Back when I was in undergrad - hard to believe it was actually a full decade ago - I had the 'pleasure' of taking a course on music in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Essentially, although we were lured in at the beginning with pretty nineteenth century waltzes, we very quickly moved past that to the beginning of the twentieth century studying a composer whose works pushed the definition of music: Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, his earlier stuff - like Verklarte Nacht - actually sounded good, but then we learned about the early 20th century notion of "liberation of the UGLY" in music and art which apparently meant, as far as I could tell, that art was supposed to look as bad as possible and music was supposed to sound like noise just to be "new"... marked in Schoenberg's case by breaking completely from tonality and creating pieces which, to me at least, sound like someone with no sense of music and a blindfold on walked over to the piano and started pressing notes at random without paying attention to such things as how the notes sounded in combination with each other. (To see what I mean, take a listen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrjg3jzP2uI for a representative example). Everything after that seemed even worse... his magnum opus seemed to be a 21-part opera called "Pierrot lunaire", each act of which consisted of someone singing in a "Sprechstimme" (half singing, half speaking) where the pitches of the notes were almost completely random along with two or three instruments playing out of tune, with no pair of instruments being in sync with each other or with the Sprechstimme. And don't get me started on his 'twelve-tone' system which he invented next...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of the modern classical music, starting from that Schoenberg noise, does not really strike me as MUSIC because it is not created to sound good and, at times, almost sounds as if it was designed to be as unpleasant-sounding as humanly possible!
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Everything after that seemed even worse... his magnum opus seemed to be a 21-part opera called "Pierrot lunaire", each act of which consisted of someone singing in a "Sprechstimme" (half singing, half speaking) where the pitches of the notes were almost completely random along with two or three instruments playing out of tune, with no pair of instruments being in sync with each other or with the Sprechstimme. And don't get me started on his 'twelve-tone' system which he invented next...
I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of the modern classical music, starting from that Schoenberg noise, does not really strike me as MUSIC because it is not created to sound good and, at times, almost sounds as if it was designed to be as unpleasant-sounding as humanly possible!
William//Slytherin