Music or not music?

[cemaphonic]

I posted this in the giant thread of doom too, but I am curious what people think of this (on the music/not music scale, not so much whether you like it or not) Plus, I thought the choreography was pretty neat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCZe6eL9gDE

More Reich (my favorite of his):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCZEckS5X94

[some guy]

1. 11111

There isn't music in the first minute of the first link. It could be classified, at least loosely, as a chant, or acapella, but there isn't music. I got bored by the end of the first minute, so didn't listen beyond that. :)

The second piece has music. I didn't listen to all of it either.

[harmonicon]

4. then here's one that you'll really love

A piece by one of my favourite composers, George Brecht:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMnl2JpCYAE&feature=related

[some guy]

5. wow

that would be worth having on CD! :eyes:

[harmonicon]

6. no you wouldn't!

Neither would I. My point is that there are some very extreme types of music (far more so than "come out") which don't fit in with our normal conceptions of what "music" is. George Brecht published most of his scores in the 50's and 60's, and people are still performing his pieces today. We're small in number, but we love our work - as evidence by this woman putting her performance on youtube - we engage with it just as passionately as do other sorts of musicians. Some things don't work as recordings that are good works for performance, even if it's a private performance in one's home, and some great recordings (especially some studio-created electronic music) can't ever be performed and are all the better for it.

[some guy]

7. fine.

I don't mind being a music luddite. If you called it performance art, I'd be willing to accept your statement. Mostly, I don't much care what other people call music or non-music or what their preferences are in those realms.

The violin piece doesn't harm anyone or anything as far as I know, so I have no objection to its being performed.

The original poster asked a question, I offered my opinion. If you disagree, that's fine with me. But you'll have more fun :banghead: than striving to convince me that piece was music.

:hi:

[harmonicon]

8. convincing has nothing to do with it

It's just denial on your part, and if you want to deny it, and live in willful ignorance, be my guest, and send me a postcard from the creationist museum. However, if you're sure that you're right, you may want to send a letter to my university explaining why they shouldn't be granting me a PhD in music. As for "performance art", I'm skeptical of it as a term, because it's only been around for 40 - 50 years. In my experience what most people describe as performance art is usually music or theatre, which are both performing arts, along with dance, so maybe the distinction doesn't matter.

[cemaphonic]

11. Well, boredom is certainly a common reaction to "Come Out"

And on some levels, I think provoking that reaction is part of the point of the piece. But a minute isn't really long enough to get a feel for what the piece is doing. In particular, at the minute point, you can only just start to distinctly hear the phasing process that is the core of the structure.

If you don't want to listen to the entire 10 minutes, maybe try fast-forwarding to the midway point to see how the piece has evolved, and then again to near the end, where it has nearly completely dissolved into rhythmic noise.

[harmonicon]

2. *banging head against wall*

Ok, look, if it's music to one person, it's music. My television isn't music, cows aren't music, but music is music, no matter if you understand it, or if you like it, or if you want it to exist. There are loads of pieces of music that I love that don't have instruments, voices, certainly no rhythm, harmony, or melody, and in some cases not even any sounds, but it's still music. It amazes me that people think that saying what music is is some sort of subjective thing. Music is just as much a part of culture as something like a specific language. Just as it would make no sense for someone to say that ancient Mayan isn't a language because they can't comprehend it, or that sign language isn't a language, because it doesn't involve talking or writing, it makes no sense for a person to say that a piece of music or a type of music isn't music. I hate Wagner and wish it would go away, but it's still music. I hate Led Zeppelin, but it's still music.

"Come Out" is an amazing piece, and a high point of 20th century music. I think "Music for 18 Musicians" is also a great piece, but not as ground-breaking. It was a sort of culmination of his previous work, and is thus very very good. Unfortunately most of his stuff falls flat from there on, I think, because he had no where else to go on that path and didn't seem interested in starting along a new one.

[cemaphonic]

9. Interesting point about "Come Out" vs "18"

Come Out really is a huge watershed, especially in popular music, where a lot of Reich's early techniques spread into mainstream pop music via Eno and others. It's a bit too reductionist for me to want to listen to very often, although I really like the almost equally austere Piano Phase. 18 is less audacious, going back to traditional practices of orchestration, and harmonic development of sorts, but it is just so engaging that I never get tired of listening to it.

I agree that he's never outdone it, although I do think he's kept trying to try new things. Philip Glass is the one who has really been stuck in a creative rut (albeit a very lucrative one) for the last 25 years or so.

[harmonicon]

13. Music for 18 still has some interesting things going for it orchestration-wise

It's not something a listener would probably notice, but it calls for strange doublings of instruments for players to do that aren't standard practice. What Reich, and also Glass, did was to create their own ensembles to play their music, and thusly composed specifically for these ensembles and no one else for several years. I also really like Piano Phase. An interesting story about that piece: a friend and teacher of mine played in the premiere of it, and someone in the audience had a seizure. I've also been to a performance of drumming when an audience member had a seizure. It's more rare than the visual-induced seizures, but some people suffer from auditory induced seizures, and this type of phasing (with drumming I don't think it was the phasing in the music, which is metric, but phasing overtone reverberations from the metal percussion) can cause seizures. Of course it's a horrible thing, but I also think it's a testament to the sheer physical power of the work.

Philip Glass did do some good things in the past, but I'm not sure that he's suffered from a creative rut. I think he's quite honest as composing for a living and performing a function as a film composer. I don't like the music that he's making now, but he seems to be more honest and matter-of-fact about it that Reich. I don't know either of them personally, but know people that do, and it seems like Reich is just lazy, but also full of himself, which I see as a bad combination. My girlfriend sat next to him at a talk he gave a few years ago where he played a recording of a new piece of his and then said something like "wasn't that great?" - what they hell can you say in response to that?! The last thing of his that I saw was the Hindenburg (sp?) opera, which I thought was just ok. That was 10 years, and I'd probably be more negative about it now, as I'm an increasingly grumpy old man who hates all music.

[cemaphonic]

15. True about Glass

He seems pretty upfront about being a commercial composer, and I think the total divorce of art from commerce that happened in the late Romantic/early Modernist period was one of the reasons that so much of that music was so sterile. I doubt that Bach was very concerned with novelty or critical acclaim when he was churning out a cantata a week in Leipzig.

Still, Glass came up with a really interesting bag of tricks, especially rhythmic ones, in his early music, and then grafted it back onto traditional harmonic practice in "Music in 12 Parts" and "Einstein on the Beach," which was a combination I really like. Since then, he seems to have jettisoned all of the interesting rhythmic stuff in favor of endless triplet arpeggios, and in refining a "Philip Glass sound." (chugging strings, major third chord progressions, the aforementioned arpeggios, etc.) It's a good gig for him, and he's done a lot to bring people back into contemporary classical music, but I still find it kinda disappointing.

[harmonicon]

17. I agree that those are two of his best pieces - great, even

I don't know how much I'd say that their harmonic content is traditional though. Perhaps "familiar" would be a better word? The pieces (not so much with "Music in 12 Parts") use familiar chords and modes, but the ways of implementing them are still novel.

[cemaphonic]

18. Well, in his really early pieces,

you have diatonic material, but the melodic material it tends to be really harmonically static - elaborations of a single chord or scale, and the harmony is really bare-bones - a long pedal bass, or doubling in fifths and the like (and yeah, lots of Music in 12 and Einstein work like that too) But there are also honest-to-god chord progressions in those two pieces as well, although it is true that they aren't really using the dominant-tonic paradigm of common-practice tonality.

[harmonicon]

19. yeah, that's what I meant

Parallel movement in fifths is one of the biggest no-no's in classical harmony, but Glass does it all of the time. The resultant chords are familiar, but the way in which they're constructed within the piece is novel.

[Athens30603]

3. Steve Reich is great. n/t

[PermanentRevolution]

10. I actually really liked those...

And I'd say they definitely count as music. I'm not by any stretch a music "aficionado," and know hardly anything about it in an academic sense, but those were quite interesting to hear. I especially enjoyed "Come Out." I really like the way something as simple as that one brief repeated phrase turns into a completely different, un-speech-like sound by the end. (I don't know if there's an actual word for that)

I doubt I'm gonna go and buy a CD of it, but... thanks for sharing that, I doubt I would have ever heard it otherwise.

[cemaphonic]

20. Well, if you don't want to buy the CD...

Here are links to all the other pieces from it. They are all structured the same way with the process that Recih dubbed "phasing."

2 are mechanical, using tape recorders playing at different speeds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCZe6eL9gDE&feature=related (Come Out - included again for completeness)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anXcSl5uFig&feature=related (It's Gonna Rain)

The other 2 are performed live:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcFyl8amoEE&feature=related (Clapping Music - this one has been aped by tons of performing groups of various types)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wkVXxRf8Pw&feature=related (Piano Phase - My favorite from this CD, even if Come Out is more groundbreaking and influential. The different pitches in the piano melody really emphasize the points where the two parts slip out of phase, and new sub-melodies are constantly being created and destroyed as the two piano lines drift farther and farther apart.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpURYG2F2ug&feature=related (Part 2 of Piano Phase)

[asthmaticeog]

12. It's gon' rain, it's gon' rain, it's gon' rain, it's gon' rain, it's gon' rain, it's gon' rain...

Yes, it's goddamn music. Some of the most amazing ever.

[cemaphonic]

14. Yep

I just always find the perennial "is rap music?" threads funny because there is so much out there that is a whole hell of a lot of music out there that is a lot more unconventional than hiphop.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

16. Neither of those show any merit to me.

Tough.


By the weird and witty Oscar Levant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Meh1CqE0_so