Day 16. A song that you used to love but now hate

[mlr]

Pierre Boulez - Le marteau sans maître

cpratt said in a comment There are very, very few things I liked twenty years ago that I still like today - which I quote out of context. This prompted me to think a bit. I do feel somewhat unqualified to participate in this meme. The questions are obviously oriented to a pop/rock view of music - definitely not my forte. Words such as hate, love, favorite etc. are broad and sometimes not very helpful applied to classical music. If someone said I hate Mozart, what could that possibly mean? You would immediately wonder about exposure, background - all kinds of things.

When someone returns years later to Monteverdi, or the Jupiter Symphony, or Opus 111, they rarely think how immature!, or it was just a phase, but usually rather how could I have missed so much?, or this means such different things to me in middle age than it did in my 20s. That is not to say that tastes don't change, or that musical classics are static. We evolve, our tastes evolve. But if you are fortunate enough to have Byrd or Marin Marais or Charles Ives or Mompou as a companion, they remain your companion. Maybe not always with the same intensity, but in some way, always present. They define us more than we define them.

The works of the recent past are more in flux. Returning to them, I can be startled to find how much less or how much more they mean than when I first encountered them.

One easy example: Phillip Glass. I had an interest in his work in the 70s, and I could kick myself for failing to see Akhnaten and Satyagraha at the Houston Opera in the early 80s. Though I respect him and his early music, which was undeniably iconoclastic, it didn't take me long to tire of his formulae. His newer compositions are wearying and unchanging, and I can't imagine returning to the early ones. (In all fairness, I usually tune him out instead paying close attention.)

Instead of choosing a piece by Phillip Glass, I think I'll choose a piece that seems different to me every time I return to it - sometimes I think it is brilliant, sometimes simply overworked, sometimes exquisite, sometimes austere. It is Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, one of the most famous pieces of the 50s avant-garde. Although it can sound quite free and improvised, every pluck, zip, and thump is meticulously notated. The clip is a brief choreographed excerpt from the end of 2nd movement. There is also a YouTube of the entire movement. I do not hate Le marteau. It is a wondrous composition that sometimes puzzles me. I think currently I prefer Boulez's later works, which sometimes verge on sound experiments, to his earlier more Webernesque pieces.

Comments

[holy13nation.livejournal.com]

To be honest I think it is not just the pop/rock bias. I have trouble with most of the categories and the wording (love, hate, favorite etc). I think it is perhaps the aforementioned bias but also age. While my tastes are still very much rock based and I still do genuinely appreciate music I was listening to when I was 12 even (!), the emotional responses are tempered by the years.
I have found myself having to play with the meme a little rather than answering literally as I would find that difficult.

You could have taken my place when I saw Akhnaten at the ENO. Lost on me at the time.
However I have since heard a piece where only a central melody/progression solely on piano and it was beautiful. I heard it on the radio and didn't catch who it was.
Would you have any idea ?

[mlr.livejournal.com]

Sorry, not quite enough to go on. If I heard it, I could make a guess.

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Oh, Boulez, you torment me so. I've been struggling with this kind of music for all of my adult life: it doesn't seem to lend itself to any kind of usual listening approach (i.e. "this sounds good") - what's the trick? I can read about twelve tone theory, serialism, whatever all I like and it doesn't help. I can understand that it was fashionable in the middle of the previous centuries to be au fait with other tunings/timbres/whatever; I know what gamelan music sounds like and what a raga is. I know enough about technology to understand that sometimes newer technology necessarily leads to specific styles of music that may or may not be listened to by anyone decades later: Buchla, ring modulators, ondes Martinot, you name it: someone is always inventing something new that someone thinks can be made to produce sounds, but whether or not those are pleasurable without knowing how they're made always seems to be a challenge.

I suppose what I'm getting at here is this: how do I listen into these sorts of things? Every other year or so I pick up a batch of CDs with things I feel I should enjoy or at least understand (Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, etc.), listen to them a few times, unmoved, and then it's back to my usual frustrated self. Given my lack of education (I can play a few instruments, but was never taught music theory or anything, you know, interesting), what's missing here?

Or is that I just don't like that kind of music?

Anyhow: big thumbs up on how you feel about Phillip Glass. I don't think his music works outside of a few times when he's partnered with a powerful visual collaborator (Einstein on the Beach, Kundun, Koyaanisqatsi, etc.) I may like the occasional piece qua recorded music, but it really needs something visual to make it work, I think.

On the other hand, I really like Varèse's Ionization. Go figure.

[mlr.livejournal.com]

Wow - what a hard question.

For one, you are doing nothing wrong. You have an interest, a knowledge, and you lack some of the pre-conceived notions of what 'serious' music should be - you are the ideal listener.

IMHO:

This music has always been difficult. It had a difficult birth in the ruins of Europe after WWII. It was difficult to compose, to perform, to listen to, and to pass on. It is coming into a period of re-evaluation that it really has never had before. (It has already been through its period of reaction which of course was minimalism.) The cloud of its intellectual and authoritative aura is beginning to fade. Winners and losers are starting to emerge. Ligeti, who back in the day, was often relegated to an 'also-ran', for me has become the most interesting of the group. Instrumentalists are no longer so intimidated - many more of them now have the necessary chops.

For many young composers, there aren't so many issues. They choose from both of these worlds - the maximalists and the minimalists - in addition to technology, rock, and several generations of electronic music to create new hybrids of style. In Europe, the heritage of this music is more elevated. A composer I have started to enjoy, Michael Jarrell, writes in this maximalist, serialist style - but his pieces breathe much easier. They're not such edifices.

There have been a few periods in music history like this. The period of the late middle ages was one. The isorhythmic motet was the serialist technique of a previous age. It was a bumpy time musically. Then all of a sudden, the early Renaissance composers (Ockeghem, Obrecht, Josquin, etc.) pulled it all together in a music that was suddenly cohesive and powerful. And also music that had digested some of the experimentation.

How to listen? That is also hard to answer. I think for one, this music is easier to appreciate up close and in person. I made a trip several years ago to hear Le marteau in L.A., and was able to hear it in two different concerts. It made a big difference. It was easier to sense the overall structure. It was also important to see the musicians at work. Some of these pieces are extraordinarily hard. When you're sitting a few feet from the musicians - it's easier to appreciate the technique of the performer and the composer. It's also easier to sense some of the aura that the music has. (It's a little like me and punk - going to the clubs themselves made me see the whole subculture - which was hard for me to get from just the recordings - and it made me appreciate the music more.)

Again - you're doing absolutely nothing wrong. I'm surprised you're not getting a rebate check for your efforts!

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Oh - I forgot Varese. Yes - most of his few pieces are amazing. Boulez et. al had to write (or felt they had to write) music that followed from Varese, Webern, Schoenberg, Ives, etc. It was quite a challenge - kind of like trying to write novels that picked up where Joyce left off.