Further remarks on how to approach contemporary music 

One of the odd things about all this is that back in the 19th century, most concerts of "classical music" that most people heard were mostly of new music. There was not that much performed that was more than about 25 years old. And that didn't seem to present anything like the problems for the audience that new music often seems to present these days. To me, that means that there have been some real changes in either the nature of the music or in the people listening to it. Or both.

Samuel is doing an outstanding job explaining the challenge and rewards of listening to unfamiliar music. He hopes for the ideal audience that is hard to find but here and there, composers luck out. It is unfortunate that there is no money in challenging new music. The crowds that attend, say, a retrospective show by an artist promoted by Gagosian galleries is there because of the artifacts presented have a monetized value. One painting by a living artist (not necessary among his or her best) is worth more than the entire lifetime income of a non-commerically oriented very fine composer.

Great follow-up. Good to have you back Samuel, looking forward to new videos!

I've just discovered you and I am amazed! The overall quality of this channel is outstanding! Thank you for sharing your knowledge, you have a new suscriber.

Extremely interesting, the whole discussion. I’m a student of composition and sometimes I feel myself discouraged when it comes to show my little steps forward to my close friends and family, who are not familiar with the experience of approaching modern stuff. Greetings from Vienna.

Great video. My ultimate barometer on whether I want to listen to something again is whether it stirred something inside of me. For instance, Penderecki's Threnody for Victim's of Hiroshima isn't pleasant listening but it's tremendously evocative music.

I appreciate your clarification of the "category of the new" and it's surrounding ethos. Food for thought... Thanks!

man you are great, keep going with this great work

What you say at c12:42 about the present works conditioning our listening to the older works reminded me of how Robert Fripp implored King Crimson fans to now go back and listen to the older versions of the band through the new one.

Great video. I am curious as to what your thoughts are on the composer Horatiu Radulescu (if you've heard of him) and if so, if you'd consider doing a video on his music.

Anton Webern's little book of his published lectures titled "the path to the new music" is a great little volume on the subject critical thinking.

Unrelated - have you heard the music of chilean composer Acario Cotapos? I recommend his ‘sonata-fantasia’ composed 100 years ago on 1924. I find it to be incredibly forward looking for its year of composition.

Great comments. Keep up the work.

It would be interesting to see your favourites from rock and pop music. I struggle to find musicians who reach the talent of the magic band in those genres. Also, I would love to see a video on John Cage and indeterminacy.

Excellent rejoinder . If the only fruit you've tasted is Pergolesi,Hadyn,Mozart,W.FBach ,J.C.Bach others of that period and like these apples and oranges if you go to the concert hall and here La Mer or the Ligeti violin concerto and if you were looking for the taste of the apples and oranges you know then the fault will always be yours and we will always be dissatisfied til our brains and hearts open up ! In response to what you said about hearing music and only coming back to some of it .You mention great music but I know you also know fun , novelty, kookiness, weirdness,crazines, diffuse and dense moments so fullof event we can;t een remember the last second but are thrilled anyway . all of these and more can be reasons for going back to a piece . Right ? We all know that we don't always want the best music all the time . Boulez 2nd sonata is my bible (even though I know nothing about it except I can identify many of its pages and know its series-so what that isn;t the music anymore than Bach's bminor's passion look on the page or the arcane stuff inside it is being registered when I listen the slow movement of Beethoven 's Hammerklavier or Brahms 2nd concerto is not music for every hour of the day . I hear thousands of pieces music every year .Much I can't remember because of the density in much of the music being written today . Much I say is for certain moods. I'm finding some very old music that seems new .the renaissance madrigals that I'm completely unfamiliar with as well as buber and alot of pre-Baroque sounds new to me .even Purcell's airs sem odd to me now as does Elizabethan court and tavern music . I bring up all of this because in addition to the notions you explicate and address so well in your video -the first idea what I want tolisten , or play right now or what will I memorize or work on the piano today seems a rather different but connected issue . Your point of engaging with contemporary art in general is a well know response . you get what you put in it and what you see and hear depends on what you have been exposed to . this is why pop music is so easy to write . Any 6 year old can come up with an aba form without ever thinking aboutit cuz it's so established in his 'setting s" .Ok.Next to Carl Ruggles whho i never cared for . Now I'll have abetter idea of what he's trying to do.

I love your channel. What worries me as a composer is how do I know whether a piece is 'born old'...

I find myself in perfect accord with you.

Real good points in this video! I'd love to hear how you think about and respond to the statement "at least the audience won't tell if you play a wrong note" with regards to contemporary repertoire. As a pianist focusing on 20th and 21th century music, I often have friends (who aren't into this kind of music) drop that line on me when talking about upcoming gigs, etc. I get that it's meant as a joke, but I feel like it also makes some really nasty value judgements about contemporary music. Have you run into this?

Thank you for the video. I was wondering if you take the same approach to popular music of all types? Or do you consider popular music of inherently lesser artistic value, and therefore give it less analytical thought? Also you touched on it in this video and mentioned it a bit more in another, but can you expand on what you think music critics do wrong? You said (paraphrasing here) that rock critics tend to poorly/incorrectly explain the technical aspects, but most often just say what they feel or thought about the album. I guess what I'm asking is how do you think these kinds of critics can be better? Again thanks for the amazing videos.

Great video

Thank Your kind reply Best Regards

I have found new music in the concert hall to be largely devoid of a signature or salient idea. Much of it is textural for the sake of being so, which academia endorses, but it's not new. These techniques were pioneered more the 60 years ago and feel as engrained in the repertoire as anything pre dating the modern period. If I want to hear modern, I will turn to Crumb, Varése, Ligeti, Xenakis, etc etc. I find I'm enjoying much of Rautavaara's work because it straddles some of these modern concepts but with ostensibly a tonal core or foundation that roots it. I myself compose work that also dances with modernism but, as Prokofiev related, I employ these for contrast rather than a static unrelenting narrative.

Hello Samuel! i just started to know about contemporary music since i saw your channel. But i barely know any modern or contemporary composers to listen. Do you have any suggestions? Best Regards

In my experience, most of contemporary music pieces are tempting to listen to again and again, and in fact, when I listen to them, I enjoy them over and over again. However, new works come out every day, so I doesn't have much time to listen back to the works I listened to in the past.

Yes!

Interesting idea: write a pop style piece incorporating serial techniques and aleatoric elements. It might be a cool comment on commercial dance music of today to score for 808s and synthesizers with the intention of expanding the pop color palette! Only issue I’d see is that composers in my opinion are partial to noise music, and it might lead them down an electro-acoustic “noise path” so to speak, when I mean to re-shade today’s popular music with a more esoteric sound.

suspend judgement. well put.

Its a very common feature of creative production that most of what is created is rubbish and only small fraction of what's worthwhile gets a lot of attention. See Pareto Distribution. Even a genius like Shakespeare, only a small percentage of his enormous body of work gets much attention.

Is the Thumbnail of this video from an actual score or did you make/get it only for this Video?

Maybe one of the problems is the constant search for "new" in contemporary music because not everything you try works the first time. If we throw out forms and traditional notation then the constant search for new invariably end up with works that are studies and improvisations. Studies in performance, or studies interpretation or studies in something else. . . and it's not just a small percentage of pieces are unrelistenable (if I may) but many works also have a small percentage of really neat stuff - and a lot of crap in the one piece. Constant work on the process can inevitably lead to good works or a style (but if it is so long in the refining process is it even really new at that point?) but the many pieces leading up to the good ones aren't. . . and who knows if you are listening to their good ones or their crap? (Anyway, . . . I've been drinking so . . . sorry for my logic at the moment)

What do you think is the function of modern classical music (or art music) ? Is it the same as the function of common classical music: giving people enjoyment?

It's actually not that easy to get to know contemporary music besides the big figures of 20th century. Those are performed frequently at philharmony but not much current 21st century music from younger composers like you. What might be a good way to find out about these because Im interested in new trends and approaches of music. Also it is difficult for me to see where contemporary music is going. Now, knowing that this is never an easy topic to predict music of the future and there has been a more or less natural evolution of music from renaissance on, it seems even more difficult now. Some people call it a dead end as limits have been explored and different composeres now seem to go different paths. But maybe thats wrong perception on my part.

Alex Ross is a great source re: critics of contemporary music.

it's really unfortunate that all new music tends to get kind of 'clumped in' together in the same awkward pot for many people ... same with anything i suppose. But we forget - all the greats were in the same pot at one point ...

Samuel, it would be immensely interesting (as all your presentations are) if you could reveal your own path to finding new music. The vast diversity and understandably the lack of useful categories for new music must leave you yourself with the same problem you cover for your audience in this video. Can you give some concrete ways that you search for music that you may like. My wife says that the new music of interest will find you, but I wholly disagree. I have had to search out for the unusual and sometimes rare composers and musics in contemporary genre. So how do you go about searching for something that is worth your while. You can't just sit back and let people recommend this composer, or artist, or composition; you must have a concrete way of beginning a search for those gems out there. If you can, please share how (where, why, and so on) you begin that search. What is the path and markers you look for etc. For example, say I never heard of Samuel Andreyev's music and that not enough information is about that music on the internet or in magazines I've never heard of, where would you start that journey to find his music? Love your presentations, analyses, and general tone of curiosity and vitality.

Which is the piece notated in the thumbnail of this video?

What's the outro music?

Old arguments to explain why a lot of music is not comprehensible (it is because the listeners are ignorant), mixed in with the recurrent obsession with the "new". The first argument was, and probably is, very common especially in music schools, bound together with the pretentious idea that the audience needs to be "educated". The obsession with the "new" is also a recurrent affliction that plagues a lot of 20th century art "movements". One could spend a lot of time trying to explain why art and the "new" have little to do with each other. It might be sufficient to say that novelty is the most irrelevant category for a listener, and certainly not anything that should be used to justify "patience" for a work that is not comprehensible. And trying to be "new" is probably the worst advise one could give to an artist (sadly, it was actually the advise that I was given in music school!). As an artist one has to try to express something that is of relevance to the human experience, and try to be true in the process. Want to be new? You might be better off joining a marketing department. They try to sell "new" products every year.

That habit of identifying quality with formal innovation… There was nothing unheard of in the style of Barber's adagio for strings when it was created. "Born old" as you say in this video. Same thing with the fugue works by Bach, a very outdated style of writing when he composed his "Art of…". This esthetic credo is very conformist, a 20th century convention. My guess is that in the next decades and in the context of the immense problems and tragedies we'll face (global warming etc.), that belief system will become simply incongruous. Formal innovation will still happen and be enjoyed but won't remain that central requisite and convention it became, especially here in France. Depth, authenticity, communicability will matter maybe like never before. And as regards to 20th century music we'll have the critical distance to discern real composers (Ligeti, Messiaen, Chosta, Florentz…) from anecdotal innovators (Cage, Feldman, Barraqué,…) who were poor composers. The Zeitgeist is already changing.

Do you think that the audience of contemporary music is increasing due to youtube etc.?

me the blink

Can you please create videos on extremely dissonant music composers like Xenakis?

Serious question: Do you ever think that the requirement of video instruction on how to listen to and appreciate contemporary music is perhaps an indicator that it simply isn't good music, similar to how a joke isn't funny if you have to explain it?

I don´t like more than 1% of Mozart´s works, so it is the same with older music.

Excuse me, but you have to treat your nervous system, boy...the eyelids are very altered...a very high energy drain...it's going to hurt you...take care!

This is nonsense.