Music Club: Ouverture (Term XXII Activity #01)

[flyingharmony.livejournal.com]

Activity: Ouverture
Points: Long debate: Participation 10pts, Additional comment: 2pts, 30pts limit.
Deadline: Submit your answers by Monday, April 30th @ 22:59 UTC (timezone converter).
Details: New club leader, new luck, don't they say? Let's start with discussing a fundamental question: Music. We all love music, at least we who joined the music club. But what does music mean? Can we define music like we can define physical laws? What does music mean to us, how does it influence our lives, our thinking, etc? There's lots of material for discussions. As always, you'll get ten points for your initial comment (which should be at least 100-150 words long) and two more for each additional comment (I'm not giving you any limits for this, but please, show that you've put some thought and effort in it, just saying "I agree/don't agree" isn't enough) with a limit of 30 points as a total.

Note: I've turned notifications off for this, so if there are any questions etc, feel free to contact me via PM!

Note #2: As always, please don't forget to sign each comment with your name&house and to check if you're on the roster - there will be no grace periods!

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Victor Hugo recommends you to join the Club.

Comments

[mmailliw.livejournal.com]

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!

William//Slytherin

[slumber.livejournal.com]

I do think that's a pretty interesting viewpoint--and as I was writing up my initial comment here, I wondered if anyone had ever tried to push beyond the boundaries of music as an art form to challenge the common conceptions or ideas of what it was. I'm inclined to think that yes, it still falls under music, and can still be defined as music, but it just becomes something that is evaluated by taste/preference. (Perhaps not positively.) I mean, after all, going by this notion, plenty of artists have become quite known figures because they broke the mold of what was deemed acceptable or normal, right? So if they can do it, who's to say Schoenberg was just ahead of his time? (Still ahead, too, as I agree with your assessment--that video you linked to is kind of disjointed and jarring.)

Evy/Claw