Classical Listening

[Babbalanja]

Funny YOU should mention Hopper. Hopper, after all, was dismissed by a great many of the most influential critics of the time as provincial, conservative, and most certainly ignorant of the innovations in contemporary art and far from being part of the avant garde.

Well, so was William Schuman. And now he's dismissed as being cerebral and academic. You know, not "accessible" enough.

Regards,

Istvan

[mortalterror]

So you can appreciate the purely abstract art of music... and even architecture... but painting must be a picture of something? Why?

I don't know that I'd characterize music as purely abstract. A lot of music has words and narratives. After all, the most beautiful instrument is doubtless the human voice, which is one reason why I like Doo Wop and A Cappella so much.

I suppose I make distinctions in my art. Architecture serves different functions and operates by different aesthetic rules than painting. With the exception of fortune cookies, communion, and Bazooka Joe, food is rarely didactic. Applying the same rules to the culinary arts as I do to literature just doesn't make sense to me.

My God! Mortal! You're a 19th century academician!! Your concept of the heirarchy of artistic subject matter was dominant in the early 19th century and was the very thing against which the great landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Casper David Friedrich as well as the Impressionists... and later painters such as Cezanne and the Modernists rebelled.

I guess, to you, a world filled with Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome wouldn't be worth living in.



Besides, I think if you look at Friedrich's best work, he'll usually have figures contemplating the landscapes. I don't see him as too far outside of the stylistic zeitgeist of the time. He's just working Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime with it's large, imposing, vague shapes, instead of the beautiful with it's balance, proportion, and clear lines.

Seriously, I see very little "wit" in Close. He is coolly analytical. Cotton's subject matter is certainly light and witty... but his splendid and equally light and fluid handling of paint perfectly suits the subject. Essentially, he is a Neo-Rococo painter: all powder puffs and candy canes.

To me, they look like the visual arts equivalent of M. Night Shyamalan. They are clever instead of profound. They are working from cliche's but giving them a fairly obvious twist that anyone could think of. They are like Anatole France who liked to take a common phrase and then change it just enough to make it novel. That's why I call them clever.

It is intriguing that you speak of the lack of color, considering that brilliant color has long been connected in the minds of some critics with light-weight art.

Yeah, that Michelangelo was a real light-weight.

I'm also intrigued that you criticize Wyeth's color... and yet admit that Caravaggio is your favorite painter... an artist who rarely used little more color than Wyeth. Most of his paintings are limited to earth-tones, white, and red.

He'll use some yellow, orange, and flesh tone, but yes his palette is comparatively limited. He'll color people's hair, or throw in some green drapery, but when he uses color he really goes for it. His reds are RED. They pop, and stand out, they direct the eye like his use of light. If I had to name the two characteristics that attract me most to Caravaggio it would have to be the same things I admire in Rembrandt: the chiaroscuro, and the personality of his figures.

There are many other fascinating painters within the figurative/narrative tradition that you would seemingly follow. You might wish to check out:

None of those are really my thing. The first one is a little plain, but with a few changes it could be something good.

Houdon's The Cold Girl
The next couple, it's like, if you're going for photorealism take a photograph. We have some really talented photographers.

Gordon Parks

Evans

Waldman
Karsh, Newman, Rodchenko...

Seriously, what's with Peacock Clown Lady and Zombie Bride?

[stlukesguild]

Well, so was William Schuman. And now he's dismissed as being cerebral and academic. You know, not "accessible" enough.

That seems to be somewhat similar to some of criticism leveled at Minimalism and the "New Simplicity" (Gorecki, Part, etc...). One camp find them to be too cerebral with their forms pared down too far denying all possibilities of sensuality and emotion... while the other camp criticizes them for being too accessible... clearly tonal in structure.

William Schuman is indeed someone I need to explore further. It has only been over the last year or so that I have made a concerted effort to focus upon contemporary and late Modernist composers... including a great many Americans. I have a disc on order. I also have been listening a great deal to Walter Piston, Alan Hovhaness, Ned Rorem, Charles Griffes, William Bolcom, etc... I'm actually quite struck by the fact that Alan Hovhaness and John Cage were so close and mutual admirers of the other's work.

Right now...? I'm on a Mozart kick. I haven't seriously listened to him much for quite some time. Right now I'm listening to the Gran Partita.

[Babbalanja]

That seems to be somewhat similar to some of criticism leveled at Minimalism and the "New Simplicity" (Gorecki, Part, etc...).

I have my doubts about it as well. I find a lot of it very interesting, like the Kronos CD with quartets by Pärt, Reich, and Glass. I've seen good performances of some of Gorecki's chamber music here in Boston. I quite like John Adams. But only Morton Feldman really fascinates me. Just those static, spacious compositions, flowing at a glacial pace. Wow.

I also have been listening a great deal to Walter Piston, Alan Hovhaness, Ned Rorem, Charles Griffes, William Bolcom, etc...

I love Walter Piston, just as much as I do Schuman. But the rest leave me cold. There have been times I've been in the right mood for Hovanhess, but his stuff can be a little hokey. Is there anything in particular from these gents I should listen to?

Right now...? I'm on a Mozart kick. I haven't seriously listened to him much for quite some time. Right now I'm listening to the Gran Partita.

Coincidentally, I was just listening to his Symphony #40 last night. Now who did the Illuminati get to ghost-write that for him?

Regards,

Istvan

[stlukesguild]

So you can appreciate the purely abstract art of music... and even architecture... but painting must be a picture of something? Why?

I don't know that I'd characterize music as purely abstract. A lot of music has words and narratives. After all, the most beautiful instrument is doubtless the human voice, which is one reason why I like Doo Wop and A Cappella so much.

Of course... and I am probably as enamored of vocal music as anyone... but then again there is an endless array of music that is purely instrumental and without any implied narrative (such as that of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Beethoven's 6th, or Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).

I suppose I make distinctions in my art. Architecture serves different functions and operates by different aesthetic rules than painting. With the exception of fortune cookies, communion, and Bazooka Joe, food is rarely didactic. Applying the same rules to the culinary arts as I do to literature just doesn't make sense to me.

The culinary arts are quite removed from the visual arts. Architecture, the Persian carpet, the ceramic vase, and the painting are all works of visual art and all employ similar elements of composition, design, color, etc... You have seemly made an assumption that painting should function according to a single set of aesthetic rules that include the notion that painting should be a representation (ideally an illusionistic representation) of something else... especially a human being... and that it should employ narrative elements. This assumption was commonly held from the Renaissance until the onset of Modernism... but it has been rejected for several reasons. With the "discovery" of non-Western art and the "re-discovery" of older artistic traditions as a result of the development of art history, painters embraced the notion that there were other possibilities open to them. At the same the developments of the age led artists to question the rationale of continuing to cling to dated forms and traditions. Narrative is clearly serviced far more effectively through literature. Illusion is achieved far more effectively and easily through photography. Painters began to look at the other possibilities open to painting. Of course this has not eliminated narrative and realism from painting... but it has challenged the notion that these elements are requisite and standards by which all painting need be measured.

My God! Mortal! You're a 19th century academician!! Your concept of the heirarchy of artistic subject matter was dominant in the early 19th century and was the very thing against which the great landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Casper David Friedrich as well as the Impressionists... and later painters such as Cezanne and the Modernists rebelled.

I guess, to you, a world filled with Bouguereau, Cabanel, and Gerome wouldn't be worth living in.

I would be a rather one-sided and disjointed one in which art had little or nothing to do with the reality of the world.

Besides, I think if you look at Friedrich's best work, he'll usually have figures contemplating the landscapes. I don't see him as too far outside of the stylistic zeitgeist of the time. He's just working Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime with it's large, imposing, vague shapes, instead of the beautiful with it's balance, proportion, and clear lines.

Of course the initial impetus to explore the landscape in painting was firmly rooted in Romanticist thinking... in notions of the sublime and the beautiful that mirror Burke... and in thoughts that the landscape was a reflection of human emotion... a motif to give form to the inner thoughts as we find in Wordsworth:



It was initially essential that these landscapes contain elements of the tragic... or the dramatic... of the sublime... Turner, for example, often clung to dramatic narratives such as in his painting of Regulus in which the blinding light of the setting sun suggests Regulus eyes as the sun burns away his sight... as well as it suggests the sun setting upon the Carthaginian Empire.



While later artists embraced the formal innovations of the Romantic landscape painters... especially their freedom in the handling of paint... they rejected the need for the sublime... the grandiose... It was imagined that there just might be an equally worthy beauty and visual poetry to be found in the landscape of one's own back yard...



... or in the contemplation of one's own intimate surroundings: one's lovers, wives, and family...



Seriously, I see very little "wit" in Close. He is coolly analytical. Cotton's subject matter is certainly light and witty... but his splendid and equally light and fluid handling of paint perfectly suits the subject. Essentially, he is a Neo-Rococo painter: all powder puffs and candy canes.

To me, they look like the visual arts equivalent of M. Night Shyamalan. They are clever instead of profound. They are working from cliche's but giving them a fairly obvious twist that anyone could think of. They are like Anatole France who liked to take a common phrase and then change it just enough to make it novel. That's why I call them clever.

Perhaps... but the "ideas" are but a single aspect of painting. Painting is not story-telling or philosophy. There is much more to be found in the thought that goes into the actual painting process... the artist's mastery (or lack thereof) of the handling of light, line, color, the material elements of paint, etc... The notion that painting should be rooted in a deep philosophical thought is what has led us to Duchamp and Conceptual Art as a result of artists who failed to understand the thought that goes into each and every brush-stroke... just as it goes into each note written by a composer such as Mozart.

It is intriguing that you speak of the lack of color, considering that brilliant color has long been connected in the minds of some critics with light-weight art.

Yeah, that Michelangelo was a real light-weight.

You might remember the outrage in certain circles following the restoration of the Sistine Ceiling. This outrage... in spite of the scientific documentation that proved that no pigment was ever removed... that in fact the slightest layer of ancient varnish and soot was left in place in order to avoid even the chance of removing anything by the master's hand... was based purely upon an emotional response and a belief that the brilliant colors of the Sistine could not have been what Michelangelo intended... for real profundity is not to be found in brilliant colors (look, after all, at Rembrandt). This thinking, which even went against all we know of Renaissance painting and its brilliant colors, was an expression of the belief (common especially among British and Puritanical American critics) that profundity is to be found in drawing (disegno) rather than color. This belief led to battles between the supporters of such colorists as Delacroix and supporters of Ingres and David (in spite of the fact that Ingres is actually one of the most daring of colorists). It continued into the 20th century among critics who dismissed painters such as Bonnard... and even Matisse as overly "decorative" and lacking the intellectual rigor of Picasso. Of course the entire idea in bunk... but there are still those who bristle at the seductive and "decorative" aspects of color.

If I had to name the two characteristics that attract me most to Caravaggio it would have to be the same things I admire in Rembrandt: the chiaroscuro, and the personality of his figures.

Yes... these are certainly their greatest strengths.

There are many other fascinating painters within the figurative/narrative tradition that you would seemingly follow. You might wish to check out:
None of those are really my thing. The first one is a little plain, but with a few changes it could be something good. The next couple, it's like, if you're going for photorealism take a photograph. We have some really talented photographers.

Seriously, what's with Peacock Clown Lady and Zombie Bride?

banghead:

[stlukesguild]

That seems to be somewhat similar to some of criticism leveled at Minimalism and the "New Simplicity" (Gorecki, Part, etc...).

I have my doubts about it as well. I find a lot of it very interesting, like the Kronos CD with quartets by Pärt, Reich, and Glass. I've seen good performances of some of Gorecki's chamber music here in Boston. I quite like John Adams. But only Morton Feldman really fascinates me. Just those static, spacious compositions, flowing at a glacial pace. Wow.


Some might suggest that such an admission makes you clearly a tied-in-the-wool Modernist... clinging to Modernist concepts of what constitutes the best in new art and music just as the tied-in-the-wool Romantics cling to Mahler, Bruckner, Vaughan-Williams, and Richard Strauss.

I also have been listening a great deal to Walter Piston, Alan Hovhaness, Ned Rorem, Charles Griffes, William Bolcom, etc...

I love Walter Piston, just as much as I do Schuman. But the rest leave me cold. There have been times I've been in the right mood for Hovanhess, but his stuff can be a little hokey. Is there anything in particular from these gents I should listen to?

Rorem's strongest work seems to be in the genre of the American "art song". I am particularly fond of the recent Susan Graham recording of his songs. Griffes is certainly not a Modernist but rather an American Impressionist (of course he died in 1920). His output is rather limited (he was 36 when he died) but I quite like the Naxos disc which includes The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan and Three Poems of Fiona McLeod... a lovely suite of orchestral songs. I find Bolcom's settings of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to be fascinating... if flawed work... but what else could one expect of something so broad and grandiose? Hovhaneness? Like many contemporary or near contemporary composers one is almost limited to the offerings of Naxos... most of which I find quite marvelous.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

I apologize for diverging away from the current visual vis-á-vis audible art line of discussion, but I wanted to share an evening that my son and I enjoyed with Itzhak Perlman and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. For those who are not aware, outside the usual suspects of this thread, Itzhak Perlman is a world renowned violin virtuoso and accomplished conductor.

The performance included:
Johann Sebastian Bach; Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor (BWV 1041). Perlman performed as the solo violinist utilizing his nearly 300 year old “Soil Stradivarius”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XUiks5I6s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_Stradivarius

The second piece was Antonin Dvořák’s “Serenade in E major, Op. 22 conducted by Mr. Perlman. Here is a recording of the first movement (moderato):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6eORIi-y0

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, rounded out the evening. Here again, Mr. Perlman took on the role of conductor.

All in all, it was a magnificent performance. We were a little disappointed that Perlman played the violin in the one Bach piece only. (He conducted the other two performances.) Sitting to my right was an elderly woman along with her daughter who had treated her mother to this performance as a birthday gift. I have no idea why I am relating this anecdote other than I have polished off my third glass of Chianti and the woman was so kind and pleasant. We chatted between movements and during the intermission. Behind us, many could hear the torturous attempts of a woman trying to prevent a lung from being coughed up. Fortunately she was able to keep the violent hackings in check during the performances. However, all hell broke loose between movements and during the intermission.

Gilliatt

[LitNetIsGreat]

I apologize for diverging away from the current visual vis-á-vis audible art line of discussion, but I wanted to share an evening that my son and I enjoyed with Itzhak Perlman and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. For those who are not aware, outside the usual suspects of this thread, Itzhak Perlman is a world renowned violin virtuoso and accomplished conductor.

The performance included:
Johann Sebastian Bach; Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor (BWV 1041). Perlman performed as the solo violinist utilizing his nearly 300 year old “Soil Stradivarius”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XUiks5I6s

Oh excellent, I'm quite addicted to this little piece and its piano equivalent - delicious!

All in all, it was a magnificent performance. We were a little disappointed that Perlman played the violin in the one Bach piece only. (He conducted the other two performances.) Sitting to my right was an elderly woman along with her daughter who had treated her mother to this performance as a birthday gift. I have no idea why I am relating this anecdote other than I have polished off my third glass of Chianti and the woman was so kind and pleasant. We chatted between movements and during the intermission. Behind us, many could hear the torturous attempts of a woman trying to prevent a lung from being coughed up. Fortunately she was able to keep the violent hackings in check during the performances. However, all hell broke loose between movements and during the intermission.

Gilliatt

It sounded like a good night and interestingly, you seem to express my belief that the audience dynamic is as much a part of the overall performance as the artists on stage. There's something about the shared live experience, as well as the relationship between artist and audience that matters - even down to the little annoyances like the sudden relentless coughing fits that always seem to come alive whenever there is silence. One of my past theatre tutors was always going on about the special relationship or dialogue which exists between performer and audience, and over time I have come to feel the extent to which she was right, though I would say that it is more than just a two-way dialogue from performer to artist and back again, but also from audience to audience and from performer to performer, sort of like a magic letter "I": I.

As we're talking performances, I had quite a funny experience with going to see Ibsen's Enemy of the People the other week. I had taken Mrs Neely out for a meal, usual Italian, and as I had managed to get tickets for the performance that day we headed down to the newly refurbished Crucible Theatre to see the play (leaving enough time for an extra drink of course). Anyway, as soon as we walked in we realised that something was a little unusual with the amount of really "posh" people there in attendance, dressed more aptly really for a wedding reception than to see a play. I mean top-hats, shirts with ties on and everything! There were also a host of minor celebrities there, soap actors and the like (I didn't know who they were but Mrs Neely did) as well as a load of "important" people like the leader of the Council, the Lord Mayor (whom I had met three weeks earlier at something else) there were TV cameras there and apparently, Prince Edward himself was hovering around someplace!

Anyway, in we walk, I, the only one in the whole place wearing jeans, thinking that it was rather good of them to celebrate the fact that I had taken out Mrs Neely (which is a bi-annual thing thankfully) to be met by that lot. It turns out to be the grand official opening, and for some reason, I had managed to get hold of some spare tickets on the day. The celebration of the event was also complete with free food and free champagne and little goodie bags of stuff. Quite an unexpected little reception. The play was quite good. I've told Mrs Neely not to expect royalty on our next night out, but I feel that I'm going to have a hard sell to get her to the real ale pub quiz night!

This audience contrasted quite sharply with last week’s Lyceum performance of The Woman in Black (I took my brother in my on-going attempts to "civilize" him - he doesn't read books) which was complete with several classes worth of screaming school girls and several violent coughers. Needless to say the dynamics were very different, but just as fun.

Anyway, back to music...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XUiks5I6s

[Babbalanja]

Congratulations on everybody's successful nights out!

Some might suggest that such an admission makes you clearly a tied-in-the-wool Modernist... clinging to Modernist concepts of what constitutes the best in new art and music just as the tied-in-the-wool Romantics cling to Mahler, Bruckner, Vaughan-Williams, and Richard Strauss.

I hardly object to the Modernist tag. But what exactly did I admit? That I like John Adams? That I find Feldman's music ravishing?

I find Bolcom's settings of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to be fascinating... if flawed work... but what else could one expect of something so broad and grandiose?

I'll give it a listen. There is a lot of Bolcom's music I find unoriginal, but I was amazed by his Symphony #3. This is really strong stuff. But it depends what side of the fence you're on. I thought the broad theme of the scherzo was probably meant to be satirical. But that was the only part my wife liked.

Regards,

Istvan

[mortalterror]

Of course... and I am probably as enamored of vocal music as anyone... but then again there is an endless array of music that is purely instrumental and without any implied narrative (such as that of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Beethoven's 6th, or Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).

All three of those have narratives, and are fine examples of program music. Vivaldi's Four Seasons originally had sonnets too.

For example, "Winter" is peppered with silvery staccato notes from the high strings, calling to mind icy rain, whereas "Summer" evokes a thunderstorm in its final movement, which is why said movement is often dubbed 'Storm'. -wikipedia

Beethoven's 6th or Pastoral Symphony bears the subtitle "Recollections of Country Life." Take the movement Andante molto mosso

This movement, entitled by Beethoven "By the brook," is heldto be one of Beethoven's most beautiful and serene compositions... At the opening the strings play a motif that clearly imitates flowing water.-wikipedia

Beethoven even identifies the species of bird call different instruments are supposed to represent, much as Prokofiev would do in Peter and the Wolf. Then you have music meant to suggest peasants dancing and on and on.

Pictures at an Exhibition is meant to evoke an actual day that Mussorgsky spent looking at paintings by his friend Viktor Hartmann. The ten movements are about ten specific paintings, and then there's this promenade part that evokes the sensation of walking from picture to picture.

That music is about actual stuff. It attempts to be an audio representation of a visual and kinesthetic experience. There's a narrative running through each. It's like your boy Richard Wagner said, "Where music can go no further, there comes the word… the word stands higher than the tone.” I like his concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. I can get behind that. "You mean I can have pictures in my books? Rock on." "So they're going to dance and sing. Awesome." I can have my pie and eat it too. Adding a narrative, or words to music, is just like adding a figure to paintings. It just makes them that much more interesting.

Architecture, the Persian carpet, the ceramic vase, and the painting are all works of visual art and all employ similar elements of composition, design, color, etc...

Yeah, I really don't got a lot of use for them either. I like them functional. Their forms should suit their utility, and the best you can hope for from buildings or crockery is that they not be eye sores when you're called upon to use them. Buildings ought to keep out weather, stay cool in Winter and warm in Summer, and if they do that I don't care what they look like. Same goes for mugs, glasses, and vases. I just want them to hold liquid and not break too easily. When it comes to carpets, I've never seen one I'd be afraid to wipe my feet on.

I spent much of yesterday looking at architecture to try and form a response to your criticism of my aesthetic. My contention was going to be that the best architecture had meaning, like how Notre Dame of Paris is shaped like a cross, and blah blah blah, the rose windows are a circle which represents eternity, the one God, unity, harmony with visual depictions of Jesus in the center. I was going to go on about how the columns and arches drew the eye up toward a contemplation of God and the whole construction was a visual prayer toward heaven.

I could have said that the spires of the Sagrada Familia represent the 12 apostles, the 4 evangelists, Mary, and Jesus and that the globular structure, which apes natural forms was an attempt to imitate God without exceeding him. Or I could have talked about the Muslim's use of domes on their mosques to represent the sheltering sky, and the pyramids line up on the constellation Orion to activate the stargate. But the truth is, if they weren't huge and old I wouldn't give a damn about the pyramids.

I'm looking back and forth between the Registan complex and the Taj Mahal, when it occurs to me that the reason I like looking at most of the buildings I like is because they employ domes, columns, and arches. I like the colors they use in Registan, not the patterns, and if I have a choice I prefer solid blocks of color. I'm comparing Angkor Wat to the Temple of Karnak and it occurs to me I wouldn't give either a second look if it weren't for their ornate pictoral carvings. I may love the Colosseum, but I don't wander around gazing at baseball stadiums.

So... gut reaction? I don't really care about sacred geometry or any of that stuff. Meenakshi and Khajuraho might just as well be glorified shelves for displaying real art.

While later artists embraced the formal innovations of the Romantic landscape painters... especially their freedom in the handling of paint... they rejected the need for the sublime... the grandiose... It was imagined that there just might be an equally worthy beauty and visual poetry to be found in the landscape of one's own back yard...

I like the Friedrich and Turner better than the Monet. That painting your backyard idea seems a little bourgeoisie and lazy, and his water lilies do nothing for me.

Perhaps... but the "ideas" are but a single aspect of painting. Painting is not story-telling or philosophy. There is much more to be found in the thought that goes into the actual painting process... the artist's mastery (or lack thereof) of the handling of light, line, color, the material elements of paint, etc... The notion that painting should be rooted in a deep philosophical thought is what has led us to Duchamp and Conceptual Art as a result of artists who failed to understand the thought that goes into each and every brush-stroke... just as it goes into each note written by a composer such as Mozart.

Yeah, well Bob Ross, Thomas Kinkade, and Hitler ruined the landscape painting; so let's all go back to figure drawing. Just because Duchamp was an idiot, doesn't make every idea he ever had wrong. You can be right about some things and still make lame art.

[stlukesguild]

I hardly object to the Modernist tag. But what exactly did I admit? That I like John Adams? That I find Feldman's music ravishing?

I'm not suggesting that you should be ashamed of the "Modernist" label. I quite like Modernism, myself. I'd argue that it was second perhaps only to the Renaissance in terms of the changes it brought to the arts of the West... and perhaps also in the sheer volume of brilliant art produced. On the other hand... might one not interpret your doubts about the worth of Minimalism and other Post-Modernist developments in music as clinging to the past in a manner no different from those who cling to Romanticism or Impressionism and reject tole of Modern and Contemporary art/music/literature?

[stlukesguild]

Of course... and I am probably as enamored of vocal music as anyone... but then again there is an endless array of music that is purely instrumental and without any implied narrative (such as that of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Beethoven's 6th, or Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).

All three of those have narratives, and are fine examples of program music. Vivaldi's Four Seasons originally had sonnets too.

Poor wording on my part. What I meant to suggest was that there is an endless array of purely instrumental music that lacks any implied narrative unlike The Four Seasons, etc... A clear example would be Bach's Well Tempered Clavier.

[Babbalanja]

On the other hand... might one not interpret your doubts about the worth of Minimalism and other Post-Modernist developments in music as clinging to the past in a manner no different from those who cling to Romanticism or Impressionism and reject tole of Modern and Contemporary art/music/literature?

Since I never explained what my "doubts" about the Minimalists entailed, I wonder what this interpretation of your is based on.

In fact, I think Minimalism was a retreat from the emphasis on innovation prevalent in the supposedly academic forms of serious music of the Sixties and Seventies. An attempt to produce something more digestible than the truly avant-garde statements of the time, the work of most of the Minimalists was actually pretty superficial. Call it post-Modernism if you like, but to me it was Modernism lite.

Only Feldman's work seems substantial and forward-looking. Too often, Minimalists like Pärt pander to the most sentimental and nostalgic tendencies in the audience. The music is pretty, but there's not much in it that's brave or new.

Regards,

Istvan

[LitNetIsGreat]

I’ve been listening to, and watching, various bits of opera performances this weekend including The Marriage of Figaro and what I thought was a brilliantly done cinematic version of Madame Butterfly: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113731/

I’m going to book tickets for a production of The Marriage of Figaro that’s coming my way next month, though I am a wee bit annoyed by the fact it is sung in English and not in Italian with staged sub-titles as I would have preferred. Maybe I’m just being a little picky, but surely it loses something in translation more so than it does with literature? It looks like a solid production, and I’m more than happy to go along, but I just wondered what the general opinion on operatic translation was. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[stlukesguild]

Since I never explained what my "doubts" about the Minimalists entailed, I wonder what this interpretation of your is based on.

In fact, I think Minimalism was a retreat from the emphasis on innovation prevalent in the supposedly academic forms of serious music of the Sixties and Seventies. An attempt to produce something more digestible than the truly avant-garde statements of the time, the work of most of the Minimalists was actually pretty superficial. Call it post-Modernism if you like, but to me it was Modernism lite.

Only Feldman's work seems substantial and forward-looking. Too often, Minimalists like Pärt pander to the most sentimental and nostalgic tendencies in the audience. The music is pretty, but there's not much in it that's brave or new.

In critical discussions of the visual arts (and I assume these are somewhat similar in music) Minimalism was seen as the logical last step of Modernism. Modernism had stripped away various elements of pre-Modernist art: illusion, representation, color, the artist's touch, until such a point as it had painted itself into a corner... disappearing into a white or gray square... and then even that was gone... leaving us without any art object at all... which led to the embrace of Conceptual Art... "art as idea".

Post-Modernism rejected the notion that novelty... endless experimentation for the mere sake of experimentation... was the end-all/be-all measure of art. It was recognized that Modernism was essentially dead... that experimentation had been pushed to the point where the art was unrecognizable as ART to all but a limited cognoscenti... that it had nothing to offer... not merely to the masses, but even to the audience of knowledgeable art lovers.

Of course to the died-in-the-wool Modernists, Post-Modernism represented a retreat from the the imagined "thousand year Reich" of Modernist experimentation. Any retreat from the "purity" of the Modernist experiment was certain to result in pandering, aesthetic debasement, and an embrace of populist urges.

One of the strongest Post-Modernist painters, Odd Nerdrum, dealt with this attitude in an ironic manner... declaring that if what Modernism had become is art, then he wasn't an artist... essentially giving over the claim of ART to the Modernists and allowing them to go whither away in the corner somewhere with the full recognition that if ART is only that which is defined as such by the late Modernists, then ART is essentially dead or irrelevant to the vast majority of humanity.

The Post-Modernists, essentially, see the late Modernists as mere academics... clinging to an outdated philosophy... a belief that art can only evolve in response to its immediate predecessors... whereas Post-Modernism sees the whole of art or music or literary history as one grand palette from which one can pick and choose. Modernism, with glassy-eyed belief in progress and the future is surely representative of a world before Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Post-Modernism is a more apt view of a world in which historical eras and artistic styles (high and low) rub up against each other and blur together via the media, popular culture, the internet, etc...