Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Boulez's music! I went to Alisa Weilerstein's Fragments world premiere at Kroner Hall yesterday where the solo cello performance interweaves Bach's cello suite movements and some contemporary pieces. Admittedly I haven't listened to contemporary (classical) music much at all but was quite intrigued by it. It also stuck me that, like writing, music essentially is a mind game between the creator and consumer, one tries to set anticipations and the other tries to guess where things go. In an active listening mode (as we are in a concert), this is really interesting to do. It would be much harder to listen to music we're not familiar with in passive mode. I wonder if this is your experience?
I agree. And the complexity of Boulez's music, or at least the profusion of it, extends the period before one can listen to it in what you call passive mode. It's a strange giddy pleasure when you can.
I'm sure there's a lot written about music and predictability, pattern and variation. Mozart's very good at repeating a phrase and varying the last iteration just a little in a way that's peculiarly satisfying. And it's that lack of predictability that makes contemporary classical music so difficult for many people. I like Auden's memorable, too-simple-to-be-totally-true line that 'The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.' I might replace 'rhythms' with 'harmonies' a lot of the time - I like that early Second Viennese stuff when the shapes are romantic and the harmonies shifting and strange: Berg's piano sonata, Schoenberg's 2nd quartet and the Book Of The Hanging Gardens etc.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Boulez's music! I went to Alisa Weilerstein's Fragments world premiere at Kroner Hall yesterday where the solo cello performance interweaves Bach's cello suite movements and some contemporary pieces. Admittedly I haven't listened to contemporary (classical) music much at all but was quite intrigued by it. It also stuck me that, like writing, music essentially is a mind game between the creator and consumer, one tries to set anticipations and the other tries to guess where things go. In an active listening mode (as we are in a concert), this is really interesting to do. It would be much harder to listen to music we're not familiar with in passive mode. I wonder if this is your experience?
I agree. And the complexity of Boulez's music, or at least the profusion of it, extends the period before one can listen to it in what you call passive mode. It's a strange giddy pleasure when you can.
I'm sure there's a lot written about music and predictability, pattern and variation. Mozart's very good at repeating a phrase and varying the last iteration just a little in a way that's peculiarly satisfying. And it's that lack of predictability that makes contemporary classical music so difficult for many people. I like Auden's memorable, too-simple-to-be-totally-true line that 'The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.' I might replace 'rhythms' with 'harmonies' a lot of the time - I like that early Second Viennese stuff when the shapes are romantic and the harmonies shifting and strange: Berg's piano sonata, Schoenberg's 2nd quartet and the Book Of The Hanging Gardens etc.