Here is another "genius"

I would define him rather as a soporific pianist..... I can't manage 42 seconds more.... what tedium, but they all do the same thing!?!?!?!?! honestly I feel like all 50 studies of Czerny's Op. 740 one after another.... in these moments I miss Schoenberg and Berg.....

What a shame there isn't a bit of irony in these performances....

A minimal attempt to communicate a shred of enjoyment to the listener, some quirkiness, a wink to tell you "now I'll show you".....

In the video I would have made the dancers trip... I would have had a carpenter enter sawing the legs of the stool.... I would have shown a close-up of a pig in a tuxedo sipping champagne at the table.... I would have placed bombs connected to the keyboard, so that the pianist would have to avoid the explosive keys while continuing to play the melody anyway (this is a quote)

I always expect more from this youth....

But it is always too solemn, and terribly serious.

Is it possible they don't grasp all of this?

scattered considerations:

1) I don't like the piece.

2) This piece belongs to that "genre" that today we might define as easy listening piano, which is a very specific genre, with a large international following, a considerable amount of money involved and, as you can see from the music video, "visual" languages very similar to those of pop.

3) From point 2 follows, in my opinion, a simple consideration: judging this genre using the categories of classical music is wrong. As they say in these situations, if we judge a fish by its ability to climb trees, we will always find it inadequate.

4) As I often happen to say, if we want to give a serious judgment and do not want to turn these topics into bar conversations, we must strive to understand the music from the inside, not from the outside. In ethnomusicology, one speaks of an "etic" point of view and an "emic" point of view. The former is an external point of view, the one according to which folk singers are out of tune. The latter is an internal point of view, the one that judges a musical genre with respect to the values of that same musical genre. Well, in my opinion, it would be interesting to strive to judge this piece "as if" we were fans of this genre. To understand, for example, why Michael Nyman was better and this is worse.

5) Michael Nyman is a great composer and was a great musicologist and music critic. You may not appreciate his compositions, but it would be nice if everyone strove to distinguish their judgments of taste from considerations of a professional nature. Do you like Ockeghem? Probably not much, but I don't think you would start saying that it would have been better to tear him down. Who knows why with Nyman and other contemporary composers, on the other hand, scornful judgments are wasted. It is possible, and would be desirable, to recognize "famous" composers for their professionalism, and a place in art history. Michael Nyman is beyond doubt one of the most important living film music composers and has enviable fame and ability also in other genres.

I appreciate Thallo's contribution, but his children are not quite up to his standard....they are even further behind despite arriving half a century later

thallo wrote:

Michael Nyman is without a doubt one of the most important living film music composers and has an
enviable reputation and ability in other genres as well.

...and Delord?

I haven't heard any other genres and above all, where is the film? So what remains? A useless repetition. Frankly, closing my eyes and listening to the piece in question, I am not inclined to say: there, Delord! On the contrary, I am inclined to say... he is just one in the crowd

(let's not specify the type of crowd, it's better that way)

Frankly, there are people who improvise songs on the pf (including vocals, if they want) ... that are more beautiful

Bah...

I expressed myself this way because I share Thallo's judgment, but listening to this "stuff" took me back in time to my high school days.

There was a classmate of mine who had no kind of musical knowledge; he only knew the names of the notes and how they were arranged on the piano keys. He didn't know what a chord was, he knew nothing at all about music, but he had a small electronic keyboard, one of those 61-key Bontempi ones given to him by his dad as a Christmas present when he was a child.

He enjoyed putting a few notes together with both hands, and I assure you that the result was more or less what was obtained by this "Delord" in his video.

We can talk about ethnomusicology and comparative ethnomusicology as much as we want, but in my opinion, people are getting increasingly incensed without ever finding the end of the thread; to resolve these messes, one must always bring the issues back not to taste, but to common sense...

I agree 100%. I am relatively interested in the composition; I am talking about the performance.

If the phenomenon is explained as a change in aesthetics, whereby today a raw, naive way of playing is preferred... where the lack of basic technical foundations is even appreciated (I am not talking about virtuosity, I am talking about the ability to make the instrument sound as the instrument is capable of sounding)... then this aesthetic evolution may be criticized as a product of lack of culture.

It goes without saying that snobbery and intolerance should be censored: everyone gets the musicians they deserve.

remember point 1, I don't like the piece :-) but in my opinion, saying it was played badly is not enough to justify its low level. How should I put it, if it were the Moonlight Sonata it would still be a masterpiece, even if played badly, and we could say "Delord writes well but plays badly".

In my opinion, however, the problems with the piece are different. It's long, you can't tell what the pauses are for, the harmonic progression is always the same, and also the rhythmic configuration; the piano writing is banal, there isn't even a recognizable melody.

Let's make a comparison with Nyman's most famous piece, "The Sacrifice" from "The Piano" soundtrack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsxHuW26rc8

here the piece is not very long, it has an engaging structure, a climax, harmonic movement; even the single-voice counterpoint writing (which we have discussed elsewhere) manages to be varied, because the notes that form the melody are in different places every time, and with the final slowing down—a very simple procedure—it manages to give a sense of conclusion, of cadence, and in a very original way.

But I will also let you hear William Duckworth, a less well-known composer but who is the true spiritual father of easy listening piano and post-minimalist compositions for piano. This is the entirety of his first book of preludes.

he writes preludes, which is a kind of "stroke of genius" because effectively all these compositions are preludes, or toccatas, in intention and form (free). The single-voice counterpoint writing is varied in a thousand ways, with very interesting internal rhythmic subdivisions, despite being minimalist. He manages to create variety with minimal means: piano and forte, oppositions between different parts of the keyboard, major-minor ambiguity. From a harmonic point of view, he seems like Bartók, quite unlike Allevi! And that is why when I hear Allevi I get angry, because people like Duckworth HAVE succeeded in making post-minimalism for piano interesting. Okay, they are not absolute masterpieces, but they are interesting pieces, not just pleasant ones.

Open content (youtube)

Open content (youtube)

Thanks for Duckworth .

Unknown to me.