Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Why did the Composer Era die out and why don't we have great composers today?

Some good points there. I totally agree with your last paragraph, it's what I was trying to say in my post.

Kind of. I would suggest it is the other way around. No contemporary great composers (in the traditional "classical" mould) to shine a focus on great new music and therefore a lack of audience wanting to here it.

There is an audience for classical music, I see it every day at work and on this forum, but classical in the traditional sense (which nowadays seems to mean anything before the a-tonal nonsense took off which is approximately WW1). People love a melody, something they can hum or sing to in their cars or homes or wherever. The contemporary stuff which is being put out these days (with the exception of some film music) is usually quite the opposite unfortunately.

Also I think no-one is encouraged to improvise in the "classical" way which was of course the norm in the hey-day of the great composers.

Very interesting thread indeed.

I personally don't know Beethoven's "method", as i have no knowledge of theory or composition.

Therefore i do not have anything a priori against atonality. I liked Prokofiev ever sonce i heard his music for the first time, and i don't think he sounds much like Beethoven.

So it's not prejudice i have against "contemporary" music. It just does not make me feel anything, 90% of the times.

If atonality is just a method to get to a certain goal, and a new one, i think so far it's not developed well enough to make this new language useful to a lot of people. It just seems to have a very limited range in terms of transmitting feelings , emotions, the listener can relate to.

I do like Schoenberg , i loved that Rautavaara posted in this thread, but some of the stuff that goes by the name of contemporary music is just "experimental nonsense" to me.

Proteus,s point [previous page] is a good one concerning specialized education.
Many early composers knew little else but music and their general education compared to contemporary standards would have been poor.
Is it today that broadly based educational curricula are failing to educate gifted individuals in specific skills?

Yes, that is quite possible. Good thought. Perhaps we see the similar mono-focussed training in the tennis players of today. Players like the Williams sisters who's father in the past has admitted to choosing their career even before they were born and training them to play before they could even ride a bike.

I am amazed at how many father (trainer)-daughter (player) combinations there seem to be in tennis. Makes me think of the stories of Mozart and Beethoven and their task-master fathers.

The role of fathers is much diminished in society today and perhaps this may have something to do with it as well.

@ Toddo

"I think Beethoven could be 'blamed' for the more recent lack of tonality. He really pushed the boundaries. Even today a lot of people don't get what he was trying to do. I think early 20th C composers thought that you either had to baffle the audience (al-la Beethoven) to be considered great."

Beethoven surely pushed the boundaries and his final trio of sonatas challenges the listener (the interpreter even more) in a way that most pieces don't. Yet we know instinctively that it is worth meeting the challenge.

The words in your post that bother me are 'baffle the audience a-la Beethoven'. I hope, and assume you did not mean to imply that Beethoven deliberately set out to 'baffle' so maybe I am complaining merely about an unfortunate choice of word.

Actually, Beethoven went to great lengths to avoid baffling an interpreter of these sonatas. Has there ever been more explicit instructions written in the score by a composer as to how a piece should be played (even if these are more often than not observed in the breach)?

Op 109-111 will probably never be challenged by any composer of piano music. But this is not a competition. Much great piano music has since and can today be written.

In my opinion, what went wrong in the 20th Century is not the adoption of atonality as such, but having lost sight of the ultimate goal of music, which is to elicit an emotional response in the listener. The means by which one does this are irrelevant. To give one example, Alban Berg's Violin Concerto is written within the 12-tone struture, yet is devatatingly involving.

i totally agree

Sorry rrb, Whilst I don't think it was his intention (from what I've read) to baffle the audience, it apparently did. I seem to remember a quote where he was reported to have said something like "It's not for you, it's for future generations (to understand)'. I'm not sure that he didn't baffle them toward the end. Certainly with his string quartets, many people of the day thought he'd lost his marbles.

As for the piano music, I understand he intentionally wrote difficult music to be out of the reach of the average player.


I wholeheartedly agree with you here. Well said

I don't believe anyone has mentioned Nicholai Kapustin yet, but he is still alive. His teacher was a student of Felix Blumenfeld, the same pianist who taught Horowitz.

I've also heard a Scriabin imitator over the classical station on the radio that sounded really interesting, but whose name I can't recall.

As for the reason the Composer Era died out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13D1YY_BvWU

You have a quartet riding on a helicopter with someone with Down Syndrome yodeling. And this is from Stockhausen, supposed to be the greatest of the contemporary composers.

Even Samuel Barber sounded his best before he started shifting to atonality.

I know that music in this vein is intellectually grounded, but it is too unbearable to listen.

My teacher likened it to an intelligent but really, really ugly girl. It's great she is smart and everything, but unfortunately there are equally intelligent and prettier girls found in their predecessors such as Chopin and Rachmaninoff (their music I mean).

It's like the Hollywood love-triangle scenario involving two girls: one pretty but vapid, the other ugly but smart and with a great personality.

Then the pretty girl is also intelligent and with a wonderful personality, representing the romantic, baroque, and classical era composers, there's literally no reason to give the others, representing the majority (not all) of the contemporary composers the time of day.

The word "great" in relation to "composers" is subjective. One person's great composer is another's poor one.

To the same extent that beauty is subjective. Swordfish speaks of "ugly" girls; one person's ugly is another's beauty.

This thread has been dead for six months, and probably should have been allowed to rest in peace.

Steven

On the subject of girls, this assertion is not true, at least according to the sociologists who waste everyone's tax $$'s conducting surveys. It seems there is strong evidence that one man's beautiful girl is probably another man's beautiful girl. (And it is supposed to work the other way as well. One woman's dishy guy is likely to be another woman's dishy guy.)


I can sympathise with this. But if we are now going to claim that beauty is subjective, the implication being this translates to music, then the analogy with sexual appeal, according to the evidence, is not going to cut it.

I do believe there is a broad consensus as to what beauty is, whether one refers to a girl, a guy, a painting or a piece of music.

Of course, not all great music is 'beautiful' in the usual sense of the word, so there is still room for debate. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that a great piece of music will find its public, even if it takes a while. We argue a lot in this forum about whether piece A is more appealing than piece B, but usually A and B both refer to music that is generally perceived as 'of significance'.

Of course there's consensus, at least within a given cultural milieu. Still, the standards of different cultures can (and do) certainly vary greatly.

Steven

I'd second John Williams and Howard Shore as today's classical composers in EXACTLY the same vein as those of previous centuries. I remember seeing all of those movies with the splashy scores like "Star Wars," "Raiders," and the Lord of the Rings movies. The entire theater would pile out into the mall, several hundred people, and make a beeline straight for the music store to go get the CD and stick it in the car on the way home.

Also, I can't disqualify popular composers at ALL. Webb, Lennon/McCartney, Paul Simon, Lennox, Perry/Schon, Carly Simon, Billy Joel, Carole King, Barry Gibb, even Giorgio Moroder ... there are quite a few of them. It's hard to tell which ones will be remembered in four hundred years (although L/McC and Paul Simon are good bets), but some will.

Also, recall that Bach died in obscurity and his wife died about a decade later in total poverty. Mozart got dumped into a potter's field. Their music definitely DID pass out of fashion. Many of the people now considered great were only great after someone rediscovered them 150 years after they died.

It's just a broad consensus about where the middle of the road lies.

Who 'rediscovered' Mozart? His burial was in line with the practice of the day.

In line with the practice of the day for people without a whole lot of money. We think of these guys as "fame-and-fortune" types nowdays because we have a few centuries of perspective, but even the best geniuses had no guarantee of either.

In order to determine what's immortal, you need to sit by for a bit and wait to see when things start dropping dead. That takes time. There's plenty of composers of that level around today, I have no doubt. We just lack the perspective of a hundred or so years to be able to tell them apart just yet. That's usually how it is; the ones who are lauded, well-paid, and loved from start to finish in their own lifetimes are pretty rare.

Do your research. Mozart's burial was perfectly usual under the circumstances. He wasn't treated as a pauper. Also, his fame was never eclipsed from the Magic Flute onwards.
from http://www.aproposmozart.com/BCC%20--%20Review%20of%20M.%20in%20Wien.pdf

Per J Cortese - "Also, recall that Bach died in obscurity and his wife died about a decade later in total poverty. Mozart got dumped into a potter's field. Their music definitely DID pass out of fashion. Many of the people now considered great were only great after someone rediscovered them 150 years after they died."

Just to set the record straight, Mozart's music continued to be popular well after his death - and while Bach's music was considered "old fashioned" and was largely forgotten in the second half of the 18th century, in 1792 a young Beethoven caused a sensation in musical circles in Vienna by playing preludes and fugues from the WTC. And it was Mendelssohn who championed performances of Bach's major choral works in the early 19th century, conducting the St. Matthew Passion in 1829 in Berlin.

Um, I have done my research. The man struggled to pay his bills all his life, and yes, Bach WAS out of fashion by the time he died. There's no "one person" who rediscovered anyone's works any more than there is one person who rediscovered anything that goes from out-of-fashion to retro-chic to classic.

And the fact remains: there are great composers around nowdays, we simply may not yet know who they are. We may also have a skewed idea of what constitutes appropriate audience behavior in the Presence of Great Works of Aht. We may think that great composers are greeted with attentive silence and polite clapping at the end. God knows that's not how early operas were received. Shouts, jeers, puking, throwing things ... pretty much all the basics of rock-concert behavior were pretty common. It makes me wonder if in a hundred years, people aren't going to put on their best formal clothing to go listen to minutely perfect renditions of "Bohemian Rhapsody" while shushing anyone uncouth enough to whisper during the cadenzas.

The great composers were not immortal before they died, for pete's sake. They came and went, struggled to pay their bills, and wrote commonly popular stuff. Until time passes, there is just no way to say that there are no centuries-old legends around today. Of course there aren't. Centuries haven't passed yet.