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

[JaMaSt]

Berio was an instructor to Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. This movement from Berio's Sinfonia borrows [steals?] heavily from the third movement of Mahler's 2nd symphony.

Yes, I don't actually dislike it. I was being facetious. I've owned the Nonesuch recording for probably 30 years?

 

[theREALdotnet]

Why? who knows, maybe these modern composers think it's too infra-dig to compose something that people can hum along to! If it's incomprehensible, it must be deep.

I think one of the biggest insults among modern classical composers and critics is to call someone’s work “accessible”

 

[Robin L]

Yes, I don't actually dislike it. I was being facetious. I've owned the Nonesuch recording for probably 30 years?

I thought the famous recording of Berio's Sinfonia was on Columbia?

 

[Robin L]

A personal favorite, lo these many years:

 

[JaMaSt]

I thought the famous recording of Berio's Sinfonia was on Columbia?

It's actually the Erato recording conducted by Boulez. Not sure why I thought it was Nonesuch. Too many hard seltzers.....

Berio - New Swingle Singers, Orchestre National De France, Pierre Boulez - Sinfonia - Eindrücke

View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1986 CD release of "Sinfonia - Eindrücke" on Discogs.

www.discogs.com

 

[Robin L]

It's actually the Erato recording conducted by Boulez. Not sure why I thought it was Nonesuch. Too many hard seltzers.....

Like so?

 

[Axo1989]

When artists produce art for other artists, they often use challenge as a metric of (one could say substitute for) creativity. "It is difficult to listen to" or "I can't tap my foot to this" transforms into "subverting norms" or "discovering untread ground" etc. You can build an appreciation for this sort of stuff if you want, or don't, and I don't think it makes you less sophisticated to dislike it. I've inadvertently listened to a lot of 'modern classical' and the linked performance didn't sound that weird to me, but people can have different artistic Overton windows without one being 'better'. As the Bernstein vid above shows, there is quite a bit of art in the noise - but it is, and is fully intended to be, recognizable by comrade artists, laypeople be damned.

This is to an extent inevitable: an artist who doesn't explore/develop their work risks stagnating. But they may lose some of your initial audience. Producing the same popular work ad nauseam is really just fan service. In terms of sophistication, you can certainly like/dislike certain artists or works (or find them interesting/uninteresting, as the response may be intellectual rather than emotional). But being unaware of such work is literally unsophisticated: specifically, this thread started with an unsophisticated post.

The somewhat more mainstream equivalent of 'modern classical' with its "pushing a piano down the stairs" sound is free jazz, or most of modern jazz in general, fully freed from its roots of entertaining club dancers, and some would say the resulting noodlings of bloops and scranks are unlistenable wankery. I know I've grown to appreciate it more, but I've still got albums I have to cut off or skip through thinking "ugh I don't want to listen to this."

This isn't specific to or I think even prevalent in music, which still has a large audience and also is still generally tied to mainstream consumption. Compare that to painted art, whose casual audience has completely evaporated, and the remaining audience of endowments and investors value distinctiveness of vision and rarity of product beyond any recognizable artistic skill. Meanwhile the layperson looks at a million dollar painting and think it looks like someone's dog threw up. And while we tend to see this as a modern thing, I suspect it's gone back through the ages, but those sorts of works are a lot less likely to be preserved.

Not sure about the visual art comparison. The then-contemporary audience for what we consider classical music (centuries ago) wasn't 'casual' so much, that was entertainment for the upper classes. The middle classes emerged later and followed those tastes as modern societies became more egalitarian. Contrary to 'evaporation' If I go to a Biennale or other major exhibition of new work here (in Sydney) the galleries are full of 'casual' audience. I imagine that's the case in most large cities.

You'd have to start another thread perhaps to discuss 'recognisable artistic skill' in the visual arts, but I don't imagine it's what you appear to assert there. It certainly isn't simply the craft skills of verisimilitude any more. But that may be on-topic for the music discussed here: the performance depicted in the OP video wasn't unskilled. But recall also that not playing a piano for three minutes and fourteen seconds was entirely valid, and now, a classic.

 

[Daverz]

Are any of you listening to this kind of music (what (sub)genre is it?), and what exactly are you enjoying in the music?

Messiaen is an acquired taste even for those who like mid-20th Century modernism. I'd still start someone new to his music with his Quartet for the End of Time.

 

[Vuki]

How about this jazz classic?

 

[JaMaSt]

Lol. This was very much on my mind tonight, with this topic. I actually listened to it on YouTube.

1984, I was 16.

I was helping my father construct a retaining wall on our lake shoreline in August (Midwest, United States). It had to be 105 degrees. I took a break and laid on my back under a huge elm tree and listened to this on my crappy Sony Walkman knock-off and cheap headphones. It blew me away.

I was Sundestrunken and not Mondestrunken.....

 

[Robin L]

But recall also that not playing a piano for three minutes and fourteen seconds was entirely valid, and now, a classic.

4' 33", but I digress.

 

[Vuki]

Nice books about it:

 

[Axo1989]

4' 33", but I digress.

Haha, thank you! How bizarre, my mind glitched and came up with π ...

 

[Vacceo]

Messiaen is not obscure at all. When I teach about the Soah, his Quartet for the End of Time is part of the material I use to show the problem of irrepresentability of atrocity.

In that regard, Japanese Butoh is another art form that deals with the same issue.

 

[JaMaSt]

I know Gergiev's politics are objectionable to many outside Russia

Beware the Toothpick of Power! +20 Intimidation.

 

[Axo1989]

How about this jazz classic?

That was great. And not unlike throwing a jazz octet down the staircase, I guess.

(Also new to me, when it comes to jazz, and classical before avant-garde for that matter, I'm pretty unsophisticated.)

 

[Blumlein 88]

How about this jazz classic?

An actual machine gun would be more interesting and musical if fired by an "artiste"

 

[Vuki]

An actual machine gun would be more interesting and musical if fired by an "artiste"

Well, this one became classic, so...

 

[Vive la dissonance!]

I enjoyed listening to Messiaen's music long before I understood a thing about it. His Quartet for the End of Time grabbed me from the first bar and never let go. I understand it extremely well now, esthetically, technically, and theoretically, but that was never, ever essential, let's be clear.

A few other things to understand: no, this music was not written to be deliberately ugly. In fact, a notion of ugly is actually an acquired thing. I myself do not and did not find Messiaen's music ugly, ever. What it actually was, was a desire to enable creativity ito find new modes of beauty: that very much so, as opposed to treading over the same extremely well-worn paths that everyone already knows about.

Just about everyone thinks Mt. Rainier is beautiful, and that fact makes a picture of it a potentially easy (in fact, very easy) way to make something beautiful. But it's also totally banal: there's little to nothing new to say about beauty with yet another picture of Mt. Rainier. So, what about a picture of a homeless person? Can beauty be found there? How about a picture of a derelict building? A crumbling street? A vandalized concrete wall? A pile of litter? Are these things only ever irredeemably ugly?

Those are just examples, and even with them the clichés run amok nowadays, certainly. But I hope my point is clear: at some point, the truly creative photographer isn't going to be artistically satisfied with just another picture of Mt. Rainier at sunset with a lenticular cloud over it. It's a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of something someone else did. Not invalid, not not beautiful, just not very interesting or original as art.

So it is with composers, and actually has always been. People were shocked at Beethoven's Fifth Symphony when it was new. Many people found it contemptible and ugly, in fact! And this was in a time when performing any music older than a couple decades was just not even a thing at all. Yet still for many Beethoven was too radical. Many composers pushed boundaries and have been pilloried for it, in fact, from antiquity onwards.

I can name examples of great art that was confusing, baffling, or deemed ugly or awful when it was new, that is now treasured and widely accepted as part of our collective artistic heritage, from any time period you care to name.

So, sure, some people start, or waltz into, a thread like this, and bash the tastes of people, like me, who genuinely, truly, adore the music of a composer such as Olivier Messiaen. And that's just fine, as I'd probably find the musical tastes of someone who would do that entirely worth bashing as well.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

P. S. Kindly stop using "atonal" as a synonym for "music I dislike." The word has almost no worthy meaning; even Schönberg repudiated it as a term. "Post tonal" is far better, because the fact is, we live in a post-tonal musical world. Dissonance has been emancipated (jazz for one would be impossible without it), and the actual, real principles of common-practice tonality as any composer would have understood it before the 20th century (but after the early 17th century) are basically not substantively adhered to by anyone, not pop music song writers, not neo-tonal composers, not film composers, not anyone. Possibly music theory teachers but that's about it. Unless you're perfectly fine with a mushy definition to the word "tonal" that would actually apply to literally all music ever, if you just thought about it for half a second, or would just mean something as vapid as basically just "only the music I like": we can do better.

 

[JaMaSt]

(jazz for one would be impossible without it)

Yep.