"Getting modern music"

I got this the other day:

I'm rather partial to trumpet and organ, for which very little was actually written, most of it being adaptions of works for other instruments. I think the idea was originally devised by super-trumpetter Maurice André, in his attempts to overcome the paucity of trumpet repertoire. There's no doubt the two instruments go well together.

The problem is this. The first part, Sweelinck, Purcell, Bach (and a rather nice version of "Shenandoah" for flugelhorn) is great. Thereafter the modern stuff starts - and it's often dreadful. All sorts of discordant chords and notes apparently without any recognisable (to me) pattern. I tried, but I found it unlistenable.

So, does one have to be a musical intellectual to comprehend this stuff (which of course leaves me out)? Or is there a way for ordinary folk with zero technical musical knowledge ever to come to grips with it? Or should I just stick to Bach cantatas?

By the way, Ms. Balsom plays a mean trumpet (she manages ordinary, piccolo and natural trumpets and flugelhorn with great aplomb).

 

This is what puzzles me about 'modern' music. Surely the whole point is that it should be accessible. I consider myself to be 'Well Educated', I've been listening to classical music, live and recorded, for over forty years, and yet it(the modern stuff) still leaves me cold. I sometimes wonder how much the "Emperor's New Clothes" syndrome is a factor.

 

If you guys want to here some modern trumpet, check out the work of Greg Kelly or Axel Dörner. This isn't modern classical but it's definitely modern!

 

I think it has become less accessible. In a way, it's hard to fault composers as artists, looking constantly for something new to say. It took a century for people to catch up on Beethoven's final quartets. And when folk such as Mahler had taken Romantic music as far as it could go, where else to go but into musical abstraction, same as painting (no, I don't like Picasso either)?

I think the problem is that modern music has become purely an intellectual exercise. I think that we may have forever lost the world in which a composer such as Johann Strauss Jr. could be simultaneously loved by the people and admired by the likes of Brahms and Wagner for his compositional abilities.

I'm sure that people who know and understand music derive much pleasure from modern music, but to plebs such as myself, it has no heart, no soul. As "The Economist" once asked, when was the last time you heard anyone whistling Stockhausen?

 

My sort of modern trumpet:

 

There definitely seems to be a hi-brow factor in modern music. Also there was much experimentation, because of the revolutionary spirit (I mean cultural, e.g. Boulez) during the 20th Century.
With the bourgeois hating syndrome gone, we may expect 'listenable' if not 'pleasant' music to come again.

There is much modern music that I like, at least in the concert hall. Some more intimate stuff may also be quite beautiful, but it is almost always so terribly dark that it is hard to get into it and come back feeling well (Alban Berg, for instance).

The problem is that modern music is not familiar to us, because for any music to be familiar to us we need to listen to it repeatedly, and get used to some kind of parameters. If every composer wants to defy parametrization, it becomes impossible to get used to the music's idiom. That was what happened in the mid 20th century, I think.

Strauss, I feel, will not come back: there is Diana Krall instead, and it is not too bad a change...

A good 2007 for you all.

P.S.: If any of you know something about pe-zulu, would you mail me? Thanks

RdS

 

Modern Music

You might like to try"Birds and Bells" by Bent Sorensen. It features Christian Lindberg on trombone with The Oslo Sinfonietta and The Cikada. This 1999 ECM New Series recording is wonderful. The Cikada have recorded some interesting stuff with this label and the albums I have heard did not dissapoint. Their 2005 album of works by Kaija Saariaho, John Cage and Bruno Maderna is superb. They toured some of this at last years Huddersfield CMF. There is so much new good stuff out there if only we allow ourselves to be open to it. So let the Emperor strutt his stuff in his new attire.