welcome to a thread about western art music. its split into roughly nine periods from medieval liturgical musics through to the 21st century. wikipedia has a pretty good run down of the periods of western art music
anyways, im personally really only interested in music after chopin/debussy, so mostly 20th C. the world wars and upheaval in this century produced some of the most brutal, challenging and rewarding music of this ancient tradition. post your favorite. heres what i've been listening to a lot in the past year:
painstakingly constructed on magnetic tape using recordings of children's voices and text fragments drawn from the bible, gesang is one of stockhausens most ~*v i s i o n a r y*~ compositions, the culminations of his earlier electronic studies
composed and performed in a ww2 concentration camp. transcendental
insane composition for a number of pianos turned on their sides, manipulated with bows, hammers and picks. the clepsydra is a greek water clock, and this music is truly microscopic, stretching out sound and time until it is almost crystalline
ligetis etudes are considered some of the best of the 20th century, and heres why. "arc-en-ciel" is french for rainbow, and this composition is probably the musical embodiment of ephemerality, constantly drifting and moving away from the listener trying to grasp the pot of gold at the end
well thats my story. post some great musics
and something less firmly in the art music tradition but i love it all the same.
Cloud: "..."
Stockhausen’s Refrain, the piece I have been asked to talk about, is a part of the cultural superstructure of the largest-scale system of human oppression and exploitation the world has ever known: imperialism. The way to attacking the heart of that system is through attacking the manifestations of that system, not only the emanations from the American war machine in Vietnam, not only the emanations from Stockhausen’s mind, but also the infesations of this system in our own minds, as deep-rooted wrong ideas. And we must attack them not only on the superficial level, as physical cruelty or artistic nonsense or muddled thinking, but also on the fundamental level for what they are: manifestations of imperialism.
The avant garde period (consisting of successive avant gardes) is not the latest, but the last chapter in the history of bourgeois music. The bourgeois class audience turns away from the contemporary musical expression of its death agony, and contemporary bourgeois music becomes the concern of a tiny clique taking a morbid interest in the process of decay. I must avoid giving the impression that this tiny clique of the avant garde has its own kind of purity and honesty in representing the collapse of imperialism and bourgeois values in general. No, imperialism is rotten to the core and so is its culture. However, the ruling classes, the big business men, the politicians, the field marshals, the media controllers, etc. - don’t just ‘turn away’ to groan and expire gracefully. They fight to stave off their collapse and in this fight they use all the means at their disposal - economic, military, political, cultural, ideological. The aim of the establishment is to use ideas not as a liberating force for clarification and enlightenment and the releasing of people’s initiative, but as an enslaving force, for confusion and deception and the perversion of talent. In this way they hope to stave off collapse.
blinkandwheeze posted:stockhausen serves imperialism
Stockhausen’s Refrain, the piece I have been asked to talk about, is a part of the cultural superstructure of the largest-scale system of human oppression and exploitation the world has ever known: imperialism. The way to attacking the heart of that system is through attacking the manifestations of that system, not only the emanations from the American war machine in Vietnam, not only the emanations from Stockhausen’s mind, but also the infesations of this system in our own minds, as deep-rooted wrong ideas. And we must attack them not only on the superficial level, as physical cruelty or artistic nonsense or muddled thinking, but also on the fundamental level for what they are: manifestations of imperialism.
The avant garde period (consisting of successive avant gardes) is not the latest, but the last chapter in the history of bourgeois music. The bourgeois class audience turns away from the contemporary musical expression of its death agony, and contemporary bourgeois music becomes the concern of a tiny clique taking a morbid interest in the process of decay. I must avoid giving the impression that this tiny clique of the avant garde has its own kind of purity and honesty in representing the collapse of imperialism and bourgeois values in general. No, imperialism is rotten to the core and so is its culture. However, the ruling classes, the big business men, the politicians, the field marshals, the media controllers, etc. - don’t just ‘turn away’ to groan and expire gracefully. They fight to stave off their collapse and in this fight they use all the means at their disposal - economic, military, political, cultural, ideological. The aim of the establishment is to use ideas not as a liberating force for clarification and enlightenment and the releasing of people’s initiative, but as an enslaving force, for confusion and deception and the perversion of talent. In this way they hope to stave off collapse.
dumb and creepy imo
deadken posted:
i know almost no 20th c classical music. except for like schoenberg, and philip glass, and alban berg. list me. give me a list. listomania
varese, webern, boulez, ligeti, reich, gorecki, alvin lucier, douglas lilburn, terry riley, la monte young & charlemagne palestine are all pretty great !! listen to those if you want to have a bunch of fun !
babyfinland posted:
other fins