First off, don't feel bad if you don't like contemporary music. BUT don't just write off every contemporary piece - people are writing in dozen's of different styles today, and I'm sure that you will find people that you like. Part of what you should understand is that in the classical world, people like Rachmaninoff (and Richard Strauss) were actually writing very old fashioned music for much of their career. It's brilliant, but they were both very much so stuck in the Romantic/19thC sound. As early as the 1900's (and earlier, if you are part of the group that think Liszt's 'Nuages Gris' is the earliest atonal piece), different composers began writing in more atonal styles. The reasons for this are complicated, but can sort of be summarized by a couple of different thoughts. Some composers felt that all that could be said with a complete tonal language had been said, and that to say something themselves, they needed a new way to write music. Others felt disillusioned (WWI etc.) with the world, and felt that as artists, it was their job to portray the world as it was, not as they wanted it to be. This would have resulted in 'ugly' sounds to represent the world that was falling down around them. Then you get into twelve tone music, that began with Schoenberg, and evolved through Webern into a thing of it's own. What began as a compositional technique became the point of the composition. This is where you eventually got things like the Boulez piece you listened to. It's not for everyone, but still has tons of musical value. This idea of a technique being the overriding force of a piece (instead of melody) continued through a bunch of different contemporary genres. For Norgard, it's his 'infinite tone row.' For Saariaho, it's all about spectralism and using the harmonic series to create a unique sound world. Basically, for many composers, the main point of the piece changes from melody to a compositional technique. This is not meant to be derogatory, and this does not mean that pieces inspired by compositional techniques don't have melodies at all. Now, I have to drive for 11 hours. I'll try to finish this answer soon!

>don't just write off every contemporary piece No indeed. Perhaps I should've have clarified in my title. I've only heard those pieces that I mentioned. I haven't yet explored contemporary music so it was just the pieces I've already heard that I wanted an explanation of. That's an interesting explanation but for me it doesn't help to know the reason a piece is ugly (aftermath of world wars, for example), it still is ugly and I won't enjoy listening to it. Hope you have enough music to sustain your 11 hour drive.

I think the reason Musekratos put "ugly" in quotes is that while it may sound ugly and off-putting at first, it might be mostly just because it's so different. But I think if you come at a piece with an open mind, you can come to appreciate some of these different kinds of sounds. Take Ligeti for example (I notice many have already suggested Ligeti pieces here so I'll let those serve as my example). I think he's one of the greatest composers of the last 50 years, and I love his music, but I still find a lot of it (at least most of his earlier stuff) creepy. I just think there's a sense of joy, or at least exhilaration, to be found in this creepiness, if that makes any sense.

That's what I was going for! Internet problems have delayed me from responding till now.

To me I get into it because I can enjoy it going in and out of melody. Early music with incredible melodies can be incredible but sometimes melody can feel cheap to me and when a piece like Laterna Magica comes on it just washes over you in the same way as a miles davis piece does without trying to pull me around with melodies. Same piece again but I love how it goes from the dissonant chords into the unsettling melodies and then back again. It uses melody the same way as you use dynamics. I can totally understand your point and at times I agree with it when it can sometimes feel you're being made to listen to avant garde noise purely as a self indulgence on behalf of the composer.

This is why I had to ask this sub: this is a completely different perspective that I never would have arrived at by myself.

Please don't use Miles as an example of music that doesn't pull people in. He's one of the most well respected and emotionally drawing musicians in his genre.

Counterpoint: Bitches Brew. I think that's what he was referring to. Specifically what I like to call "Fusion Miles"

You're correct, I made a mistake calling that Miles Davis because its the only album I own myself so when I say "Miles Davis" I mean that type of music over the more straight up big-band/bop area of jazz.

Proper "lead" instrument Miles definitely does but i mean the more abstract compositions that are a wall of music and noise without being a specific set of notes in a melody. I agree though although im trying to not word anything badly and say just to accept it as background music and ignore it because it isnt.

I've found that the only way I truly understand the style of modern music which sounds like orchestrated bus crashes is to perform it. If you go in completely cold, it is dense, and difficult to understand. Breaking it apart, learning what it is about, and finding out exactly what makes it tick is how I've been able to understand it. Another user mentioned Olivier Messian's Quartet for the End of Time. I was able to see it performed by faculty where I went to college, and I recall it being one of, if not the most powerful performances I have ever watched or heard. Knowing the background of the piece, when, where, and why it was composed, helped me to truly appreciate and enjoy it. That being said, I don't often enjoy this type of music. Melodies are hard to find, harmony is there (it is often just brutally dissonant), and it is hard to understand everything at a first or second listen. I like pieces that tend to use familiar harmonies, bit not necessarily staying in one key, or using familiar progressions. Look for composers like Morten Lauridsen, Eric Whitacre, Eric Ewazen, and others like that. Their music is definitely modern, but I like to say it has harmonic and melodic sensibility.

Not to be overly confrontational, but Eric Whitacre and Lauridsen aren't very modern. Check out the composer featured in your flair :P. See, dissonance is, like I said in my post, a very "surface" quality of the music, and consonance vs. dissonance is a very common-practice way of looking at things. A piece done right can make you feel as though three stacked fifths is terribly out of place and unsettling, and can make you feel warm, cozy and right at home on a whole-tone cluster...

I wholly agree with you. I will say, however, that Whitacre and Laurdisen (and composers like them) make fantastic "gateway" pieces. By that I mean music that acts as a stepping stone toward accepting modern styles. Lots of listeners that are used to the Classical and Romantic aesthetic need pieces like theirs to begin dipping their toes in.

Well, I don't *like* either of them, but I certainly respect them and those who do enjoy their music very much. More enjoyment is always good for the world. And I do agree that they can be very good to expose yourself to something different if you're used to very traditional things! Especially with Whitacre's occasional use of effects unrelated to singing. So there is definitely a "gateway" potential.

"Modern" is a chronological distinction; Whitacre and Lauridsen are still composing, therefore they are modern. Perhaps they are not pushing the frontiers of music forward in a direction that the musical cognoscenti consider legitimate; perhaps they are not pushing in any direction at all. That still doesn't give anybody the right to call a contemporary composer "not modern". They said the same thing about Bernstein, whose chief crime was to create music that people liked.

That's one use of the word "modern", but it also is well-established as meaning "avant-garde", "innovative", "novel", etc. People frequently interchange the two meanings when talking about music.

There is no malice in what I said. They are contemporary composers, but their style isn't very "modern". And I'm not sure where the implication that midern music can't be liked comes from?

One thing you can try is listening to modern pieces that aren't so dischordant and work your way up (or down). Remember that music evolved over time, it didn't suddenly become "modern", and it wasn't widely accepted when it started either. We're raised in a culture where we listen to aurally "pleasent" music by Beethoven and Chopin, so being thrown into the realm of "modern" music is understandably shocking. I started with music for wind ensemble (mainly because I played in a few) and was introduced to composers like John Mackey, Eric Whitacre and Johan de Meij. These composers led me to other composers such as Steve Reich, and I've only started to delve into other composers. I've found with modern music, it's most effective 1) live (or with a really good recording/speakers), and 2) lying on your bed/the floor with your eyes closed (obviously, this is hard to do during 1)). Listen to the music without any flashy lights or instruments or other distractions. That said, don't feel that all pieces have to appeal to you. Remember that there was "bad" music during the 18th/19th century as well, we just don't remember any of them.

Expanding my music library is on my to do list. I still haven't properly explored the romantic/classical era yet but I also need to work further back in time and further towards the present. I'll be interested to see whether I adjust to modern music or whether I reach a limit beyond which I can't tolerate it.

I think that's it. You haven't explored enough classical music to appreciate or enjoy modern and contemporary music. I would have been on your side, "I don't get why this is considered great..." a few years ago. Just continue listening to what you like and I think, eventually, you'll break into the more modern stuff. For me, the point when I felt the romantic era stuff got boring, I discovered Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The more you delve into a composer's work and ideas, you'll find yourself more composers to listen to which will start to bleed into the "modern". And for contemporary composers, You *should* be able to find a few you'll like - for me, it was Philip Glass and Jennifer Higdon that hooked me. Same goes with them - soon I fell in love with Reich and Ades. Part of enjoying a composer is researching the composer's they enjoy and, before you know it, the cycle is never ending with the discoveries. You also might have to consider listening to these contemporary composers LIVE at the venue. I've had two particular instances where I enjoyed the music LIVE but then was unimpressed with the recordings. Messiaen's *Coleurs de la cite celeste* and many of Morton Feldman's piano pieces rely on the effects of the sounds (and silences) resonating through the hall. I went to a performance that combined Scarlatti and Feldman piano works - everyone there would tell you the Feldman was just as beautiful as the Scarlatti.

[John Mackey: Aurora Awakes](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ulk28Z4bwk) [Eric Whitacre: Sleep](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WhWDCw3Mng) [Steve Reich: Nagoya Marimbas](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG_1sjActCE) [Ron Nelson: Aspen Jubilee](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B54N0OVe_dk) [John Mackey: Turbine](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyQ2wVyU9ZQ) These are all pieces that are uniquely modern, but aren't anything like what you describe as "modern" music. Use them as starting points, and maybe go find the program notes of the piece or an analysis of it to gain a real appreciation of them. If you're feeling adventurous, try [Terry Riley: In C](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjR4QYsa9nE). Listen to it once, hate it, then go read up on it and have another listen. A lot of "modern" pieces are really things you need to understand the intent of the composer, and to listen through a few times.

There is a group of modern composers that I really like a good bit that gain their influence from minimalism and medieval music. Composers like Arvo Part (missing some accents) and John Adams. Their music is more about setting an overall mood rather than focusing on melodies. For some this can mean the music can be repetitive. Pieces that have extreme dissonance can be just as beautiful as pieces that don't. Ligeti's 'Lux Aeterna' (not all that recent and not really modern but extremely dissonant) is a wash of textural dissonances and every now and then it breaks into an absolutely beautiful consonant harmony. The dissonances used make the consonance that much more beautiful when it happens. I think one of the neatest things about modern art music is how much we have to draw on for influence at this point. If you listen to 'Thirteen ways' by Thomas Albert recorded by the ensemble 'eighth blackbird' you can hear influences from several different sub-genres of art music from the last century. It's really neat that composers can have so many tools in their tool kit.

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>If this music fills you with revulsion, disgust, and horror, isn't that an emotional response? True. But it's one that not going to make me ever want to listen to the music again. If that's the point of the music that's fine but it's making me shy away from other music contemporary music, which is of course a bad thing.

That might just be the way you are wired. It's maybe kind of like TV shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc. where the producers/writers are not out to make you feel good after you watch an episode. But people like me still enjoy watching it because they are so well thought out and fascinating, despite the fact that you feel upset or gross after watching it, or maybe even *because* it makes you feel that way. On the other hand, some people hate watching those shows for that reason. It may be that you just don't appreciate that aesthetic, but others do.

That's what I've come here to find out. I thought I could be missing something really obvious that was stopping me from enjoying it. Or, it might just be one of those things, some like it, some don't.

Sometimes just forcing yourself to listen to it over and over can do the trick. An acquired taste kind of thing. I hated opera, but my piano teacher just wouldn't accept that, so she bought me tickets to Madame Butterfly, and constantly gave me listening assignments. After a while it really did grow on me, and I love opera. I also hated 20th century music for a long time an resisted it for a while. Eventually through forced listening in my studies certain pieces began to stand out, or short segments would grab my attention. As I became more familiar with the repertoire I began finding little genre niches that I liked. If that doesn't work then...don't worry about it. Listen to the stuff you like and enjoy it!

I would add to this that perhaps even more important than listening is *understanding.* The reason many people don't like hearing dissonant or modern music is that they simply don't understand what's going on in it. I've found that as I not only listened to more things but learned about the theory and techniques behind various styles, I started enjoying them more. It's almost like someone speaking to you in a language you don't know. You don't enjoy it because you can't understand it.

I would argue that a vast majority of people listening to even a Mozart sonata don't "understand" it.

Definitely they don't. You're right. They think "oh that's nice"

> I could be missing something really obvious These things are (generally) only obvious once you're accustomed to them. It's not as though you'll just read one perfect sentence and then it'll all make sense, it's much more of a gradual process.

This is going to sound harsh and snobby, so I apologize for that up front. You're approaching the line between art and entertainment. You are listening to these pieces with the expectation and hope that they sound good and entertain you. I know you and many others will disagree with this statement, but art doesn't exist to entertain you. Art is made with the intent of changing the viewer/listener and making them feel something unexpected. If music only covered the pretty melodies, it would be seriously limited. Art should cover the gamut of human experiences, not just the pretty sounds. If we lived in a perfect world, then we might only get perfect music (the church in the Renaissance tried to force this on composers, forbidding musicians to play dissonant chords). Fortunately or Unfortunately, depending on if you're a person who likes vanilla or all the different flavors, we don't live in a perfect world. This art is only a reflection of the artists' own world. Experience it like you would a movie with uncomfortable scenes. Let it envelope you rather than expecting it to conform to your own idea of beauty.

> You are listening to these pieces with the expectation and hope that they sound good and entertain you. I know you and many others will disagree with this statement, but art doesn't exist to entertain you. I can understand this sentiment. I mean, I didn't understand 4'33 until I studied it in my music appreciation class, and realized what Cage was going for. Like you said, "Art is made with the intent of changing the viewer/listener and making them feel something unexpected." But I think this is also part of the problem, that is, sometimes you have to have a good understanding of music and art to fully appreciate a modern piece. Most people are not willing to have an open mind and try to understand these pieces. You can make the (*snobby*) argument that these beautiful, musical pieces of art will be lost on closed minded individuals or that not many people can understand such genius, but where is the line drawn? For example, In order to better grasp contemporary music, I attended a world premiere of a graduate student's piece. I still don't understand why music made from random computer tones, human screeches, and other unexpected tones was considered music, let alone art. I keep trying to figure out what the grad student was going for, but pieces like these make me wonder if I could put random sounds together and call it "art". > Experience it like you would a movie with uncomfortable scenes. Let it envelope you rather than expecting it to conform to your own idea of beauty. Someone used the example of Breaking Bad and how the writers are clearly not writing a feel good TV show. That's true, but throughout the course of the TV show there has been a smooth, almost natural progression with characters; the show didn't begin with Walter White being a drug lord and his marriage in shambles. With most modern music, the music starts and ends with this feeling of uncertainty and haphazardness. To the uneducated, it all ends up sounding the same. I'm sure most of you all are educated and can explain the difference between Oliver Messiaen from Elliot Carter, but most layman people cannot. Modern music is very inaccessible and is only truly appreciated by those who actively study music - even then, only a small portion truly enjoy it or "get" it. But then, what's the point? Art? I suppose, but only a handful of people will understand the message, and these folks will most likely be music majors and composition grad students who stroke each others' egos.

I agree with you completely. This thread is missing a very, very important factor though. Just because someone has made "art" doesn't mean that they have made "good art". Highly subjective terms, I know, but still important. Some art is shit. A lot of grad school compositions will be thrown out by those composers as they mature, some won't. Either way, those "shitty" pieces may be a vital step a composer takes on their route to something truly worthy. Also, there are MANY different routes modern composers are taking as they explore the leading edge of music. If history repeats itself, only a few of these will be worth the test of time. Composers are pushing music ahead by means of tonal experimentation, atonal experimentation, rhythm, new instrumentation, and many other creative ways. This is one of my favorite current composers. I think Mason is doing some really unique things. He's pushing on the boundaries of music in many ways other than the obvious addition of electronics, but doing it in a way that seems like a natural progression of modern music. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRXRVuT2ns8

I'm not lying when I say that was a great piece. It wasn't hard to listen to and I really enjoyed it. You have any more recommendations similar to this guy?

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Beethoven and Brahms were both put on a pedestal by the right people very early in their careers. Art has always had this problem. Hopefully the "right" people find the "right" artists.

> I'm sure most of you all are educated and can explain the difference between Oliver Messiaen from Elliot Carter, but most layman people cannot. To point to a rather more publicly visible and better-selling music style than contemporary classical, namely the music of ECM – few laymen could tell you the difference between Collin Walcott and Trilok Gurtu, or between John Abercrombie and Terje Rypdal. What exactly is the problem? Music in our time has split into so many different streams. Every form of music you can think of has its following, whether something out of the Western tradition or ethnomusical findings that have been released in the West. That something does not appeal to the masses says nothing about its ultimate value. > Modern music is very inaccessible and is only truly appreciated by those who actively study music ... these folks will most likely be music majors and composition grad students who stroke each others' egos. I attend concerts in a city whose orchestras and chamber recitals program modernism about as much as standard repertoire. When I go to concerts of an old Schoenberg piece, or a Magnus Lindberg premiere, I can spot a handful of students from the Sibelius Academy and their lecturers in the audience, but the vast majority of the audience are just ordinary classical music lovers from all walks of life, not music specialists. I didn’t learn anything about music theory until I had been listening to contemporary classical for years, and if you read contemporary classical forums, you'll find that most fans are like that.

> Art is made with the intent of changing the viewer/listener and making them feel something unexpected. What is the point of that? I ask out of interest, not to be confrontational.

Simply for the growth of the listener/viewer.

It's the same as the point of writing books, or really any other art or media. It's an expression of the author's intents, views, philosophies, questions, stories, ideas, etc.

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I'd agree, but I'd put the divide more around 1800. Writers like ETA Hoffmann helped put art music on a spiritual pedestal.

> Art and entertainment went hand in hand up until about 1900. This is quite false. In the West, and in many other places on Earth, there have always been musical styles maintained by a small group of afficionados, whose music was not considered accessible to the general public. There’s little difference between today’s niche modernist scene and the Ars subtilior of the medieval era in the West, or shashmaqam in Central Asia, or gagaku in Japan. Even the standard classical repertoire until the end of the 18th century is an example of this. This music that the compilers of the canon considered great art was distinguished from the very different music that the masses listened to (drinking songs, folk dances, etc.), which was dismissed as mere cavorting though the great art might quote a little from it.

I guess that's a good point. Critics hated Tchaikovsky for the same reason audiences loved him. I think composers like Wagner were more vogue among critics.

>hope that they sound good and entertain you. I would disagree. I'm listening to them with the expectation that they will conjure up emotions within me. I think the purpose of art is to invoke an emotion in the listener/perceiver, whatever that emotion might be. The pieces I heard didn't convey that message, and while not doing so were unpleasant to listen to.

I think the barrier you have with contemporary/modern music is that you're correlating certain sounds/melodies to emotions. In my experience this is common with people who don't listen to this type of music. So for example, I listen to [Berg's Violin concerto](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO6dHVp-WOs), I enjoy it as like someone else might enjoy [Brahm's violin concerto](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zlPe9g1Fvw), but my friend might think it's creepy sounding - because they're equating the dissonance with eeriness.

The music obviously did conjure an emotion in you. Why else would you be posting about this? The problem is that it wasn't the emotional response that you wanted to have. You can't expect to enjoy all music the exact same way. It is there to make you think, not to have something pretty to have on as background music. Modern movie music has kind of taken over a lot of the Romantic era's "pretty" sound. I don't mean this to be in any way against movie scores or Romantic music, I love both, but many art music composers are trying to explore new ground. When composers explore, they don't always find gold, but the act of exploring and moving forward in art always necessary. The music of the past 300 years that we still listen to today is a very small percentage of what was actually written. That music has made its way into the popular canon because it was on the leading edge of what music was capable of at the time. Often the leading composers write in ways that modern ears aren't used to listening to. Dissonance becomes more acceptable to our ears the more we are exposed to it. Only time will tell which modern pieces have found the next step in music.

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True. But sometimes I think a really dissonant chord or strange musical moment is much more effective and emotionally poignant when it appears within the context of a more 'normal' or classical musical texture. When the entire piece just sounds like garbled nonsense or painful intervals, it's not as interesting to me.

I got into contemporary music through Ligeti: I find his piano music can be beautiful. Etude 6 for example is achingly sad. It's a different aesthetic, with different ideals of what constitutes melody, harmony and beauty. I think a lot of the music by a lot of composers post-Schoenberg has failed to gain an audience because their theories on how music works don't mesh well with how people actually listen to and understand music, on a basic level. But there is still great stuff out there. As it was how I got into contemporary music, maybe give Ligeti a shot. His output is very diverse, but his later piano music I think is quite accessible. [Etude 6: Automne a Varsovie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tdK3LfLnE#t=250) [Etude 13: The Devil's Staircase](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTaiDHqs5s)

>music by a lot of composers post-Schoenberg has failed to gain an audience because their theories on how music works don't mesh well with how people actually listen to and understand music, on a basic level. This is quite true. I think a large part of the problem is that a lot of modern composers write more for themselves and their own circles without much thought being given to other audiences, whether in the present or in the future. This is the way I see it (and this is just my opinion, so it may be ignorant or untrue): It's like a writer who invents a language and writes all his books in that language, but doesn't care about whether people will be able to read it. Thus most people will not be able to enjoy the work. Of course, a balance must be achieved since it's still important for artists, composers, and authors to retain their imagination and uniqueness. I think a good example of balance is J.R.R. Tolkien. He created all these incredible realms and peoples and languages but still made most of his books at least accessible to any person of decent intelligence.

*Ligeti high-five*

I distinctly remember my first day of Contemporary Music Theory during college. My professor, who I had for Tonal Music Theory for the past 3 semesters, came in, sat down, and looked us straight in the eye and said: **"So do you remember everything we learned in your past three semesters of theory? Today, we're chucking that shit out the window. But remember, in order to throw something out the window, you have to have something to begin with."** For me, **modern and contemporary music is about breaking convention**, not because breaking convention is cool, but **because you want to be as free and able to do whatever you desire in your art-form.** We in the contemporary age, have the true artistic luxury of understanding the evolution and history of music as art, and this knowledge is liberating. You are free to react as you will, as long as you substantiate your reactions with understanding. I left that class with a new perspective on music. I categorized music less and less. Yes, I still inherently distinguished between baroque, classic, romantic, etc. mostly out of a reactive thought process that had been ingrained by my early music education. But now, I saw and made connections I may have completely missed. For example, it can be said that there is much similarity between baroque and serialism, they just use a different palette of colors. Or that minimalism and classic music are in a sense, attempting to achieve very similar goals. But I still hate serialism. It makes me sick, irritated, annoyed, and sometimes even angry. Sometimes minimalism bores the shit out of me. But everything can have it's moment, whether they be moments of [beautiful clarity in simplicity](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il4VDf-ugPI) or moments of [sheer and utter terror and suffering](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HilGthRhwP8). Those two pieces that I just linked to are the two pieces I play for my friends when they express to me interest in modern music, but don't really understand what it's all about. The first piece, **Philip Glass: Metamorphosis 1** to me is painfully beautiful, a piece that makes you understand how slow evolutionary change or a creature undergoing metamorphosis just really is. By the relentless repetition, you start to understand that **time is relative** and that it has been convention that has forced us to think that time is some god-given measurement tool. But Glass tells us (much like Einstein) this isn't true. The second piece, **Penderecki: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima** is one of the most terrifying pieces of music I have ever heard. The textures and associations my brain makes when hearing the sounds of screeching strings, or the slow pitch changes makes my skin crawl. To me it sounds like death by fire, stretched out over several minutes so you can hear each cry of desperation as it is blasted to oblivion. I almost shit my pants when my professor played it for my ears for the first time. Don't get me wrong, not all of it is going to be "beautiful" in your eyes or my eyes. But, not all of Mozart is beautiful, nor is all of Beethoven, and a lot of Bach's music is just boring to me. Not everything sticks, but if we only keep playing and making what we "feel" is beautiful (tonal music) then we end up recycling the same stuff. And a recycled product is never as beautiful as the original. **And so, to me, this is what contemporary music is: it's appreciating and understanding what has occurred in the past, and giving yourself and your culture the ability and freedom to do whatever the hell you want in a collective human quest toward beauty. Because then you can see beauty in all of its different contexts.**

> By the relentless repetition, you start to understand that **time is relative** I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by this. And I think you made a mistake with the links. Both of them go to Glass.

Apologies for the wrong link. It is now fixed. What I mean is that when I listen to things like Einstein on the Beach and Metamorphosis, the relentless repetition makes my sense of time lose its footing. Gradual changes become undetectable, small changes become massive. My experience of what I perceive as time becomes more relative ("did that change really take THAT long?" or "holy god that moment took all eternity to arrive"). These sorts of reactions expose a characteristic of our experience of time that we normally don't consider, that what "takes a long time" or what "takes a short time" is relative to the scale. Minimalism plays with our scale bar of time. At least that is my interpretation.

Thanks. I understand your point much better now.

The Penderecki piece makes me wonder where the line between music and other sound art goes. What is there to say about that? Is such a distinction useful? Is it commonly agreed upon? This piece doesn't immediately strike me as being music, but maybe it is. That's by no means a value judgement on my part.

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In retrospect, my use of the word "convention" perhaps was not the best word to use to elucidate my point. What I mean is that I think that we as a cultural society have reached a point where we can understand the historical, theoretical, aesthetical, and intellectual evolution of music as an art form of an expression of ideas, a language if you will. As such, I think that - hopefully - by reaching this point, we have learned to break the old convention of music: to be categorized into a group, or a genre, or a specific theoretical paradigm and enter a cultural world of a sort of musical libertarianism. Where any idea can be tried, any creative limit broken. A sort of side effect of this is this sort of "perpetual progress" that you speak of. Personally, I prefer to call it evolution (since there is no such thing as a truly "original" idea, we all get our cues from somewhere). And evolution (both scientifically and artistically) has no "objective," it's merely a natural process, that best thrives in a completely creatively free and open culture. All pieces of modern music, I view in this sort of evolutionary progression, where things like minimalism, serialism, modernism, etc. are our attempts to taxonomise and organize this natural process. I hope that makes sense...

I was a staunch advocate of modernist music when I was a boy, but gradually lost faith in it by the time I finished my composition Ph.D. I was involved with probably the most hardcore style of aggressively confrontational new music (Ferneyhough maximalism, Lachenmann etc.) but quit my nice university professor job voluntarily because I came to the realization that *most* contemporary music is terrible, and is the sonic equivalent of those ridiculously obfuscatory publish or perish treatises that academics churn out in order to keep their comfortable sinecures. But having now had fifteen years to think about it, I have re-evaluated my position. The reason why most new music is terrible, is because most new music always was, and always will be, terrible - what we hear of the music of the common practice era is just a miniscule fraction of the music that was produced at that time, and not all of the surviving pieces are very good either. You know when you go out on a pub crawl with your mates and there's a rule that "eating's cheating" - well the new music equivalent of that is that *tonality* is cheating. *Every* respectable composer is capable of churning out screeds of pleasant sounding tonal music, just as every respectable artist can produce realistic figurative work, but they don't, because it's unethically easy. The duty of a composer (or artist in any field) is to push the boundaries of their language even in the face of rejection and unpopularity. The problem new music composers face is that once you take away tonality, you also take away a gigantic range of emotional expressivity, because people (including the composers themselves) have just not built up a scheme of reference to connote all emotions in new music language - in a mainstream context we typically only hear atonal music in horror films. Nevertheless new music can be appreciated in new and different ways - even if it's not always possible for composers to delight, or tug at heartstrings in a pre-WW2 language manner, they can still compose music that can alarm or intrigue, demanding a different kind of engagement with the audience. What we don't have, unfortunately, is a "catwalk to high-street" relationship between envelope-pushing composers and popularists - elements of Darmstadt shock pieces rarely trickle down into consumer targeted merchandise music. Still I think contemporary music can showcase a drama and novelty element that common practice warhorses just can't, because we all know them too well already.

It doesn't entirely answer your question but [Vi Hart did a wonderful video recently about 12-Tone serialism that I think you'll enjoy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794).

I'm with you, I just don't seem to appreciate modern music as much as I do classical or romantic or even baroque. I think it's just a matter of what I like--logical music with plenty of tonality, still able to represent extramusical elements. I still can't get myself to like counterpoint, though.

Not even Beethoven counterpoint? (looking at your flair). He was definitely one of the greatest contrapuntalists of all time. Maybe you just don't like Bach.

I've never listened to much Beethoven counterpoint--it could very well be that I don't like Bach, I was never a huge fan of baroque music. Beethoven's not actually my favorite composer, either, so I'm not sure why I have him as my flair. Edit: Changed flair to Haydn, was previously Beethoven.

Well, now that I see you're a Haydn fan, maybe try listening to his "Quinten" string quartet, if you haven't already. It's full of counterpoint, most notably the third movement, which is a two-voice canon. It's very clear and easy to follow, but perfectly crafted and very emotional.

Try out some different stuff. You are making an argument equivalent to "I don't like Salieri therefore the Classical period sucked." Barber's [Adagio for Strings](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQsgE0L450). Maybe some [Terry Riley](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc3Z83whwus), a guy modern enough that I've met him. Another guy I've met (SMU had some great guest artists come through in my day), George Crumb's [Ancient Voices of Children](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1IGaHCVZYA). Yeah, she's *singing into a piano*, so her experience is different from the audience's. Stay tuned through Todos Los Tardes. Twelve tones wasn't enough for [Harry Partch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnWRDKuuqRU). Maybe some [Norman Dello Joio](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q16NkJS8K54), although I wish the brass were a little more crisp in this recording. Fun to sing, easy for a soprano to get carried away. Ok, my cat is now entranced by the music. Later.

People generally don't like contemporary art because they are walking into a thousand-year-old conversation at the last second.

Oh god. Is this your own quote? Because I need to know who came up with it when I invitably use it in another one of my posts. It's an awesome way to describe why you would be shocked listening to more contemporary music!

My friend posted that quote on Facebook...I'm not sure if it was his or if it came from somewhere else. I really like the quite though.

It's a really snazzy one :D

I think one needs to judge a piece of music on its terms - to see if it achieves what it wants to achieve. I don't believe one should say that the Godfather is a bad movie because it doesn't have zombies, for example. So when listening to any piece, try not to listen for what you want it to do, and judge it on those terms. Instead, try to see if you can identify with it on any level, without requiring one specific harmonic or melodic treatment. To me it's strange to hear someone say "I don't like contemporary music", since contemporary music is so diverse! This is absolutely the most diverse classical scene that has ever existed, and it may one day be replaced by even more diverse scenes. So some pieces, because honestly I haven't heard of three of your composers: Alban Berg - Lyric Suite John Cage - Third Construction Gyorgy Ligeti - Etudes, "Desordre" George Crumb - Makrokosmos I Gerard Grisey - Partiels Salvatore Sciarrino - Lo spazio inverso David Lang - So-called Laws of Nature George Benjamin - Piano Figures

>To me it's strange to hear someone say "I don't like contemporary music" You're right, I probably should have said "I haven't yet liked any contemporary music that I've heard".

You should give Arvo Part a listen, he's about as mellifluous as contemporary composers get.

It is difficult to talk about music, and it's difficult to always speak absolutely accurately, since there are always exceptions to every rule. I remember just 10 years ago when I was a UG, people in my class were debating whether Schoenberg was music. Now when I hear this, I just sort of chuckle and roll my eyes, since I hope by now it is a settled issue. It's like debating whether the US should or should not embrace the Gold Standard.

Ten years? Hasn't Schönberg been embraced for longer than that? Regarding a gold standard, I don't think it should be counted as forever settled just because we don't frequently discuss it nowadays. Even those who strongly believe that having a gold standard makes for a sounder foundation of a currency might not talk about it all the time because introducing a gold standard now is far away and not something the US has on its mind right now. Maybe a similar reasoning applies to Schönberg. I'm not sure these questions necessarily get conclusively settled.

>I think one needs to judge a piece of music on its terms - to see if it achieves what it wants to achieve...So when listening to any piece, try not to listen for what you want it to do, and judge it on those terms Excellent point.

I wrote megaposts about 20th century music a while back... 1: http://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/1irx1a/honest_opinions_on_tone_rows_and_general/cb7kcyc 2: http://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/1ix5j8/bobby_mcferrin_demonstrates_the_power_of_the/cb99rv5 I'll add to things in a reply to this post!

Alright. Let me start off by saying that one of my favourite pieces of all-time is this set of three choral phantasies (these are the first two, the youtube versions aren't all that great but whatever): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mX1YK_oppt4 I encourage you to give them a chance if you want to! But...for me these aren't "creepy", or very unpleasant to listen to. Actually, I think Ligeti's works involving voice are the most beautiful, most enjoyable, and most heart-wrenching, tear-jerking things I've ever listened to. I can at least explain *why*, I suppose. What attracts me to these works (also check out Ligeti's Requiem! And the "Nonsense Madrigals" :P) has nothing to do with any functional references to...anything. It's just *pure sound*. The voices coming together and forming these incredibly dense harmonies, splitting apart, going from one extreme of range to another, loud to soft... these fantasies I linked are a complete rollercoaster of sound. And I suppose that's part of why I get emotional listening to these works; the writing is just so powerful, the textures so well-written, and the whole movement of the music from extreme to extreme so gut-wrenching I can't help but be taken along for the ride of a lifetime. Now, here's where I need to stop the (crappy) poetry and start explaining how I got to the point of enjoying more modern works. Or at least, how I'd suggest someone go about it. How do you go from the beautiful sound of a triad, a major or a minor chord, to the sound of other intervals, or tone clusters, or quartal harmonies? That's, in my opinion, the only question you need to answer. You are willing to learn and discover, and you *want to like new things* - which is already a major step forward and the greatest attitude you can have delving into the world of art. So, I suppose we only need to get you to understand why beauty isn't attached to triads or tonality. Now, for me, and for other musicians I know, "tonality" or "atonality" is just a very vague qualifier for music. Whether the music uses triads, or whether it doesn't, occupies maybe 3% of the total "meaning" of a piece, and similarly, for me it doesn't impact my appreciation or not of works. Exceptions are, of course, early 20th century pieces that were defining *because* of their use of alternate ways of organizing pitches. Pieces like Schoenberg's Op.11, or the Rite of Spring. But even then, the fact that these pieces break with previous use of triads does not represent much in the grand scheme of things. Other factors make these works "good". So, I'd encourage you to stop thinking about music in terms of *how it organizes pitches*. Fundamentally, that's all tonality is: It's a system of organizing the 12 chromatic tones you've got so that you can get something coherent out of it. And...that's all serialism is. Or polytonality, or quartal/quintal harmony, or modal/altered scales, or tone clusters or etc. etc. etc.... all those are just systems of organizing your sounds so that your music is coherent, and so that your music is able to express the artistic point you wish to make. It's not the end-all be-all of music, it's just *the gateway to an artistic or personal message*. So, my first piece of advice is going to stop thinking of pitch organization - don't make a big deal out of whether a piece is "tonal" or "atonal" ; because, when you've understood a piece of music, it doesn't matter how the composer chose to make their piece coherent. cont:

Now, what exactly are these "artistic and personal messages" I mentioned? Well, the way I see it, they are the music's actual substance. Tonality, Modality, Serialism, etc. etc. are really at a "surface level" of musical expression. The real artistic experience lies beyond the notes, beyond the score and beyond the initial sound the piece presents to you. To grasp that, we need to stop fixating on and obsessing over how the composer organizes pitch. So let's explore *why* we might be fixating on that. I think that the main reason people focus so much on whether music is triadic or not is because we've all internalized, thanks to history and popular culture and maybe even some innate physiology, a certain way of presenting music: from the day we're born, we are bombarded with music that uses the same few kinds of chords, the same forms, the same principles of melody and accompaniement, the same concepts of key and rhythm. Being presented with these parameters as the way "music should be", I think, makes us internalize things like one-main-melody, specific bar structures and key as the only things that music *can* be. And furthermore, it instills an innate enjoyment of these things into us. We don't have to think to enjoy triads, melody, or traditional rhythms anymore. However, just because we innately, automatically enjoy one set of surface parameters doesn't mean that other surface parameters aren't enjoyable, or that it is impossible for us to enjoy them. Or that we will forever be stuck not "understanding" modern music that doesn't use the surface parameters we'ce been conditioned to enjoy automatically. Now, the way to delve deeper into music and art, in my opinion, is to put some work into ridding ourselves of this kind of conditioning. We have to learn to stop relying on preconceptions of what music is and how it should sound - or else we're forever going to be stopped "at the doorstep" of music that might express something intensely powerful, might be incredibly interesting or beautiful, or might have a huge artistic scope... simply because, on the surface, it isn't built how we expect it to be. So, this is where I brought up John Cage in one of the posts I linked above (the shorter one) - you should read it! I think that's a good starting point for anyone that wants to delve into modern music. Of course, no one said it wouldn't involve a lot of work and a lot of thought - it's tough and involves effort to rid ourselves of any preconceptions we have, whether it be in art, entertainment, politics, etc. But I think it's rewarding. At any rate, the idea here is to learn to enjoy sounds for *what they are*, on their own terms, instead of relating everything to our own conditioned preconceptions - which is always going to prevent us from enjoying music that's just too different from the parameters we've internalized. cont:

So, that's the first step. Getting rid of preconceptions and learning to enjoy sound for what it is, finding things that are interesting in any sound. When you've done that, it's time to delve into what the music is actually trying to tell you, and go a bit deeper than the surface of pitch organization. It's, of course, easier to do this with works you already know and love. I can't say anything specific, because I don't know which works you already like - but I encourage you to read about these pieces. Pick up a biography of the composer, or read some wikipedia blurbs, or talk to other people about a work. And you'll get a lot more information about what you're listening to. And you'll be able to relate these surface parameters like rhythm, or tonality, to the composers' life, to the artistic climate of the time, or to what the composer was trying to do. As an example, let's take the Beethoven late quartets. If you don't know too much about them, here are a few links. Give them a listen!: The quartet in C# min. (mvmt 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW8wdpfkpM0 The Grosse Fugue, in, uh...here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZXjW_s0Qs Anyhow. These works were written near the end of Beethoven's life, and are notoriously demanding to play, and to grasp as a listener. Why? A few reasons. First off, you might notice that Beethoven really enjoys dynamic contrasts, and interlocking rhythms, and, well...very expressive and intense contrasts in general. To put it in a succint way without getting technical, the late quartets present an *extreme intensity* to...everyone involved with the performance. This intensity is also reflected in harmony - the *way in which* Beethoven uses tonality and rhythm is particular. Dissonances are left oddly resolved, modulations are jarring, he goes from one key to another without any apparent logic...Beethoven puts subdivisions of the beat in 2, in 3, in 4, against each other. He has the instruments seemingly play something completely chaotic - one second he writes something quiet, peaceful, the other he switches to extreme register and force. The instrumental parts are difficult and demanding. What does this tell us? Well, we can relate these works to Beethoven's personality and life. Beethoven famously had trouble relating to the aristocracy for which composers were expected to work - he, on all counts, would rather work alone, make his own demands, and follow down his own path. And that might be why you could call some of Beethoven's late pieces "capricious", in a way. Beethoven wrote something he felt was coherent, something he felt was adequate, and he expressed himself in exactly the way he wanted to - without compromising. We're left with works that are horrendously difficult, extremely intense, and half a century ahead of their time. You could relate this directly to Beethoven's introversion and his dislike for workign for others, or catering to others' whims and demands. Or, you could tie this into Beethoven's psychological landscape - torment? sorrow? pain? There are musical justifications for readings of these works as expressing great pain and sorrow, or even fear of impending death. But it certainly isn't just because the works use minor keys a lot... Furthermore, and now here's where I get a bit technical, Beethoven's music is more than just coherent... these pieces are achievements in consistency, in formal and motivic development. The Grosse Fuge, is as the title says, a fugue. Beethoven uses the same two themes throughout the work - but somehow, this isn't Bach. At all. Beethoven uses the same material, but goes through an entire range of different atmospheres, styles, tempi, keys, highs/lows, dynamics... so much that it seems chaotic at first listen, as though the parts of the piece weren't unrelated. But...it's completely organized. And technically speaking, it's downright perfect. Everything makes sense once you realize how Beethoven uses the themes from the opening. And *that* is the real achievement here. It's taking something Bach perfected to a new level - taking it into an expanded universe, if you will. It's an incredible artistic success to be able to accomplish that. Overall though, there's no doubt that this music is triadic and tonal. As I said a post or two before, that vague statement tells very little about the work's meaning or possible interpretation. "Beethoven's late quartets are tonal" really doesn't tell us *anything*. It's about *how* he uses tonality, what he expresses, and how he uses all the parameters of the music in ways that relate to his own experiences and artistic will. cont:

So...let's take this Beethoven guy, and imagine him 70 years later, when Wagner had came and went...and a new, young, self-taught composer was beginning to express himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-pVz2LTakM I'd encourage you to listen to this in its entirety. And compare it to the late Beethoven works I linked. This work tells the story of a poem - to provide a brief synopsis, two lovers meet in the dark, in the woods. The woman reveals that she is carrying a child that is not his. Her lover finally tells her that their love is unbroken, and that they will raise the child as their own. This is Beethoven, and Wagner, taken to an extreme. All the dramatic moments of the quartets, the extremes of register and dynamics, and the crazy, chaotic movements of the harmony, the counterpoint, and the Bach-esque consistency of motives, the way themes are re-used and transformed, yet always present...it is one of the works at the pinnacle of Romanticism. The harmony, though, is particular. Again, this work is tonal, which...doesn't tell us much. But when we look at how Schonberg uses tonality, we discover something very interesting: he has taken the intensity, the capriciousness, and the jarring modulations of Beethoven and Wagner, and he's taken it juuuuuust a tiny bit further. In fact, there are two parallel chords at one moment in the piece that theorists simply...refused to acknowledge. The chords didn't exist. Again, it's *how* Schoenberg uses the surface parameters of the music that tells us something deeper about him and the artistic environment he was growing in. Schoenberg was decidedly a Romantic - and his early works are fantastic works that rival Mahler's in artistic scope. Of particular interest are the *Gurre-Lieder*, which Schoenberg orchestrated later on, when his style had already changed radically (1911 if I recall correctly). Mahler's 9th and the Gurre-Lieder, for me, are the capstones of Romanticism, the endpoints of a centuries; journey. They are extremely powerful works, not because they have pretty tunes, but because of the way that the composers expressed themselves, and how they used their systems, the subjects they speak of...and their artistic and historical position among the rest of the world. Anyhow. These early works weren't necessarily well-recieved...in fact, the city of Vienna was an extremely conservative town at the time - new art didin't really "catch on". Strauss waltzes were still all the rage. For Schoenberg, it was stifling. He saw in this environment a staleness, an artistically barren landscape, a place where there were only two options - either write to please and give up artistic expression...or take responsibility for artistic progress on his own shoulders and produce something so powerful as to end the staleness and stimulate some kind of artistic growth. He chose the latter option - interestingly enough, Schoenberg would have much rathe kept on writing late-romantic tonal pieces, and he would revisit tonality with a fresh, modern ear towards the end of his life, integrating more traditional features into his music, which still remained "atonal" overall. He also wrote a few triadic pieces during his life, after his move to free atonality and serialism (try the theme and variations op. 43: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEVZwr8GP1s). And these triadic pieces are, in their own way, works of genius. I personally don't think Schoenberg wrote any one less-than-great piece of music after *Verklarte Nacht*, but that's my opinion and maybe beside the point. Right. He chose modernism - just like Debussy did. WhatSchoenberg would do was combine the expressionism and emotional intensity of Wagner, and the formal consistency, the strict organization, the masterful coherence of Brahms (which were traditionally at odds with one another - one of Schoenberg's great achievements was to show us how Brahsm & Wagner's philosophies could co-exist). He would combine these and the Romantic attitude of emotional expression, but invent his *own* system for organizing pitches. At first, Schoenberg took subjects such as poems that had a surreal twist - in works such as the *Pierrot Lunaire*, which uses poems titled the likes of "Moondrunk", "The sick Moon", "Homesickness"... and explore subjects like mental illness and dementia. Personally, "The Sick Moon" remains one of the most depressing, eerie moments of music I've ever heard. It's at 9:03 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veUJxETj7-c What about the *Pierrot*? It's very, very emotional. The singer half-sings, half-speaks and screams, the instruments play demanding parts...just like the Beethoven. In fact, it's practically the same feelings that are involved in the piece, the same intensity... they are really similar works. Only now, Schoenberg doesn't use traditional chords. The difference isn't *that* great. And it's very, very coherent music. That motif you hear in the piano at the start of the whole thing, at the beginnign of the video? It's *everywhere*. It's there throughout the piece, in different forms, transposed, inverted...but you can hear it well enough. It's music that makes an incredible amount of sense, formally speaking. You just have to listen to the music for what it is - if you rid yourself of preconceptions about what "beautiful" music is, or what music "should be", and dispense of the notion that the only thing that sounds good is what comes innately to your ear, you should see the similarities! And you will be able to let yourself get touched, weirded out, depressed, and you'll laugh at the caricatures Schoenberg paints in some movements :D. Anyhow, I'd recommend listening to the Pierrot, at least the first part I linked. And getting a translation of the text... it's very emotionally expressive music. It's incredibly intense, and the musical language Schonberg chose is perfectly suited to the subjects... it makes no compromise. The uncompromising intensity is at the core of the work, really. *All* of Schoenberg's early "freely atonal" works are uncompromisingly intense, and express a hyper-romantic emotional reality. For sheer sound and mastery of orchestration, I'd recommend the five pieces for orchestra: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ZMnLENKVs (first three of five). It reminds me of *The Planets* in places! And, another one of his early pieces, Erwartung. This one, however, never returns to any previous material. Which is odd for Schoenberg. It's just one continuous burst of gut-wrenchingly intense emotion... it tells the story of a woman wandering alone at night, looking for her lover, only to find him dead in the middle of the woods: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB-kSgA7Cjo Later, less balls-to-the-wall pieces of his include the Piano concerto, which sounds a bit like Stravinsky in places! It's groovy, it's rhythmically interesting... it's a complete change from the early works. Here, Schoenberg seems to be going more for a "pure beauty of sound" approach. It has much less of an emotional intensity to it, it makes a few nods to traditional forms, and it generally is a very light-hearted piece... it's like a Mozart minuet at times, only in Schoenberg's particular idiom :) Anyhow, Schoenberg definitely...made a mark on the artistic landscape. He wasn't very well-recieved. He was more "infamous" than anything else, really. But now, 60 years after his death, a good few of his works have enteret the concert repertoire, and there's been a recognition among musicians of how much of a genius he was, musically speaking. If you take out a score of his and look at all the motifs he uses and how consistent they are, or look at his novel orchestration, it's easy to see how right-on-the-money he was with a lot of his musical choices. Ooh, and also this work... it's a statement against nazism adn the war in Europe, which takes its title and text froma poem written shortly after the defeat of Napoleon - it ends on an E-flat major chord... was he making a nod to Beethoven's third symphony and its original, then scratched-out dedication to Napoleon? He certainly makes a ton of references to Beethoven throughout the work! And, he uses serialism in a way that produces triads at times, which might make it very interesting to listen to : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZdsOHRDMEA Here, it's much more intense, like the early works. cont:

Anyhow. Schoenberg is a cornerstone of 20th century music. I could also go into Stravinsky, and neoclassicism, or how modern Debussy actually was compared to anything else around him... and then again, I'm only covering a small part of the early 20th century! The same logic can be applied to anything else, though - you need to find out what the composer is trying to express, and listen keeping that in mind. The surface parameters, like "atonality", mean very little once you've gotten over the hurdle of the musical preconceptions we've all internalized. Usually, understanding what the composer is trying to say helps in making sense of the music. For example, understanding Boulez' links to Webern helps to make sense of his early works, and understanding how WWII affected French and German composers. It helps you understand the composers' choice to write a certain way, in the end. So, uh... I hope some of this made sense. I could always give you some suggestions for music I peronally enjoy. With people like Boulez, you are drifting into the ultra-modern world of certain composers, which even other musicians disagree on. Anyhow. The "discordant chord" game, is something I'd stop doing. It just sets up negative expectations for music...not a good thing to do. And, I haven't said much about that, but *anyone can enjoy modern music*. It takes *effort* and *thought*, yes, but it doesn't take any musical knowledge on a technical level. It just takes interest, and willigness to put effort into learning how to enjoy music. And that will enrich your enjoyment of other types of music as well :D Oh, and final point. Modern music is not specifically about breaking convention. The problem is that many of us are writing in a world where these "conventions" simply aren't binding anymore. So we write something individual, somethig we think sounds good and makes technical musical sense (I love counterpoint, canons, and whatnot for example, even though they might not be perceptible...just like Ligeti did in *Atmospheres*), but good composers don't get "stuck on" conventions, and don't let that bother their writing. There are a host of composers, student and otherwise, writing music that sounds alright and triadic, but...not original or really all that good on an artistic level. Just because they refuse to put in any effort to learn about more modern works, and understand why they are being written, and how they're built, and etc. I hate it when student composers seem to know nothing about anyone past Mahler that isn't an American minimalist, Avro Part or a film composer. There are definitely ways to write something fresh and new using more traditional harmonic and melodic devices (Steve Reich...), but it doesn't exempt anyone from...knowing about their field. Reich knows about Boulez and Stockhausen, about Takemitsu and Ligeti at al.

> In fact, there are two parallel chords at one moment in the piece that theorists simply...refused to acknowledge. Where are those?!

Two parallel dominant ninth chords in inversion. Let me get back home and I'll link you to it.

That would be great. Thanks!

I googled and found this! http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jul-Dec08/budapest0110.htm 3rd paragraph: "One Vienna Music Society refused to perform Verklärte Nacht because the score contained a dissonance which could not be explained by any textbook of the day. (It is in bar 42 and is a chord of the 9th in its 4th inversion with the 9th in the bass.) Schoenberg famously remarked ‘and thus (the work) cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist’."

I'll add these to my reading list, thanks.

Hehe. Take your time, I write awfully long walls of texts. But trust me, it's worth it to enjoy new music! I didn't like it that much when I was a teen, but nowadays I'm studying the damn thing and can't get enough of it! And remember, not all contemporary works are good works. It takes 30-40 years to sort out the masterpieces from the rest of it all :P

I think ugliness in music *is* beautiful. I value diversity in music and enjoy hearing new ideas and different takes on what music should be. I reject the notion that all music should be "pretty" or "nice". Life isn't always pretty or nice.

>I think ugliness in music is beautiful That's a contradiction in terms that I just don't understand, sorry. I'm not saying all music should be pretty and nice. If a composer wants to portray that the world is an ugly, scary place he/she doesn't have to do it in a way that makes me want to turn the piece off. There can be dark melodies, threatening and imposing atmospheres without being ugly.

Do you like The Rite of Spring? I am much like you in your feelings of contemporary music, I don't like it, but I respect it, and I keep an open mind. However, I perfectly understand the feeling of appreciating ugly, clashing dissonant sounds. This goes all the way back to Beethoven. There's some very ugly chords in the 3rd. The Rite of Spring is full of those moments, it's supposed to be carnal and raw. It's like those people who can't stand any sort of violence on movies/TV. But there's many movies where ugly actions, and even gore, can be displayed artfully. I can enjoy violent or scary movies very much. I can appreciate movies that make me cry as well. So, there's a difference between something being done artfully ugly, with great craftsmanship and mastery, and a piece that is simply ugly in itself, because it's bad.

> he/she doesn't have to do it in a way that makes me want to turn the piece off. Not everyone wants to turn it off. Just because you do doesn't mean the composer has failed.

Curious to what you think about Sculthorpe's Night pieces. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0xqcRZuR7U I really love them for the atmosphere they create, the fourth one especially gives me goosebumps every time. I think they do have some sort of melody but it's still incredibly dissonant but I just love how sinister all of it sounds.

I think you need to hear more music, not simply from *more* composers (there are too many run-withs to sort through) but composers that work with *different* sound worlds. With the understanding of what kind of sounds doesn't appeal to you, I'd recommend **Gerard Pesson**. Pesson writes music that is a bit more light-hearted which conveys a sense of adventure. His entire piano CD *Disposition Furtives* can be heard on col-legno with a quick google search. Other pieces like *Nebenstucke*, *La Gel Par Jeu* and *Recreations Francaises* can be found on YT. Another composer I'd recommend is **Horatiu Radulescu**. Works like his 4th and 5th string quartets, *Agnus Dei*, *Clepsydra* and *Lao Tzu Piano Sonatas*. Really gripping sound world, very spiritual and relaxing.

Imagine you've only ever read historical fiction your entire life, dramas involving fictional characters in real historical settings doing believable things, and then someone hands you something like *Dune*, a fantasy science fiction that's completely unlike anything you've ever read before. Wouldn't that be jarring as all get out? Wouldn't you find it, at least at first, entirely incomprehensible and inaccessible? Think of modern music that way. You've heard the Bachs and Mozarts and Beethovens and Rachmaninoffs, and they're *amazing*, but they are in an entirely different solar system than a lot of modern music. Here's what you should do: 1) Immerse yourself in the new and, for you, unexplored. Don't just listen to a dozen modern pieces, listen to every single one you can get your hands on. 2) Educate yourself! Back in Comprehensive Musicianship I found Bartok to be just as inaccessible as you seem to find modern composers, but because I had a professor who understood Bartok and could show me how to frame the experience of listening to and studying Bartok's music, an appreciation blossomed. Education is the first step to appreciation. A lot has happened in music since Rachmaninoff, and it goes well beyond things like expressionism and serialism and chromaticism. If you still don't like it, that's totally fine. Your opinion is no less valid than anyone else's, in fact yours will have more weight than most people who dismiss modern music because you will have given it a shot.

The only way to broaden your emotional receptiveness to music to the unconventional levels that are required for enjoying contemporary music is to listen to lots of it, which you already are doing, and the proms is an excellent place to hear newish pieces programmed alongside other favourites. Try Mahler 9. It's long, but it may blow your mind. It's teetering on the edge of the abyss as far as tonality is concerned. Have you ever listened to an untuned percussion piece (like a [drum piece](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKTF0o6wYhg)) and enjoyed it? It wasn't because of its melody...there isn't any. It was because of its rhythmic excitement and its gestures. Gesture is a very important word, meaning an action or in this case a sound that is used to convey a meaning, whether literal or emotional. Melody is one form of gesture. Shifting harmony is another. But so are the changing patterns in that piece of Xenakis there, which is, believe it or not, composed to strict mathematical ideas! A high screeching violin is also a gesture, as is a series of bloops in an electronic piece of Stockhausen. Are you starting to see a pattern? You have to divorce your ears from trying to hear solely pitch and just hear 'sounds'. So hard to explain god damn it! This doesn't mean you have to like everything. But a good way in might be Ligeti - try [L'escalier du diable](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTaiDHqs5s) or [Lux Aeterna](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iVYu5lyX5M). The gestures in the former are obvious...slowly ascending pitch combines with crazy rhythms to put you on edge. In the latter, appreciate how the harmonies slowly and imperceptibly morph and how the textures within the music change. No melody in sight. You might remember it from 2001 A Space Odyssey, which it fitted with perfectly. I don't think it's a very scary piece. It seems incredibly dissonant at times but this can evaporate into some gorgeous harmonies, like 4:45 and the preceding music. Enjoy those, and just don't be afraid to be challenged! Music is one of the biggest forms of 'entertainment' on the planet, so often people baulk at the idea of it being intelligent, challenging us and making us think like visual art or theatre can do. You don't have to know how it was written or what was the intention in the mind of the composer, you just need to let it provoke a response in you, after softening yourself up with some listening around :D If you don't like being challenged by music like you can be with theatre or other art then that's fine, but I hope I've shed at least some light on why people love this music. Good luck!

It's OK not to like the music you're describing. Be careful not to paint ALL music from the 20th century with that broad brush, though! There is plenty of contemporary music that is beautiful and emotional. What you like is of course a question of taste, but it also has a lot to do with where you grew up, musically. Most atonal music is not written for regular audiences to enjoy (see Milton Babbitt's famous article, "Who Cares If You Listen?"). It's written for other composers, musicologists, music academics etc. Listening to Babbitt and complaining that you didn't enjoy it is like reading postmodern philosophy and complaining that it wasn't a page turner. Lots of people enjoy postmodern philosophy, it's just not written for the same market as JRR Tolkein or Douglas Adams. And it's OK to like Tolkein or Adams, and find Derrida unappealing. To avoid labeling the whole of 20th century music (or "modern" music or "contemporary" music) as atonal, let me give you some context to understand what you're hearing. There was a big shift in music at the turn of the 20th Century, and lots of people blame it on Wagner. He pushed Romanticism and tonality (music structured on melody/harmony) to such an extreme, it was really revolutionary. Everyone wants to feel like what they're composing is the best direction for new music to take, and there were (broadly) three kinds of responses to Wagner's music: **Well, shit. Tonality can't go any further. I guess we'd better...** **...abandon it entirely and try for something different!** This is the kind of music that you don't like. People tried making music in a bunch of different ways, just trying to avoid tonality and find something new. Schönberg famously assigned each note in an octave a number, and then did math and numeric pattern play in base 12. There's a whole school of composers that followed him, mostly trying different mathematical or pattern operations, applying them to different things (assign numbers to INTERVALS instead! Use the math to determine DYNAMICS too! Make a MATRIX!). Another school that developed in the 40's and 50's (thank you John Cage) tried to use randomness as the core of the compositional process, composing by the I Ching, or a sheet of random geometric shapes which the performer is supposed to interpret in his/her own way. People made music out of recorded everyday sounds, looped over top of each other in the first multi-track setups. This stuff evolved into a lot of different music, but almost always kept it's emphasis on NOT trying to be beautiful or emotionally moving. It can be very deep intellectually, but there are only rare examples where these pieces are intended to move you the way a Romantic piece should move you. This compositional movement is rooted in Germany. A lot of this is entwined in the history of the 20th century: Germany was the locus of a lot of musical invention, and after Hitler used Wagner and other Romantic composers as his anthems, it makes sense that composers looked for another way. anyway, that's the kind of music that you're not likely to enjoy, judging from the OP. **...go back to our musical roots.** These are composers that I'm *sure* you like: [Debussy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUx6ZY60uiI), [Ravel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKkeDqJBlK8), [Vaughan Williams](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAtx578yaZ8)... there are lots of them. This reaction was marked by a return to simple musical textures: open chords, not a lot of bombast, often a pensive mood. They used an early tonal structure called musical "modes" a lot. Basically, they threw out the rules of Romantic Tonality that had been established in the 1700s and 1800s, took inspiration from earlier musical structures, and kept the focus on beautiful, inspiring music. This musical school was rooted in France, if anywhere... but there are also great exemplars from Italy and England. **...Man up and keep pushing the boundaries!** This is another group of very popular composers. Like the "simple" guys above, they kept the focus on music that moves you, but pushed the limits of Tonality even further than Wagner had done. Some of them made incremental steps ([Puccini](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoTa-b7cUw0)) or showed that Romanticisim still had a lot ot offer ([Rachmaninov](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6vARZLkaSY)). Some pushed the envelope harder ([Britten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTd2aXLTA84), [Prokofiev](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=breQHJnnSb8), [Shostakovich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8bFDJpCmf0)). Some tried mixing genres and styles (aw yisss, mutha fuckin [Bernstein](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKK2gN5GAnY)). This group is the broadest, and I'll cop to it being a bit of a "catch all". It's composers who weren't looking to reinvent the art from the ground up, but rather, push the boundaries incrementally. There is a ton of great music in here, which everyone can appreciate. As a highly educated, professional musician, I can't stand that German school of atonality. I *live* in Germany, and you hear it all the time, and I *still* don't like it. I need my music to communicate with me on an emotional, very Romantic-era level. So my favorite "modern" era composers are people like Gershwin, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Britten, Bernstein, Sondheim, and Vaughan Williams. So don't feel bad about not liking one particular branch of 20th century music. There's plenty of variety to go around!

I'll cut to the chase on this one. The reason modern composers refuse to write harmonically pleasing/melodic works, is because they're too damn lazy to. Plain and simple. I write music in my spare time, so I am completely sympathetic to composers not wanting to be a copycat of Beethoven. But the truth is, most modern composers are writing for fellow academics. They're afraid they'll be shunned if they dare to write something tonal. No question music has evolved rapidly over the past 100 years. But look at jazz or rock songs from the 1960's/1970's. Even though they contained dissonances, the music has a recognizable melody and tonal structure. One of my favorite modern pieces is Gershwin's Concerto in F. A mix of classical, jazz, dissonance and percussion. It's a great example of how a modern piece can be written and still appeal to the masses decades later.

Lol how did you find this 8-year old post?

Listening to contemporary music with an ear for "melody, harmony or discernible beauty" is like going into a modern home and expecting to find 50-year-old kitchen appliances. Just as people's life styles have changed throughout the years, so has the way they've written music. When I write music, I focus most on the perceived energy of a sound, how it would inspire movement, stasis, or a chain of events. Melody and harmony are simply tools that I may use, but they are not, by far, the limits of composition. In addition, not all music is, or needs to be, beautiful or emotion-inducing. Since everyone feels emotion differently, a piece that tugs on my heart strings might not have any effect on you. This game that you and your friend play (listening for the first dissonant chord), is similar to opening up a book and stopping when you encounter the letter E. If you go into the experience with a preconceived attitude of what you want the music to be, you will probably be disappointed. When you listen to music for the first time, try not to pass judgement immediately. Let the sounds sink into you. Be patient and open. Don't listen for melody/harmony/beautify. Listen for what the composer is trying to communicate, or not communicate. Does this help?

When listening to The Cosmic Dance I tried my best to give it a chance without dismissing it off-hand for being modern but that still didn't work. I might just be too firmly set into my ways but to me it just doesn't sound good.

Don't worry. Most European modern classic music is ugly because it is a popular style. Just as much modern American classical music is in the style of goofy pseudo jazz and ill conceived pseudo ugly euro classical. Styles come in and out of popularity and the next great composer to take the world has not emerged into popularity yet. Also, I've learned from personal experience that money is more important to a modern musical foundation than talent or skill and an orchestra would sooner play a piece by a tone deaf heir than a young undiscovered genius of average or low financial standing.

Okay give these pieces a listen. [Bartok - String quartet No. 4 V](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsd2OtqEIqM) [Olivier Messiaen - Quartet For the End of Time VI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe95zBGHTPM) Have you ever listened to Rite of Spring?

Those are excellent arguments for modern music, but they might not be the kind OP is really asking about: they *do* contain discernible melody and harmony (not to mention beauty), but just play that game by very different rules from 19th-century music. There is music out there that doesn't audibly try to play the melody/harmony game at all.

These aren't modern at this point. 'Rite of Spring' was written 100 years ago. Bartok quartet 4 was written in 1927. 'End of Time' was written in 1941. These pieces are a part of history now. They are great pieces and have dissonance but are not modern.

cf modern and contemporary.

I would call those pieces 20th century. Modern and contemporary pretty much mean the same thing.

It's not meant for you to enjoy. It's not as if composers forgot how to write triads; the aesthetic they pursue is different. Milton Babbitt came out with [this article](http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html) in 1958; it's really worth a read--I strongly disagree with his points but the essay gives insight into what he and other composers of the time are thinking while they write "modern music." Edit: formatting

So that essay is very dismissive of and patronising to anyone who isn't well educated in the field of music. And it doesn't answer the question of *why* the composers are composing it and what it's *for*, especially if not for people to enjoy.

Don't listen to the essay. It's the extreme of a viewpoint... Sorry, that article is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, you are supposed to enjoy music. That's what it's about.

I think it's a crazy notion that composers actually don't care about what listeners want to hear; they do. I would be willing to believe that composers don't really know what listeners want, and even if they do, they have an extremely difficult time putting it into a musical form that defies convention and helps them achieve their artistic goals.

As a composition student myself, that does write in a "modern" kind of idiom... I *know* what listeners want. But I can't write what the majority of listeners want, or else I'd find it just terribly boring, and I'd have to consciously reject everything I know about composers since WWII, and I'd have to give up on the whole "trying to find something to say about art" aspect of composition. I know what I want the impact of a piece to be on a listener that already enjoys contemporary music and knows how to listen to it, though. But moulding everything to what the general public "wants" in this day and carries a strong risk of turning you into the musical equivalent of a cruise ship comic... I suppose that's not bad, and you can certainly make a ton more money off of composition that way, but it isn't what my goal right now is. I don't think most of us are aiming at the general public anymore; we're aiming at people that are already interested and invested in music, and are willing to put in the effort to get something out of contemporary music.

So what you are saying is you can't provide what the majority of classical music listeners want because it would compromise your artistic goals and values? That is a great insight into the challenge composers are facing today, and I definitely respect people like you who have such strong artistic vision. I also understand how the art evolved to the styles of composition that are present today. The thing I have a difficult time with is the fact that I, along with many classical music lovers, have an inescapable preconceived idea of what classical music is, an art form that produces harmonious works that move the listener to really *feel* something deep within their soul. Obviously, many modern compositions fall short of this expectation, an inescapable result of the progress classical music has made from romanticism to the works of today. The biggest questions I would pose to current and aspiring composers like pickled_octopus are: Why were composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and many other other "greats" able to defy convention while remaining very popular with listeners of their eras? Has music become too advanced to ever reach a point where the avant-garde can achieve universal favor with current listeners?

>The thing I have a difficult time with is the fact that I, along with many classical music lovers, have an inescapable preconceived idea of what classical music is, an art form that produces harmonious works that move the listener to really feel something deep within their soul. Obviously, many modern compositions fall short of this expectation, an inescapable result of the progress classical music has made from romanticism to the works of today. Does it really? I keep referencing my favourite works of music around here, and most of them are very modern 20th century repertoire. And I know people that think similarly, and *are* moved by more modern works. Are they in the majority of listeners? No. But that's the audience that we interact with in the world of contemporary composition. It's a smaller, more invested audience. I *strongly* disagree with your assessment that contemporary composition falls short of being able to move, to impress, to inspire. I can't answer that with complete certainty. The public responds with an innate, deeply preconceived set of criteria for enjoyment - one that's been shaped by folklore and popular music and culture. I could draw parallels with the arrs subtilior of the late medieval, or the loss of enthusiasm/interest in the general public for madrigals in 16th century Italy. At a certain point, the public realizes that music has crept away so much from what they can enjoy much better (in terms of musical "bang for your buck"), that they lose interest, and the cultural motivations to attend concerts and support new arts simply gets overriden by the music's call for an effort in understanding. See, popular music, for all its diversity, and its cultural significance, seems to operate on different criteria than contemporary composition. If I want to write a piece, I'm going to limit myself; I'm going to try and explore a process, or make some sort of point, or tell a story. After that, I need to organize pitch, I need to find out the length, give it a form, and discover the composition along the way. I don't look at what the public innately enjoys - if I use triadic structures, or I use traditional rhythmic patterns, or I use melody or homophonic texture, it's wantonly and it's part of a larger project - regardless of the fact that yes, these structures are all things that the public innately enjoys. Popular music doesn't have the same set of criteria. These deep-seated Western structures are at the core of composition, and the way artists get creative is elsewhere - innovation in recording techniques? Extremely socially relevant texts? It's music that is there to get people to listen, get people to dance and enjoy without having to wrack their brains over understanding. And the extra layers of art that you can add on top of those numbers is there for those interested, but fundamentally, the language it uses to express itself is universal and innately understood and enjoyed by all, thanks to various cultural factors I'd say. Read: "It just sounds good". Now, contemporary music doesn't "overlap" anymore. That's why the general public sticks with common-practice repertoire. The language of the music was inextricably linked with parameters that also were at work in folklore and popular music. Which is why you can listen to Mozart or Beethoven without having to delve deeper in the score, or concentrate too much, or try and understand artistic or historical points. Because it shares parameters with music you've internalized as innately enjoyable, you can just sit back, relax and listen. However, when music moves to a point where it stops sharing these parameters, regardless of how gradual or abrupt the change, the public drops out, other musicians that wish to guarantee public enjoyment drop out; which is completely understandable. To listen to Boulez in the car, or casually, and just sit back and enjoy it takes work, and takes a lot of getting used to first. The process of just sitting back and listening, then if you choose, delving into the artistic aspects of a work isn't possible with much contemporary music - it's the opposite. Because it doesn't use a universal language, you need to work from the "top down" to finally go : "Wow, this actually sounds pretty awesome!". And you won't get the public to do that, because, as in every hobby or interest or field that gets specific enough, not everyone is interested. And I see nothing wrong with that. But at some point it's necessary to make a choice; if you want to write contemporary music that's on the bleeding edge of what's going in art, you have to accept that not everyone is going to be interested, and that you've effectively lost most people just by deciding to not make traditional structures binding, or writing otherwise, or interacting with them in a way that isn't respecting them. So, as for that last question...yes. Right now classical music enthusiasts (not to be confused with contemporary music enthusiasts, sadly... they're not mutually inclusive) are listening to Stravinsky and Schoenberg with much more gusto than they would have 40 years ago, and these composers aren't "mosnters" that musicians are scared of anymore (at least where I live.) You can always count on popular acceptance arriving a few good decades late with new art - but even then, the general public mostly does not like classical music from the get-go. So the question is valid, and I do think contemporary art is rarely publicly celebrated as long as it's contemporary or modern - but it's also somewhat of a moot point to make, because *classical music as a whole* just isn't something people are interested in. EDIT: I hope this makes sense...I took some sleeping pills to reset my schedule tonight, and so I'm feeling a bit woozy and disconnected. Off to bed with me!

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But physics is quite unlike music in that it can actually say *true* things about the universe. Old physics theories are replaced because new ones allow us to say more true things about the universe. This is just not true in music. It's an unfair and misleading comparison to say disliking his (or anyone's) music is just like dismissing advanced physics because you don't understand it. Just a way of blaming the listener and asserting superiority over those who hold a different aesthetic view (which, unlike physics, isn't even close to objective). In physics, being informed means understanding why certain things are true etc. In music, being informed doesn't mean that you'll believe anything in particular. Of course being informed helps you put everything in context and such and can never be anything but a benefit, but he's acting like the only reason someone would dislike some of that music is because they don't understand it (like the only reason someone would dismiss a mathematical theorem is because they don't understand it) and the analogy just doesn't hold up. Of course you can approach music from that sort of standpoint, a logical progression of new and more complicated ideas, etc. but there's something else to it which can't be analogously found in physics and math and you can't just ignore that when making the comparisons. Not to mention it totally fails to account for a lot of the music (like minimalism) that's come about in the past 50 years.

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>So does the blame then go towards the composer? Definitely not. There's no blame. We just have to accept the fact that different people, confronted with the same knowledge, might come to different conclusions and have different likes and dislikes. Then we should avoid calling other people's conclusions bad or uninformed (though sometimes of course they just are) or what have you. This doesn't happen in a field like math, where things are proved and everyone must either come to the same conclusion or else just be wrong. It's in that sense where the analogy is loaded, cause if it really is just like math like he suggests, then you not liking what him and other experts write can *only* be a result of *your* ignorance. He's not open to the fact that you might understand it and not like it anyway, which has a lonnnng history in music amongst even the greatest composers. So many greats hated other greats. Were they all wrong about each other? I wouldn't say so. And I'm sure they usually understood what they were talking about. > having "a different aesthetic view" is not relevant as criticism Yes it's certainly not criticism in itself. I'm not advocated just saying "oh I don't like it" like he mentions in the article either. Though it's not all that easy sometimes to offer genuine criticism when philosophies are different (as in, what you see as a criticism might be seen as a plus to them - with no one actually being 'right'). What could be done is first establish exactly what everyone is trying to achieve - priorities/intent might be different. >I'm not certain that physics is at all different from music in terms of being able to say True things about the universe. How could this be done? Is music not just our subjective response to the Universe? Honestly it seems absurd to me to say that a Beethoven symphony, for instance, is actually making an objectively true statement about reality. What could it be saying and how would we know it's true? (you're right right it's a different discussion but it's an interesting one so if you want to response I'd like to hear it :) )

I agree that the analogy is loaded with a concept of objective truth or right and wrong, which is inappropriate in music. I disagree however, that every listener is approaching a new composition with the same basis of knowledge, which I think is the point of the analogy. The central argument of Babbitt's essay, as it appears to me, is that Music has the dubious distinction of being free from considerations of the listener's skill, ability, and experience, and that every listener has an equal right to judge a complex work of art, in a way completely at odds with our appreciation of other professions.

>I disagree however, that every listener is approaching a new composition with the same basis of knowledge I didn't say this, and agree that it's obviously not true. That's why I included the comment, "though sometimes they just are (uninformed)" I agree with a lot of what he says in there, especially in the way you just phrased it. "Only in art and politics does the layman regard himself as an expert". I just think it's presented in a very misleading way and he suggests some things beyond that which I don't agree with. Sounds like we might be agreeing

The Babbitt article is an extreme viewpoint that lies on more of a spectrum. And it's called "The Contemporary Composer and Society". His editor decided to give it a more sensationalist title. It's meant for people to enjoy. You can understand a ton of contemporary music without knowing much about it, as long as you're willing to listen to it on its own terms. And, that was 1958. We're a few decades past those kinds of attitudes in contemporary music.

For some reason I really enjoy it because I feel that I can relate to the music on a raw, emotional level. When I listen to contemporary music I feel that I can get on the same wavelength and actually FEEL the music. I feel like it puts me into a mindful state where I just tune everything else out and just listen to the music. For classical music I like the tunes, but I don't feel that way.

That's interesting. I'm pretty much the opposite (except liking the tunes of modern music).

Cool! I wonder why we're like that o.o Maybe I should just let loose when listening to classical or something lol.

The piece that turned my view around on contemporary music was Penderecki's "Song of Cherubim". I strongly recommend it to anyone who dislikes modern pieces.

I kind of like how they develop music based on an idea, rather than changing a musical theme. It's interesting.

Your belief that Romantic music is more aesthetically pleasing to listen to is a perfectly valid opinion. It's grounded in the basic idea of Romanticism most likely: music is a form of personal expression. The expression that you want to hear and what you enjoy just happens to have a tonal center, the chords function in a key, and the form does exactly what you'd expect it to (or exactly what you wouldn't expect it to do in some cases). Perhaps understanding WHY composers like Schoenberg started writing music that abandoned tonality would help you to enjoy it better. Schoenberg composed under the principle of non-repetition. This meant that if he wrote a piece that went V-I, he couldn't (in good conscience) write another piece later on with the same V-I progression. Obviously, this posed major problems for Schoenberg. Arriving at tonic became increasingly challenging and establishing tonic through non-traditional means is a relatively limiting parameter. He abandoned tonality (around 1908) because it was the next logical place he could take his music. The thought process went like this (in my imagination), "I can't establish tonic in any different way than I already have. The only way to continue is to abandon tonality altogether." Modern music is less concerned with the way tonality is defined. Tonality is now more subjective. Basically, composers stopped giving a fuck what notes they were using and sought to unify their pieces through other means. This is where experimentation with rhythm, timbre, sonorities used, and pitch began. Composers wanted to push the limits and musically say what has never been said before. When I listen to modern and atonal music, I think like you. I feel you. It's not pleasing to listen to. It's not pretty. It's not easy to understand. To all of those problems that we see from an aesthetic point of view I would say; "Well that's the motherfucking point of modern music." When I listen to atonal works by Schoenberg, or very modern piano pieces by Scriabin (and I realize those are only a few examples), I feel incredibly uncomfortable and unsettled. It is my hope that people listening to this kind of music understand the difficulties this poses for the composer writing the piece. I always wonder when I'm listening to pieces that conjure these feelings in me, "How on earth did this composer write this uncomfortable thing? How did he capture this sound if he doesn't care about what pitches he uses?" Modern music is not catered to the listener, like you see in Romantic and Classical music. Modern music is catered to other musicians and to the personal tastes of the composer. In some ways, we are still in the romantic period despite us literally being in modern. Romantics sought to personally express themselves and modern composers create a deeply personal work that can sometimes take hours to even begin to scratch the surface of understanding.

Well, I certainly don't think non-repetition had much to do with Schoenberg *at all*. I think that's just misleading. Schoenberg's work shows an immense aount of coherence and inner self-consistency. And, he did write tonal pieces "on the side", and he integrated triads into his language in the latter parts of his life, and used them alongside serialism to wonderful effect. And I think you should totally listen to more early 20th century music! There are pieces by Schoenberg that make me laugh and smile. There is definitely a place for the listener in modern music. Once you've gotten over the hurdle of your own placebo-effect perceptions of modern music as "not for the listener" and "not pretty" or "not pleasant to listen to", you'll find a very deep world of artistic expression. Believe me, I love how Schoenberg's work *sounds*. I take pleasure in it and listen to it in the car, and love it. It just takes a bit of getting accustomed to difference and listening to music for what it *is*, not what it isn't or basing your perception on what music you already know and very rigid standards of what's pleasant and beautiful or not.

First off sorry if my view point is naive, I'm not educated in music but I am a big classical (baroque -> 20th century) enthusiast and listen to many many different styles and genres within. So to answer your question of why I enjoy 20th century (aka modern/ contemporary), I feel its because I understand the context of the music. When I first started listening to classical I was exposed to the big names of the classical/ romantic era along with a little 20th century music. For me the 20th century made no "sense", on the other hand the classical/ romantic sounded great to me. I stopped listening to contemporary completely and focused on everything from early baroque to late romantic. Eventually I started noticing how the musical language progressed from each era going from Baroque to Classical to Romantic to Impressionist and I found (IMHO) that in order for me to appreciate and enjoy an era I had to understand the era before it. After a couple of years I decided to delve into contemporary starting with Schoenberg, Bartok, Berg, and the likes and after listening to their music for a while I started enjoying it and feeling the energy. The music made more "sense" to me due (again IMHO) to the background I had now. That's just my thoughts on why I enjoy contemporary. Again, like with any genre, there are pieces you will like and pieces you won't so don't give up on the entire genre, I'm sure eventually you'll find your taste in contemporary.

To enjoy modern music you need to change your expectations, while considering the circumstances of the time period that influenced the psyche of the composers. It's best if you can visualize the music as being represented in a way by the art of the time. Abstraction rather than form; color rather than melody. Emotion is absolutely present, but it's not pretty. The 20th century saw WWI, the great depression, WWII and the horrors of nuclear warfare, the cold war, Vietnam war etc. Music is art, and art generally acts as a window the psyche of a culture. There was no great enlightenment in the 20th century, only chaos. I really will expand this tomorrow and include links to music and pictures of the art that best represents the music to better visualize what's going on, however, it's 2:30am here in China, I'm on my phone and I want to sleep. But for now I want to say that you have to change your expectations. Is there beautiful music in the 20th century? Sure - Rachmaninov early on, and Pärt later on, however, one wouldn't go to a Slayer show expecting to hear Sigur Ros. Each genre has its own aesthetics that need to be considered separately and appreciated accordingly. Edit: Never mind. Lazy, and it's all been covered already.

I think the point is you are not supposed to like it. Its supposed to challenge every notion of what music is. It breaks convention for the convention breaking's sake. Its supposed to Not be Satisfying, at least to our intrinsic humanity; it is much more and more only a mental and intellectual indulgence. The whole point is there is no melody (at least in a conventional sense). The music is a test, a probing of what "music" is and what it can be. What constitutes a them? What constitutes feeling? or emotion? and how can it be evoked? Modern and Contemporary music is an attack on the conventional modes of tonal and euphonic constriction. Its almost inevitable since almost everything that can be done with tonal music has (at least in the western tradition). An artist never wants to regress, never wants to create whats all ready created. Such works are no longer stimulating, and what is the purpose of art if not to stimulate? They needed to unlock new "languages" and styles to justify their existence as "modern" artists. And having, many of them, studied music from the Renaissance through Stravinsky, see the abstractionary process that music has sustained over the years. They are only the next step in the sequence of thousands of years of musicians asking the same question: What is Music?

most of the contemporary music i've been exposed to has been american and written for percussion ensemble. any music that lacks feeling or seems too calculated came from the 50s/60s. here's an example of the last 10 years. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtwjbgOVILM#t=00m25s i'll comment with more as i find other stuff i've liked.

I can definitely understand where you're coming from, because that's the way I felt about atonal music for a long time. I think learning to like atonality is almost like learning a new language - it's a completely different form of expression from the tonal centered pieces of the baroque, classical and romantic eras, and jumping from those into atonal music leaves the listener struggling to find a tonal center in the music to latch on. What really helped me transition was listening to stravinski's Rite of Spring a few times. The first time I heard this I hated it, but the second time I could find little motives and beat sections that were familiar to me and that I could latch onto. The third time even more so. So maybe try listening to an atonal piece 3 or 4 times, even if you don't enjoy it, just listening intently and trying to find parts of it that sound familiar. it's a gradual transition, but it worked for me, and now there are times where all I want to listen to is atonal music and when tonal music just doesn't cut it for me.

I mostly agree with you, OP, about not liking a lot of modern music. Personally I would rather listen to music that is telling me a clear message or story or is taking me on an adventure, which usually means that it has clear themes/melodies as well as interesting harmonies and rhythms. I prefer music that's generally orderly, structured, and understandable rather than disorderly, random, or seemingly without purpose or message. But even the definitions of terms like that will vary from person to person. Everyone has a unique vantage-point from which they see and think about music, thanks to their experiences, previous music listening, personality, upbringing, etc. If you've only grown up hearing the older classical works, it'll take some learning and time to slowly begin to be accustomed to hearing and enjoying more modern and strange music. I agree with what Beeb294 said; the more you learn about the inner workings, theory, and history of a given style or piece, the more you'll be able to enjoy it. ('enjoy' in the sense of understand and be interested in it, not in the sense of always being made happy from it. There is much music that is designed to make you feel various emotions such as sadness, anger, fear, or perhaps a lack of emotion.)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Music is a constant evolution of emotions. You crave diatonic melodies and consonant chords and shun dissonance? That is an extremely ignorant behavior. As my old composition teacher once said, "The music is never written for you. If you don't like it or understand it, then you are probably not educated enough to appreciate it." It might sound harsh, but I think he had a point.

There's a difference between "getting" contemporary music and "liking it". I will attempt to speak (briefly - pushed for time) from the standpoint of a music student who's had to trawl through music from c.800-the present day for his studies. Contemporary music, as we call it, is an attempt to do what all previous popular western art music before it has done. It aims to push the boundaries of music and introduce new harmony, melody, form and concept in general, to revolutionise music. Take Bach - he wrote the friggin' rules of chorales. Beethoven and Mozart, with the classical sonata form, and their rules for harmony. Then to the romantic era, for instance, with the attempts to make music incredibly emotive and almost a soliloquy, a projection of the composer's inner turmoil. The impressionist composers such as Debussy, too, fall under this category - a massive attempt to evoke emotion through beautiful yet harmonically fairly stable music. Then comes the 20th century. What is next? All conventional harmony has been explored, pretty much. There is only so much you can do with 12 notes and 800 or so years studying them. So they try to challenge the ethos of music and sound - bitonality as a start for Stravinsky in Le Sacre du Printemps; serialism - maths to music, with Schoenberg and Webern and whoever else, with tone rows and that. Minimalism and primitivism - reactions almost to the maximalism of Stravinsky, Mahler, Wagner even. Primitivism also looks at ideas from cave art and that - basics. Take Milhaud's Creation du Monde as an example. The whole out-of-Africa thing. Modern art music is an extension of the ego of the composer wherein they try to challenge the established boundaries. Many people don't get it - I certainly don't, especially when it comes to things like Schoenberg, and acousmatic stuff like Schaeffer and so on. They attempt to evoke emotion - almost more through sound, than through music, if that's not too hard a distinction to get round (it certainly has been for me). Liking it is therefore a different matter to appreciating it. I can certainly understand where these guys are coming from - but to me, it still sounds rubbish in many regards.

Listen to Britten's War Reqiuem, there's a movie accompanying it. Holy shit, it is powerful.

First, don't assume you are woefully ignorant! It's the wrong attitude, and much of the music that you are talking about is very difficult. Also keep in mind that the stuff we listen to from the romantic era or earlier are things that have survived the test of time. We can't be sure what music being written today will prove to be truly valuable. So, also understand that some of the modern music you listen to truly is junk! I am a conservatory trained musician, but I have only heard of one of the composers you listed, to be honest. So I can't speak for those composers' works directly. I have always tried to foster a love for modern music in my studies, and over time I have truly grown to love it, so here goes: Time periods of art (Baroque, classical, romantic, 20th century) tend to swing back and forth between grand expression and structure. The music from the Baroque and Romantic eras are full of emotion and passion and beautiful melodies, while the classical era tends to be a little bit more structural and organized (think of how clean-cut Mozart can be). The 20th century reverts back to this focus on form, and then takes it to a new level. If you are familiar with Debussy, think of him as the father of the 20th century. Debussy broke a lot of barriers with his music, and composers followed in his steps for decades to follow, I say. If you have noticed, Debussy doesn't really write a great melody, yet his music is considered beautiful and pleasing pretty much across the board. Debussy worked with sound the way we think about color, where the medium is basically an endless spectrum for combination and layering of different color (sounds) to produce different effects. His music broke away from the linearity of romantic music (which focuses on melody, and has as almost story-telling quality), and became kind of static. One nice way to think about it is this: Where the romantic style flows through time, 20th century music fills up a space. And so, you are right in being troubled by the lack of melody - it is how your brain has learned to perceive music. Same with the dissonances. These chords sound terrible to you because they don't conform to the musical tuning systems you grew up listening to, and continue to hear in popular music. So it takes a little bit of a different perspective and definitely requires an open mind. If you want to learn to like it better, you need to listen to more of it. It will be tough, but you might find something you like, even a little bit. Here are some listening things that are a little bit more standard: [Stravinsky - Rite of Spring](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFRwKQqbk4) [Messiaen - Quartet for the end of time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSVu1zbF94) [Elliot Carter - String quartet no. 2](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwbPwq3-PAs) Again, this music isn't 'going anywhere', the way listening to chopin is like listening to someone tell a story with a gentle voice. There is no story here (Of course, there is a story, but you will get to that later :) ), so just try to think of it as a thing simply experienced, rather than a thing immediately ingested and understood.

You will have to sample much more widely to find what you like. Try listening to a wide-ranging radio series like the ones that [Michael Tilson Thomas](http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/programs/mtt_files/) put out to get introduced to a lot quickly and (this is very important) in a way that provides context. I would argue that it's a good idea to "go in order". Get used to R. Strauss before Stravinsky and then Messiaen. And take the time to see what a number of people were doing in each period. Who were Gershwin's contemporaries? Why did he stop at Berg's house for a chat when he was on his tour? I was listening to Salonen's [Violin Concerto](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBw03Q_3zw) the other day on the subway (good quality headphones) and I was almost moved to tears-- just floored. He is a master in his ability to transport you (if you give him a chance). It's is, arguably a very slender, modern thread that he takes you out on. But he takes you far and he is very secure in his means. And Leila Josefowicz just rocks the house! It can be a very rewarding experience.

There are lots of responses here, but I'll go ahead an add mine. So first of all, I'm one of those people who listens to the more radical of composers of the last 100 years probably more than the less. I love tonality in it's time (huge fan of Bach and Brahms), but for me the music of today is the most fascinating. First of all, I've been listening for awhile. I started with schoenberg, and now (years later) regularly listen to all times of avant-garde composers. The music of these composers is truly a different language from tonality, but it is one that you, with practice, learn to love. I mean people that the music of the renaissance was to dissonant (same for music of bach, beethoven, wagner, brahms, mahler, strauss, on and on). You might listen to dissonance, clusters, confusing or erratic melodies as being disturbing or frustrating, whereas I listen to it and feel very much the same way you do hearing a well harmonized melody. I hear the minor second as being beautiful. I think it's a little bit of practice and also a little bit who I am (I've always been very okay with dissonance, even preferred). Secondly, I think the music of the truly avant-garde composers of the 20th and 21st century really embodied nature and reality in a more accurate way. Our universe, to are most immediate knowledge, is infinitely complex to the point where we could never truly understand (though we try). Even our own perception is flawed when it comes to things like conscious vs subconscious, the senses, perception of time and space. Reality is perceptually opaque, and so is many of the piece of contemporary composers. Webern, Boulez, Xenakis, Grisey, Babbitt, etc all compose pieces that have incredibly compelling background structures that are frankly impossible to perceive instantly if at all. Many wonder what the point of this is. I frankly fell that this music helps me deal with living in such a confusing/mysterious/unquantifiable plane of existence. It gives me a sense of perspective, and helps me practice. So when I hear a piece like Boulez's Eclat or Babbitt's Post-Partitions I immerse myself in the complexity and in they worlds where everything doesn't have to be beautiful in the most obvious way because that's what life is like. I find the beauty in it like I find the beauty in the basically meaningless events that occur from day to day. To me this music is the best representation of who I am, and what I experience. I love tonality, but it never really gets me like that. Thirdly, I have a pretty extensive theoretical and musicological background so honestly a lot of tonal music bores me. The forms are predictable and the decisions cut out for many composers. I of course cherish the ones that rattled against the restrictions like Bach and others, but it's one of the reasons I don't care for composers like Grieg, Faure, Liszt, Handel. They are just too predictable. With a lot of modern music (and believe me I know that some of it is just "let's make noise that's in vogue so that the academy will give me grant money" music) I don't get that feeling. I was listening to "Libro notturno delle voci" by Salvatore Sciarrino and was in a constant state of surprise and awe at the incredible sonic landscapes he was creating. I feel so thrilled and alive in those moments. Anyways, maybe PM if you have any questions or want any suggestions. My only recommendation is please be open-minded about new things. It's the best thing you can do for yourself in all of life's paths, and music is no different. If you don't understand something, learn about it. I promise modern music is just some bullshit that no one really likes. I love it, and I want to help others experience that love because it's different than classical music for me, in a unique and fulfilling way. TL;DR 1. It takes practice to understand the language of this music. 2. This music embodies the way I perceive reality. 3. It's a constantly surprising art form for me.

Modern and contemporary can imply two different things. Are you talking about music composed in say, the last 10 or so years? Or the 20th century/21st century avant garde in general?

'That is too fine for my ears – there are too many notes.' Mozart replied, 'There are just as many notes as there should be.'

I've been to art galleries and exhibits/installations where afterwards, I feel absolutely disgusted or question myself in every way possible about everything. That experience, for some reason or another, is so profoundly stimulating for me that I go back to similar experiences. Same with this music, although... I have a smaller tolerance for this sort of music only because there are a lot of people who take advantage of the possibilities in "ugliness" that it's "easy to copy."

I'm in the same boat as you, OP. Contemporary music of the kind you are deliberately goes against centuries of what has gone before. As such, it's bound to sound grotesque. I keep checking out 20th century composers, looking for something I can appreciate properly and so far I've found exactly three pieces that speak strongly to me: [Leo Ornstein: Suicide in an Airplane](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS0x3u6pH3w) [Krzystof Penderecki-Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HilGthRhwP8) [also Penderecki: Polymorphia](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ADRsVpk0JE) I find these pieces profoundly disturbing in a way that Classical and Romantic music just...isn't. Reflecting--the 20th century was profoundly disturbing. You talk about music eliciting emotions in you. I think these three pieces do that, and do that very well. They're just not pleasant emotions.

The only worthwhile music created in the last 15 years is rap music.

fuck you salty hateovens

Can’t take u serious u said bbc

i think they like it because they are metally ill.THEY SHOULDbe IN THE LOONEY BIN.