Experimental Music: Your opinions...?

[Fozzer]

Hello my Instrument-Playing, and Music-Listening Chums... ....

What are your opinions on "Experimental Music", and the playing and listening to music...

Composed and conducted by the following:
John Cage.
Karl Stockhausen.
Pierre Boulez.
Luciano Berio.
..etc...
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/Experimental-Mu ... 0521653835

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

Excerpt:
Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument*. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.
End.

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* ...I ask you!... ...!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
(I wish he had concentrated on collecting Mushrooms...full-time).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen
(I wish he had concentrated on making Concrete...full-time).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boulez
(I wish he would stay in France...permanantly)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciano_Berio
(He should have stayed in in Italy..... and enjoyed Berio Olive Oil)

As a musician of many years, having been brought up listening to, and playing music by John Dowland, Henry Purcell, Johan Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, Mozart, Sir Edward Elgar, and similar Clasical Musicians...I could never understand professional musicians actually enjoying performing "Experimental Music" composed by the originators of it!

What do you think..?

F.....8/16 beats to the Bar... !

[Omag 2.0]

Good music should touch your soul and bring over sentiments... I can't say that any experimental music ever did that to me..

Yet, some people love jazz, which I don't... so who's to say what's good and what isn't...  ;)

[Sir_Crashalot]

I wonder; Isn't any kind of music experimental music? I mean, every kind of music has to be played for the first time. Some get popular, some don't. Now I never heard of the musicians you mentioned Paul. I guess for a certain audience they are very popular, for others not. Same for my taste of music. I love it, others hate it.

Crash

I know some Dutch 'artists' who should make a full album of songs like 4'33''. Should help the noise polution....

[microlight]

Paul,

There's certainly a market for it these days, but it doesn't ring my bell. Boulez the conductor is a different beast to Boulez the composer, and he learned that the hard way when he was chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the 70s. Audiences stayed away from concert halls in droves when he performed his own music and he's very much more successful these days as a conductor of Mahler and Schoenberg where there is a hold on tonality (albeit tenuous in Schoenberg's case). Stockhausen is even more alien to my ears, with some of his earlier stuff resembling the kind of music-less bleeps and squeaks that you can hear from a supermarket cash register.

Cage made something of a laughing stock of himself recently when he arranged his 'four minutes thirty three seconds' for orchestra from the original piano, so for me his credibility is now even further out of the window.

Berio is a little different - have you heard his Sinfonia? It's cleverly put together, with great bleeding chunks of the Mahler Resurrections symphony and Debussy's La Mer (plus some others) making guest appearances.

One modernist that I have a sneaking admiration for is Edgard Varese (the Varese Sarabande record label was named after him) whose output is individual to say the least. Apart from the 'musique concrete' of the Poeme Electronique, one of the most individual of his pieces is Ionisation, written completely for 13 percussionsist playing 36 different percussion instruments in 1933, and inspired by molecular ionisation(?!). Rumour has it that it was this piece that made Frank Zappa take up music.

Otherwise, I've tended to stay tonal, following Mahler and Ravel through to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

I guess it's all about what is 'good' music, and to me good music is what I like, and bad music is what I don't like. I like jazz, I like the Beatles and Pink Floyd, I appreciate Metallica and the Eagles, but can't get on with rap (where there seems to be a silent 'c' missing). However, there's nothing like the hue and cry of a symphony orchestra to send a shiver up my back - but playing tonal music rather than our friends Boulez and Stockhausen.

I can hear the knives sharpening already...

Allegro con anima!

[JBaymore]

...... but can't get on with rap (where there seems to be a silent 'c' missing).

Martyn,

I happen to like rap along with a lot of other genre,............ but that above is FUNNY!  ;D

best,

.............john

[microlight]

No offense intended John, and none taken, I'm sure. I like Wagner operas but can't abide rap, and it's certain that there are those whose views are diametrically opposed - but that's fine, of course. It makes music as diverse in its appeal as it should be.

Just as I like JS Bach keyboard (especially played by Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia), but am not convinced that Mozart was the genius he's normally made out to be.

Life's funny, ain't it!

[beaky]

I always liked Cage's "four minutes of silence" conceptually,... he was like the Klaus Oldenburg of music... but like a lot of "academic" experimental music, it ain't much to listen to.

One of my faves, although not considered a "serious composer" is Brian Eno: whether it's putting his production stamp on pop and rock records or making strange loops out of classical music or anything in between, it's interesting to me technically but also moves me or at least intrigues me.

It's just like any other art form: if it doesn't move you, it's not working. If there's anything more tedious to me than listening to a piece I don't like, it's talking about music that speaks very well for itself.

Which reminds me of Mozart: I suppose he is overrated in a way, but I have yet to hear a Mozart melody I don't like.

[microlight]

Agree with you 100% about Brian Eno, Rotty - the man's talented.

It's not the tunes that Mozart gets wrong, or the technique (he put a twelve-tone row into his 40th symphony more than 100 years before Schoenberg 'thought it up') - I guess maybe he was born a hundred years too early?