I don’t know about this so much in principle, but rather in practice, it still matters that no DAW can adequately represent the subtleties of the sound of real instruments, much less the additional subtleties of their players; and as long as that remains the case, people will want to write music for human musicians to play on their physical instruments. Even if you were to postulate a modern (i.e. post-recording) composer who wanted what he heard in his head to be replicated exactly, with absolutely no room for any interpretation (and I tend to believe that very few modern composers actually want this, to completely excise the interpretive process of the conductor and the musician), if exactly what he wanted included the full subtle sounds of acoustic instruments, he’d still be forced, even now, to produce scores for musicians to play.
of course, scores can be involved, real instruments can be involved. a score is written… and what happens after that?
are they forced to wash their hands of it at that point?
to loop back to the main topic, i want my life to be changed by classical music that was written very recently is what i’m saying. if anyone can help me find that, you know. i’m open to it. i want to find things that are vital to me in that way that are ongoing and active
edit: the TM Krishna stuff earlier in this thread is pretty convincing
here’s a piece by several musicians i like
they passed a famitracker file back and forth between themselves and it was a beautiful ftm file
then…
they rendered it to an audio file with parameters of their choosing so other people could hear it, you know?
and now that people have heard it, maybe some ensemble will want to play it. i think the .ftm file is available on battleofthebits.com
I was very lucky to have some “art” string quartets played while I was in college. They didn’t get practiced and realized to where I would have liked them to but I still felt very lucky for that. The other people in the very small intro to composition elective I took many more terms than I should have been allowed (me and the professor got along) learned what I had learned writing things fro the church group in elementary school and a few woodwind things in high school. Main thing is that that pulse that MIDI just has, well, it ain’t there anymore. Secondly, mathematically perfect equal temperament isn’t real. So, at least my pieces weren’t total disasters. Only parts of them were.
Composers equally need the ensembles to hone this craft. Now, a good conductor with a good ensemble can probably make an infant’s scrawl on a score sheet sound like something. But when learning to write down ideas to be realized through notation, there is a special sort of imagination that the environment to learn to wield well is only found in the highest levels of academia and among those who can afford to fail in grand scale.
Perhaps this is obvious. I originally was going to write a few thoughts on the pointlessness of writing down music to be read but wanted to respond with a bit more effort.
is this classical?
it’s very unclear to me what is or isn’t anyway, but i do like it. i appreciate louis cole’s harmonic language being fleshed out here by the orchestra more than on his solo and group recordings
I’m getting like a holiday Poston pops feel. It certainly has the mark of classical. I’m not crazy about so many of the instrumentalists wearing headphones and are close mic’d but that’s pretty superficial I suppose. It sounds nice.
Unambiguously yes I’d say, if we’re using the pop definition (of course it isn’t if we are using the academic definition, but we rightfully said no to that since post #1 lol). I actually thought it was wonderful that Cole’s newest album was like 45% contemporary classical by volume.
I think actually that no one has ever come up with an adequate solution for micing an orchestra or any other large ensemble, and that goes double for any outdoor performance (marching bands sound particularly anemic relative to their live sound no matter how high quality the recording). I’m the opposite of a hardware engineer and so could not even begin to offer solutions, but in my vague understanding they haven’t even like, invented the microphone yet that could record the sound of what a live orchestra in the hall feels like.
As for Louis, who is kind of in that Vulfpeck axis of superproduction, he was never not gonna try to run like three inputs per instrumentalist, lol.
Youtube served this up from a channel that shares a name with my college theory teacher that I had looked up for a previous post. It’s a bit rough but I like listening to this kind of stuff sometimes.
This is the real shit, ya know? Hearing the bassoons struggle with the staccato eighth notes around 2:10 or so, I feel that. And that acoustic is prime through the camcorder audio.
I wanna make it clear, I genuinely like this and I love that they went so hard at it.
They have and the solution is one (1) microphone. Listen to any old good mono recordings off of vinyl through a decent pair of speakers and it’s pretty convincing. I understand this is unrealistic but I’ve done it.
the thing i like about tm krishna is he has this very generative working relationship with other ‘non classical’ sectors of society, from folk musicians (esp of low caste) to dravidian politics and pure-tamil partisans, environmental concerns, trans musicians even, etc. he’s been causing controversy for over 10 years for departing from this very insular world and puncturing the bubble of self importance that says only ‘classical’ musicians can speak of their art as Art, that it must remain pure of ‘corrupting influences’ from other parts of society, etc - which is all intrinsically tied with class and caste of course, but caste rivals the worst of race in america when it comes to the majority’s ability to deny the nature of its own condition and the structures it imposes upon the minority. they look at krishna as some kind of race traitor, i think - on all of his videos you will find among the glowing comments a very substantial minority of the most vitriolic kind of criticism, which i suppose is a sign he is doing something right.
here’s a composition about ‘manual scavenging’ (read the wiki for quick intro), lyrics were composed by a tamil scholar who is not from a high caste (to my understanding) and comes from well outside the sphere of carnatic music. he talks in an interview about the struggle of singing the word “shit” (pī in tamil) and giving it a classical inflection. a deeply scandalous thing, there’s a reason his youtube comments are turned off because people come near to giving him death threats for this, his ‘sullying the classical art form’ with such ‘low’ language
here he is singing with a group of transgender religious musicians from rural karnataka, the jogappas. he’s spoken in interviews about the sort of tentativeness of this encounter, as a classical musician unprepared for how to musically interface with folk musicians of such a marginalized group. (i listened to krishna interviews all day, really recommend it, he’s voluble on any topic and usually has very interesting and thoughtful things to say)
Santosh Jogappa speaks a language that is an indistinguishable mix of Kannada and Marathi. “My language seems to have become like my gender, no?” he laughs. “But as long as you understand what I am trying to say, that is enough.”
not classic but to the point of getting fed up with high art, i have been getting tired of the well-brought-up jazz ‘modern legends’ who are all like, yeah i started studying with bill evans at age 5, won the thelonious monk prize at 14, have released 5 albums each named after a different misquote of the Tao Te Ching, just got profiled in NPR, all my original compositions are named “i remember [progressively more obscure musician from the 1940’s]”, just recorded an album of monk songs arranged for 8-string mandolin etc. the jazz industrial complex. i see why the jazz piano history video @meauxdal posted in the learning instrument thread kind of ends after mccoy tyner
if there’s hope left, the real cats are wearing hoodies at the gig i think
RIP jaimie branch
(sorry this is incoherent nd probably incorrect)
i mean (liek for example) performance practices & instrument technology have changed greatly since the 19th century & even within the lifetime of recorded music. compare itzhak perlmans recording of brahms hungarian dance 1
with a period recording by Joseph Joachim, a frequent collaborator with brahms himself
almost no vibrato! so much portamento! no suddenly getting appassionato at the double notes bit!! idk what im getting at exactly but like, a violinist who is as establishment as they come is violating how brahms himself likely envisioned the music - or something closer to it anyway, nd this time there’s No Excuse. idt this is any great loss for the composer’s vision or artistically (depending on the performer) bc interpretation is what written music is
^ erwin nyiregyhàzi, one of the most legendarily score-butchering performers of all time. for reference:
on the other hand i dont want to get too cheaply postmodern about it, like u still have to respect the architecture of the piece itself (is this the same thing as “music”?) to give a worthwhile interpretation, if not “the composer’s intentions”, whatever that means. idk what the boundaries are on this stuff cuz i dont read books, i just dont think authorship works quite the same way with live improvised music vs written music vs absolute audio
as someone who took / dropped out of a classical composition degree, ofc we spent time talking abt how to work with musicians and give directions they could understand but even as the courses involved both score-based nd pure audio music this question of authorial control didnt really come up. my old professor might have something interesting to say if i brought it up to him though.
i might be misunderstanding u but isnt this always the case for written performance material, like a screenplay
unfortunately i am a plebeian & a dilettante and cant give u much recs for new classical music. i did a presentation on this once
was not in the best state at the time so i dont remember much about it but it seems nice
hmmm this is a good response.
it’s not so much i care about “the composer’s vision” in any general sense; however, i care about my musical vision as it relates to my work and i can only assume some decent portion of other people trying to write music in 2025 have similar feelings, though maybe this thread will disabuse me of this in the end.
i’d love for (competent) ensembles to play my work, and if life had turned out such that that might ever realistically happen, i would happily write scores for them like i used to.
i don’t think i’m alone in thinking, hmmm, i wonder if i just take better control over the rendering of my composition since i now have technology to do so. what’s the alternative? maybe if i had taken one of the composition scholarships offered to me, i could have made stuff like that happen. i didn’t do it because i wanted to play in a band and record music but it didn’t end up happening so i just ended up with depression lol
so maybe i’m just bitter that no ensemble will ever play my written work haha. we can leave it at that because it’s appropriate bringing the whole thing to me being a manic idiot, which i approve of.
speaking of which, i have been in the midst of a gradually intensifying manic episode the last week or so and i apologize for everything i’ve ever said to anyone for any reason. or not. i don’t know. it’s a miracle i haven’t deleted this entire thread yet… i guess the meds still do something
I really like the interpretation examples. It got me thinking about how it is like a script of a play and the performance is the production.
this piece is divine (Robert Schumann - Fantasy in C major, Op. 17)
I’m enjoying the thread! if it makes you feel better my orneriness on the average day is much higher than anything I’ve seen here
Yeah, same.
Sometimes I feel like getting back into classical music brings me back to my school days which had an energy my aging brain is decreasingly equipped to fathom.
With all the BS around music academia and the titanic challenge of organizing any kind of ensemble outside of it, I think some bitterness is fair. Opportunities may arise though. I’m hopping to arrange some choral stuff some day.
maybe i’ve heard this before or maybe not but it is so, so good
this is so interesting to me. idk about this. in the brahms / joachim / perlman case we actually do have an example of someone most likely following something probably more closely aligned with brahms’ intent for the piece
we of course do not have that, or anything approaching that in all cases, as you go further back in the timeline before recordings. i wonder if brahms, like myself, would prefer the older interpretation because i really personally think a certain directness is lost in the perlman version. too much let’s call it performer-centrism and not enough piece-centrism. that’d be my note if i were conducting and had the absolute unmitigated audacity and gall to give notes in the first place.
in terms of the emotional affect delta in the versions, perlman’s excessive vibrato (while technically incredible and beautiful in its own right, irrespective of what he’s playing) comes off like performing a mime of a tragedy rather than experiencing it oneself, to my ear. obviously as subjective as it gets. to me, though, in this game of telephone (a couple centuries ago, basically the only game in town) we’re increasingly relying on the expertise of increasingly disconnected musicians. this could be glorious, superior, beyond anything the writer could have envisioned, but i think this might be less the case than we expect. maybe i need to write into my composition No vibrato; do not play like Ithzak Perlman were i to try and write something with that mood myself. or worse (for me, in this very specific case, in a confusing hypothetical) if Perlman is considered the pinnacle for most “classical” violinists (or whoever may play a piece i write), i may need to wholly disavow the current cultural milieu much as scott joplin did when he wrote things like “DO NOT PLAY FAST. RAGTIME SHOULD NEVER BE PLAYED FAST” in some of his later published works
perlman has become a part of the conversation in the music, which is lovely and has evident and abundant value in and of itself; but i think that has its greatest effect if there is more of a reference of our best understanding of what the composer may have intended based on a close reading of the evidence we have in that regard. in this case, there is: it’s no loss at all, entirely a benefit. without that reference, i do think we lose something.
surely many listeners to an itzhak perlman performance or record are interested in him playing perhaps moreso than any piece he might choose to play, given it doesn’t stray too far from a safe consensus undestanding of what “classical” may be. me, i feel like itzhak perlman is a very good violinist, but i am not a violinist nor a violin enthusiast. i’m a composer and a composition enthusiast, and i want as much as possible to hear what they wanted me to hear