xiangyik

Changed some bits of my fugue, and added some program notes/ analysis. Hope it helps people enjoy the little beastie more!

I'm going to put this here, late and loose though it is, for the poo poos and giggles. I'm still not writing stuff *for* competitions, so I can claim some spurious principled consistency here. http://www.youngcomposers.com/music/listen/6045/prelude-no-18-dance-ii-and-19-fugue-/

No surprise here, Luderart: it's you.

Austenite -- how many pieces of yours have you not listed that are already on this site? "Best" is meant to be reserved for something really special, you know. :) I'm particularly fond of my Passacaglia, mostly because I like variations, because they are fun to listen to. Now that wasn't too shamelessly self-promoting, was it?

I believe Beethoven is still a superior teacher how to compose long pieces with little material. Take his first movement of Eroica. Most of 20 minutes are based on just a basic triad. Awesome. Could not agree more re Beethoven. Look at the Diabelli Variations! Or the Pastoral Symphony, or the motivic gorgeousness of the 5th. Anyway, when it comes to areas for development: restraint, melody, modulation, and (judging from the comments people usually make on my pieces) playability. :) No running away from that one, I guess.

I'm not going to slam you over the use of the word "modern" or "contemporary", but provide you with an example of a terrific fugue, and a stunning performance of it. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga_280If08A

This thread is evil. It puts at odds the immense fun-ness of this thing and my selfish interest in hopefully getting a piece nominated with my general dislike of competitions. Oh this is a cruel world. ;)

In a word: lots. In a few more words: upwards of 20, often quite significant. I just can't stop fiddling, for no particular grand or musicological reason.

It's glad to know I'm not the only one out here. Something loving horrible must have happened to this site really fast if suddenly people can start mindlessly prattling on about the "infinite" with ridiculously pretentious (not bad, just stomach-churningly, unrepentantly awful) grammar and sad metaphysical references and massively inflating their egos (ooh, look, I am a prodigy) and receive the sort of kneejerk support that seems to be accumulating here. Have we really become so sad and wishy-washy? Has no-one actually ever read Marzique's profile? To Marzique: I'm not sure how good a composer you are. Your ideas are grandiose but marginally interesting. Whatever the case may be, you are a lousy human being with an ego that's frankly unbelievable. You claim to be a composer of "genius" (I hope the fact that English is not your first language does not exonerate you. Certainly you ought to be familiar with the meaning of such grossly hyperbolic terms if you bandy them about with such ease), but I have yet to see any evidence of it. I read a couple of your reviews recently and you seemed to be sobering up (and not stupidly liking your own comments like you used to), but apparently that has not been the case. Sarastro, ffs, what utter bollocks. If I can't see any external coherence I see not reason to believe it is internally coherent (an interesting synonym for "meaningless"). Shockingly, the purpose of language is communicative, not obfuscative.

Sounds like an incredibly fun idea! I would't like it to become a competition, though -- it can potentially create a rather unpleasant working relationship, and not one I would like to be part of.

I'm never sure what my thoughts on originality are. I dislike the modern idiom quite a bit (or a big chunk of it. there's a lot in ligeti etc that I like, but.) because I think it assumes that written and heard music are experienced in the same way, and descends into lame gimmickry as a result. Once music gets mathematical in the 12-tone sense, aural meaning gets lost. Our ears cannot extract from what is heard the tone row, or its inversions, or its numerous chordal transformations. Music that is mathematical on the page is noise to the ear. I have a test which I use when I'm listening to something moderately "modern" -- that is, does my *listening* to the music make me appreciate it more than if I just saw the incredibly clever/original/quirky/avant-garde score? Very often the music just sounds lame. What *can* our ears plausibly extract, then? Tonality is an especially useful tool (though it is certainly not the only one) because it builds upon the natural biological capacities of the ear. We can obviously distinguish between different scales (note that the "western" scale is built up naturally from a succession of overtones) and different major/minor triads, etc. We can also tell modulations or certain harmonic effects (dissonance, consonance) apart. A more sensitive ear may catch certain harmonic intervals or leitmotifs, etc. What is the unique value of "uniqueness"? Why does the statement "this music is unlike past music" goad me in any way to be inclined to like that music more? Good music is nice notes put in nice orders. I could not care less whether they are put in Bach-like orders, Mozart-like orders, or wholly new orders. Maybe a value of newness is the surprise and the intellectual pleasure that we gain from experiencing a new idiom. Is the value of that emotional response more important in some meaningful sense from just having well-organised, sensitive music on a page? I don't see why. So if I write a Mozart symphony, it's still brilliant music. If I write a Bach fugue, it's still great. The notes are in nice orders. The danger in some fetishization of originality is that we forget that music is not, essentially, clever gimmickry, or intellectual self-pleasuring. It's about trying to elicit emotional responses -- one of which is a sense of intellectual satisfaction. We ought not delude ourselves into thinking that this is the only meaningful emotional response music can elicit. Many composers who try very hard to be original forget that originality is very, very, often more fun and exciting for the composer than the listener. I will make a major caveat here: that the ear can adapt to new sounds. See Stravinsky, Prokofiev, etc. But I do claim that there are inherent limits to this. So some people consider 12-tone stuff deeply moving, but I do claim that they would find any random piece of nonsense equally moving, because they would learn to like the randomness of the sounds they were hearing. It is not the *organization* of notes, no matter how intellectually pleasing, that creates the emotional response. It is the listener doing for the composer what the composer ought to have done. I object strongly to the claim that "True to yourself does also mean true to your time. That implies: no style-copies." 1. Why can I not conceive myself as a person of a different time? 2. Well, what is the music of our time like? The vast majority of the music being listened to is tonal. Most of it is vocal. Most of it incorporates electronic stuff, and most of it uses very straightforward harmony. So I'm afraid that while Jrcramer writes very interesting music that I often like very much, he is not writing music of our time at all. A modern casual listener would not get much out of it. I'm sure people prefer, say, Coldplay's stuff to my musical scribblings. The truth us that *none* of us should pretend to be writing "music of our time". What we are doing, and what is no less praiseworthy, is writing music that we like, for all sorts of subjective reasons, and hoping that in a community of people like this one other peiple will appreciate our efforts. Austenite is right on this point, and we ought to be at least a little less pretentious about what we're actually doing. I dislike fluffy "true to yourself" nonsense, but I find it a better standard than being "modern" or "original", at least. Great literary writers do not write gibberish, objecting to the fact that their language is the language of the past. James Joyce came very close, but even then his language was rooted in an infinitude of reference to the past. What they do is take words, sentences, phrases, plot structures, and do things with them that are interesting. I do not see why we ought in music to aspire toward some undefinable and naive ideal of being true to some arbitrary value of originality. If we discovered a manuscript by Beethoven and declared it a masterpiece, and then realised that it was a forgery by some 21st century hack, the notes on the page remain exactly the same. Why, suddenly and inexplicably, does that music then become bad? So, in what is at best an oblique answer to Marzique's question, (I do not believe from past observation that you desire any serious discussion, but I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, since Jrcramer is clearly keen of having a real discussion about the merits of a modern idiom) I'll say: why do you even care to be "modern"? I fear that many of the most original composers were not trying particularly hard to be modern. Scriabin wrote what he thought sounded interesting to him. Prokofiev's very first pieces featured his natural affinity for asymmetry, tritones, percussive use of the piano, etc. Just write stuff, listen to stuff, and hopefully the notes will take you places. Or maybe they won't, but we ought not care. Cry me a river.

Should we take bets on how long this thread lasts before it gets shut down?

My God, these forums have a habit of asking impossible questions, don't they? :) If I assume that the complete question is: Is formal training necessary to write good music? then we need to first come up with a way of deciding what good music is. And I'm afraid humanity has yet to come up with a clear, single answer to that one. And once you've picked some definition of "good", the answer will more or less imply itself, though it may not be a simple answer, because it can be difficult to isolate precisely what formal training gives you that no mode of self-study, no matter how disciplined, can. What music do I like? (I'm answering a different but related question to the one which was asked, but at least it's one that admits of a clear answer.) Well, I like it well-organized, very colourful, texturally dense (generalizing) and fairly harmonically complex. Medner/Prokofiev/Rach. So I'd say nearly every piece on this site that I really like has been written by someone with formal training. I *think* the reason for this correspondence is that formal training gives you the ability to work through very knotty musical problems in an organized way, so that you don't feel the need to take shortcuts around them. Maybe it also makes a person more daring? Maybe I'm wrong -- who knows? But for me, at least, formal training helped a lot. (Counterpoint!) Also, when you play pieces you inevitably pick up the tricks those pieces use. (Unless you're a particularly uninteresting performer who barely pays attention to the meaning of the notes on the page.)This was part of my formal instrumental training, though, so I'm not sure if that counts.

As with almost all such vague penumbral questions, the answer really is : it depends. One one level, the answer is, trivially, yes. My composition tells you that I can take these particular notes and put them in this particular order. Sounds stupidly obvious. But then comes the next issue: what does that fact imply? I like jazz harmony. Or I like chords. Or, I play the piano. Beyond that, extrapolation gets very, very, impressionistic and imprecise. The fact that I like jazz harmony a lot might suggest I have played jazz somewhere, in a casual band, or in a bar. Or it might not. Does it imply that I am some kind of cool, laidback person? Probably not. Does my use of harmonic substitution mean that I am mildly schizophrenic? That's obviously a bit much. So yes. It depends on what exactly you're looking for. (Complicated by the fact that music can sound very different from the processes used to create it. So serialism can sound random, but really demands careful construction. The Rite of Spring sounds like a glorious, throbbing mess (and on a literal level, it is just a motivic fantasy), but Stravinsky was incredibly careful in creating it.)

I hereby affirm the Aweomeness of Wayne-scales and the Complete and Utter Idiocy of Marzique.