A small addendum from aforementioned "valued member", though I'm sure we've discussed this already. To me (a composer) the greatest goal of the romantic is to attain the transcendent, to surpass what the human body and mind are capable of imagining and achieving alone through the connection of humans and music. If this transcendence lies beyond our current existences, at the core of some primordial truth and instinct in our hearts, I feel that music that has surpassed the need for the habits, forms and regulations of the Romantic era are just as capable if not more free to express this innate instinct and desire for beauty and expression. As you are right to remark, the work you chose to attribute me upon is a poorly selected example, which no better illustrates the will of all of modern composers as does the most inane and dull nocturne written by a British man no one ever remembers. I too have a distaste for a dry "experimentation for the sake of experimentation". I too absolutely hate music that is grounded in a realist cynicism, and does not care to think further about what COULD be, what SHOULD be, and what we ourselves cannot be. And yes, as a formerly electronic composer, I do believe an appreciable deal of modern classical music is better recorded than performed (though it would be an exaggeration to say "most"). But, and above all, composers are also human. Just as it is the performer's responsibility as artist to translate their experiences, philosophy and beliefs through their playing, it is also the composer's, yes, as ARTIST, to do the same. And where that guides us, in our world today, with our exposure to electronic music, to the chaos of the internet, to the greed and cynicism of a dying world around us, of course, sometimes leads certain people down paths which are less than aesthetic. But above all of this, above the rabble that treads of the graves of postmodernism with a complete lack (or disdain?) of thought, the techniques and freedoms modern music offers give far more freedom to striking at this primordial instinct that it is our duty as artists, as romantics, to realise. Fuck the nihilistic 80 year old expiring serial warlords who think that music is nothing more than cogs turning a sudoku puzzle generator for them to solve. They live for the past and the present, but we romantics have to look beyond that. To truly transcend our human frames into a universal expression capable of touching souls far and apart from ours in space and time, we have to reach inside ourselves, question our flawed instincts, our tinted experiences, our own cynical and hopeful views of the world. But yet, we have to embrace all of these elements of ourselves to create art. And that is EXACTLY where the role of the performer in modern music is. The true music is not buried somewhere in the parchment, or the DAW, or the MIDI file, or the pulsations of air pressure we call a WAV file. The true music is in the connection, the transient moment where performer, composer, and listener, are able to unite their souls together. What can be more romantic, or greater, than this struggle against fate? Of this human frame that limits us? Of our desire to transcend our own emotions and achieve the souls of others, yet we rely wholly on this mortal frame to produce our art? Of the crushing and overwhelming pressure of a society that disdains us as artists? That scorns our need to look inwards beyond what the present world and Man can achieve? THIS is romanticism. The struggle against humanity itself, to fight for the greatest thing humanity can achieve. And how did the Romantics choose to achieve this? By taking the structures this society had built around them like walls, and harnessing them as their weapons against them. By bending the rules, by questioning what was known to be law, by following their instincts, to go against their knowledge. THAT is the true spirit of Postmodernism. A freedom from the stifling serial dogma of the twilight of the Modernist era, whose dictators claimed to build a new world order, but simply by establishing a dead-ended dystopia exactly akin to the one that came before.

@Hundotte

11 ай бұрын

Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. The ones so often blamed for this path, did not walk down this path to "destroy" music or "discard" beauty, or anything close to that. All three of them were deeply emotional romantics at their core, who wanted nothing more than to carve a new path of overwhelming expression for themselves. As I had shown you in the recording of the Schoenberg today, their music is rich, with just as much imagination, as much freedom for a performer to tell an entire universe, and just as beautiful as the music that came before theirs. Schoenberg LOVED tonal music. He loved tonal music and the legacy of the composers before him so greatly, that he could not bear to destroy it or twist it any further for his own expression. He forged his own path. For ten years he struggled. The great Schoenberg, who had composed a hour-long tone poem, who had composed Verklate Nacht, had been reduced down to writing minute-long piano miniatures in this desperate search for an expression of the self and the soul beyond the self, beyond the reach of what society had enabled or allowed him to know. Serialism was not a medication he administered to "cure" music of tonality. It was not a prescription he forced every student under his wing to study. He refused to teach it to all of his students. When Cage came to him to study it, he instead directed him to the study of traditional counterpoint. Serialism was a means for Schoenberg, himself, one man against a world who disdained and scorned his direction, to find his footing again. Because now that he had the means to create, he finally could do all he had wanted to do in the first place. Massive, sprawling, deeply expressive concerti. Themes and variations. All the things that he loved about music. That same, romantic struggle, of one man seeking the answers to a universe from within, against the same universe seeking to silence him. The love for the past and society that had shaped him, yet the heartbreaking need to reject the human self in the seeking of a higher artistic truth beyond what he, one man, could know with these limits. And Berg, to say less, everyone knows and adores the most as a romantic out of the three. But he was no different from Schoenberg, perhaps even more cynical. In the middle of his violin concerto, he at once quotes from Bach, and at the same time, quotes from a vulgar, obscene and sexual bar song. Yet, he takes the Bach and mars it with the tense harmony of the 12-tone system, and elevates the distasteful song to a heartbreaking elegy for the deceased the piece was dedicated to. He speaks of this same duality. The evil and corrupt greed that is so deeply intertwined with what society tells us and forces us to accept as virtuous. But yet, even in the most banal nature of humanity, there is such transcendence even in the littlest of souls. Almost as though any sin can be redeemed through the transcendence of the soul into music. What more romanticism can one find elsewhere? And just like them, postmodernism isn't about the REJECTION of the past. It is about the acknowledgement and celebration of the multiplicity of truths. This isn't a nihilistic "truth is unknowable, so let us give up search for it", it is "truth is unknowable, so let us celebrate every reality each individual can express of their own, who knows more than any other what they mean, what they want to tell, what they are screaming from their hearts more than their bodies can express." John Cage had spent much of his life searching for a means to express himself in this way. Today he is known for being pompous, for "bourgeois art that talentless hacks produce and money launder with", but that is in fact the complete opposite of the answer he found. Nothing to him was more beautiful than the sounds of nature. In his own words, is there anything more courageous than the lesser plant that grows? More mirthful than otters in the river? More terrible than a thunderclap, and more invigorating than a waterfall? I do not mean to say that all his compositions should be weighed in gold against the magnificence of Bach or Scriabin before him. But this choice he made, as a composer, as an artist, to go completely against this society that harangues him for not making real music, who calls him a fraud, a hack, a charlatan, to give up his control as a composer as much as possible, to give as much freedom to performance and the operations of nature as he could possibly conceive, and to ultimately let sound itself, the universe that he sought to reach beyond his own capacity, guide his art more than himself? Is this not the connection of spirit beyond the notes that is our very highest task as artists to search for? Again, not all postmodern music is excellent, or of esteemed quality, or sounds to our individual ears as wonderful as Cage might feel about them. And that is precisely what he invites us all to feel. When one hears the calm rattling of seeds in his Child of Tree and Branches, when one hears the mysterious, alien, yet charming and alluring gongs in his piano sonatas, what does one feel? Just like a performer, Cage invites us as listeners to connect our souls with his, with the performers, in an exploration of what we know, what confuses us about what we don't know, what we wish we knew, and what we shouldn't let control us. Yes, the fucking ping pong concerto or some tiktok grade epilepsy-inducing stomach-churning mess of a postmodern work comes up every now and so often. It is inevitable that mediocrity is all around us in this day and age: survivorship bias. I am certain that there were just as many moutains of imaginationless hacks in the Romantic bygone era, whose names were never uttered once after they died. It is up to us, the listeners, the composers, and the performers of today, to not shun the possibilities that this new freedom is offering us, but to seize it, rejecting all of this bullshit music that society is pressing into us, rejecting all of the criticisms of "you can't make atonal music if you want people to feel", or "you can't write tonal music in this day and age". All of it. And choosing to look within ourselves, to be willing to sacrifice and tear ourselves from everything we love and know, in order to strive for this fleeting, transient, sometimes infinitesimally small span of a connection, just a blink of it, with another musician. And in that one fleeting moment, where we are both, and all, soaring in the freedom of transcendence beyond what we as composers, what we as performers, and what we as listeners, are capable in our frail human bodies and minds of achieving, we experience what it truly means to be human. THIS is the spirit of modern music that I am so proud to uphold as the descendent of the Romantics. A music that does not reject the past, but is more keenly aware of it than ever. A music that does not seek to bind and constrict the performer, but offer them a freedom and relationship with the composer deeper than ever before. A music that, at once, questions what mould society has shaped us into pursuing, but also looks deep inwards at how this as shaped us as people. A music of love, of hatred. Of struggle and of kinship. Of appreciation and rejection, of order and of chaos. This is the romantic music I compose, I love, and that I believe in. I hope you will someday too, John.

@dpetrov32

7 ай бұрын

i agree with some of your points, Schoenberg truly loved the old music. at the same time: so what? Im sure Hitler would say he loved the German nation more than anything and you would agree with him. He destroyed the nation though. this single point makes most of your text false, because you base your approach to music on this romantic idea that love = good. we just proved that love can lead to incredible suffering and destruction. also an interesting point you can think about: the absence of rules can become a rule. the absence of rules everywhere around can become a shackle from which a romantic soul would need to free himself somehow. do you agree?

This was quite a fun watch!

@RachManJohn

10 ай бұрын

Hello Cardiacs man

I am not surprised if some music sheets can be used for the Mr. incredible Becoming Uncanny Meme.

Egon Petri’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica is just mind blowing

Lovely to see the descent of a substandard creator into a discord mod.

@RachManJohn

11 ай бұрын

Substandard, I agree, but mod? Never!

Danger Music 17 isn't dangerous for the performer but rather dangerous for the washroom as it evokes the feelings of extreme constipation.

I have got say this video is really amazing! There's so much interesting stuff out there and while not all of it is my cup of tea its definitely cool to broaden my horizons.

Yikes I have some varied expressions on my face listening to this weirdly wonderful variety of music!! Thanks as always RMJ for introducing us to new music experiences!!! 🎹🎵🎹🎵🎹🎵🎹🎵🎹🙂🙂🙂🤗🤗

Good G-d - Exhibit 5, Schulhoff's Symphonia Germanica - my retinas are burnt to a crisp. And all ten fingers have become unravelably entwined with each other. My ears, on the other hand - alas, there are none on either of my hands. P.S. Steve Reich's Piano Phase was strangely a delight. I could go on about each of your choices here, every one uniquely entrancing - uh...except Ping Pong; or Danger Music; but I shall refrain. And instead agree with your, as ever, excellent conclusions post Exhibit 10.

Danger Music 17 is a masterpiece.

Thank you for sharing Danger Music 17! The clip you show is one of my favorite KZread videos. But I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. I just think it is clever and hilarious.

@RachManJohn

11 ай бұрын

Cathartic, also, perhaps. Don't we all want to *Scream, Scream, Scream* sometimes?

@LioMcAllisterMusic-sw4vj

11 ай бұрын

@@RachManJohn Yeah.

Surely this too is vanity.

holy jesus what the hell was some of that.... jesus

awards of Andy Akiho: 2008 Brian Israel Prize 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award 2010 Horatio Parker Award 2011 Finale National Composition Competition Grand Prize 2011 Woods Chandler Memorial Prize 2011 Yale School of Music Alumni Award 2012 Carlsbad Composer Competition Commission 2012 Chamber Music America (CMA) Grant 2014 Chamber Music America (CMA) Grant 2014 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Emerging Composers Commission 2014 Fromm Foundation Commission from Harvard University 2014-15 Luciano Berio Rome Prize 2015 Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund 2022 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (Nominated) 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music finalist for Seven Pillars [11] 2023 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (Nominated) 2024 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Compendium 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo lmao

Where’s Sorabji?

@justinandmaxgames5472

11 ай бұрын

My thoughts exactly. Especially things like the end of the Sequentia cyclica!

@RachManJohn

11 ай бұрын

Sorabji is to be expected of this list - I left him out deliberately for another time.

Is it just me or is there a high humming sound at 3:05?

@RachManJohn

11 ай бұрын

I believe there may be! An artefact of a home recording, I believe

@dpmusicman

11 ай бұрын

I think it's the fade-in of the De Profundis excerpt. (F# in accordion)