questions you are dying to ask but are too scared to b/c of music nerd cred?

zhao

there are no accidents
Rambler said:
The composer comes up with some sort of 'system' (this might be technological, or intellectual) for generating music, sets the system going, and the music creates itself with little or no subsequent intervention from the composer.

I went to a talk with Oval's Markus Popp and he was trying to absolve himself of any creative responsibility by talking about his work in these terms. this exemplifies a tendency in a lot of artists who make use of "generative" methods to conveniently remove themselves from the focus of critical debate to the safe distance of "clock-maker" -- "hey, don't ask me, I just make the damn things. what they wanna do is not my problem".

It was a little too smug and convenient and I had to point out that despite whatever systems or software (tools) he is using, there is absolutely no way authorship can be denied. Nor his personality or subjective aesthetic choices or ego, which can all be found in the music he directly or indirectly makes.

even a clinically cut and dry and seemingly impersonal "systems" piece like Penduluum or Sitting in a Room speaks volumes about the composer's personality and taste.

if systems music is some kind of removal of the artists's ego, then so is photography. which is absurd.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
what exactly does "slew dem" mean? I know it means killing people but is it in the context of gang warfare or what? tons of dancehall and reggae songs about AK-47s and warriors and mowing down people like mowing the lawn...

when I first got the Slew Dem 12 inch I had just seen the movie Hotel Rowanda and I know the 2 are probably unrelated but the combination made me uncomfortable to say the least.
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
Originally posted by confucious
this exemplifies a tendency in a lot of artists who make use of "generative" methods to conveniently remove themselves from the focus of critical debate to the safe distance of "clock-maker"
the architect Peter Eisenman used this "death of the author" stance in framing his late 80's buildings (Wexner Center, Columbus Convention Center)...I, too, was/am very suspicious...seemed like an obvious attempt to defray aesthetic criticism...
 

ryan17

Well-known member
alright

the whole 'are you mad? do you hate yourself?'

what the fuck song is that? kids won't shut up about it.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
henry s said:
the architect Peter Eisenman used this "death of the author" stance in framing his late 80's buildings (Wexner Center, Columbus Convention Center)...I, too, was/am very suspicious...seemed like an obvious attempt to defray aesthetic criticism...
\

yeah when they do that it's like "no. sorry. you are neither novel nor shocking nor cute. just stop this beating around the po-mo bush crap and get on with it like you mean it."
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
confucius said:
I went to a talk with Oval's Markus Popp and he was trying to absolve himself of any creative responsibility by talking about his work in these terms. this exemplifies a tendency in a lot of artists who make use of "generative" methods to conveniently remove themselves from the focus of critical debate to the safe distance of "clock-maker"
I found it interesting that Autechre, who have gone more and more down this route for making music, argue that the whole concept of "generative" methods is meaningless. Even with music where you are using software in such a way that it all chugs away by itself, giving you notes or melodies or beats or a million different timbral effects, you still chose the parameters with which that kind of thing takes place and decided what bits to keep and so on...

I guess Autechre were not going for systems music, insofar as I don't think the listener is ever supposed to be listening to their music to hear a fairly obvious process unfolding, but that's probably irrelevant to what confucius has written.

Isn't Squarepusher way over on the Popp side of the fence, arguing that with electronic "instruments" being as they are, its the nature of the device used that is the biggest determining factor on the music created? Maybe I misunderstood the essay I saw from him...
 

gabriel

The Heatwave
confucius said:
what exactly does "slew dem" mean? I know it means killing people but is it in the context of gang warfare or what?

slew = past tense of slay. so 'slew dem' means 'kill them violently'. metaphorically, of course! ;)

as far as i'm aware it doesn't have any specific, gang-related meaning
 

jack

Well-known member
michael said:
I found it interesting that Autechre, who have gone more and more down this route for making music, argue that the whole concept of "generative" methods is meaningless. Even with music where you are using software in such a way that it all chugs away by itself, giving you notes or melodies or beats or a million different timbral effects, you still chose the parameters with which that kind of thing takes place and decided what bits to keep and so on...

yes, but in systems music the system would be outlined by the composer and maybe released in sheet music form. Any time the piece was heard it would be the particular performer's performance of it, so, unlike an Authechre record, the sound and performance would not be inherent in the composition.
 
S

simon silverdollar

Guest
what is 'serial music'? i need a VERY basic explanation that assumes no knowledge of compositional theory, please!
 

tate

Brown Sugar
simon silverdollar said:
what is 'serial music'? i need a VERY basic explanation that assumes no knowledge of compositional theory, please!

another word for 12-tone composition, pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg
 

zhao

there are no accidents
simon silverdollar said:
what's 12-tone composition?i know nothing!

my knowledge on this is not deep at all, just the general aerial view of the basics:

12 tone / serialism is very much based on mathematics and numeric systems. a typical serialist composition looks like a quantum physics equation on a blackboard. critics of it say that it relies on cold logic, giving rise to mind boggling complexity but is devoid of human feeling, and is an artist's art where the practitioners get lost up their own bung-holes in endless calculations, ending up as nothing more than an impenatrable tangle of meaningless notes.

my experience of Schoenberg is that he's boring as hell. and headache inducing. all of my friends hate on 12-tone shit with a passion.

but atleast one fan of Schoenberg I respect is the Frankfurt School theorist Adorno (but then again his writing on music is absolute rubbish. can't trust anyone -atleast on musical topics- who hates jazz)

stockhousen (and Xenakis, right?) came out of that and has done many interesting and very much enjoyable things.

Minimalism came right after (1960s), and is largely a response to the complexity and lack of physical immediacy of Serialism: fuck the mathematical equations and all that BULLSHIT, we gonna do it with 1 note. that's it.
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
simon silverdollar said:
what's 12-tone composition?

Enormous topic, but I'll give it a try.

In the first decades of the 20th century composer Arnold Schoenberg was looking for a way out of what many perceived to be something of a dead end in late romantic music and methods of composition, namely, a kind of undifferentiated and (seemingly) totally subjective atonality with too few principles of organization. (This is only one way of characterizing the moment, and is terribly reductive, others will be able to put it better.)

In response, Schoenberg developed a method whereby all of the pitches in the octave could be used to generate the harmonic fabric of a piece without excluding, or favoring, any particular pitch. His method was to generate a row or 'series' of notes made from all 12 tones of the octave and to put them in a sequence *without repeating any of the notes*. This was an attempt to give all of the pitches within the western scale an equal weight or value. The 12-tone row was then used as a basis for generating the harmony of the piece instead, say, of using western scales or previously attested harmonic systems which brought with them their own burden of tradition and harmonic expectations. A kind of methodical modernism if you like, not terribly far from the use of the grid in 20th century painting.

(1) So, according to the method, a composer would literally write out, from left to right on the music staff, a row of 12 pitches, using every note within the octave, without repetition. This was often called the 'prime' row.

(2) Next one writes this row of 12 tones in reverse, literally backwards. This comprises the second 12-tone tone row, otherwise known as the 'retrograde' row of notes.

(3) Then you take the original tone row and 'invert' it, which, in music parlance means that you write the prime row in something like an upside-down fashion, or, in other words, you rewrite the row with the same intervals but each interval is shifted in the oppositie direction on the music staff, i.e., either up or down. Again, this generates yet another sequence of 12 tones, all of which come from one octave, none of which are repeated before the end of the sequence.

(4) Finally, you reverse the order of the 'inverted' row, or, again, you write the 'inverted' row backwards.

Having done this, the composer now has four separate melodic lines, all of which were generated from the twelve available notes of the western scale/octave, virtually none of which depended on the subjective preference of one interval or melody or chord progression or other compositional technique etc etc (which was one of the points of the method, to avoid these).

(Sure, the intervals themselves in the original row were selected by the composer. But the other three followed from this row in a mechanical way. The results were almost always somewhat 'dissonant', and common intervals such as major thirds were usually avoided so as not to imply or hint at western tonal systems.)

The four rows were then used for generating the harmonic material of the piece. This was seen as a way of methodically overcoming a kind of abyss where every composer simply writes whatever atonal music they like, without any method whatsoever.

**************

Brief notes on the history:

Schoenberg's first 12-tone piece is usually said to have been written in 1921, though I'm not sure about this.

Alban Berg and Anton von Webern were Schoenberg's most famous students, and both went on to become very successful composers. It is worth noting that both employed Schoenberg's method in drastically different ways.

Later composers took this method of serializing the harmonic material ( = generating 'rows') and applied it to all aspects of the piece, including rhythmic material, dynamics, and so on. Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbit are two well-known examples of this, though Boulez did much, much more later (to say nothing of the fact that he is one of the finest conductors and promoters of 'new music' in the classical world since WWII), and Babbit is usually known among more electronically-oriented music fans for his early experiments with computer music (much? all? of which was serial as well).

This method was absolutely ubiquitous in the classical world at one point, and many composers, such as Stravinsky, had their so-called '12-tone period,' even when they were not otherwise ever 12-tone composers exclusively.

There was a huge reaction against the method. John Cage and minimalism are two well-known examples of going the opposite direction harmonically and compositionally (though OF COURSE I do not mean to suggest that Cage or minimalism in classical music can be reduced to a simple reaction against 12-tone method, i'm just trying to give a a sense of the historical trajectory).

Incidentally, many people today love to hate 12-tone music, both inside and outside of the classical music world. I happen to think that it was an extremely interesting moment in the history of classical music, for numerous complicated reasons, and I also completely disagree that the results were always overintellectualized dissonant music (the usual complaint). There was plenty of beautiful 12 tone music written, Alban Berg's Violin Concerto in Memory of an Angel being one of the early examples IMHO.

Really though, the Rambler should be the one to answer this. He is an expert, and his blog is a wonderful source for learning more about contemporary classical music . . .
 

tate

Brown Sugar
confucius said:
but atleast one fan of Schoenberg I respect is the Frankfurt School theorist Adorno (but then again his writing on music is absolute rubbish. can't trust anyone -atleast on musical topics- who hates jazz)

Actually Adorno studied composition with Schoenberg's student, Alban Berg. But yes I agree, Adorno's hostility to jazz and other forms of new music feels very, very backward today.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
Tate said:
Arnold Schoenberg was looking for a way out of what many perceived to be something of a dead end in late romantic music and methods of composition, namely, a kind of undifferentiated and (seemingly) totally subjective atonality with too few principles of organization.

ah. this makes sense. that Arnold was actually trying to avoid and get away from the oppressiveness of the late romantic music - which was overladen with emotional content at the expense of formal logic and clarity.
 
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