Who's a modern Bach or Beethoven?

[javasaurus]

What is the nature of 21st century orchestral music? Yes, John Williams does a masterful job of scoring films, but is there any distinctive sound for non-programatic "classical" music in the current millenium?

Comments

[dawntreader]

i think Vangelis certainly counts. the 1492 soundtrack is one of my favourites and doesn't come off like a soundtrack at all. while they do a lot of soundtracks, they also do a not-soundtracks too. their music is very classical and inspiring and new agey all at the same time.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Film music isn't really treated as "classical" by the genre, so Williams is out. It's not whether or not the music is programmatic that makes the difference, and I'm really not sure what does.

Olivier Messiaen dominated the musical scene through the 40s and 50s by building on the row concept from Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern into a larger scale by programming not just the notes, but also the rhythms and attacks.

In the same way that Schoenberg and Stravinsky each dominated one aspect of composition in the 20s and 30s, Messiaen dominated the late 40s (he was a POW in France through most of the war) and 50s.

His pupil, Karlheinz Stockhausen, though even he is sometimes really off the wall in a Cage sense, took that to its extreme in a piece called Gruppen in the late 50s. Very little of what he's done since then has been noticed.

It's really been a case of who's inherited from whom since the great split between Schoenberg's subjectivity and serialism vs Stravinsky's objectivity and neo-classicism. Follow one and you'll end up with names like Knussen; follow the other and you'll get to names like Henze.

No one composer is dominating thought at this time. The reality is that outside of film scores, most 21st century music remains unperformed or at least unrecorded. For that matter, outside of minimalist works like Steve Reich's, very little new compositions have been recorded even since the 60s.

The heart of the problem is that we all know so much about music that we can see where every new composition is derived from, but thanks to the curse of modern corporatism and copyright law, we've come to treat obvious derivations as being second rate and not worth exploring.

This is *against* the history of classical music, where deriving from another's work was essential, from Bach through Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner (the Tristan and Isolde that changed the world was just a diminished third removed from Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet), and most certainly Stravinsky (almost every work in his neo-classical period could be seen as being derived from or a homage to another composer).

but we're cursed with it now and until that attitude changes, no composer no matter how good his music, will ever receive any respect.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

one other thing to consider: in the first decade of any century, the works all tend to be the closure of the previous century. 1800-1810 saw Beethoven and Schubert stretching classical forms with new tonal colors, moving beyond Mozart. 1900-1910 saw Ravel, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Mahler himself all putting the final nail in 19th century Romanticism. Schoenberg didn't bring atonality into full view until 1911, a year after Stravinsky reinvigorated tonality with the rhythms, colors, and harmonies in The Firebird.

In short, by experience one could say there's not yet been enough time for this century to find its voice. in this, music remains in parallel with many other cultural artifacts as well.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the input. So it's not my imagination that we are fairly devoid of truely modern orchestral music (which makes your statement about the beginning of this century being tied to last century a little problematic -- little there to tie to!). I did find an interesting web site (www.numusic.org) which promotes itself as modern "classical" music. Also, looking at this wikipedia page was also helpful.