How The 20th-Century Avant-Garde Committed Musical Suicide

[@ronthomas2564]

I was a student of Stockhausen’s at the U of Penn in 1964. I was 22. I also got to know John Cage very well not as a follower but a good friend and as an engaging conversationalist. I also was one of the last students of Stefan Wolpe. Your theory is quite well defended. The basis for a useful essay which I encourage you to write. My own pathway took me to many places both within and outside of the framework of avant-garde “movements”. I was fortunate to have always disdained being “part of a movement”, a major aspect of my own liberations. It’s a long story (I am 81). But I wanted you to know that (as someone directly involved) your analysis is spot on.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you very much.

[@Mackeson3]

Virgil Thomson called Cage's work "A ping qualified by a thud"

[@mlinton02]

@@Mackeson3 I think we always have to suspect that there was an element of sexual politics in Virgil Thomson's comments about other gay composers. I think it's important to remember that Thomson bribed Ned Rorem with a Guggenheim fellowship to get Rorem to write laudatory criticism of Thomson's work.

[@johnsimca7093]

I worked as an usher at a concert that featured a work by John Cage. After the piece, the composer was asked to the stage and was loudly booed.

[@kanishknishar]

@@johnsimca7093 Yikes. Which work was it?

[@ronaldcomber6676]

Retired symphony violinist here. The number of pieces that we had to play that were written on graph paper and involved stop watches... so moving! Many years later, when I was orchestral librarian, I discovered a wall in a storage room where all those works had been stored. In ten years, only one piece was requested, by the composer.

[@MrInterestingthings]

Exactly. Very little serious music being created today reaches heart and mind. Great intelligence , systems ,extravagant experiments , fresh new ideas can be dead before their first breath.

[@emusic4269]

@@MrInterestingthingsPeople - composers, that is - are allowed to experiment and have fun (frankly I think the only defining tenet of art is "something with which you entertain yourself"), but the onus is not on the public to care.

[@jemiller226]

@@emusic4269 And it shouldn't be the onus of ensembles to have to deal with performing it. It's long past time to bring beauty back to composition.

[@tombarfuss3528]

Greetings from Germany! Thank you so much for all your terriffic videos! Your KZbin channel is one of my favorites! In the 1980s I studied composition at the Munich music academy (Musikhochschule). We students were strictly forbidden to use any harmonic sounds but forced to write cacophonic music like the at this time hyped German composer Wolfgang Rihm. After one year I was so frustrated that I stopped my studies and changed to the conductor's class. To hell with the 20th-Century Avant-Garde!

[@michaelm5926]

Agree totally with your comment. 20th-Century music, politics and art in general was atrocious. Avant-garde was like a papal office. At least now we have diverse styles of music with just as many popes ;-) But we are free to choose and that counts. Everyone can choose what gives them soul's pleasure!

[@classicallpvault]

That is like entering university in a mathematics course and being forbidden from doing any arithmetic. Completely bonkers! It should have been the other way around: ban students from doing anything modernist as part of their course work until they are very advanced in their studies and are able to write a decent piece in Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Impressionist style. Modernism is about bending the rules but in order to bend the rules in any artistically meaningful way, you need to be perfectly capable of working within them.

[@laurenceperaire418]

Exactly.

[@minddriver6358]

... a complete misunderstanding of Wolfgang Rihm's work...

[@fabiopaolobarbieri2286]

@@classicallpvault And Webern would never have approved of it. An English musician who studied with him reports that he disapproved of the then popular depreciation of Wagner, and that he praised greatly the arch of melody in the works of Brahms.

[@1-JBL]

I remember John Cage was amused that the results he achieved by composing by random I Ching hexagrams were indistinguishable from the results Milton Babbitt achieved with careful mathematical calculation of every musical parameter. Charles Wuorinen ( a guy we disagree on ) grumbled "How can you make a revolution when the previous revolution said 'anything goes'?" And, of course, people like Glass and Reich made a revolution by saying the previous revolution was WRONG and very little goes. Thus tonality and regular rhythm re-entered the vocabulary. Many great composers -- Howard Hanson, Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, Gene Gutche -- got left behind in the avant-garde wave; they seem to slowly be coming to the fore again. As they should. Some of the avant-garde stands: Berio, Feldman, Xenakis, Penderecki, Crumb, etc. Because they were talented. But so much of that material was of no consequence; it's sad. Some of those composers may have had some skill and talent, if they hadn't bought into the avant-garde fallacy. I give Berio great credit for telling Reich "If you want to write tonal music, write tonal music."

[@finneganlindsay]

Spot on sir

[@Mackeson3]

David Diamond once asked Schoenberg if he ought to take lessons with him. Schoenberg replied "Why should you,? You are the new Bruckner, I never intended my system for everyone"

[@jeffblanks529]

Someone else on this thread is a fan of "progressive rock". I am, too, and the fortunes of progressive rock and Punk Etc. reflect what's going on here quite well. Part of it is the fact that, as Punk Etc., this "revolution where very little goes" has, by its nature, rooted itself so deeply that we can hardly imagine another revolution ever taking place. I can't see how this is good for Western civilization. Maybe the best we can hope for right now is a pluralistic situation where many different things can at least survive. From here, we can encourage questioning the assumptions of today and make real exploration "hip" again.

[@nowkentapplegate5315]

I tried and tried ( I was at Juilliard at the time) Xenaksis' Pithoprakta is a psuedo intellectual exercise in musical elitism. Frankly stuff like that and Cage's 4:33 are ridiculous pretensions. If you want to tune people into spiriual silence you don't do iy by being affrontive one coaxes people into silence. To roughly quote DT Suzuki John Cage stidied Zen but did not practice it. If you read everything there is about the piano but never practiced you are not qualified to tell other people how to play. A bunch of know nothings play or tell pep[le what is all about. Of course no one but a rareified few has read Suzuki's translation of the Mahayana Treatise "Th Awakeng of Faith" attributed to Asvagosha (500 AD) let alone practiced what it suggests. High minded know it all western minds couldn't possibly be bothered with introspective insight. It requires real discipline somnething of which most know it all western minds avoid like the plague. Cage should have closely listened to what the I Ching was telling him instead of trying to turn it into garbage.

[@walterprossnitz3471]

​@@nowkentapplegate5315 I have "played" 4:33 to some young students, and it tends to get quite uncomfortable.... (sometimes I've stopped after about half of it, saying I couldn't continue because I hadn't practised the rest 😂). What it does display is that how one experiences 4 1/2 minutes can be extremely different whether one is for instance having a good time at a party, or sitting there, waiting for the silence to stop.... Even though everyone knows this, sitting through 4:33 (for instance) in a concert hall is certainly an interesting experience.

[@savis0]

Even nowadays in academia (and note this is just anecdotal), there's an over-insistence on composition students to be 'original' and 'find their own style,' which feels like a hangover from decades ago. Thinking back to my undergraduate just a few years ago, this attitude unintentionally caused mine and my colleagues' music to sound stifled and hemmed in; any whiff of 'pastiche' was marked harshly. I went to another institution and my new supervisor had better advice: 'I don't care if it's original I only care if it's good.'

[@SimonHesterLonelyPianist]

😢 Originality should never be the aim, telling a story, finding your voice, these are the aims.

[@gustinian]

Originality will emerge naturally, born by the mere fact that composers' influences and listening history are inavoidably different. Contrived 'originality' is a fool's errand. A cautionary tale about putting the cart before the horse.

[@schafer_r]

Completely agreed - it's a very common attitude in a lot of music academia where overall "originality" (whatever that ends up meaning) is placed higher than craftsmanship or execution of ideas

[@Mooseman327]

Excellent video, David. Haydn also famously (and supposedly) said that the more (classical) music got away from the dance, the less popular it would become. We saw this happen to what is known as "jazz" music in the 20th century. Jazz was popular in the 1920's-1940's because it was the favored music to dance to. When jazz' avant-garde came around, right after the war and into the 1970's, jazz music became, more and more, only a music of the cognoscenti and lost its position as a popular music. Another victim of the 20th century emphasis on technique, limitation, and over-intellectualism to the detriment of melody, dance, and uplifting feeling. Pops and Duke, who were the masters of the prior popular form of jazz music, were considered old-fashioned by the newer avant-gardists but we still listen to, and appreciate, their music today because "it sounds good."

[@markhomer8567]

Ultimately, expecting people to listen to music designed to be non-melodic, non-rhythmic, non-emotional, non-pretty, is absurd. These were spoiled brats. Their main accomplishment was to cure people of guilt for not appreciating new music; the middle-brow public simply walked away.

[@miltonjohnston1683]

My fondest memories when performing such music was being at ease since no one could tell if you’d made a mistake.

[@PeteFine]

That's so true! And it says a lot about "composition" of those pieces. Since when did emotion leave symphonic music? Since when did the great masterpieces that brings us joy or tears, etc. become outdated. In this world of AI it is a bit scary.

[@SoiledWig]

On the other side of the coin: it really bothered me when as a composition student something of mine was performed poorly, people would reassure me that no one would be able to tell something went wrong, anyway. That suggested my music had no rhyme or reason to anyone but myself and no one expected it to. To me it was dismissive. If music is no longer an act of communication, they've lost the plot!

[@aelfwine119]

An excellent point. There was, back in 2012, a conference given by the pianist Jérôme Ducros at the Collège de France, where he compared atonal vs. tonal music. He had specially composed a short tonal piece for the conference, and everybody realised two notes were wrong near the end. Then he played the first page of a known atonal piece from Schönberg, and played more than half wrong. Nobody noticed, not even the musicologists who were attending and were supposed to know that piece. This tells rather a lot. The conference and its transcripts can easily be found.

[@steveschwartz8944]

@@miltonjohnston1683 Is that a bug or a feature?

[@kowalityjesus]

In grad school I performed an entire 15 minute Lachenmann piece reading exactly zero notes of the score. Fortunately I didn't have a stand partner, which would have made this obvious, and my conductor never noticed how much I was staring at him for cutoffs.

[@apirecords]

As a composer who lived through the indoctrination of serial and 12 tone education in the late 70's and early 80's, I completely concure. It took me a good 10 years to clear myself of my 'education' to begin to write anything that had any significance to the 'real' world. I think your analysis is spot on. Thank you for sharing your insight.

[@erikjohnson1216]

As a classically trained trombonist who studied in conservatory in the late 70's, I found much avant garde music to be extremely difficult to interpret. Imagine how difficult it was for the listener to connect to the sounds he was hearing! As an aside, my fellow musicians referred to such works as "squeak-fart" music.😂 Hi Tim!

[@apirecords]

@erikjohnson1216 So glad to hear from you! Hope you and the the family are good! Miss you and Ceci in the orchestra. Always an open door if you guys want to play!

[@Cleekschrey]

Unfortunately what composers are indoctrinated with these days is far worse than serial technique. Composers are always chasing a lost paradise.

[@mrhenu]

I don't disagree but I think this whole scene or experiment was on the whole fruitful. It burned itself out but in the end we got all the amazing compositions by Webern, Xenakis, Lutoslawski, Feldman, Nono, Ligeti, Cage, Scelsi, Dallapiccola etc. etc.

[@musicianinseattle]

Two quotes: "A composer isn't original because he tries to be, but because he can't help it." - Ralph Vaughan Williams "I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life.” -Bernard Herrmann

[@Mackeson3]

I love the story of RVW being shown a piece of 'avant garde music' by a young student, apparently, he handed it back to him with the words "If you ever DO think of a tune old chap, don't forget to write it down will you?" 🤣

[@pianomaly9]

Latter quote is by Beecham.

[@musicianinseattle]

@@pianomaly9 Not according to several Vaughan Williams biographies in which I’ve found it - but, given Beecham’s famous disdain for RVW’s music, perhaps he appropriated the quote out of malice!

[@pianomaly9]

@@Mackeson3 Fifty years ago Ives scholar/associate or whatever John Kirkpatrick came to Cal State Fullerton and gave a talk to the composition class. He said to the budding young avant-gardistes (which was by then, as Dave implied pulling the last stops on its organ) "never be afraid of a good tune".

[@pianomaly9]

@@musicianinseattle I'm remembering it in Schonberg's "The Great Conductors' , Beecham replying to some query as to what he thought of/didn't conduct Berg's Wozzeck. btw, down here in Covington, Black Diamond and Maple Valley triangle.

[@arturkranz-dobrowolski2959]

When Penderecki was accused of betraying the avant-garde, he replied: I was not a traitor to the avant-garde, but the avant-garde was a traitor to music.

[@alans98989]

Weirdly enough, I find Penderecki's earlier avant-garde works to be more enjoyable and accessible than his later ones. Much of his later music sounds like what you'd get if you took a Brahms piece and rearranged all the notes to make it atonal. His musical style underwent a similar transformation to that of Ligeti and Lutoslawski in that, they all started out writing sonoric/aleatoric music and later abandoned that technique. The difference is that Ligeti and Lutoslawski's later works demonstrate that they had substance as composers that went beyond writing shifting tone clusters. Penderecki, however, didn't have anything unique to say when he abandoned avant-garde techniques.

[@stevowilliams8279]

@@alans98989 Thanks for mentioning "sonoric" music, I've been looking for the term to describe Ligeti's music with. Sonorism!

[@Cleekschrey]

No one listens to Penderecki’s post experimental works, something he was always very bitter about. No reason to take his angry bumblings seriously

[@davidhival4494]

@@alans98989 All the composers you mention still wrote dramatic and emotionally-affecting music, even if the style was "avant-garde"

[@hamishmccallum131]

Wonderful quote attributed to Beecham, when asked “have you conducted any Stockhausen- “no, but I’ve trodden in some”

[@Bobbnoxious]

Ravel put his finger on the problem when he described Schoenberg's serial technique as "laboratory music". Method became an end in itself, and the audience was lost.

[@steveschwartz8944]

Ravel was wrong. Schoenberg was a Romantic through and through.

[@charlieclark983]

Ravel was ALWAYS right 🎉

[@steveschwartz8944]

Strangely enough, he didn't think so.

[@steveschwartz8944]

​@thomaslaubli1886 Actually, he wrote both kinds of music, as well as tonal music. De profundis is serial. The last two movements of the second string quartet are twelve-tonal/pan-tonal/freely atonal. The Suite in G for Strings is tonal. Rene Leibowitz came up with the term "serialism" in 1947 to describe Schoenberg's "method of composing with twelve tones" - the music Schoenberg began writing with the Piano Suite, op. 25. It's a handy synonym. However, Schoenberg wrote all three types of music throughout the rest of his career.

[@kingconcerto5860]

@@steveschwartz8944 Don't forget that Schoenberg's best music was tonal.

[@arthurgoodman2531]

The trick nowadays is to preface your uninspired music with a personal backstory so admirable that the listener feels like a cad for giving an honest critique.

[@hortleberrycircusbround9678]

More specifically, a identity story

[@hortleberrycircusbround9678]

@@finlybenyunes8385 you don't know what your yapping about. You can easily see Pierre Bonnard sublimated by Rothko. He is clearly an American master despite whatever his public sales pitch was.

[@hortleberrycircusbround9678]

@@finlybenyunes8385 you think it's impressive to call Rothko a hack? Or Morton Feldman a hack because of their Modenist inventions? That's pretty conservative and boring. Lemme help you, Rothko painted abstracted windows. That's the structure, a window. Bonnard also painted a couple window scenes. Rothko is a color- Meister like who? Bonnard. Use your neuroplasticity more before trashing a Modern Master. You don't need to like his work but there is a solid reason why he is celebrated worldwide.

[@hektor6766]

It makes me reflect that the backstory was perhaps well deserved.

[@hektor6766]

@@hortleberrycircusbround9678 Rothko certainly saw you coming. His "windows" all faced blank walls.

[@smurashige]

As I listened to your really thoughtful comments, two things came to mind. I heard a specialist in Chinese philosophy, a Canadian-American, observe that the discipline of modern philosophy had given up its roots as "love of wisdom" to become "love of knowledge", a shift from "philo-sophia" to "philo-episteme", or something like that. It seems to me that so much of the academic world has made this shift, under some quest for "deeper" meanings. I see it as a residue of the identification of sin with the body (flesh), or a perpetuation of an "ideal" over what's "real" and here-and-now. I think you can see it in the quest for "authentic" performance in the world of HIP in music. It's permeated the visual arts too, where we move from abstraction to "purely" conceptual art. Artist's like Donald Judd would choose industrial materials, and simple repetitive shapes. He would draw up plans and have manufacturers make the work, so that he hoped his art would be free of his physical touch, free of the taint of feeling - the traditional signs of artistic genius. Be rid of paint brush marks, be rid of the artist's hand, be rid of feeling so that all that remains is pure Idea. Artists where I taught spoke of being "post-media": it didn't matter whether you painted, built, filmed, or performed. What mattered was that your concept determined what media you used. Having lived in this world of contemporary art for decades, I'm not so cynical as to claim that it was always intended as a scam or to "pull the wool over people's eyes." I think it was and continues to be a matter of real belief, for the most part (I've also seen work that I really thought was a scam), but that it was about building its own protective, self-energizing and self-affirming bubble - a kind of shield against real feeling, vulnerability, and against the real hard work that is necessary to create something and share it with others. Thanks, as always, for your wisdom and desire to share.

[@thomasdeansfineart149]

Even traditionalist painters often feel the pressure to add a conceptual element/concept to their work, even if it’s totally irrelevant. And don’t forget talent. That helps, too. The reams of serial compositions by composers using the method as a replacement for authenticity and creativity, while being praised for it, smothered music for a generation at least.

[@hektor6766]

episteme is safer than sophia. Regurgitating facts and information takes less courage than exercising wisdom or insight.

[@wardropper]

Excellent points. Thank you.

[@douglasjensen8986]

Terrific, one of the most interesting (to me) of all your posts, thank you.

[@erickorte]

My father, Karl Korte, was a composer and tenured professor during the 60's, 70's and 80's. He was very much part of the sheltered, academic world which you describe so well, and ultimately became very disillusioned by it- even bitter. If you in any way attempted to create music that anyone outside of academia could relate to you were immediately branded a hack. He rejected it all late in life and mostly stopped composing, although he wrote some charming pieces for guitar and violin inspired by one of his (secret) idols- Astor Piazzolla. My personal opinion is that the ascent of minimalism and Philip Glass was an over-reaction to the hyper-abstract avant garde of the era. While arrogance should always be avoided, it should also be acknowledged that some great art requires a level of sophistication and insight that many listeners may not command. (Bartok string quartets come to mind.)

[@jamessylercomposer5770]

I was a student of your father's at UT in the early 90's. Sorry to hear of his passing in 2022.

[@erickorte]

@@jamessylercomposer5770 Thanks for the reply! I did not know about you or your work but I do now. (Karl would have been very pleased.) All the best.

[@1-JBL]

I was in touch with your father briefly -- I quite like his piece for flute and electronic sounds, REMEMBRANCES -- and he sent me a CD-R of the piece, clearly the Baron recording, but clear and crisp and without any of the vinyl noise my old album had developed. And I agree with you 100% on the advent of minimalism. I also respect Luciano Berio, who told his pupil Steve Reich "if you want to write tonal music, write tonal music." You wouldn't have gotten that from Boulez!

[@erickorte]

@@1-JBL Thanks- always good to hear when someone is aware of his music. I have a theory about atonality that you may or may not agree with. It’s not the lack of a tonal center itself that listeners resisted; there are many great 20th century works- by Penderecki, Ligeti, Sockhausen, Varese and others- that expanded or disregarded tonality and were tonally ambiguous, atonal, polytonal and beyond. It was the adherence to a strict, rigid system that listeners (and ultimately most composers) rejected. Is anyone in the current academic community, or anywhere else, working in the serial, 12-tone format? I don’t keep up with that world anymore, but I would be surprised.

[@1-JBL]

@@erickorte Somewhere else in these comments I mentioned that Cage was amused to find Babbitt's systematized serial music was indistinguishable AUDIBLY from the results Cage was achieving with I Ching hexagrams and star maps. And since music only exists for the hearing, he had a point. And I can go further and say that both Babbitt and Cage get rare performances these days -- though Cage has a body of work that he wrote before embracing Zen and seeking to remove all personality from his music, and that still gets played and recorded. I quite like most of his prepared piano stuff up to 1950... And I don't know of any composers who are still working in that total serialization vein. I think of Russell Peck, whose music is criminally forgotten, saying that he found people came to hear tonal music, so he dropped the "academia requirements" and wrote what he really liked. Track down his percussion concerto THE GLORY AND THE GRANDEUR, boy, that's a fine piece. Or Mason Bates, or Samuel Jones, or Jennifer Higdon. These are the course of modern composition, not Boulez and Babbitt's path.

[@dennischiapello7243]

Another element worth mentioning--although you did imply it--was the arrogance of the avant garde in their belief that art should only appeal to a select group, and therefore unpopularity counted in favor of its worth. (Easy enough for a tenured music professor to hold.) That notion was already gaining a foothold. Alban Berg, of all people, was somewhat distressed that his Wozzeck proved so popular, thinking it a sign that it wasn't serious enough.

[@jimyoung9262]

I'm glad I helped them reach their goals by not liking their music.

[@bbailey7818]

Milton Babbitt's (in)famous High Fidelity article which was titled (although not by him), "Who Cares If You Listen."

[@stepanvalek3363]

And what's wrong with that?

[@dennischiapello7243]

@@stepanvalek3363 Please clarify what "that" is, and I'll try to answer.

[@stepanvalek3363]

@@dennischiapello7243 How an artist feels about their work (or about their audience) doesn't have a bearing on the work's quality (which wasn't necessarily your argument). Also, I sympathize with Berg's sentiment (to an extent). People usually like stuff they're familiar with. With Wozzek being so popular, Berg may have felt he had created something unoriginal/redundant.

[@davebillnitzer5824]

Modern composers seem to think music should be seen but not heard. They have so intellectualized it that audiences have a hard time connecting with it, and in its place movie soundtracks have become the modern version of concert music. It conveys emotions, drama, story telling and is often memorable, hummable and even singable and audiences can associate the music with something specific.

[@wardropper]

So much wisdom in this short video, and, yes, I have thought about this subject all my musical life. It is said that Schoenberg couldn't understand why his 'avant-garde' music wasn't embraced and enjoyed by the public at large, but at least he FIRST proved that he had wonderful, MUSICAL things to offer our ears when he was younger. Appreciating his later work requires study, but then so does Wagner. Flinging mud at the wall is not 'equally valid' music, and anyway the desperation to be 'different' has basically made everybody sound the same to listeners - remember THOSE?

[@NickZwar]

This is a straightforward summery about what the post WW2 classical music avant-garde was about, and why it ultimately had to implode. While I have always enjoyed many (but by no means all) of the compositions by the (so called) post WW2 avant-garde composers (very certainly I enjoy Penderecki), my approach to them was always the same as to any other piece of music: I have to enjoy listening to it. I know a lot of the avant-garde pieces were basically "paper music", music with a "concept" that may have some internal logic and a set of rules on paper, but that sounds like totally random sounds when actually performed. Interestingly, I do enjoy some of these pieces very much. I love Pierre Boulez' "Sur Incises", but I enjoy it on a very visceral level, rather than an intellectual one. For me, the music is like an immersive, shimmering kaleidoscope of sounds, and I find it deeply soothing and relaxing even (yes, maybe I'm odd that way). But I agree with the assessment that the avant-garde painted themselves into a corner and just basically couldn't get out anymore. The coming up with new rules and do's and don't of composition became more important than the actual compositions, and, as could have been expected, public interest was almost non-existent. It became a bubble.

[@notsodumb51]

I have a very similar way of listening to music. I don't understand Iannis Xenakis's fractal based compositional techniques but I really enjoy several of his works on a visceral level, such as Metastasis and Syrmos

[@belsha]

I think "Sur Incises" is Boulez's best work, by a far margin. Very seductive, in its triple mirror design.

[@notsodumb51]

​@@belsha I agree, but I would also add Le marteau sans maître

[@jimkelseymusiccjh]

The do's and don'ts. You hit the nail on the head. This was still prevalent into the 1990s when, by that point, most professors were disregarding 12-tone music. Mine wasn't. While working on my MA in composition through Central Washington University, he assigned me a 12-tone piece for string quartet. It took a while, but I created a tone row that had a tonal outcome. After the tone-row was introduced, one instrument continued on the tone row, while the rest went their own way, blending in harmony with the melody. My professor took one look at my piece and told me words I will never forget, "Either conform to the system or get out of the program." That completely shut me down and was the straw that broke the camel's back. I took no further lessons from him and, instead, focused my MA in music theory. I haven't composed much since as I can find much more rewarding things to do with my time.

[@NecronomThe4th]

“They wrote themselves out of existence” is what I’ll tell my child when he will inevitably ask me what happened to the 20th century musical avant-garde.

[@JanPBtest]

Or perhaps "they de-composed themselves..." 🙂

[@shirohniichan]

Thank you for your video. Until now I've figured I was just a musical philistine when it came to my disdain of most avant-garde works. I've echoed Rimsky-Korsakov's criticism of younger composers churning out "brain-spun" works with no heart. Now I know I'm not the only curmudgeon out there, and you've enlightened me on why many modern composers have jumped t tracks in the pursuit of soulless exercises. Keep up the good work!

[@MichaelFineMusic]

An excellent and thoughtful essay, David. The tyranny of the 20th century musical avant garde reminds me of the tyranny of the period instrument enforcers. When I invited André Previn to conduct Mozart 39 with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, my boss warned me that I would be trashed by the musical establishment for daring to let a fine conductor perform music he loved in a style that was no longer 'permitted.' The same sort of thing still infects certain corners of the Ivory Tower. I studied geology at a major American University before plate tectonics as the mechanism for mountain building and continental drift became the accepted model. One young faculty member - who wanted to teach plate tectonics - was censured and forbidden from bringing up the subject in his classes. When I worked at Radio France as Artistic Director, my predecessor left a pile of about 100 scores on my desk, all commissions. I decided to make three piles: yes, no, maybe. As I speed read through the scores, most of them were the musical equivalent of the Emperor's New Clothes: earnest, cliché ridden avant-garde scores, often with more text about what the composer wanted than notes to actually play. The 'no' pile grew. I ended up with one 'yes' and two 'maybes.' Most of these composers came from schools where their composition professor would have scoffed at anything musical. A brief anecdote: Not that many years ago, I was playing 2nd/bass clarinet in a festival orchestra touring in Asia. One of the works was by a notable avant-garde composer, well regarded in Germany - that is another interesting discussion. Despite all of us having scores on our stands, we could make little sense of what was going on or how our part fit in. My principal turned and said to me: 'As an experiment, play anything you want from letter A to B and let's see if anyone notices.' I played an improvised, somewhat chaotic avant-garde lick for the 15 measures, as did the Principal. We expected to see, at the very least, a raise eyebrow from the podium but no response. Of course, we did our best for the rest of rehearsal and in the concerts to try and give the composer her due, but it didn't really matter what we played. It was, for me, a very telling moment! I would note that the post-war avant-garde affected all forms of art.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Hello Michael. Thanks for sharing this. It's been ages. I hope you're doing well.

[@MichaelFineMusic]

@@DavesClassicalGuide Thanks, David. I'm well, just finished recording in LA with the Barclay Theatre Trio - three happily beautiful new Piano Trios. Back home for a day and then an LSO recording. I've been enjoying your videos.

[@thomassmith3841]

I agree with you on this one. I live near a very large university with a music school, so I can have my fill of free but usually very good recitals from faculty and students, on almost any day of the week. Generally, the composition students are moving away from anything avant-garde or serialist or things that do the equivalent of repeatedly blasting F-sharp at 100 decibels, but every once in a rare while I sit through a very avant-garde recital, from someone still trying to beat the proverbial dead horse--and the "message" I get from their "compositions" is so clear that it could just as well be announced with trumpets: "Someone give me a grant! Anyone, PLEASE, give me a grant!"

[@sandramccoll4256]

Thank you. You have articulated with your characteristic eloquence the thoughts that have been swimming in my head since I was a music student in the late 70s. Plus adding your own. I used to say that the emperor had no clothes.

[@GuyBeausoleil]

Dear Mister Hurwitz, I've been enjoying your mini conferences ( sometimes not so mini, in fact ) for a while now. I find them entertaining AND enlightning. What grabs me most, however, is your immense, exuberant, humourous LOVE and deep, direct, sensual knowledge of music. It is contagious and exhilirating. À propos of this particular topic of the avant-garde and its demise, it seems to me your views intersect with those of Leonard Bernstein's during his famous NORTON LECTURES « The Unaswered question ». His attempt at demonstrating that tonality was embedded somehow in the human condition seems nowadays to be legitimized by this generalized return to a new kind of tonality in music all over the world. I myself spent years -- especially in my youth -- listening almost exclusively to serial, electronic, conceptual abstract compositions. And, with time, I became, as you so rightly put, more INCLUSIVE. Simply, more human. Unafraid of my own emotions. Thanks a million.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you!

[@fabiopaolobarbieri2286]

@@DavesClassicalGuide The great art historian Sir Ernst Gombrich, whose son I knew, believed tonality to be the natural form of music, and he was an immensely learned Viennese man who had seen all the original avant-garde movement in person. And so, I think, did his friend, the philosopher Karl R.Popper - another Viennese who had seen and heard everything and reached his own conclusions.

[@BrianOxleyTexan]

Great video post. I went through music school in the 80s as a composition major, and was fully turned off. Eventually I got into IT and programming, and have never looked back. I consider Mahler and Stravinsky as the last great composers, and I find nothing after them much listenable or enjoyable or sensible. My composing started around age 13, and by age 21, I was completely done with all of that. I would never get the advice I wanted, and getting performances was an incredible ordeal. I went from improvising fugues with no education but using only my ears as a child, to giving up. Music school for me was horrible. Presently I continue light composing for personal satisfaction more as doodling. I would love to put together a setting of the 22nd and 23rd Psalms as strong contrast.

[@dionbaillargeon4899]

As a PhD student I feel I must offer an explanation for that "irrelevant minutiae" that have become the common theme of so many doctoral dissertations in musicology and humanities in general. 30 or 40 years ago, a dissertation could take 10 years to complete and end up being like 1,000 pages long. However, as the number of PhD students have increased, the means to finance their research have run thin. Nowadays, a typical doctorate lasts between 4 to 6 years. Some research grants in my country last for just 3 years. This includes at least 1 year to write it up and about 4 more months of revision. This means you may have as little as 2 years for conducting reseach before you're pushed to start writing. That's not much when you're trying to make an original contribution. And to make it even worse, you're are also burdened with other obligations: attenting conferences, doing reseach stays abroad, lecturing and tending to undegraduate students, helping to organize seminars, etc. In these conditions, it's no wonder we are pushed to limit our reseach to narrower and narrower topics. In my experience it's not really an "Academic Avant-Garde mentality" problem. We would love to expand the scope of what we're doing. It's more of a resources and a systemic problem.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

It's still a problem.

[@dionbaillargeon4899]

@@DavesClassicalGuide Indeed it is! All I wanted to say was that it's not specific to musicology or related to the restrictive mentality of Avant-Garde music, but more of a general (and practical) problem. Great and insightful video, by the way. As always.

[@baldrbraa]

Quote by CS Lewis seems relevant, even to music I feel: «Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.»

[@josefkrenshaw179]

My parents took me to see Peter Maxwell Davies conduct his "Eight Songs for a Mad King" as a kid. I have had a soft spot for him since then. He fits your pattern. His later works like "Orkney Wedding" and "Mavis in Las Vegas" are far more approachable. An afternoon with his Naxos quartets is a good afternoon for me.

[@JMaxwell1000]

This is one of the best, most insightful essays on 20th-century avant-garde music I've read or heard. Brilliant points made here, which should be required material for every university music student.

[@chipgarner8555]

A friend once described a concert he had just experienced in the 1980's as sounding like a hack saw murder,

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

How would he know what one of those sounds like, I wonder?

[@christophermacintyre5890]

​@@DavesClassicalGuideMust've been while researching for his dissertation.

[@flexusmaximus4701]

Great video Dave! I always liked Duke Ellingtons take, if it sounds good, it is good. I know rather simple.

[@SoiledWig]

This is true. Some avant-garde has survived and will survive simply because it sounds interesting enough to enough people.

[@njlauren]

@@SoiledWig Very little of it. Robert Greenberg, a musicologist and music professor, did a course for the learning company about the great pieces, and the last piece was in 1957.He said the reason was simple, music written after 1957 was mostly one and done and literally none of it enters the standard rep ensembles play.

[@SoiledWig]

@@njlauren Tell that to devotees of Lutoslawski, Penderecki, or Gorecki. Considering money is the deciding factor behind too many concert programs, fear of risk drives the decisions more than musical taste. Music from the 60's forward, though not dirt common, is definitely out there and performed. i think Greenberg is out to lunch.

[@njlauren]

@@SoiledWig The proof is in the pudding, name modern music that is programmed regularly as lets say Beethoven or Copeland or shastakovich or yes, Bartok. Is it programmed? Yes, not not enough to say it is in the standard repertoire.

[@abyssssb913]

​@@njlaureni don't understand why it would matter whether the music is played in concerts I predominantly listen to popular music and 20th c classical and I just don't attend any concerts, I mainly buy CDs or listen to music online

[@steveschwartz8944]

My problem with most of the avant-garde is that they ran out of ideas very quickly and had little sense of what their predecessors had already done. I remember attending a concert of contemporary music and realizing that all of the "new" techniques had been done in the Twenties.

[@steveschwartz8944]

@thomaslaubli1886 As I say, I'm interested in new music and go to contemporary programs. The problem, as I've hinted, is who is considered avant-garde? It's hardly a monolith. It includes a wide range of disparate composers, some better than others. Also, it's hard to begin from scratch with each new piece. Virgil Thomson recognized this when he predicted to Boulez that he would have a very small catalogue. This says nothing about the quality of Boulez's music, but it's right on the money about its scarcity.

[@steveschwartz8944]

The pianist and wit Oscar Levant knew Schoenberg in Los Angeles. He was visiting Schoenberg and Mrs. Schoenberg brought out the coffee. Schoenberg began humming "one of those unhummable tunes" and demanded of his wife, "What work is that?" She didn't know. "That was the piece I dedicated to you." Levant and Schoenberg were discussing the Violin Concerto. Levant, objecting to the difficulty of the music, asked, "Who's going to play this?" Schoenberg replied, "In a hundred years, everybody." Only 12 more years to go!😃

[@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist]

@@steveschwartz8944 Schoenberg's Violin Concerto is programmed (it does get played!)at this years BBC Proms prefaced by RVW's 'Greensleves' I'm quite looking forward to that unlikely pairing!

[@bevanmanson5898]

Excellent and thoughtful comments. However, there are still many critics and some influential (younger, oddly enough) composers in academia who still persist in a single-minded agenda: either absolute novelty or a great deal of abstraction are still the only allowable angles in 21st century composition. (The embrace of technological novelty doesn't help). Or, especially for some middle-aged critics, normal human emotions are too 'sentimental' to be allowed in new music. Dave is so correct in pointing out the inhumanity in this kind of agenda. For us tonally- minded composers from the late 20th who got sidelined, and who also did not follow the minimalists' path, this is still an uncertain and strange time-we might have some musical and life experience to offer, but too many younger composers whose ears have been too often numbed by simplistic pop and electronics cannot relate. Not all, to be sure. However, one of the problems (as Dave points out in a subtle way) is that a lot of avant-garders young and older really don't have much harmonic facility. Nor are they able to create memorable melody. Nor have they the capability to even play a wedding gig. I know that's an extreme statement, but....listen.

[@JanPBtest]

A quick footnote re. "sclerotic" (a native Polish speaker here): in Polish that word is used exactly as the word "senile" or "Alzheimer" is in English. So I'm pretty sure Penderecki wanted especially to underline the "old age senility" aspect of the avant-garde here (before other aspects like "hardening of the arteries" which is also true but a distant second in terms of meaning in Polish).

[@ukdavepianoman]

Really interesting talk - I agree 100%. I was fascinated by the avant garde as a teenager (40+ years ago) in the sense of marvelling at how quickly music was changing (in the 60s and 70s) and how experimental it had become BUT I was almost always left with the feeling of "This is interesting but doesn't do anything for me [emotionally]". There was also the feeling of this "music" doesn't require any skill to compose. As you say, this music essentially reached a dead end. The greatest composers are those that could/can actually compose and have something to say which they share with us. So I love Bach to Berg, Reich/Glass, some Maxwell Davies, Tippett, Messaien, even some Xenakis...while some pieces can be initially very difficult to "get" after some perserverance I discover a great emotional message in their works. Conversely I find composers such as Ferneyhough and his New Complexity pretentious drivel that leaves me cold.

[@fabiopaolobarbieri2286]

A friend and I listened to some Ferneyhough in a Prom Concert in London years ago, and we agreed that the question was, how can you tell whether it's even good or not?

[@marks1417]

I remember another talk where Dave spoke about the "arrogance" of Boulez dropping his 3rd piano sonata on the world where it wasn't even complete. I suppose that piece also falls into the category of fanciful pseudo-scientfic names : "Constellation-Miroir " etc . Great talk

[@ngarber]

I remember going to hear Boulez play one of his piano sonatas when I was still in school. It was horrid. I always wondered if that was the point.

[@tommorrissey4726]

Excellent talk and a nice break from discussing recordings. Some of the fruits of the avant garde will survive, e.g. Ligeti or Adams as you referenced. It won't be easy picking through the detritus to find the worthwhile things, however.

[@fabiopaolobarbieri2286]

If nothing else, Ligeti's music will always have the boost of the mightily effective use of some of his pieces by Stanley Kubrick in 2001, A Space Odyssey. Even though, in the great tradition, Kubrick tried to avoid paying the composer!

[@jeffblanks529]

That's why it's important to shine a light on the good stuff. It was ever thus!

[@andresoeteman7950]

There are more bad composers than good composers, in the 20th century and in the past. Since the 20th century happened shortly we know them all. A few will be remembered later on, like Schoenberg, Ives and Ligeti.

[@njlauren]

While that is true, what you are leaving out is almost none of the 12 tone and serrialists and atonal music, or minimalist for that matter, has entered the standard rep. Why? Because most people don't want to listen to it. A piece gets premiered, and then it disappears.

[@nigelhaywood9753]

I love what you say about the composers being obsessed with the creation of personal styles in such a deliberate and calculated way that they 'defined themselves out of existence' (paraphrasing a little). What's the point of having a language that only you, the composer, can understand?

[@abdul7591]

What happened in music after ca. 1950 closely parallels what happened to the visual arts during the same period.

[@PeteFine]

For me, a composer who I guess would be classified as "late Romantic" or so, I find so much modern music (including that which is referred to as Avant Garde, to be little more than an experiment in sound and not containing the emotions that make us human. Some are brilliantly orchestrated but where is the musical content? I hear so many "Look what I can do with the orchestra...look how strange I can sound...isn't that so original?" works that, unfortunately, conductors see worthy of performance. I realize that, in his day, Beethoven, or Mahler, etc. were considered "modern" and "new" but the expressiveness and tonalities that convey emotions were always there. So much of modern composition for classical instruments lacks that, in my view. I truly believe that these new works will never survive and be listened to for centuries like the great masterpieces we still love.

[@ragnarthepirate]

I loved your presentation. I often wonder that my own symphonies will be hated, not because they are avant garde in any way, but because they are the complete opposite.

[@PeteFine]

I agree, as another composer. I have seen my "romantic" style music turned down and then gone to concerts where a new "modern" work was presented and was, in my Humble Opinion, noise notated to get attention, not express human emotion.

[@ragnarthepirate]

The gatekeepers at our major symphony orchestras need to be replaced by Dave Hurwitz. I would trust him to make better choices. @@PeteFine

[@heroinbae2324]

I think that only now, with more sophisticated electronic avant garde music or noise in general becoming a ricurrent element (also in more mainstream Digital composed music) the younger generations are very sensible to atonality and noise. I mean, It all started with rock and roll and then Velvet underground, and now you can see that what people consider cool strong moments in a Song (in contrast with more melodic calm parts) seems to be what composers as Stravinskij or maybe Penderecki invented as atonal elements in their music. If i listen to some of the Penderecki avantgarde works i can recognize a lot of elements that are present in today electronic music and made their way to PoP music in the last Years. Its difficult tò explain in detail. But i think if you are a youngster and you know both avantgarde music and today's electronic music you can see of what im talking about.

[@mattmaloney2445]

Hi Dave, I hope you do a video on your favourite classic pieces of the 21st century.

[@michaelhoppe8367]

Excellent talk, Dave. Thank you!

[@composingpenguin]

I went to grad school to further my composition craft and all I got was some lousy ideas. Perhaps it was just the particular school and department (it was in the UK), but when I was there they didn’t seem to know what to do with masters students who weren’t studying musicology. They were embroiled in the question of how composition could be a research subject. I’m not sure if the avant-grade actually died or morphed into a different matter. But I still read program notes which read like thesis statements and are more interesting than the music they explain, from composers my generation (millennial) and younger.

[@SoiledWig]

That's a good point. Either way, music-making has been ham-strung and suffocated by academia. They've lost the plot.

[@MrMayAllDay]

I could be wrong, but I have long felt that not only did the mid-20th century avant-garde music burn out gloriously. But it also seemed to be so unpalatable, that it played a major role in the general public’s overall loss of interest in “classical” music altogether. The majority hardly like to hear “beautiful classical music”. Why would they go to the concert hall for more chaos?

[@KeithOtisEdwards]

The classical audience voted with their feet.

[@CharlesSchroeder-b1j]

As a composition major at MSM back in the early eighties, I learned that "tonal" was a dirty word. It had already been done. But so had everything else. There was really nowhere to go from there. I've never felt that music should be the equivalent of a science project, a mathematical equation or a banana duct-taped to a wall. I suspect that many of the so-called composers at that time had no idea how their music would sound until it was played. Many snobs pretended to like it because, if they didn't, they would be labeled "ignorant," just as they would if they liked composers such as Rachmaninoff or Puccini.

[@robertyanal3818]

In his history of twentieth century music, “The Rest is Noise,” Alex Ross describes members of the avant garde as detesting music that appealed to normal audiences.

[@pianomaly9]

My experience in a music department fifty years ago, there was the "everything composed between 1600 and 1950 is crap" crowd.

[@keithcooper6715]

I Learn from you - Thank You very much.

[@Emerald_City_]

*What a contribution.* Done in a leisurely, casual style, yet you touched some corner stones of the XXth century music phenomena. I sometimes don't agree with your reviews (mostly well), but even then you feel there is a great musical intellect and insight behind judgements you don't approve with. This video has confirmed to me that I haven't spent many hours on your channel in vain. One thing that might elude you in this survey: the art is born within / out of its age. The _zeitgeist..._ The artists, especially the composers, cannot transcend their day and age and break out of the world they live in... Well perhaps only some, like *_Arvo Pärt,_* or performers like *_Elisabeth Chojnacka,_* but they occupy a special and rather limited niche. Briefly, there cannot be a grand heroic or even cheerful juicy music in an age of fallen, limp humanity, shaped by consumerism and media lobotomized, reduced onto a lower stage of existence with the art surviving just in the form of left-over exotic islands far from the society's mainstream.

[@BrianHurley-b7o]

Excellent analysis! This is truth serum. Every young composer should listen to this.

[@joseluisherreralepron9987]

Ives' 4th is one of my favorite works. My musical friends hate my for that. I don't care. It's an amazing, staggering work that I only play when my neighbors are out.

[@justinandmaxgames5472]

As a composer myself, it took me half my life to get over the 'need' to find my 'place' in the historical 'progress' and find something interesting, emotional, and meaningful. I discounted my tastes for what I perhaps expected of myself to be.

[@richmelvin2]

You know the 20th century Avant-Garde was over when the writing (bloviated philosophy) about the music/visual art/performing art(s) was more interesting than the actual performed music/painting/dance. Arvo Part is another great example of a composer who went from 12 tone composition to a more expressive style. Great topic Dave!

[@richmelvin2]

Everybody has different likes and dislikes and all I can say is more power to you for not liking Part - it is your privilege. I happen to like Part and have listened to him since the 1990@@thomaslaubli1886

[@mattholsen7060]

I studied Composition with a man who once pushed Boulez off the stage at a lecture (or so I heard). He raged against serialists and the avant-guarde generally. This was in the 70's, and most of the composers he loathed and despised I had never heard, much less played. They had dominated for a while and blighted his life, it seemed, but they never meant anything to me. As you say, they were spent. I never considered the philosophy that lay under their methods and their esthetics, or the cultural context of their work. It's fascinating to hear about it. Thanks.

[@danielpincus221]

Thanks!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you very much!

[@drgaryb13]

It made me so happy to hear you agree with me that Ives was a rare genius! Now I'm going to see if you've done a full video on him.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Several

[@drgaryb13]

@@DavesClassicalGuide - Woo hoo! The issue is just that there are SO many videos and no real way to search for them easily. But anything I think of, you've covered it! Today, I tried to see if you had ever discussed the interesting composer Rebecca Clarke. KZbin brought me to a video you did which made reference to "romantic viola music" and I was heartened, but, alas, she wasn't included!

[@nycsym]

American composer, Stephen Albert said of the atonal/serial movement, "Once you brought the cultural bolshevism of the time, you were down the mindless trail of the avant-garde. Twenty-five years down the line I suspect that one will look back with mystification as to how people took the fifties to the seventies seriously except as some kind of sociological aberration." It seems that Albert had it right.

[@jeffblanks529]

I'm suspicious of any sentence containing the phrase "cultural Bolshevism".

[@jeffblanks529]

I distrust any sentence containing the term "cultural Bolshevism".

[@mikesmovingimages]

@@jeffblanks529 Cultural Bolshevism is exactly what it was! Revolutionaries who were out to destroy what was and replace it with a new musical utopia.

[@terryquinn1419]

All very well put and NOT limited to music.

[@briandempsey7258]

Studied & taught with the University 12 Tone-Electroacoustic mafia in the late 1970s-1980s. I could never understand why the very simplicity of a beautiful melody was verboten as an expressive human necessity. Tried to present a graduate seminar on Pink Floyd analog synthesis & was shown the exit (they wrote for money not real art) which turned into an escape route to teach my beloved high school musical students in the inner city for the remainder of my my career. Have turned to Shostakovich & Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin , Bernstein & Stephen Sondheim, & Philip Glass to cleanse the festering rot in my artistic soul. Every Bach melody is sacred & a seemingly spontaneous execution of a profound well disciplined craft. But I do still enjoy a lot of the lost generation’s work as it is part of my own younger personal journey.

[@varundixit1365]

I feel like many of the avant-gadists do not seem to be able to differentiate between "pushing the boundaries" and "crossing the boundaries". Pushing the boundaries is precisely what made the composers like Liszt, Bartok or Stravinsky the musical giants, they had their one foot set in the rich tradition of historical music and other foot firmly set in the future created by themselves; whilst also taking the inspiration from centuries old music outside of classical tradition. These composers "expanded" the scope of music; rather than restricting their expression to limited rules. Disowning the entire tradition by declaring it as irrelevant (which I define as "crossing the boundaries") might make you look ahead of your time in the short term, but it won't stand the test of time in many of the cases; especially if it's the experimentation just for the sake of it.

[@Sulsfort]

"they had their one foot set in the rich tradition of historical music and other foot firmly set in the future created by themselves; whilst also taking the inspiration from centuries old music outside of classical tradition" Actually this is no contrast to the 2nd Viennese School. Schönberg first and foremost teached by studying closely traditional works. He was a little bit limited, because he considered J.S. Bach the beginning of the tradition. So he had to learn a little bit about Renaissance music from Webern. But Schönberg even despised composers, who were "crossing the boundaries".

[@ThreadBomb]

@@Sulsfort I think Schoenberg's veneration of the classics was a smokescreen. Judge him by his music, not his words.

[@stefanehrenkreutz1839]

I Believe it was the philosopher Wittgenstein who concerned himself the pointlessness of a private language.

[@Sulsfort]

@@ThreadBomb "I think Schoenberg's veneration of the classics was a smokescreen." I don't think so, because analyzing the classics was an important part of his teaching. More important than introducing his serial technique. "Judge him by his music, not his words." I do. First I liked Beethoven and fugues by J.S. Bach. And that was a good preparation for enjoying Pierrot lunaire, the 2nd string quartet, the piano pieces op. 11, the piano suite op. 25 ...

[@quinnsine1650]

When you swear off all things found music of the past and said music of the past and one of the things found in music of the past is appeal and listenability, well, need I say more?

[@MaterLacrymarum]

Intelligence and emotion are different things. I listen to a lot of so called "Avant Garde", and the best thing about it is that it engages me on an intellectual basis. Better yet, as a challenge. I don't "understand" much of it, but I find it fascinating. Whereas, if the focus is on something that is easier to consume, and to engage emotions in a more natural way, the things like clearly defined melodies help. They're just different things to me.

[@mlinton02]

Interesting point of view, largely agree. About Penderecki: I studied with him for several years. The last time we were together he told me over lunch that even though he had spent his summers for years in Lucerne, Boulez--who ran a music festival there--had never programed one of his works. There was a personal animus between them. Plus, I don't think Penderecki's works, since he was a Pole, received the clandestine financial support the avant-garde received from the Committee for Cultural Freedom and its various successors--both of these things might have colored Penderecki's comments about the "avant-garde." There's an irony, that has yet to be addressed, that probably the most performed piece of post WWII music, and probably most loved, is Giazotto's "Adagio." It would be interesting to hear your comments on this.

[@fabiopaolobarbieri2286]

Boulez made a lot of enemies. On a memorable occasion, he had to be polite to Shostakovich, on one of his visits to the West, after having attacked his music in the bitterest terms decades earlier. Shostakovich had not forgotten, and was freezingly polite in response.

[@tomsea7500]

Long ago I found that there was a parallel with visual art, namely painting, and music. In the early 1970s I took the art class at the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia. Violette DeMazia gave a lecture on abstract art as compared to art that had (figurative) subject matter. Without saying that abstract art was bad, she pointed out that all the elements of abstract art; drawing, composition, color etc. are also contained in figurative art. So the intellectual appreciation can be similar. But figurative art has the extra benefit in that anyone can more easily have a relationship with the work of art. Likewise, melody gives everyone an entry point into a work of music. Take that away and you are left with just intellectual appreciation.

[@fredhaight3088]

Dear Dave; Thank you for introducing that necessary discussion. You ended by saying, " I would be interested to hear what you think!" I hope you mean that. Responses to your hypothesis have come mostly from seasoned musical veterans, and reflect decades of experience and thought by them. Personally, I have thought about the matter for over 50 years, and attempted to make sense of it from a "metamusical" standpoint. Here are three such metamusical ideas: 1. It involves a shift in the role of the artist from cultural optimism to cultural pessimism. Under the former, the artist must be a leader of society, and seek to uplift it. Under the latter, he or she's job is to rub our noses in how bad things are (as if we didn't already know). Theodore Adorno said, famously " To write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric." While different opinions may exist as to what he meant by that, my own take is that his meaning, consistent with the avant-garde, is that Auschwitz revealed true human nature to be brutish; and that the naivete, of say, the Ode to Joy, would be blind optimism, to the point of being barbaric, if replicated today. My own view is that Auschwitz (and subsequent horrors) demonstrate the need for cultural optimism even more, if we are to move ahead. Maybe human nature is not a fixed state, but its ability to change. Maybe the artist should lead that change. 2. The two systems differ in terms of musical science. The tonal system is anchored in the real universe. Kepler's demonstration of that is insufficiently appreciated. Serialism is an arbitrary man-concocted system, in which a larger scale harmonic structure cannot exist. Resolutions- motion- such as dominant to tonic are necessary to provide structure. Schoenberg, in more ways than one, imposed a Jacobin equality on the tones, which precludes such a structure, one that originates in motion. Dave, you mentioned, correctly, how everyone had to sound different. Ironically, the system made everyone sound the same, as noticed by one of your respondents. Mere chance (the aleatoric) was indistinguishable from dodecaphony, the serial predetermination of every note. Dave, you said it committed suicide. Agreed, but it was also stillborn. Its demise was inevitable from its inception. That was clear to me in the 70's. It didn't take a genius. Schoenberg argued that "everything that could be said in that language (tonality) , has been said." It was the opposite. The tonal language, like the English (and other) languages, remain infinitely open. Serialism began to strangle in its crib. It was always a dead-end. 3. This will be the biggest point of contention. IT WAS POLITICAL. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was exposed in 1967 as having been funded and controlled by the CIA. It's influence was so massive that it influenced everyone involved in the arts. It promoted the avant-garde in the name of fighting communism. WTF? How exactly, does the promotion of cultural pessimism fight communism? The idea that Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Berio, Maderna, Eimert, Xenakis, et al would have not been possible without the CIA and MI6, is mind-boggling. Rather than promote my own views, I invite you and friends to a serious response, and please, not a casual dismissal. My own experience is like many of your other responders. There was a police-state aspect to modern art. You could not become a composition major in a university, you could not get a grant, or a post, if you did not genuflect before the avant-garde. Time to unboggle our minds.

[@jimkelseymusiccjh]

The problem with 20th century music is that (my opinion) is that each composer tried to create something new so as to get his/her name in the music history and theory books. I composed a lot during my teenage years and really wanted to major in music when I was in college. I was devastated at the end of my sophomore year because I realized I couldn't create anything new that academia would recognize - it had all been done. I didn't compose anything for six months. The composition bug didn't die; however. and I continued to compose until my MA composition professor from Central Washington University shut me down entirely. Herbert Paul's "Two Centuries in One" is a worthy read of the elites controlling the narrative of what rules composers should follow and the flip side of composers wanting to compose quality music that was meaningful to their listening audience.

[@gerhardfischer6057]

Hallo from Greece! Enjoyed your way to talk! Beside playing almost exclusively Bach I find much innocent pleasure in Turkish classical music.

[@TenorCantusFirmus]

Spot-on both about Avant-garde and contemporary Musicology.

[@jimthompson606]

In one of Oscar Levant's autobiographies, he mentioned that he once studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg. He wrote something that seemed a bit severe so he slipped in a little tonality. When Schoenberg reviewed it and got to that part, he asked "And how does this follow?" Once when Levant sat down to perform one of his compositions, he played "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" instead. He sorely questioned himself for doing that, and could never figure out why he did it. Oscar was a treasure in so many ways.

[@davidross5338]

I have long felt that music that can be enjoyed needs to have elements that are in some sense familiar, with points at which the composer diverges from our expectations. Without the divergence, the music would be predictable and therefore boring; but without the familiar, with no recognizable form to grasp on to, the sounds become just a series of sounds, with no connection/progression that can transform them into music. Thus, if a piece strays too far from our musical understanding, rather than an intellectual basis, it is difficult to appreciate it, emotionally or otherwise, as music. In a similar way, it is because of Picasso's enormous emotional strength in his earlier works that imbue his less obviously representational later works with their communicative ability. (It is also easier to give a composer who has demonstrated his understanding of 'real' music the benefit of the doubt with his more esoteric works - Tippett and Nicholas Maw come to mind.)

[@dmntuba]

You got it right. Can't be said or discussed better 👍

[@howard5259]

Thanks for this very thought-provoking presentation. It's a subject I've considered many times from my extremely unacademic viewpoint. It seems to me that the 20th and even 21st century composers we most enjoy are those who continued the traditions of instrumentation left to us by the 19th century. So through the 20th century we had Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, etc. This continues now into Adams, Macmillan and so on. It seems to me that fast technological developments, especially in the field of electronics, lured some musicians into a route to composition which avoided the rigours of the centuries. The use of electronics in instrumentation and performance using recorded music/sound allowed the merely modern to parade as academic and ingeneous. Some excellent composers do use electronics but I struggle to think of any who have not previously and to a greater extent used 'traditional' instrumentation.

[@ElPricto]

Citing Haydn at the beginning was quite assertive. The inclusive/exclusive dichotomy at the end is a great observation. It could be expanded indefinitely if considered as short periods of inclusiveness and exclusiveness in the works of many composers. Food for analysts. Love the phrase "They wrote themselves out of existence". I do happen to love many avant-garde compositions, and I think they were and still are necessary. The extramusical factors may serve to show how difficult is to separate music from everything else as well as the opposite, how difficult integration could be. In the case of emotionality and music, these composers stumbled into many cognitive limitations based on the human capacity to engage or disengage emotionally with anything, mainly for cultural reasons. Musicians like John Cage and Pauline Oliveiros made some very interesting explorations on how differently we perceive sound by just accepting it as music or not. It was a great moment for testing human limitations, and understanding music and our relationship to it. A great prelude for what's to come with all hybrid academic research and new AI technologies coming up. From this perspective seeing the XX century avant-garde as a failure may be considered at least as a little exaggeration.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

I think that's a very fair summation.

[@ElPricto]

@@DavesClassicalGuide Love your Haydn book, by the way. Exposing Haydn's genius to the general public is very much needed. Thank you!

[@Coolsnacker]

I like the phrase that Rorem used, "any notes will do."

[@grahamcombs4752]

Cage's In a Landscape and Maxwell Davies' Farewell to Stromness seemed to come from nowhere given their composers. And what did Leonard Bernstein mean when he said music is "about nothing"? BTW Mr. Hurwitz, your recommendation of the DORAT'S box set of Beethoven's nine symphonies was spot on. I am very happy with the purchase and realized there was more to composer's symphonies than 5, 7, and nine. Thank you again. Your channel has become a daily indispensable treat. I am subscribed.

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

Thank you for watching!

[@Roberjohnson]

I think the avant- guard underestimated how complicated it is to write music that’s actually good in that style. Berg’s violin concerto is a work that I think sounds great, but most other pieces are just music for musicians that, like free jazz, has no heart and soul.

[@Warp75]

Some free jazz I like, but a lot of it was just crap.

[@SoiledWig]

@@Warp75 Yeah, you have to be really good to know what to do with all that freedom.

[@Warp75]

@@SoiledWigThat’s exactly it

[@jesuisravi]

my only criterion is that I have to like the damn thing before I will listen to it...which doesn't mean I will like it the first time I hear it, but the first time I hear it I have to hear something in it that tells me that over time if I listen more I may begin to love the piece. It's all about love, after all.

[@smb-zf9bd]

I could not agree more, especially the academic aspect. It's not as if this music had not been featured - even pushed - on audiences and with a zeal so fervent that criticism was viewed as treachery. I've lost count of the number of articles I've read on why modern music is not bad, is actually great and popular with everyone except the uneducated masses. I read something along the line: "Music that sounds good is not taken seriously, and music that's taken seriously doesn't sound good". There is a direct correlation between academia, ever more obscure personal theories, anh obsession with originality, personal journeys and the downfall of serious music. Composers who were not popular with audiences were protected by universities and friendly media until they actually believed all the propaganda written about their output. Thanks

[@aljacobsen6877]

To me the ultimate irony is how much of this music was eventually unoriginal. So much sounded like the same chaotic mess with little to grab onto as a listener. I'm glad most composers today do not go that route.

[@jamessylercomposer5770]

Excellent. I'd like to hear you continue this premise and expand into the 20th c. rise and dominance of popular culture especially for the general listener. Concert music and new music movements of the day can never seem to compete with the commercial machine as a cultural phenomenon.

[@ronnyskaar3737]

This was a really interesting take, David. Loved it.

[@gustinian]

To attempt an analogy, rather like spelunking (or 'pot holing' if you are English), there is some value in mapping subterranean tunnels even if most of them are dead-ends. It can be a dangerous pastime especially when the dead ends become literal. Very very occasionally a new passage is discovered and options are widened. Devoting years of one's life to such exploits is risking wasting precious creativity time (not that composition is a competition). The classical tradition is just that - a tradition, and traditions tend to preserve the best aspects of the past and evolve cautiously if new accretions prove sufficiently robust when tested. In the music technology sphere there was a period in the late 1980s when computing and MIDI was offering enticing potential for compositional exploration with crude artificial intelligence - random notes which obeyed programmable rules of probability and so forth. It produced interesting and fascinating results for the spelunking operator, with memorable happy accidents etc. but for an audience it would eventually become tiresome - like an unwanted wind chime.

[@dhackj]

I like your analogy of the bridge with no visible means of support. The rush to the patent office approach to composing has led to a few decidedly wobbly structures. If I've written anything half-decent that remains standing it's by adhering to more solid principles - and this mainly means checking out what Haydn did - the best avant-gardist of all!

[@revivalharpsichord5078]

Wonderful food for thought here on a subject I've been contemplating for most of my 75 years. I remember rejoicing when I was still in music school in the early 70s when Harold Schonberg wrote an editorial in the NY Times declaring that serialism was officially dead, having failed to win a significant audience in half a century. I think that was one of the problems; I think at least up to Beethoven, if a composer wrote a work and the audience hated it, the piece was considered a failure and often the composer would revise it. But increasingly after Beethoven, if audiences didn't like something, it was the audience, not the composer, who supposedly failed, and presumably future audiences would one day see the error of their ways. I'm not advocating pandering to the lowest common denominator of listeners, but it's like the tree falling in the forest: If no one will listen to what you've written, is it really music? It's quite revealing how often the nicest thing that can be said about an avant-garde work is that it is "interesting"; you almost never hear it described as "beautiful" or "moving" or anything involving emotion rather than pure intellect.

[@jgesselberty]

I subscribe to the comments of the great musical humorist, Anna Russel. With modern music, you never know if the composer has reached great new heights, or if he is just trying to put one over on us.

[@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist]

depends how familiar you are with the idiom? when I first heard Debussy's 'Jeux' as a teenager i was utterly perplexed by it but i just listened to umpteen times til i felt as if i could relate to it. I hesitate to say' understand' as i think the piece retains a mystery. Nonetheless, it would have been easy for me to write the piece off on first encounter.

[@Gwailo54]

@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist I’m nearly seventy and I stil struggle with Jeux. However, with kind people reconstructing Nijinsky’s choreography as best they can and putting it on KZbin I have become more familiar with the piece. It’s grown on me much more. As for the usual knee-jerk response to unable to hum a tune from modern music, I defy anybody to find a truly extended tune in Jeux. There are fragments all over the place, creating a mosaic. Those guardians of the sacred tune wouldn’t denigrate it as tuneless as its ‘nice’ because it’s Debussy. Rant over.

[@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist]

@@Gwailo54 great description of the ballet score.

[@eliasmodernell3348]

Your description of a inclusive composer fits the beatles perfectly!

[@dvd53]

I am late to the party here, but I very much enjoyed this video. In the end, IMHO, music seems to require some form of tonality to be human. It might be very remote tonality, but some kind of musical center has to be there. Otherwise the listener is cast adrift. Even a lot of bird songs tend to come back to one or two tones. There is a reason that a person with no music education whatsoever can at least relate to Bach and Mozart, people who wrote centuries ago, but not to "art music" written last week. I agree that academia encourages exclusiveness (in many fields, not just music). What to do? Beats me. I just keep listening (and trying to play) the greats of the "Era of Common Practice."

[@tomfinot623]

I can't ever remember leaving the symphony humming a twelve tone row. I wouldn't know what one sounds like to identify it without a heads up in the program notes, and then I still wouldn't when I was hearing it.

[@stefanhorlitz]

if you need a hummable 12 tone melody, try Frank Martin's Petite Symphonie Concertante.

[@Mackeson3]

I remember seeing a documentary about Simon Rattle, he was rehearsing some Hans Werner Henze stuff with The CBSO and all at once he stopped and said "Hang on, I think I've found a tune here somewhere!" My old music teacher went to a concert featuring something or other by Peter Maxwell Davies. He said where he was sitting he could see the score on the conductor's music stand and he said it just looked as if someone had loaded some ink onto the tip of a 12 inch ruler then flicked it onto the page "Flick flick flick orchestrate that!" he said.🤣

[@jimeisenberg6701]

I largely disagree on this. I find most works of the new tonality deadly dull, repetitive and unconvincing. The Avant-Garde of the '50s-'70s hasn't died. Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna etc. continue to be performed and recorded. They may have literally passed on, but they continue to influence many young composers. At least in their early works, they were genuinely expressive. (eg. Boulez: Le Soleil des Eaux, Stockhausen: Drei Lieder, Nono: 3 Epitaphs for Garcia Lorca, Maderna: Tre Liriche Greche). True, they placed strictures on themselves with twelve note and serial ideas, but often used these to great expressive purpose. Also defending the twelve note compositions of what is sometimes called the middle generation, the composers who studied with or were directly influenced by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. (Gerhard, Valen, Skalkottas, Searle, Lutyens etc., all of whom were able to work successfully in large musical forms. Off my soap box now!!! Otherwise, I greatly enjoy your postings!

[@DavesClassicalGuide]

It may surprise you to learn that I don't actually disagree with you about the fact that many of those composers wrote excellent music. The reality, though, is that nothing you have said matters a bit, because even your list of "good stuff" repulses most listeners, and ultimately,, even in the snotty and rarified world of classical music, listeners do matter.

[@JohnPrepuce]

@@DavesClassicalGuide - "most listeners" don't want to hear any non-pop music whether it be avant-garde or not. Although, if given the choice, they would probably hear Pachelbel (for the millionth time) over Xenakis.

[@bernab]

@@JohnPrepuce Exactly. And, to be honest, I am tired and sick of Pachelbel's Canon, which most people feel and believe is beautiful, and wonderful while, for me, is overplayed, nothing happens in that piece, and I even prefer some minimalist pieces in which happen more things.

[@bernab]

@@JohnPrepuce Even If I don't like every piece by Xenakis, but give me, for example, Pleiades, or few other works than Pachelbel's Canon. Or Vivaldi's Spring.

[@JohnPrepuce]

@@bernab - I would easily listen to any of the composers the OP listed than Pachelbel's canon, or any other pop music, Kenny G, or Taylor Swift, or whoever. Pop doesn't really do it for me.

[@daviddandrea6491]

Amateur pianist here. This is an issue I have thought a lot about over the years as I explored the 20th century literature. Well before the current concerns over the academic elites, I saw much of 20th century avant garde exploratory music as an outgrowth of the burgeoning publish or perish culture in universities. The output was put out for output purposes only, not whether it was appreciated by anyone else, particularly the nonexperts. This obviously was not confined to musical academia.

[@martinm5086]

Yours is the clearest, most erudite condemnation of modern avant-garde music that I have heard. 20th-century British classical music didn't go down the rat hole (e.g., Vaughan Williams) that American "classical" music did, perhaps because of the strong influence of the Church music tradition in England. I have always thought that the successor to classical music is, in the 20th century, what is called Classical Film Music: Miklos Rosza, Bernard Hermann, Ennio Morricone, John Williams, and the like.

[@benjaminsmith2287]

Well stated and argued. I think when music doesn't keep up with Zeitgeist and gets theoretical and abstract, it loses momentum. Concert music movements like impressionism and German Expressionism were very much of the times. Stochastic stuff, well, perhaps in some ways. Electronic stuff was interesting for a bit but then the novelty of that means wore off. By the 60s onward social awareness popular music expressed the Zeitgeist while energy jazz music did as well. And yes, you can't abandon what others have done or their methods. I think great music has a structure but at the same time isn't just structure. Something else, maybe ineffable, has to move you to keep things memorable and engaging.

[@jimyoung9262]

I'm glad that stuff exists for its own sake. I have never had any use for it.

[@JakePurches-Base2music]

I have thought about this: The Avant Garde were musical nihilists. But far from being dead, it's alive and well today, it evolved into 'Techno' and EDM. And now millions of so called 'musicians' make this awful 'grand child of minimalism' up on their computers with no idea really what they are doing apart from just looping and looping. Put a beat with it and your set to go. That is what some of these good intentions ended up being. On the other hand people like Glass and Reich became classicists and Glass in particular became a great symphonist in later life. I think your premise is correct, Dave, and thanks for your video. Very interesting.

[@ChainsawCoffee]

I don't think techno and EDM are really from the classical avant-garde. I cannot imagine an avant-garde piece with a rhythm, especially with a dance rhythm. Minimal music, yes. Minimalism, avant-garde, no. A genre with imagination, no. There is no dance floor avant-garde music. In techno/EDM, it was a radical idea to have a live drummer. Ouch. 🤪