A Chat About Music History: What Happens When The "Winners" Turn Out To Be "Losers"?

[@heatherharrison264]

Back in the late 1980s, when I was getting serious about collecting recordings of classical music, academic serialism loomed large. I encountered a good many recordings of the really strange post-World War II outgrowths of this movement. I found the music difficult but fascinating. I also wondered how this movement could claim to be the culmination of western music when there were numerous other movements in 20th century classical music that were perfectly viable. In western classical music, and in the arts and literature in general, the 20th century was a time of fragmentation. Numerous little movements and sub-movements arose, and there were creators whose work defies attempts at classification. All of these musical subcultures, academic serialism included, have contributed their ideas and tool kits to the primordial musical goo, from which today's composers are free to draw whatever ideas strike their fancy. Since the late 20th century, it seems like there have been attempts at synthesis along with a return to a more readily listenable tonality. Academic serialism may be a loser in the sense that it did not succeed at its unrealistic ambition to dominate western music, but it is still important as part of the musical discourse of its time and as a tool kit that composers can use if they feel like it. I wonder if this is the story that will ultimately be told, viewing serialism as merely one among many of the fragmentary movements in 20th century music and not any more special than any of the others.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I think that is what I suggested, and if I didn't, I agree with your very smart analysis.

[@heatherharrison264]

@@DavesClassicalGuide I suppose I felt the need to consider the issue and basically came to the same conclusion that you did. This was a good video, and talks like this are a major reason to follow this channel.

[@edfromlongisland2623]

A great way of saying that, while I appreciate the importance of academic serialism, it has had its time and place in history. Additionally, I'd rather rip my ears off than listen to most of the serial drek written since the 1960s, lol!

[@mossfitz]

The principle historical musical legacy of the 20th century will be, just as always, that of the music which emerged from the dominant social forces at work - in the 17th and 18th centuries: Church, Aristocracy, craftmanship - in the 19th, upper Bourgeoisie, industrial production and individualism and 20th century popular democratic consumer societal forces including technology - in other words popular music. It seems obvious to me that the popular genre produced music that cannot be surpassed for what it is - The field has been more or less harvested just as the Symphonic genre was mostly well harvested during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Of course the boundaries are soft and there is plenty of crossover - and some great symphonic music was written well into the 20th century. Some Cole Porter songs, for example, are as complex as any by Schubert and often more sophisticated because of the wider musical vocabulary available to Porter. It SOUNDS like music for its huge popular audience just as Schubert sounds like music for a smaller public. Most people outside the narrow world of classical music are now fully aware of this - simply by experiencing how their children react to the best of popular music written long before they were born

[@ОлександрКрестін]

A similar situation is in Art History. While in music history tonal composers of the second half of the 20th century were discriminated, in art history figurative painters of the whole 20th century were simply canceled.

[@musicianinseattle]

Another fine presentation - thank you so much (esp. for the juicy little aside re period instrument performances: "Its minus is the horrible way the music sounds"). Happy New Year, Dave. Looking forward to all of your 2024 commentaries.

[@kostastopouzis7479]

Thanks so much for treating this topic, Dave. I think it is very important and a major "battle" of our days. One of the people who made me first reflect on all of these things was historian Richard Taruskin. His Oxford History of Western music was very different than most others I had read up to that point and I know it received a lot of heavy criticism from within academia. All I can say, speaking from my own experiences as a composer, is that when I was younger and studying composition I felt somehow "obliged" to write in a way that would prove how "progressive" I was (even though noone actually coerced me, I have to say). It is very bizarre that progress, a notion that was initially meant to aid the liberation of mankind, and in which I still believe, can actually become a suppresive notion if you idolize it. Anyway, this is a topic that demands more space than a comment section. Keep sharing your thoughts with us, Dave. I watch your videos with great enjoyment. And a happy New Year to all!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Taruskin's history was different, but it was also very poorly written and full of inexcusable errors of fact. I sent a raft of them to OUP, not that they cared...

[@kostastopouzis7479]

I didnt' know that. Thanks for letting me know. I am not a historian so I wouldn't be able to spot them. Perhaps it's because of one person writing the whole book on his own? Usually these works are collective endeavors. Who knows.@@DavesClassicalGuide

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

He didn't write it on his own. He got the credit, but he used a raft of grad students, I'm sure. and proofread nothing.

[@claudiofornasari1263]

Great video, as usual, Dave! You rightly said: "Arts are just entertainment, it's about what pleases us." Well, that's why I feel free to write music in Baroque or Classical style, because in fact those languages actually please me, as I perceive them as something extremely alive and vivid still today. Take care!

[@valerietaylor9615]

Great art is more than entertainment. Great art elevates us. - it makes us more discerning, less tolerant of vulgarity and mediocrity. It doesn’t dumb us down, it makes us smarter. It can also make us feel more at peace with ourselves and the world. In short, it makes us better human beings.

[@claudiofornasari1263]

@@valerietaylor9615 I think you properly explained the difference beetween "art" (that's what I was talking about) and "great art". Thank you!

[@karenbryan132]

"The world is a stage, the stage is the world of entertain...ment!".

[@ToddBaldwin-kl4sw]

Dave, this talk is what makes your channel so great! I’ve been watching for I guess nearly two years and want to THANK YOU for all of your knowledge and entertainment. Your recent D’Indy talk gave me a giggle “If you’re not an arrogant boob!” 😂 But the 2023 highlight had to be your regaling of your Tchaikovsky 4th performance where you ended up bare chested 🤣 I nearly laughed till I cried! The only thing I don’t like about your channel is that it’s not very good for my pocketbook. I’m always having to run out and get the latest recommendation or big box set. But oh well, I justify it to the wife saying I really only have this one hobby. Looking forward to more great talks in 2024! Happy New Year!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you! Same to you!

[@timdexter7600]

Glad you mentioned the minimalists, because at the very least we can say they played a part in breaking down the walls of the atonal dogma prison. It also seems to me that the boundaries of what we think of as classical music are becoming more diffuse, partly down to genre cross-over. The USA seems to be where at least a lot of this is happening. I listen to some contemporary music that has minimalist, jazz and even baroque influences, and it can be fun, but it certainly stretches what I think of as classical music ... and I really don't care, so long as it's fun and has some repeated-listening-endurance.

[@richardwills5780]

Thank you for another year of delightful videos. Happy New Year. Keep on talking!

[@danielreid5114]

Hi Dave - thanks for a great video - I think music examination boards like music to be nicely compartmentalised into historical epochs - I can still remember doing my music theory grades and being able to state what era a particular piece was from! I think I’ve read just about all your books and along with your videos they’re a great education! Hope you’re having a nice Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you. You too!

[@waterbottom8097]

Like many forms of narrative, these types of histories reach their end points at the height of modernity (the time period) and are produced by modernism (the reaction to the times, events, cultural discourses). If we're looking at now, post-post modernism perhaps with large dollops of powerful nostalgia for cohesion that never quite existed. Perhaps we need to question progress, as we connect it with capital H history... Theres also the connection of 20th century music with popular music which may play a larger role in our understanding, for instance the development of jazz. Quick edit: we must also ask who "we" are, as that heavily influences what we value and why.

[@bevanmanson5898]

Very good point that you made to David's excellent thoughts. If 'we' , for instance, represents certain music critics or musicologists or academics who are only looking for their idea of extreme significance (which is sometimes just to make them feel overly significant or powerful themselves) or progress (which is sometimes just novelty), much that is good is wrongly dismissed or ignored. If 'we' represents actual musicians who play gigs, the shoe can be on the other foot. Of course this is not a blanket condemnation of of those who live in glass towers, but if you listen to Bernstein's 1973 stunningly prescient Norton Lecture, where he clearly salutes, in his words, 'the re-acceptance of tonality' (as if it ever really went away-ask any jazz musician), then the slow evolution of new classical music from , say, the mid-70's to now can be seen as overdue.

[@joncheskin]

This is a great topic. After watching the video, I came to the realization that although I am an experienced orchestral musician, I really could not remember one instance of ever playing any music of Louis Spohr. I was inspired to go on a listening binge, found recordings of the 3rd and 5th symphonies and the 8th violin concerto, and tried to figure out what those early 19th century audiences liked so much. The results were fascinating to me--the symphonies were well-crafted enough, but compared to Beethoven I realized that I was missing the spark of imagination, drama and primal energy that Beethoven brings. At that point, I also started to realize that the comparison was unfair--Beethoven is the king of the symphony, and indeed I thought the violin concerto, which seemed to be a mix opera and violin virtuosity, was a more novel musical reflection and I guessed more indicative of Spohr's true compositional voice. Then when I looked at his biography and saw that most of his most important music was operatic, it really clicked. Back in the day opera was still much more important than it is today in establishing a composer's reputation, and for an audience accustomed to a lot of late 18th century opera his music even in a concert hall would have been much more amenable than the very challenging offerings by Beethoven. It was fun listening to Spohr with that viewpoint, and indeed I thought there was a lot to appreciate.

[@Klafknet]

There is a wonderful proverb from the podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” that speaks to all this in a witty and dark way that I love: “History is written by the victors. And then forgotten by the victors. And then the victors die, too.” Great talk, as always, Maestro.

[@pianomaly9]

Boy what a firestorm you ignited here. Thought provoking as usual. I'm glad that we can listen to Thalberg or Kalkbrenner today and come to our OWN conclusions about it, rather than relying 100-150 yr. old critiques of it that merely flushed it , often without ever hearing or seeing the music.

[@TenorCantusFirmus]

I don't think History is simply done by the "winners" - After a while, eventually those on the side of the reason will be recognized as such. Now that 12-tone music and ("total") serialism are, by now, exactly one Century old, the truth is emerging: they were one of the possible path, but on the contrary of the "narrative" by Boulez and the Darmstadt School not the only, nor even the better one. They might have seemed to be the winners, and in their "narrative" and propaganda they were, but History has proved them wrong. The biggest problem is that Music History textbooks have accepted what they were saying as fact when it wasn't and now they have to be revised, hope this would be an exemple of what's NOT to be done: writing History books before History has given us its judgement.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

The closer you get to the period of writing, the more "history" is merely the current fad.

[@jeffheller642]

You raise several interesting question in this wonderful chat. But I just want to say thank you for going against the tide and making composers like Boccherini seem a necessary part of music's story; also I'm curious as to why Spohr fell out of favor and whether you think he deserves and would reward a fresh listen.

[@jonathanparfrey9070]

Dear Mr. Hurwitz - Congratulations on another great year. I'm addicted to your tremendous video-casts. Look forward to them every morning here on the west coast. I now write with a suggestion for your series, Most Important Recording Projects Ever. It is the Maggini Quartet's survey of British String Quartets. There's a discovery on every disc.

[@xenocrates2559]

Great question and insights. A few weeks ago I listened to Roy Harris's 3rd Symphony which I hadn't engaged with for many years. You know what? It's really quite good. And it started me wondering if 20th century American symphonic music that stuck with a tonal base would some day find a means for getting heard and performed. If there is a foreground/background shift going on in the historical evaluation of 20th cent. music, that might create such an opening. That's just a speculation, of course. But likes and dislikes shift and it's nice to see them shifting at this time so that the picture of music history can become broader and more representative of what was really going on. Thanks for bringing up this topic.

[@laurentcompagna6166]

Never took the time to thank you David for everything you've done. Well thank you! My listening journey is greatly enhanced thanks to you. Haydn sounds great and he's often on the menu (his quartets i find more enjoyable than the usual quartet suspects). Your repertoire videos are so helpful. There's no need for the beginner to wander through all the inferior recordings to finally discover what a work is really about. And what a treat those dave's faves! Just listened to J. Corigliano's hallucinations, few scarlatti sonatas and Albeniz books 1,2 of Iberia. And R.V.W. Hodie is a great masterpiece. Christmas it sounds! Also I'll have a try at The Mikado, just got my vocal score. THANKS AGAIN! Laurent, Sherbrooke (QC)

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank YOU!

[@robertjones447]

The winners of the last half of the 20th Century are the motion picture composers: Herrmann, Steiner, Morricone, Goldsmith, E. Bernstein, and Rota.

[@hendriphile]

I recall in fifth grade public school, my music class teacher (do those still even exist today?) gave us a term paper assignment where we had to write a one or two page synopsis of about 20 of the great historical composers. Gustav Mahler was nowhere to be found on that list. He was a non-entity. But Edwin McDowell! He was THE great American composer of the 19th century!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Edward.

[@edfromlongisland2623]

What a great talk! First off, your discussion on the perspective of history, how it is recorded and taught/discussed is important and has broader applications beyond music nowadays. Regarding your comment: "music as entertainment" is an important concept that I think we, as a society, lost track of for a period. I think that the great composers expanded the limits of music during their time. However, we should never lose sight of the fact that these composers "entertained" with genius (even though they challenged us)! Academic serialism could be torturous and and I ingested it thinking that, like taking vitamins, I would be a better person at the end of the day. Not so, I'm afraid. Academic serialism (it's mathematical and only geniuses can understand it, really?) is not always entertaining, lol! In fact, it created a musical desert at the end of the 20th century. Anybody rushing home to hear Boulez? What are the great musical pieces since the death of Shostakovich and Britten? There are some, but there should be much more! When I look at magazines like The Gramophone and BBC, many of the recordings listed are re-hashes of the already greatly recorded and performed classics. Nothing wrong with that, but how many Bruckner series do I need (I love Bruckner, btw)? I hope that composers of today have returned to the "entertainment with genius approach" instead of trying to convince us that, if we were only smarter, we'd be able enjoy cacophonous dreck (Ives is not dreck, despite the cacophony). If composers reach out to to the humanity and intellect of audiences, we'd might have more to listen to and record during their lifetimes and ours.

[@georgesdelatour]

Maybe it’s my own contrarianism, but I started to like the atonal and 12-tone composers more once I felt confident they hadn’t won. There was a period after World War Two when the Darmstadt generation was very successful at pushing the line that theirs was the only way. By the 1970s, with the growing appeal of minimalism, that claim started to look implausible.

[@deaconhynes]

Excellent and much appreciated. A related historical question: before recordings, how often did anyone hear a particular work? I.e. Was the same program repeated on a given weekend and if so did people attend more than one concert? Were some works repeated yearly? Etc.

[@andrewhcit]

I remember looking at the London Symphony Orchestra's first decade of concert programs online (1904-1914). I don't remember whether programs were repeated on a given weekend, but some pieces were repeated far more often than today. I saw a few examples of pieces appearing on as many as three concert programs in one year -- and IIRC they were playing only about 10 concert programs a year at the time. Concerts were also generally longer than they are today.

[@Toggitryggva]

Great talk! The busts on the front of the Paris Opera have fascinated me from the moment I first saw them: Rossini - Auber - Beethoven - Mozart - Spontini - Meyerbeer - Halévy

[@gsaproposal]

Significant and thought-provoking video.

[@kathyklaxon5321]

Honestly, I think 12 tone (serialism etc.) is more the string theory than the standard model of musical composition, in that the former still hasn't proved its musical credentials, but an interesting question and an interesting response from Mr. Hurwitz.

[@ClassicalMusicComposer]

Great video with thought provoking points! I hope that in the rewriting of music history that is bound to eventually happen that (somewhat, to varying extents) forgotten geniuses such as Suk, Medtner, Janacek or Lili Boulanger are remembered alongside their contemporaries such as Dvorak, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. Speaking of Lili Boulanger, I would love to see a video comparing the best and worst recordings of her Faust et Helen. My personal favorite recording of it is the one with the BBC Philharmonic. Another thing is how interesting it is that even as many academics and teachers in colleges still encourage avant-garde music over what is becoming more popular in younger generations of composers, sometimes even strongly discouraging it. For example I have a friend who's going to CIM for composition right now who does not really want to write in the avant-garde style, but anything he write outside of it (including what he considers his best composition) his teacher has told him is no good because it is not experimental enough.

[@bevanmanson5898]

The problem with that teacher is possibly that he or she is unwilling (or incapable) of looking at your friend's best composition for what it is and judging it on its own merits. As your friend considers it his best piece, there is a reasonable likelihood that it represents your friend's own 'voice' or at least a good part of it. Much of a composition teacher's responsibility is to perceive and help develop a student's own voice, not the teacher's aesthetic agenda. Clearly the teacher is negligent here. If the teacher was concerned about technical skill missing in the piece, that should be addressed-but only to aid the student in reaching his individual goal. That said, the teacher can encourage the student to widen musical horizons, but again, not advocating experimentation for experimentation's sake alone.

[@pianomaly9]

Same thing 50 years ago in two So. Cal. Universities I attended. Neo-Dadaists, I would say.

[@kellyrichardson3665]

And what a wonderful answer! I believe what I like about these videos is the "new" fact, having never heard this before from a music critic, that great music is all about what we enjoy hearing. I took several trips to Germany where my music was being played and always felt intimidated -- realizing that in the hometown of Beethoven & Schumann, my music was illegitimate. One day, several principal players and two concertmasters were talking to me and one of them said, "We HATE [all!] of the music that is coming out of the conservatories here." Everyone present enthusiastically agreed, and I no longer worried that my American concept of "what I would like to hear" must automatically be of less value than something coming directly out of the Great German tradition. I don't believe Beethoven or any of the composers we revere wrote music they wouldn't also want to hear.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Very true!

[@dsammut8831]

The big dichotomies and splits of the Periods/Eras has made for a fine Talk, thanks Dave.

[@tristanmills4948]

These chats are great. In the far faster moving world of pop and rock music you see similar things. Especially in the heyday of the music press (at least in Britain), critics could make and break bands on a whim, but a few years later there could be a re-evaluation. In extreme cases, reformed bands do better with younger audiences today than when they originally formed. And then there's the incredibly popular music which all but disappears, and lesser known music 'discovered' by some in later generations. That actually makes me think of JS Bach - not performed that much, but composers and those in the know knew his works (as far as I understand it). Today it's often the musicians who listen to that lesser known music and draw from it, sometimes even poularizing it too. It makes me wonder, did those popular in their day composers influence those who are popular today? Would we have Brahms without Spohr?

[@steveschwartz8944]

Boy, does this resonate! I went through the conservatory during the 60s, the hegemony of serialism. At the time, I thought that the propositions that serialism had swept aside tonality forever and invalidated contemporary tonal music and that it was the music that most accurately expressed the Zeitgeist was nonsense. And I LIKED a lot of serial music - Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Copland, Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Ginastera, et al. I just didn’t understand why liking Rachmaninoff blackballed me from the Serialist Club. Serialism added another arrow to a composer's quiver. Even "tonal" composers occasionally use the techniques when they want - maybe not through the whole piece or with the same strictness and total absorption. To me, the sanest remark on the Direction of Music was made by Milhaud when he first encountered the work of Poulenc: the direction of French music will be determined by the next great French composer.

[@revivalharpsichord5078]

A very interesting video. I also have two master’s degrees, specifically in music history, earned back in the bad old days-we’re talking early 1970s here, a time when musicologist Joseph Kerman was specifically espousing the principle that music history must be based upon critical evaluation from our point of view looking back, and focusing on those composers and works that we hold in highest esteem. I remember raising a number of faculty eyebrows when I dared to suggest that, rather than assuming our taste is innately superior to that of earlier audiences, we should look more thoroughly at what they considered most important in their time, if for no other reason than to appreciate the background against which our personal favorites stand out. Perhaps as human beings we have an intrinsic intellectual insecurity that inclines us to view our taste as better than that of earlier listeners. It explains the enormous satisfaction people tend to derive from accounts of works that suffered catastrophic premieres but later achieved “masterwork” status, and it strokes our egos to think that we are so much more discerning than those earlier rubes. Another unfortunate result of this backwards judgment, and one that always irritates me, is when any composer’s work is described as being an early, less-developed predecessor of what some later composer would supposedly refine and perfect. (the “post hoc, propter hoc” fallacy you cite). But I’ll wager that no composer has ever considered his or her work as merely the antecedent of something greater that will come after them; rather, they must inevitably regard their own work as the culmination of what has come before them.

[@pianomaly9]

I get you, perceptive observations. Have M.A. in Music History and Theory from same decade. I got me some pats on the back and free cups of coffee.

[@glennportnoy1305]

This may not apply to this discussion. However I was impressed by watching the Kennedy Center Honors last night. It celebrated various genres of music. Music is entertainment and we certainly have much to choose from. I think I was most impressed with the respect and admiration shown by the honorees to each other. There were no "losers".

[@armandobayolo3270]

Hegel really set us on a difficult path, didn't he? We need to rid ourselves of dialectical thinking. I think Richard Taruskin got the re-evaluation off to a decent start in The Ox, but the work continues. Mr. Hurwitz, I think you are doing some important work in these chats. Thank you.

[@edwinbaumgartner5045]

That is a talk to think about. But aren't things changing? Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise" seems to me an interesting start into new music history, because he is free from Adorno's dogma and accepts "Show Boat" as well as "Wozzeck".

[@ToddBaldwin-kl4sw]

Dave, it’s getting close to the end of the year. When are we going to see the great scarfs of glory or shame? We are waiting with baited breath!

[@stefanehrenkreutz1839]

Would it be possible to write a 'history of the tonal system (1600-1900) and then view music history, as well as specific works, in that light,

[@stefanandressohn8448]

Great, enlightening and enjoyable talk. As always. Thank you so much!! ❤ But "winner's history" seems a bit too cynical a concept - unless by "winners" we mean the composers (as opposed to historians) whose influence was inescapable for other composers (Haydn, anybody?). It's the same with art history: we remember Raffaello and Michelangelo not because of Vasari's chauvinistic bias, but because every painter and their aunt felt the urge to emulate them for centuries. And to explain why this should have been the case is beyond the scope of historicism and relativism. But isn't it also a very interesting question after all? It may be largely avoided because it touches on the hot-potato issue of universality, not exactly en vogue these days. Of course, serialism isn't universal, as its creators believed, but the quality of their best compositions is (where it's detectable underneath the chromatic sludge). Which may be the reason why even Stravinsky ended up imitating their technique.

[@stevenmsinger]

This is a very interesting question and one I've pondered, myself. However, perhaps even more important is the realization that music history is not taught in most K-12 public schools at all. It isn't until college that we get this stuff. This is because music is not on the standardized tests and we only really focus on things that are tested. I guess I'd ask you if you think we SHOULD teach music history in K-12, and if so what would be the best way to do it?

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Yes, of course we should. Everyone should learn music, but I leave how best to do it to the professionals.

[@dem8568]

I know we're here to talk about classical music, but I don't think there's any doubt that jazz will be regarded as a, possibly THE, logical development of Western "art" music in the 20th century especially. Not that I'm saying anything original, just felt like adding my voice to the chorus. As for after jazz, I'm wandering far afield now, but I genuinely think you have to look to popular music like "Paul's Boutique", "Endtroducing", "Three Feet High and Rising", etc., to approach something even close to the level of complexity of classical music that normal people actually listen to and organically enjoy. We may not all like it here (I actually do), but if we're trying to imagine what the future will remember of now musically, things like the above stand as much of a chance as anything else.

[@BeeMichael]

Great and thoughtful video. I don’t have stats, but probably the most performed composer, in symphony concerts,last/this year is John Williams. Go figure.

[@playandteach]

Lots of truths there. I think the neoclassical movement was an interesting period that tried to scrabble backwards at the same time as looking forwards. It's also really clear that popular piano writing has become more about a single sonority and simple textures where dissonance is more gently handled than ever before. Attention spans have shortened, and technology has replaced any need for extreme instrumental techniques. I think the singer songwriter / home studio composer will drive music of all genres for a while. Folk influence will continue to contribute to pop, jazz and art music. On another point, I've very little excitement for forgotten composers or forgotten pieces. The world didn't need a complete works of Martucci, or to ever hear Beethoven's Choral Fantasy. Personally I love playing and listening minimalism- I think that the waves of repetition and metamorphosis is one way to retain the colossal lengths of previous forms and engage a modern ear. Interestingly now that the recording industry has shrunk, concerts are back to being a necessary experience. It needs bold choices of programming. Local concert halls where I am are wall to wall Mozart and Beethoven. Or film music nights. I'm also sold on contemporary dance over ballet. The church organ replaced local musicians and then became the established scene taking its turn to ho out of favour. Death and taxes. Keep the videos coming.

[@brentmarquez9057]

Interesting and fun topic to consider. I'll place my bet right now on Pierre Boulez being one of the winners in the future (if he already isn't considered that anyways). Even with the cerebral and (watered down) serialist elements in his music, I find it very emotionally charged and compelling as opposed to an intellectual exercise as some people might categorize it. If I turn out to be wrong, I'll eat my shoe. Another one I discovered is York Hoeller recently, though I can't place as confident a bet on his music going forward, but enjoy it a lot. At this point, what I'm curious about is where do we go now with art music??? What else can be done (I guess exploring microtonal music and the infinite possibilities of electronic/digital instruments). Around 7:25 David mentions that there are great serialist works that will be considered great works by history - can Dave or someone list those or recommend what they are (I'm curious and want to listen to them).

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I already did--there's a beginners' list.

[@karenbryan132]

The first name that comes to my mind when you talk about this is Meyerbeer. Enormously successful and popular in his day, but now....I freely confess that I've only listened to one complete Meyerbeer opera. I think it was a Met broadcast years ago. I came away from it feeling as if I'd just eaten a 5-course meal consisting only of candy, meringue, etc. Nothing to prompt me to seek out any MORE Meyerbeer. Obviously it's not enough to say that stagecraft and spectacle were a large part of what made him so successful when what you've got is a recording. Isn't Andrew Lloyd Webber the modern Meyerbeer? Lots of elaborate stagecraft without much music to enliven and sustain it?

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

If you haven't heard the music you really shouldn't talk about it.

[@tomfinot623]

I had a very famous history book on 20th century music published in the early sixties ( I can't remember the title) but it talked a lot about the 2nd Viennese school and people of that type. It had only a few paragraphs about Mahler who was a major influence on some of those composers. It mentioned nothing about Sibelius' , Elgar, Respighi etc. Not a word about the many beloved compositions from the 1st half that show up on concert programs regularly.

[@pianomaly9]

Persechetti maybe??

[@daccrowell4776]

The problem isn't so much that atonal composition happened, but rather that you had a bunch of academics jumping on because it was easy to write grants for "art for beancounters". And then it was necessary to justify these musical sudoku projects, so Big Schools became these enclaves of music that only a calculator could love. It had nothing to do with art, and everything to do with a "baffle 'em with bulls**t" mentality that only got stronger as the concert audiences got smaller. During my not-quite-a-semester of DMA studies at Illinois, I got to see how that mindset had essentially destroyed a once-great composition program through a whole lot of demagoguery, clout-chasing, and composing music designed to annoy the hell out of anyone with functional hearing. In short: no relevance. I left a month before that semester ended because I wanted NO PART of something that was so hell-bent on destroying itself. And their attitude about tonality at that point was toxic AF...minimalists were viewed as beneath their notice, anything that became popular was viewed as "selling out", etc. Interestingly, when studying with Stockhausen in 2001/02, I saw none of these attitudes on display. Cholly "got it", whereas the bulk of American academic composition wasn't even sure what that "it" was!

[@fredcasden]

Dave, as I know you know, ALL history is written by the winners, or at least the survivors. As far as music history is concerned, YOU are the guy with the bully pulpit and the KZbin channel with a devoted and growing audience. Many of us would be interested in your discussing some of the works that didn't quite make it into the Canon. Example: yesterday I heard a cantata on the radio, which I assumed it was by Bach. But when it was finished, the announcer said it was by Telemann! I'm guessing that back in the day, more people got to hear it than anything by Johann Sebastian. Today? Well, you know the answer.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I talk about rare repertoire all the time!

[@fredcasden]

@@DavesClassicalGuide I know you do. (I listen all the time.) But I'm thinking of your topic, winners and losers, music that was all the rage but has fallen out of favor.

[@jgesselberty]

An idea for a future series. I have always hated when musicologists describe the music of composer "x" as the precursor, or inspiration for composer "y" with "y" getting all the credit for the music. If one came before the other, how about some love for the former, instead of the latter who built on what they essentially did first.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

It depends on how good the former was. If that letter does it better, then who cares about what came before?

[@mauricegiacche4776]

In literature/humanities we have the “new historicism”. That is, context and psychology were emphasised, which focused solely on the internal qualities of the work. Is serialism o/twelve tone music the musical counterpart of this “new historicism”?

[@dsammut8831]

... Neo-Classicism versus over-sumptuous decadent glamour would have been a stark exploration...but you hinted at such diversifications.

[@zackmaster79]

I think serialism isn’t fully dead but more like what tonal music was during that era slightly less in used in orchastra, even though I don’t agree with you views on serialism you broght up some good points

[@murraylow4523]

Really interesting Dave but can you define what “academic serialism” is please as I’m pretty certain hardly anyone listens to it (or listened to it) and a lot of it in my understanding comes from a certain period in the US, like abstract expressionism? The immediate postwar was defined by very divergent things - experimental music by artists (not academics) like Boulez (yes), Berio, Nono, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, etc etc and a conservative revival of baroque and bel canto music, very important in the reconstruction of European elite culture after the war. So some social analysis of this selection or filtering is necessary. I’m not quite saying “whose side are you on “, but that’s definitely part of the narratives here. You know I hardly need to add that I have very wide tastes in all these things.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Academic serialism was the monopoly exercised by practitioners of strict 12-tone composition in academic circles, and their insistence that no other aesthetic was valid or acceptable. Not that anyone paid much attention to them in the real world, but they made the lives of many budding composers miserable and prevented performances of much music that audiences might well have enjoyed.

[@murraylow4523]

Ok, but if it wasn’t performed much what’s the problem? Everyone was off to hear Ormandy or Szell or Bernstein, or getting all dolled up £ permitting for Covent Garden, La Scala or the Met. I think it’s basically a “straw genre” and there is something worth questioning about the much more widespread “antiquarianism” of the immediate postwar period…

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

But is was performed, to the exclusion of much else what was, arguably, at least as worthy of a hearing if not more so, and which audiences might have enjoyed.

[@murraylow4523]

@@adrianleverkuehn9832 well ok. But it didn’t make much of a dent on anything. And maybe learning some maths etc isn’t a bad thing. In my own field I had to learn ridiculous maths things I was never going to use, but at least I learned a bit about them. There was never any dominance in the wide world of academic serialism.

[@philippecassagne3192]

To my point of view, it is important, in music, to make a distinction between cultural notions (for example the division of octave in 12 semi-tones, which is somewhat arbitrary) and physical notions (for example the rules of harmony, based on Fourier analysis). There is no issue, on the contrary, to transgress cultures. But transgressing physics can lead nowhere.

[@TeH9617]

As a mathematics enthusiast, I would be interested in reading how exactly tonality is related to Fourier analysis. Can you provide a source?

[@philippecassagne3192]

@@TeH9617 What I wanted to say more precisely is that any periodic sound can be expressed as a Fourier series (which gives the fundamental note and its harmonics).

[@robertpawlsoky2910]

Ok, so why is the history of music/art different than the history of science, in the western tradition? I really like this expose and clearly science has its own struggles, but the histories of both are somewhat aligned. Is there not a mathematical basis for music (tone, scales, etc…I’m not a musician as you probably have guessed) or a physics based color theory? So why should the histories be treated so differently? Yes, I realize that we all should genuflect to the German school- i do mean that seriously…I have my reasons for writing that and it is deeply personal but you may not agree. This person, Dave is it, he mentions French music. This got me thinking about French scientists. We owe a tremendous amount to French scientists, I believe the same could be said of French composers, but again I admit, I consider myself less than an amateur, who probably is not fit to discuss this topic at all. But I deeply appreciate you, Dave, is it ? Opening 5his topic.

[@Bachback]

Why were there so few accomplished British born composers after Purcell but before Elgar? Is it time to take another look at that gap?

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

There were many, but no one cares about them today, and I doubt a closer look (which the record labels have been doing for years) will change anything about that. There's just too much of everything.

[@johnenock7939]

No-one cares about Arthur Sullivan? Really? You probably would if you lived in the UK! @@DavesClassicalGuide

[@richardcarnes2834]

@@johnenock7939David has made it clear that he’s a fan of Sullivan’s music, as am I. The Lord High Executioner will have a word with anyone who looks down on Sullivan as a composer.

[@andrewhcit]

In between Purcell and Elgar, most British-born composers tended to be stylistically conservative. They wrote a lot of good music, but unfortunately we've tended to ignore composers whose music we think could have been written a decade or two earlier, because they don't fit into the prevailing narrative of music history. See also: Glazunov, who I'm pretty sure would be in the pantheon of greats if he'd written the exact same music 10-20 years earlier.

[@bbailey7818]

​@johnenock7939 I'm confident that those composers post-Purcell and pre-Elgar are more plausibly the likes of Cipriani Potter, Benedict, some of Boyce, Goring Thomas, and all of those hardworking suppliers of DOA cantatas and oratorios for the triennial festivals. I also think of Balfe but he seems to have a certain cult following.

[@micolsen9824]

The whole point of classical music was to be something at the Beatles disposal when they needed a little inspiration for the making of Sgt Pepper. 😁