre- and interwar years. But as Comte said, "To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history." The same is true of aesthetics.
Thanks for both of your answers (#774 and #775). They present the aesthetic propositions of the modernist combatants at face value. I see it differently. To me it seems more likely that the aesthetic theories themselves were beside the point. They were the most effective weapons that could be found to hand at the time for use in combat in the wars of generational succession in the bourgeois hierarchies of establishment art. I don't have time today to write about this but it so happens that in the last few minutes of our recent discussion of Exit Through The Gift Shop, Banksy's 2010 movie about Banksy, Gav got his cat all excited as he quoted Trotsky's critique of Futurism from Literature and Revolution. If you're interested it's in the last 8 minutes here which you can also find in most podcast apps.

This is not to say that the modernists' critiques of establishment aesthetics lacked all merit. That's not my point at all. My point is that the fight was not only about aesthetics, it was a fight for control of the institutions that get to define establishment aesthetics in which a young generation wanted to take over.
 
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