I burst out laughing when you read the description of Kagel's Hallelujah. This whole video is a wonderful dadaist performance in itself.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

That kind of was the idea, or maybe we are just covering our asses!

@jppitman1

9 ай бұрын

Now I`ll have to find a performance of it. Some years ago I had a little paperback of best and worst categories so I looked up best and worst music. The worst in its view: Ballet Mechanique. I had to find it to see why the disparaging label. I found an LP with it. I loved it.

@jppitman1

9 ай бұрын

Ok...I found a live performance. I had to clique out half way through.The entire set, plus Xenakis` ouerve and early Penderecki, could go down to Guantanamo Bay to play over its speaker system for its "residents".

I briefly studied composition with Elliot Schwartz at Bowdoin College in the mid 1980s. He was a terrific pianist (especially when playing Chopin), and he heard EVERYTHING. Thanks to the many contemporary music festivals he organized at the college, I got to meet composers ranging from David Raksin to Milton Babbitt and Meredith Monk. Otto Luening, his teacher when he was an undergrad at Columbia, came for Bowdoin's production of his opera "Evangline". Though I won a composition competition Elliot judged, I was much more excited by jazz and didn't pursue a career in his musical world. But the many conversations I had with him, whether at a piano or in the school cafeteria, very often led me to think about sound and musical texture in ways I hadn't before. I had lunch with him a few years before he passed, during which he mused about why Schoenberg hadn't become popular whereas Debussy is so beloved, particularly since Schoenberg is usually seen as evolutionary whereas Debussy is regarded as revolutionary. He felt that Debussy's sonorities, while often not following the hierarchy of functional tonality, were "pleasing" in and of themselves. Makes great sense to me! Whatever we think of his music, he was a sincere, insightful, and highly intelligent musician. I'm enjoying this channel immensely, by the way, including this video!

Special welcome to Herr Professor Meyer-Eller..... just imagine the combined knowlege of the formidable Professor and our dear friend David Hurwitz.. combined genius wow! I hope your Bavarian guest enjoys his trip to the US.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

I'm having a great time, thank you--sme

36:05 The composer Audi was quite unique - singular, one might say. That's why he's better known by his nickname, Einaudi.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

That is brilliant!

@ftumschk

9 ай бұрын

@@DavesClassicalGuide Thank you :)

@smurashige

9 ай бұрын

Yes, really brilliant! @@DavesClassicalGuide

Finally, THE CD box to sonically annoy my neighbours with.... thank you Deutsche Grammophon!

It was so lovely to see the both of you ploughing through this box. Cherish these friendships.

@geraldparker8125

9 ай бұрын

Isn't this box, like so many such others, destined for use as a door-stop?

@jamesmakey2792

9 ай бұрын

My reaction is similar to yours, Stephan: 'Lovely stuff. What a beautiful thing friendship is.' David, I loved seeing Dr. Sören again. I am enjoying the discussion, and the charming array of facial contortions.

@DeflatingAtheism

9 ай бұрын

Maybe the true Avant Garde was the friends we made along the way.

After all these years, i finally get to hear Sorin Myer/Eller speak German!

15:12 "He descleroticised later in his career", perfect. I saw him once on Polish TV in the late 1970s and the way he put it was: "One cannot run around forever wearing little boy's shorts".

@geraldparker8125

9 ай бұрын

Maybe if your name is Little Lord Fauntleroy you grow up to be adult Lord Fauntleroy the man, but still sporting velvet and satin raiment that is just in larger, big-people's (adult) sizes. The avant-garde is such a dead-end phenomenon, in music as much as in the visual arts. There is simply nowhere to go, so it all becomes quite stale and neutred, AND more than a bit absurd.

@jimcarlile7238

9 ай бұрын

@@geraldparker8125 That can certainly happen with tonal music as well.

@geraldparker8125

8 ай бұрын

RIght, that is so. At one time Neoclassicism was the mode, the tonal sort of neo-baroque and tiresomely motoric music, not too complex to understand, just being boring, for the most part. That, too, with the exception of some music (like Poulenc's) that has some charm, vitality, and cheekiness to it, has been trashed during the same years that avant-garde has slid into decline. @@jimcarlile7238

I've been looking forward to this set for a while. I like quite a bit of this music (surprisingly, I found my way into it a few years ago after basically disdaining it as a composer for years). And yet, Mr. Hurwitz, I love your snark about this box and this music. It is not entirely undeserving, and you're just such a wonderful commentator!

I imagine a Muppet Show with Ligeti as a special guest and this as the Statler and Waldorf sequence. Just brilliant.

Charming collaboration. I chuckled throughout.

I did music at York University in the 70s. Berio was god, Britten was the devil. I threw in my towel, went for Britten and have never regretted it! Lovely talk, very funny. Thank you

Sören's great - please let's have more of him on your channel! I love the dry German sense of humour.

This is the funniest video Dave has done: some of the best lines came in the form of his facial expressions.

This was such a treat! I laughed so hard, and I hope this won't be the last time we ever get to see Dr. Meyer-Eller join you in one of these!

This is a 21-CD box, but the price at both Amazon USA and Amazon Canada is insanely cheap?!? Of course I ordered it immediately...

@MoltenCoreMusic

8 ай бұрын

...and we know how that went. ;-)

I think I most appreciated the distinction you made early on in this wonderfully informative (and heartening) conversation: the fact that so many of these works are intellectual projects rather than musical ones. It's what I've often thought when listening to them, that it's not so much music I'm hearing as ideas about music, arguments about ideas conducted in sounds. There is certainly pleasure to be found in intellectual argumentation & exploration, but it's not musical pleasure. Thanks for a thoroughly engaging, thought-provoking (and frequently amusing) presentation of this post-war avant-garde. As for me, when I discovered, in college, that Poulenc was writing his music at the same time as many of these Darmstadt folks, it was easy enough to say, Look, there were clearly other ways to be a contemporary composer--one composing actual music! It was a liberating discovery, and helped me better able to dismiss the orthodoxy of my music history class that ALL music (or at least all respectable "classical" "serious" music) had to go, and did go, in this direction after mid-century. To hear Soren say that this was essentially a German phenomenon and really rather a "local" one, and that it was principally an "intellectual game" and not music,-well, it was very satisfying in the way it affirmed certain responses I had to this material as a student many decades ago.

The Hurwitz/Meyer-Eller Show. Please, sir, more!

Brilliant, just brilliant!

Brilliant. Very funny (and informative, of course).

Rückkopplung = feedback I enjoyed this episode. Nice idea to have an interesting guest

@gomro

9 ай бұрын

And the performance seemed lacking on tape -- since you couldn't see there was one musician making all this multilayered racket -- so someone "Added" a tape of material taken from HYMNEN to this performance. I doubt that made it more musical, but it did ruin the original intention. There have been much more authentic performances since.

Goethe Institut libraries across the world are placing their orders

This is fantastic and hilarious. I am a fan of some of this music - notably Carter, Ligeti, Boulez, and Berio - and I agree on all points.

This was brilliant. I have the original six LPs and most on open reel. Believe me....I have NO desire to purchase this set of CDs. I can appreciate this mucus and the composers' attempts to do "something different". But I can't say that I really enjoy listening to this stuff.

The "descriptions" of the music remind me of many artist statements and much contemporary art criticism that I've read. Sigh. Really great and fun video!

There is a bit of irony that the Beatles scattered a little Avant-garde adjacent music in the Revolver, Sgt Pepper, White Album period & nevertheless had #1 hits. (I want to add that the above observation was made by a composer/musicologist on KZread [when I find him I will get back with the proper credit].

@murraylow4523

9 ай бұрын

Yes.And isn’t Stockhausen on the Sgt Peppers cover? Miles Davis was also into Stockhausen

@DeflatingAtheism

9 ай бұрын

Audiences are actually very forgiving of avant-garde music in small doses, it’s when it’s stretched out over the length of a concert piece that it can become a problem.

I actually played through ("performed" would be a stretch) Berio's Sequenza V during my tromboning days. My multiphonics were not perfect, but they were both multi and phonic. I also recall the bit where you rattle a mute in the bell while making a groaning sound as you inhale -- that was fun.

@jppitman1

9 ай бұрын

“Multi and phonic”-cute! This LP was sort of a “classic” in its original days and I ordered a copy from a record store and I think it put Sequenza V onto the trombone world map, subsequently becoming part of the standard repertoire (if you were going to go professional). I noticed recently that Xenakis’ “Keren” knocked the Berio from the Tchaikovsky Competition list for the second round and that “Keren”, which takes prodigious stamina, knocked Sequenza V to 2nd place in last year`s Munich competition in terms of how many picked it to play in the 2nd round.

@johnmontanari6857

9 ай бұрын

My favorite trombone multiphonics is the late Albert Mangelsdorff's unaccompanied rendition of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo," in which he approximates Duke's original three-part voicing. Amazing!

I guess, the Hölderlin-guy you mean is Wilhelm Killmayer - and, thank's God, he is not avantgarde (at least not always). His mostly performed work is the transcription of Orffs "Carmina burana" for soli, chorus, two pianos and percussion.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

Yes, thank you!

It`s always a joy to see / hear knowledgeable and witty people talk about music, even if the topic is a 21 CD box of avantgarde. Great chat and good laughs. The german/english reading of this pseudo-intellectual gargantic crap spoke for itself - priceless. Documentation of cultural history? Maybe, but music?? Artistic expression?? Plain bullshit?? Anyway, as you had Sören Meyer-Eller as a guest, a big salute to him for his part as executive producer for the "CPE Bach-Complete Works for Piano solo " by Ana Marija Markovina > absolutely fantastic, outstanding set. I`ve been through the whole 26 CD`s a few times and the sheer amount of Quality in CPE`s writing in his colossal output is just unbelievable. AMM plays wonderfully, the recording is great, the extensive, informative and well structured booklet is great, super product. Greetings from germany and do more duo chats......

In his 'The War on Music' John Mauceri documents how avant garde music was a weapon in the Cold War. The West encouraged it as a contrast with the East's musical repression in various forms of socialist realism. Anything you can avant garde we can avant garde better. Because freedom. Sony issued a cd in the 90s called Lease Breakers. DG could have made a fortune marketing their box as "The Ultimate Lease Breaker Box." Or, "The Only Lease Breaker Box You'll Ever Need." Other than that, it seems excess to requirements.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

And much of it is chamber music.

Oh boy, this brought me back to excited finds in the cut-out bin at Chicago's long-gone Rose Records, where I would pluck down my 3-4 dollars, rush home to my record player with the latest in hip up-to-date musicality and, more often than not, listen once or twice and put the LP at the bottom of the stack, wishing I had spent the money on coffee and donuts instead. There were a few exceptions (the LaSalle Quartet recordings, for example) but now I look at sets like these and think something along the lines of "We Won't Be Fooled Again.'

@geraldparker8125

9 ай бұрын

The reason that you would "rush home to my record player" is that the trendiness factor would delegate this musical dandruff to the "has been" obsolescence realm so quickly that you hardly had a chance to take in one pile of avant-garde Junque before you felt constrained, 2 hours later, to humour the purveyors of a subsequent pile of junk.

@jimcarlile7238

9 ай бұрын

Try listening to it again. I remember the days when many people thought The Who was noise.

I cannot convince myself to buy that thing. I heard all those discs back in the day -- the county library had mountains of vinyl of all sorts -- but looking back on it, most of those pieces will never be performed again, weren't particularly interesting in the first place, and weren't very well performed on those recordings. Players were struggling with just getting the notes right, much less the weird playing techniques, bizarre scores, etc. These days we have performers who grew up with all that, so the pieces that DID stand the test of time have all had much better recordings -- the Penderecki quartets, for instance, or Berio's Sequenzas.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

That's very true.

@DeflatingAtheism

9 ай бұрын

As much as I enjoy Berio, I can’t help but feel the Sequenzas project was the progenitor of the regrettable “catalog of extended techniques” genre of instrumental music.

@gomro

9 ай бұрын

@@DeflatingAtheism Berio makes all that stuff work, because he was brilliant. But you might be right about the "extended techniques" -- lesser composers aping the great. Much as the 1979 DRACULA, which put a new and fresh spin on the character and the mythology, was a brilliant film, but also led ultimately to (-"shudder!!"-) TWILIGHT.

@geraldparker8125

8 ай бұрын

I remember sighing during those grey and drearily avant-gardist years that wll of that seemingly important modernist creeping crud was, in the long haul, going to be wasted effort. I still feel that the day is coming, as shelf space in music libraries becomes wanting, that tonnes of those avant-garde publications, in printed music and recorded forms, is going to be swept aside and into the dust bins to make space for later newer materials of more relevance to public and private musical life. The crud is NOT destined to be around forever; it was obsolescent the day that it was published, not to mention a lot of years afterward.@@DavesClassicalGuide

Could you please a "ripe for reissue" Video about the Gerard Hoffnung concerts! I'm afraid not a lot of people are getting it today but I grew up with that stuff and really miss that kind of stuff 😢

I was hoping we would get to see the Dr. again 👍 I would NEVER sit down and listen to that, but I would sit through the 2 of you chatting about it over 5 videos...that's "music" to my ears🤣 Hopefully you talk Dr. Meyer - Eller (while he's available) on video say "BRUCKNER!!" or our favorite phrase from Young Frankenstein so we can hear the horses 👍

I will buy the box.😊

Hello Mr Hurwitz. Maybe you would consider to ask Herr Professor Meyer-Eller if the Michael Gielen Edition on SWR Classics will be available again? Best wishes Fred from Kristianstad.

Presumably the Cornelius Cardew CD contains only Paragraphs 2 and 7 of The Great Learning? I've unearthed my copy of Cortical Foundation CD no. 21 which contains the DG recordings plus a later (1982) recording of Paragraph 1. It would be so good to have a recording of the complete work. Cardew died in 1981 when he was run over by a car; some people claim that this was an assassination by agents of MI5 because he was also in charge of one of the British Communist Parties (the Maoist one).

I think the Hölderlin work you are thinking about is Luigi Nono's string quartet 'Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima'.

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

That's as good as any...

I really enjoyed that :) The double act works so well in terms of the different personas. I can take or leave a lot of this stuff, but I admire the experimentalism, see why after the war there would be this kind of reaction to (German) musical tradition, and after the initial experiments which can be tedious, some very good music emerged from people like Ligeti, Berio, Nono, etc. There are some things DG has that aren’t in there, like Ligeti Chamber Concerto, and more things by Berio and Nono, but hey, where do you say the avant garde stopped and something else started? Nonetheless their inclusion might have made the set more instructive and approachable. They used to have some Stockhausen that he reappropriated the rights to and now his own label charges ludicrous prices for. Especially thinking of “Gesang der Jünglinge”, that early electronica piece, that I still think is rather cool to hear (luckily it’s on KZread). This set sounds a bit like the experience you have when going through a contemporary art museum, where you chance at things built from some of the things Kagel uses in that multifarious instrument thing. Music, however demands more time, so the analogue to all that experimental art (which a lot of people like going to see) is more demanding of the audience, so it didn’t attain the same status (plus rich people can’t buy it, but that’s another story). As you say, Dave, there is a market. I mean somebody must be buying expensive Stockhausen cds. The guy in my local second hand shop told me once that he got a lot of young people coming in looking for vinyl of Ligeti, Stockhausen etc, as they wanted to use it in DJing, making electronica and hip hop stuff. So it has carried forward in unexpected ways…

@DeflatingAtheism

9 ай бұрын

The Avant-Garde typified by this set implicitly refers to one generation of post-war composers, until the post-modern era starts (in music, at least) during the late ’60s. The actual cast of characters didn’t change much (Berio in particular strikes me as a composer with one foot planted firmly in the modern, and the other in the post-modern) but Darmstadt-school dogmatism was loosened up- which in effect meant that the notes mean even less- some hippie ideals crept in, maybe some drugs slipped in too, and “art music” became more outward-looking and less insular and absolute. I’m sure many of the composers desperately wanted to be part of their cultural moment, but avant-garde in music never connected with audiences the way the avant-garde in other art forms did. I have Gesang der Jünglinge on an anthology CD of musique concrete works I bought off Amazon, but apparently the works were never licensed, and the anthologies were illegal!

@murraylow4523

9 ай бұрын

Hi. I don’t think it’s “dogmatism” it’s experimentation. Most experiments fail. Was listening through the Boulez box and although there are some early things of him I like (le visage nuptial, for example) but other things just don’t work. I’d rather people experiment and fail than just revert to what is now a rather predictable tonal pleasing business - eg later John Adams, Michael Torke, etc etc To me, this is much more dull, and I’m going to be listening to Saint-Sean’s all day tomorrow so it’s not as though I only like so called avant garde music! @@DeflatingAtheism

Si esto lo hacen Martes y Trece nos partimos la caja. Josema Yuste hablando en alemán y Millán Salcedo poniendo caras de Encarna de Móstoles. There was a Spanish comical duo (originally a trio, but one member defected) who would have done a superb rendering of this collaboration. It's got to be here on KZread. Martes y Trece Encarna de Móstoles.

When are we getting a BMW Bach box?!

Did the writer of the notes quote Johann Fichte or Friedrich Schelling?

11:00 Hilarious. Ah, the nostalgia...

Got mine !

46:00. Herr Doktor Sören Meyer-Eller hit it on the head. If you want to know about this stuff, this is as good a set to get. I have much of it, but not on CD. I've listened, but well...I just don't really get it. I don't think badly of it, but I just don't enjoy it.

David, I always knew you were anti antelope horn.

the universe! ❤gotta be true! lol - thanks ; is laughing musical lol

Hilarious......!

Благодарю за обзор этого бокс-сета, это очень интересная новинка. Наверно, он не будет продаваться в России. Обычно авангардные записи пропадают из магазинов с потрясающей скоростью

@DavesClassicalGuide

9 ай бұрын

Конечно!

And they said writting book reports without reading the book was not a skill ...this booklet proves otherwise.

41:33 I suppose you could've called them "avant gardeners"

So funny i was going to avoid this one but 😂 couldn't a lot of this music is similar to the emperor with No Closes if you know what i mean

I disagree about the distinction between popular music and the avant-garde: both alienate the listener from self-reconciliation, one bathing in the alienation while the other attempts to stare starkly at it. “Les extremes, se touchent.” Both are unlistenable! Although I intend to pick this stuff up sometime soon; a spectacular failure of an epoch that I am unfortunately addicted to. Hopefully you can ignore the Adorno crap above. I would love to hear the Nono story one day. Perhaps you can review Prometeo, which might or might not be a “CD from hell” for Dave (although I suspect not!). -Noah

@geraldparker8125

9 ай бұрын

By all means ignore Adorno!!!! What a load of dung he propounded in all of those tiresome, migraine headache inducing books of his. I had to review a few of them. Then, y'know, he was an absolute incompetent as a musical creator (of attempted composition). He was part of the crowd. Sad.

@DeflatingAtheism

9 ай бұрын

_“Les extremes, se touchent”_ - Horseshoe theory _avant la lettre!_

"The description is more interesting than the music." 😅. Although I think I could have listened to or read that description several times and still not have gleaned the meaning of it, and I had 13.5 years of college. But I think the point is that such music doesn't have much of a meaning, and so they had to invent such a fanciful description to attempt to give it some, but that ended up just as meaningless. I certainly couldn't figure out what it was supposed to be saying about the "music".