What makes a modern composer?

[Aiantas]

History has a habit of pigeonholing things and musical style is no exception. Baroque, Classical, Romantic,
all neat little boxes with labels to tell the listener what he is hearing. If modernity was to be put into such a
box it would unfortunately have to forsake its name for modern simply means that which is in fashion.
However, in this age of borrowing and reinventing words and their meanings Modernity has come to describe
a the historical period which we identify with class based revolution and the industrialization of the western
world. One might say that Modernity, in this historical sense, has no stylistic characteristics unless one is
prepared to interpret political and social pressures as stylistically influential. In this case works written within
this chronological period which do not reflect this social climate should not be considered 'modern'.
So a work like 'La Mer' by Claude Debussy cannot be considered modern but rather 'impressionist',
and Strauss tome poems such as 'Ein Heldenleben' should be considered as post romantic rather than modern.
So how does this social condition manifest itself in the works of a 'modern' composer? I think the most
important aspect of a work that can be considered modern is that is, in some way, part of a revolution. That
is to say it is a reaction against something, whether that is a historical movement like the Romantic movement
(which chronologically exactly preceded Historical Modernity) or a comment on some extraneous social
factor such as a political regime, for example Schostakovitch often writes what could be considered satirically
of the communist regime in Russia during his lifetime, or Schoenberg's twelve-tone serialism as a reaction to
the then current tonal Romantic practice.

From about 1900 composers started devising ways in which the music they wrote became more than just
expressions of their own personal state but the expression of different social or ethnic groups, expressions of
cultural opinions held not only by themselves but by larger and not necessarily artistic bodies. After the inception
of this kind of thinking it became possible to see composers as reacting to almost anything, and quite often each
other but I think that the most enduring characteristic of a modern composer is his willingness to experiment in
order to achieve his goal. It is this that separates Charles Ives, Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Witold Penderwski,
John Cage and other 'Modern' composers and not so much a musical common characteristic.

Today most composers have reigned in this desire to experiment rather than perfect, but that is common to all
periods of musical history. There are the innovators and then come the perfectionists. Stamitz was the innovator
and Mozart the perfectionist, Schubert and Brahms were the innovators for Wagner and Mahler to build upon.
So in today's music we find Modern composers who experiment and break new ground while they are followed by
composers who examine these experiments and divine form them what is truly useful. Such composers as John Adams
and Louis Andreissen of the minimalist school have done this, Nestor Taylor and John Taverner of the 'Ecstatic Religious'
school have done this too, but their music would hardly seem to fit the term 'Modern' music as we use it in any historical
context. It is, however, very much in style today and music historians wait with baited breath to give it a new (old, borrowed,
and changed in meaning) name.
FC

[The Sparrow]

I'd realy like to just restrict it to a chronilogical label.

I wish we had more active baroque and earlier composers working today.

[Aiantas]

Originally Posted by spotty

I'd realy like to just restrict it to a chronilogical label.

If only it were that simple... Bach, writing in 1745 was chronologically treading the toes of Gallant and Rococo composers like Stamitz, not to mention his own sons. Stylistically, however he was writing Baroque music, like the Art of Fugue! Absolute time is not always the best guide to real history.
FC

[Aiantas]

Here is a link to the Dallas Symphony Orchestras Educational page about modernism. The list of works they give except for the Ives is so conservative!

DSO - Modern

The ideas about experimentation are right though!
FC

[Florestan]

I think the issue is not so much modernity as modernism versus postmodernism.

Debussy, for example, may be a romantic but he is still a rationalist. I reject the use of the term 'impressionist' music just because it was contemporaneous with impressionist painting. We do not refer to 'cubist music' and quite right too.

I think the break actually occurs much later with composers such as Glass and Tavener, who are postmodern.

I also dispute the claim that the postmods are breaking new ground. Tavener, for example, is 'informed' by mumbo ju... sorry, spiritualism and 'breaks new ground' only in dispensing with any recognisable structure. At least, that is my experience. The Protecting Veil sounds like the Andante movement of Barber's violin concerto after being put through a blender. I find it not spiritual but intensely irritating and unsatisfying. And his Spem in Alium is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

Glass, meanwhile, produced a 'symphony' based on a David Bowie album. It sounds mostly like the theme to a western and though quite easy on the ear, conceptually it is just rubbish. And I LIKE David Bowie!

Pärt, on the other hand, is both rational and spiritual. As was Bingen; as were Palestrina, Tallis and so on. Give me any of those composers any day.

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by Aiantas

Here is a link to the Dallas Symphony Orchestras Educational page about modernism. The list of works they give except for the Ives is so conservative!

DSO - Modern

The ideas about experimentation are right though!
FC

By conservative you mean modernist!

[Florestan]

To clarify, I don't reject postmodernism out of hand. I had a postmodernist higher education and agree, for example, that the cultural/social/economic conditions in which any piece of art (or set of ideas for that matter) are conceived are an important factor in its construction.

What I reject is the notion one comes across all too often that because postmodernism comes after modernism that it must always be 'better' - and that anyone who disagrees is a boring old fuddy duddy who should loosen up and get hip. This has been used as an excuse for sloppy thinking and bad art. Much postmodern art (in which I include music) is conceptually bankrupt.

[The Sparrow]

I think there needs to be a different label then "modern" as modern is too easlily interpreted as a chronological term rather than a stylistic term.
Modernism doesn't work
Post-modern is probably more applicable but not necessarily correct.

hmmmm....

My other question - perhaps another thread - is, are there 'modern' (chornologically speaking) baroque composers?

and also, could you really put John Williams, Arvo Part, R. Murray Schafer, and Stephen Wright into a common catagory?

[Florestan]

Originally Posted by spotty

I think there needs to be a different label then "modern" as modern is too easlily interpreted as a chronological term rather than a stylistic term.
Modernism doesn't work
Post-modern is probably more applicable but not necessarily correct.

hmmmm....

My other question - perhaps another thread - is, are there 'modern' (chornologically speaking) baroque composers?

and also, could you really put John Williams, Arvo Part, R. Murray Schafer, and Stephen Wright into a common catagory?

Well there is Brian Cunningham, for example - you have heard some of his work on our social network site.

But the question remains - is a contemporary baroque composer merely creating pastiche? I would argue that the answer is yes. That doesn't mean I don't like it, but it is conceptually a reproduction or rehashing of ideas from the past.

Other stylistic terms do exist for 20th/21st music - minimalist, serialist etc. Very often such stylistic terms are not applied until much later.

[Philidor]

I'm genuinely unsure how to apply the terms 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' to music. I broadly agree with Fergus's definition, viz

Modernity has come to describe a the historical period which we identify with class based revolution and the industrialization of the western world.

but would add the values of the Enlightenment: kicking God into touch; giant strides in logic, maths and science.

Yet what does non-God intoxicated, rational music sound like? Bach? But he's notoriously God-bothering. Music which is democratic in nature, which the people can hum? But what does 'democratic' music sound like? Surely not a six part fugue, or a bum-freezing Wagner opera? (It sounds, I suspect, like Andrew Lloyd Webber.) Music which expresses the axioms of logic and mathematics? But how? Two groups of two notes >>> pause >>>> one group of four notes? Gosh 2+2=4 expressed musically! It's thin gruel.

I suspect Wittgenstein got it right when he wrote 'Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.' It's impossible to speak about music without talking nonsense. It can't be zapped with the Cern atom smasher. It can't be put in a test tube. There's a small amount of room for sociologists, psychologists and bankers to operate - what music is liked by whom, what bits of the brain are involved, how much cash they'll pay for it - but that still leaves the main defining characteristic of modernism - maths, logic and science - locked out from musical analysis.