i think performing music makes you appreciate it more
well anyway here’s some wonderful big name contemporary music, which doesn’t sound anything at all like regurgitations of mid 20th century composers despite what one might be led to think
“Spright the Diner” by Nib Wryter, by Clarence Barlow
“Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues”, by Frederic Rzewski
The Soadie Waste, by James Dillon
all.fall.down, by Michael Finnissy
And for contrast, here is contemporary music that sucks:
It’s a viola concerto by Jörg Widmann. He’s apparently “the third most performed living contemporary composer in the world, behind John Williams and Arvo Pärt”. He thinks he’s funny but he’s not.
I love the story behind it, even though it may be apocryphal, that it was written with the surprise in it to catch people who just came to the symphony as a social event and didn’t pay attention to the music.
i feel like the phonograph basically killed “classical” music. slow at first but at this point…
used to be, having explicit instructions about how to play something, well. that’s the best you could fucking get! there’s no contention from anyone with producing a score as one’s final output in 1850.
but in a world where technology can create a waveform that sounds exactly like what you want it to sound like… unless the work itself requires the interpretation of unrelated musicians, which i in perpetual folly nonetheless wager is most often not the case, there is a real existential question as to why the final product of these composers is still a score and not a record.
of course there are ensembles and those ensembles need written music to play and there’s certainly demand for new music to be written for those ensembles to play. but as a listener, i feel a certain disconnect through the layers of manifestation here.
i love performance, i love orchestras and ensembles… i don’t want to get it twisted. i haven’t perfectly expressed myself above, either. but this little dilemma with recorded sound and written music goes unspoken in these discussions sometimes, and it needn’t, because in my mind it’s a very important facet of what’s going on here
here’s my ultimate distillation of a current thought:
in 1825, the best composers we can still access today were writing music and producing scores (the ones not writing it down, well, we can’t speak too much on).
in 2025, i’m in exceptionally deep doubt that that is the case. do we think modern generational talents are writing such that their final work is a score, or just making records? i’m pretty sure i know which side i’m backing
Myself I like to think of music as something that’s meant to be performed by anyone who likes, instead of a fixed audio artifact. Especially in these commodified spotify times. There doesn’t have to be a score, but I think it’s nicer when a song is a song rather than a sound file.
my previous post is especially relevant to me because growing up, i really wanted to be a COMPOSER, that was my goal in life and… i mean, it basically still is, but i define things more loosely now
i was writing music in Finale and eventually my high school band actually did end up playing a few of my pieces and we recorded it and all this shit and it was just like. fuck. the music wasn’t good, sure, but the band also couldn’t play it and it was frustrating to me like. getting to hear an ensemble actually perform my work was miracle luck, but then it actually sounded, irrespective of the notes on the page, like a high school band fumbling through basically extended sight-reads. that disconnect was painful to me in a way that while i still think about music the same way, i started trying to produce things that would make sounds i wanted them to make rather than trying to rely on getting it played by people. certainly if it got played by people i’d really want to be there to guide them on getting the sound i wanted them to make so if it was performed/recorded it would sound as close as possible as the way i wanted it to sound.
songs are always songs! a sound file is just a recording of a song, but it can’t remove the song element of it as if it were a camera that takes one’s soul. i am not one to canonize recordings. there are many recordings of many songs, but when i want to enjoy the best performances of those songs, i’m in nearly every case doing so through an audio recording unless some miraculously rare circumstances arise
edit: like, you linked me to 4 sound recordings in your post rather than posting dates where they’d next be performed, you know?
one of those sound recordings jujotech linked in her post is a recording of an automated playback (commenters called it a “MIDI playback”) of the score (Michael Finnissy - all.fall.down), further denying anyone the ability to make a cogent point about any of this haha
i did like the pieces jujotech linked generally. the second one almost goes too far in that “overexplained program music”* direction but it hits some of my weak points musically so i can’t dislike it.
i love one of the commenters on the above-mentioned Michael Finnissy piece:
*i don’t know how to designate this but there’s a certain strain of music that’s like “oh it kinda sounds like this, wow they made the instruments sound like THING” and always feels somehow written so there’s an easy hook for the curators to write about in their concert literature
right? there are a ton of talented singers, but socially/politically he’s like the only good dude in that whole milieu of carnatic vocalists.
I admit I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to Carnatic, not in the sense that it offends me in any way that he’s innovating the genre, but more so that the music which resonates with me is the traditional stuff I heard in my childhood
the women who are arguing against him (and, though they are loath to admit it, for Brahmin superiority) are especially repulsive. ranjini-gayatri and them. recall that Boston Brahmins were named after these folks for a reason - all the pathologies of the haughty upper crust with the gloss of high culture and aesthetics. especially damning is the comment about how, like only certain people can enter the sanctum sanctorum of a temple, only “certain people” can be introduced to Carnatic music. which people lady? which people?? On what basis??
This scene being incredibly caste conscious in general - or rather, “caste blind” in the way that all white spaces are “color blind” - i don’t think anyone has thought to ask this simple clarifying question. freedom of speech laws in india are also… not very good, so you can get a police complaint for “offending a community’s [caste’s] sentiments” if you get too on your SJW shit.
anyways. there are a lot of great Carnatic musicians, and a lot history of adapting Western instruments to play Carnatic. The violin for example has risen to become a default part of the ensemble, albeit played seated (resting the head of the violin on the foot) - and other instruments have been introduced, e.g. kadri gopalnath with alto saxophone or u. srinivas on mandolin
this is more Carnatic meets jazz (with Rudresh Mahanthappa who is a great jazz saxophonist)
and shout-out Charlie Mariano who not only was a jazz saxophonist but learned Carnatic and even played nadaswaram which I believe he recorded on a few albums
One particular thing I dislike, which might make my position more clear, is how the custom among youtube musicians, guitar tabbers etc is to try and meticulously reproduce a specific studio recording of a song, even though the song is a lot looser when performed by the original band. I also dislike those videos that attempt to score a series of sounds or a meme or something because they always do it with robotic millisecond precision.
Anyway I like the idea of “interpretation” I suppose, of songs belonging to everybody, and there not ever being a definitive realisation of them. And I like the idea of recordings as field recordings, even a studio recording or a complete digital construction being a sort of field recording in the abstract, belonging to a specific time and place.
well this one is really an extramusical work i think, no? it’s a theatrical performance piece situated in a concert hall rather than something strictly musical (unless we are conceding that all performance is actually that and this is merely emphasizing, but i think this opens more rabbit holes potentially). the soloist is given performance instructions which are entirely inaudible, for example. that part of the performance isn’t “music” to me, and since it appears to be a vital part of the work, i think i’d end up classifying it differently.
i actually don’t have much of a comment on the music itself but i did find the performance (what i watched of it anyway) entertaining!
maybe i find it amusingly pertinent in particular in light of my argument
since i think this one potentially does actually require that haha
I skipped ahead because the beginning was quite boring but I liked the textures (In the context of skipping around a youtube video) particularly how the xylophone was mixing in. The sound quality is really good so it has that benefit.
What’s the deal with him being massively popular in his time? With zero research we can assume a lot more than musical talent. Looks like a fun piece for the ensemble to play at least.
I really became aware of the carnatic melodic styles by way of Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band in the years after school.
I always counted it as part of the everybody was going to India in the 60’s thing. Now though, with much more widespread understanding and conversation around Indo-European cultural connections it is easier to understand the motivation.
While not as iconic as Clair de Lune for some good reason I’m always surprised when I meet a Debussy head unfamiliar with this one:
This is a Scriabin piece I really like that mixes modern dissonance with satisfying simple melody and gets really intense. It’s kind of black metal adjacent but from 1912. Horowitz also has some fun with the introduction in this video.
just to give a real example, i find this random track (off one of probably literally hundreds of releases by this incredibly prolific adventurous and brilliant but effectively unknown internet musician XoArK) to be, by a pretty wide margin, more musically interesting than most (…possibly all? depending on when we’re cutting it off, lol…) contemporary “classical” music i’ve heard, including the examples i liked in this thread
i feel the people doing the work i want to hear the most today, the most vital and cutting edge things, the most life-changing and inspiring projects, are by and large not the domain of whatever “classical” music entails in 2025.
there will always be a place for music that is written as an end result, but i personally suspect people most deeply invested in musical excellence will not stop there when so much can be done to guide a more complete version of the idea to be transmitted.
one thing that i was thinking about as a sideline is (older, synthesized) videogame music. neither written NOR recorded… programmatically prepared, and then executed in realtime. maybe this is why videogame music has a very special status to me
