Modern, experimental, avant-garde music

Reminds me of this performance of Steve Reich's Clapping music.

Another contemporary composer I really like is Nicolas Bacri. A lot of his music is extremely dramatic and expressive, like his Prelude and Fugue for piano, or his Quasi una fantasia for three violins and orchestra:

Lovecraftian doom-jazz fusion-prog rock or "zeuhl", kind of like Magma with the funereal atmosphere of Univers Zero.

Just listened to Magma, they're great!

edited 20th Jun '13 11:26:01 PM by Fresison

Definitely listen to their "K.A." album which although released in I think 2004 is comprised of material they had written during the 70's. Easily their strongest material IMO.

Musiciens du bord du monde....

Sounds like they're influenced by Stravinsky, esp. Les Noces.

I like how they don't whine or growl, but use a full-blooded opera voice.

edited 21st Jun '13 1:40:23 PM by Fresison

Here's a very strange—and very creepy Cult Classic:Abel Decaux's Clairs de Lune, from the 1st decade of the 20th century. Like Liszt's late work, it's considered a forerunner of atonality.

Ravel was an admirer, probably because he was doing something similar at the same time in Gaspard de la Nuit.

edited 22nd Jun '13 5:09:56 PM by Fresison

Ah, loving the music again here.

Bacri is indeed very, very emotional. In fact, recently I've been more into this kind of spacious not overtly dramatic music, but his is very nice. Oh an I love Magma! One of the most unique band out there. I once realized that they are almost impossible to describe to people who haven't heard them. ("So it's like a rock band influenced by modern minimalism mixed with opera and tribal chants, mixed in with jazz influences, backed by a bigband, small female and male choir singing in a made up language about a dystopian future in a science fiction setting. And it sounds perfectly coherent.") Glad to get some more Zeuhl bands, I've been lacking in knowledge of those, actually. The vocals on that band are amazing!

And naturally Stravinsky was actually the first prog rocker.

Clairs de Lune is amazing! No words. And I'd never even heard of it or the composer!

As for me, since we talked Stravinsky and Magma, the trio I am perpetually pushing, also very Stravinskian: Egg.

Also, if anyone is interested in learning a bit about one of the most important avant-garde rock groups, then I just now finished a page of Henry Cow on this very wiki!

Glad you enjoyed them!

Did you listen to Dubugnon's violin concerto I posted on the previous page as well? That's definitely a spacious, ethereal piece.

Here's another lovely something from the French Belle Epoque: Quatre poèmes hindous by Maurice Delage (Sorry about the bad audio quality.)

One of those works, along with Ravel's Mallarmé poems and Stravinsky's Japanese Lyrics, that were inspired by the peculiar instrumentation of Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

The second song, Lahore (Un sapin isolé), is especially beautiful—it starts at 2.21.

edited 27th Jun '13 3:29:53 PM by Fresison

Usually I hate this style of metal but beneath the odd mish-mash of jazz, prog rock, punk, surf rock, "shred metal", and grindcore is music that hasn't forgotten how to state and explore a theme through its various incarnations, even if all of them sound like an attempt to parody all of its numerous influences.

Other cases of early avant-garde metal I enjoy include Dead Horse, Furze, Traumatic Voyage, Korpse, and Phlebotomized.

Bit of a shift but there's a recent prog/avant-garde death/black metal band called Into Oblivion who basically put assorted elements of both the latter genres and compose their songs as if they were classic Berlin School style ambient ones. If you don't mind dodgy right-wingish associated stuff, they're pretty good.

Also, the new Zealotry album came out for those who like an interesting interplay between almost classical-ish melody and weird dissonance (w/no sketchy far right-winginess either :v).

I think I'm in love... with Dagmar Krause's voice.

Then you need to get all the Slapp Happy albums!

Yes I do.

Her versatility is just startling. If you go from "Surabaya Johnny" to "Some questions about hats" to "Casablanca Moon"—hard to believe it's the same singer.

She emotes more beautifully than Bernadette Peters. Which is saying something.

Schönberg's 1. Kammersinfonie op. 9 in his own arrangement for orchestra. I recall reading that he arranged it because he thought the original to be unbalanced, with the wind instruments completely overshadowing the strings. It's such a dense and complex work, and the orchestra makes all those motifs and small details stand out more.

edited 14th Jul '13 12:05:00 PM by Fresison

Definitely no serialism there. Lovely work though!

Having you post about Schöenberg (I prefer the German way of writing his name because I am a hipster or something, I guess) reminded me of this brilliant video about the 12 tone technique and about modern music in general. It has wonderful humor and some intelligent insights, highly recommended to watch the entire way through, it has some wonderful 12 tone tunes of her own, as well as a really Ligetian choral section at the end.

Well, "Schönberg" ist the German way of writing his name...

and "Schoenberg" the American way...

so "Schöenberg" is the hipster way, I guess.

What a coincidence—I saw that video about two days ago (Kyle Kallgren linked to it on his Tumblr account) and thought about putting it here as well! I don't agree with everything she says about sound and shape. As Roger Scruton once wrote:

Also, she explicitly chooses her twelve-tone rows so as to make sure they're rooted in the tonality, like in Berg's violin concerto or Britten's Turn of the Screw.

But what a great video!

Here's some music from an overlooked genius:

Fauré's pretty well known, but not for his sparse late music, composed when he was deaf.

Oh I definitely agree that tonality has almost endless possibilities still. Though I myself am experimenting with contrasting passages atonal with a tendency towards tonicicity (I am quite sure that word does not exist... whatever). I also prefer Bergs serialism work to that of Schöenberg, though.

Faure sounds like the sort of music Satie would write if he was more serious and less focused on making fun of musical conventions. Wonderful stuff.

In any case here is a contemporary Estonian composer I have as my example, he also likes to contrast both tonical and atonal musical languages. Wonderful emotive, spacious music that combines predictable lines with seemingly random passages. Always brings to my mind space or natural phenomena. Video by me:

The thing is, though: is music that becomes too atonal still recognisable as music? We don't listen to music as just a bunch of sounds, just like we don't look at a (traditional) painting as a couple brushstrokes or a book as a sequence of individual letters. We hear chords and melodies, hear the tension following from the contrast between consonance and dissonance, hear how the tones relate to one another. That's how you get the feeling that music can express something, or that it tells a story, even though you can't always put into words what it expresses.

In most avant-garde music (by which I mean, the avant-garde of the '50s, '60s and '70s—the serialist, pointillistic, stochastic, aleatoric music, the musique concrète, etc.), you don't have any of that—all you have there is the surface. The sound, the texture is all that matters. (In Ligeti's Atmosphères, I think you can easily change some notes without anyone noticing, as long as the overall texture is preserved. That would be unthinkable in, say, Debussy's "Cathédrale engloutie", which expresses a sense of (spiritual) spaciousness through the use of parallel fifths and the pentatonic scale. In comparison, Atmosphères merely sounds spacious.^note Which isn't to say that composing it doesn't require talent or craftsmanship. You have the same difference between e.g. Boulez' piano sonatas, which sound violent and chaotic, and Shostakovich' 4th symphony which expresses chaos and violence.)

Here's another quote from Scruton—

Speaking of expressive music—David Matthews' (not to be confused with Dave Matthews) Concerto in Azzurro:

edited 5th Jul '13 5:02:12 AM by Fresison

Something I only recently discovered—Franz Schmidt's 3rd Symphony:

But to that argument, the natural counter-argument appears: Why confine oneself to tonality, let alone the strictures of counterpoint, to convey a mood? One does not require a key to create harmony and progression, after all, nor does a series of chords truly need a "resolution" for closure.

Furthermore, why should conveying an effect through one method be valued any more than conveying it through another? If the effects of certain timbres and massed tones in motion can be used to the same effect as certain consonances, why value the latter over the former? Music is purposeful sound, and it is successful when its purpose is fulfilled.

edited 13th Jul '13 3:04:31 PM by JHM

I would go one step further. Purpose is such an ambiguous thing in this postmodern dead-author type of world. One musical piece can have multiple purposes for multiple people and thus many ways in its success or failings. All that one needs to have music, essentially, is INTENTIONAL organized sound, meant for listening.

Oh, it shouldn't!—aesthetic value is a subjective, personal thing, after all. It's just that there is a difference between those methods of music-making, and globally speaking one works for me and the other one much less.

It is 2013. All things have been tried, nothing is new anymore.

"Tout a déjà été dit ou écrit mais, comme personne n'écoute, il faut sans cesse recommencer."
"Everything has already been said or written but, seeing as how no one ever listens, we have to start over and over again."—André Gide

I never understood why the thought that something's "been done" automatically discounts it—as if you'd see the history of art as a list of boxes to tick.

"Allright, let's see now—we've had...

• Gregorian plainchant? Check;
• Polyphony? Check;
• Baroque counterpoint? Check;
• Classicism? Check;
• Romantic fervor? Check;
• Impressionism? Check;
• Expressionism? Check;
• Emancipation of the dissonance? Check;
• Serialism? Check;
• Aleatoric music? Check;
• Musique concrète? Check;
• Minimalism? Check;
• Postmodernism? Check!

Well that's about it I guess. Well done everybody, now we never have to make music again!"

If the general attitude towards art is one of blasé defeatism, isn't carrying on regardless the most revolutionary thing to do?

Anyway—

Schönberg's 2nd string quartet is something I'd read about, but only now I've actually sit down and listen to it. That fourth movement, "Entrückung", is unbelievably beautiful.

What genre would you shoehorn this?