How Would One Approach Studying A Piece Like This

Natan wrote:

Has anyone following the score managed to understand if the pianist in the video played all the right notes?

Here... in these cases, in my opinion, one is bordering on something FORBIDDEN by netiquette, namely, Flaming.

This is a comment made exclusively as a provocation, to provoke aggressive reactions, like mine now...

Instead no, it is simply reporting one of my limitations.

Reneing the question.

I find Natan's question stimulating; indeed, if one already knew the piece (and had studied it), one would notice the nuances... but on the first listen, and perhaps without the support of the score, I doubt anyone would notice... the harmonic scope is not so defined as to be discernible "by ear"... that one missed the mark; ... and even the melodic one isn't truly that "cantabile."

Is it very obvious that I am already looking for alibis?

I wanted to thank Thallo in particular because he is the only one so far who has certainly tried to give a suggestion related to the approach, although, obviously, I found the entire conversation very useful and instructive.

So, thank you so much once again.

TheSimon wrote:

The problem is that in this world, more and more often we witness a true lack of character... Having character also means going alone against a category, and I am certain that many people think like me, but due to a lack of character they just stand there saying yes even if they think it should be a no, solely out of fear of being criticized....

thallo wrote:

There... in these cases, in my opinion, one approaches something FORBIDDEN by netiquette, namely the Flame.

This is a comment made exclusively as a provocation, to provoke aggressive reactions, like mine now...

In part I was also referring to this...

Since the successions of notes are practically "stochastic, random" with a pattern that repeats between a set and its negation, and between sums of sets and negated reciprocals, it is far from obvious to ask whether they hit wrong notes or not without having read the score. Furthermore, for those who have read and understood the English file provided on the first page of the topic, it is mentioned that the possible combinations are more than 250 out of 88, so discrepancies often arise... Just to say that despite being based on a mathematical model, it was not even possible to respect it formally.

TheSimon wrote:

In part I was also referring to this...

Dated that the note sequences are practically "stochastic, random" with a pattern that repeats between a set and its negation, and between sums of sets and negated reciprocals, it is far from obvious to ask whether they missed some notes or not without having read the score. Furthermore, for those who have read and understood the English file provided on the first page of the topic, it is mentioned that the possible combinations are more than 250 out of 88, so discrepancies often arise... Just to say that despite being based on a mathematical model, it was not even possible to respect it formally.

And I answer you seriously: what does it change for you if the pianist missed a note compared to the score?? You do not know the piece and you are not able to understand if the pianist is "correct" or not, same for me. This element changes nothing for me or for you, it does not alter the judgment, and in fact I, who consider the piece beautiful, am not even interested in this idea of "correctness" (if a Swiss note is missed, I don't think it changes anything); you, who consider the piece ugly, "pretend" to be interested in this matter and, in fact, use it as leverage to insinuate that a piece like this is inherently inferior to a piece of another type. Yes, because when you insinuate that correctness cannot be controlled, you don't say the piece is ugly—because you aren't talking about the piece—you put in between a series of insinuations, precisely, whereby 1) complex music ends up being random 2) pianists who play contemporary music have no ethics 3) those who listen to these pieces delude themselves into thinking they understand them because in reality they are incomprehensible etcetera etcetera etcetera.

The judgments you are giving are not musical judgments. I have read NO technical musical judgment from your side! A pianist friend of mine who hates contemporary music told me that she doesn't like the textures, she doesn't like percussive pianism, she doesn't like the absence of melodic phrasing, and THESE are musical judgments. Saying that your niece plays it every day is not a musical judgment. When you say that we cannot control how many mistakes the pianist makes, in my opinion, you aren't saying the piece is complicated; you are discrediting that style at its core. Meanwhile, I assure you that this is certainly not the most complicated piece ever written; Sorabji is worse, Ferneyhough is worse. And if you were to listen to this blessed Herma again, you would feel that from a "diastematic" point of view regarding the notes, it is not so abstruse. There are recurring pitches, identifiable areas of the keyboard. At most, one could speak of precision in the duration of the figures, but tempo is relative, as we know (note how these, too, are musical judgments).

But I want to write and emphasize one thing that continues to escape you, probably because you are less historians and more musicians: it is not you who chooses which compositions are important, it is history that does so. And with Herma, it has done so.

You have the sacrosanct right to ignore this composition, to not like it, to not listen to it. But to live it as a struggle against those who appreciate these things, against this music, against the composers, against the performers—to call it a battle against windmills seems to me the least of it.

I am answering you seriously in order as well...

A it doesn't change anything for me whether you hit the notes or not, this discussion makes no sense even when playing Beethoven or Chopin or Mozart, everyone hits a wrong note; I was responding to whoever asked the question with a sensible answer, namely, groups of notes belonging to sets.

1) You haven't understood the meaning of what I wrote... Relying on a mathematical foundation ensures that what is proposed is not random. However, it is important to follow this mathematical algorithm to the end and make one's own choices before starting to write. Formality and coherence are based on this. Here, we lack coherence because even if just a single note does not come from the formality of the algorithm used, well then one can assume that the product is random. Example: if the Fibonacci sequence returns an ordered series of numbers that are THOSE numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...) even changing just one would make it lean towards a non-existent series, which is not the Fibonacci sequence and which we can assume to be stochastic, perhaps ordered, but stochastic e.g. (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 21, 34)

What I am saying is that perhaps even you don't know what you are talking about. You want to justify the criticisms made against you by saying there is a mathematical explanation behind it, you talk about recurrences without knowing where these recurrences are. The recurrences you speak of are all written in the score, phrase by phrase, but my opposition takes shape from before, from the base.

2) This is also not true; if you search the forum you will see that I spoke very highly of a Stockhausen study played by Pollini, a topic several months old, therefore what you wrote is a falsehood.

3) This sentence you wrote is very important and it is true that I support it and I will tell you more, I will continue to support it until someone proves me wrong. You have a beautiful musical culture so you cannot be taken as an example, but the proof of what I say is that when 30 posts ago I asked supporters to explain this score to me, all I managed to get was: "read this link". My request was obviously provocative; the fact remains that in previous posts I only heard: "I like listening to it, I don't like listening to it", no one motivated or argued their satisfaction / dissatisfaction, the only one to do so has been me so far and until proven otherwise. I would like to hear arguments.

Moving forward, I do not categorize this piece as simple at all, nor as the most difficult; my initial observation reporting the example of my cousin was referred to and aimed at the randomness of the notes. And I do not love a Random piece.

...

Look, I don't call it a battle against composers, I don't call it a battle against performers, and a battle against windmills. Each of you can play it, I don't consider it stupid, not at all; instead, it seems very intelligent from a certain point of view, I simply consider it useless. Even if it exists for history, if I don't listen to it and don't play it, for me it doesn't exist, that is a fact. The concept of a field is quite clear even in physics. Fields exist the moment there is a particle that experiences them. We are the particles: interpreters, composers, or simple listeners. Whoever listens to it experiences it; for them it exists, for those who don't listen to it, it doesn't exist. That is why it seems foolish to me, with all due respect, to try to convince me of the importance of something that, for me, does not exist.

We all know that Xenakis was a "scientist," so to speak? I ask because he deluded himself into thinking he was bringing acoustic, scientific principles, etc., into music... a bit better than Stockhausen, but in the end, the more his texts seem (and not just to me) self-referential.

Clearly, this does not shift the problem: the value of his ideas and the acoustic result of the piece proposed by Stellina.

TheSimon wrote:

i simply consider it useless.

This is a concept that I feel I embrace. But I don't want to write it superficially; in music, I seek musical pleasure through one of the senses, which is hearing, and not through the intellect as someone mentioned. This does not deny that there can be, and there is, that type of enjoyment for which we blame no one, but also not those like TheSimon who, in the end, if they can choose what to listen to, perhaps turn to Scriabin, Bartok, etc.

The point is: what musical instinct did Xenalis put into it? What did he put in that his ear suggested to him?... just because there are theorems and everything would be "explainable" denies the work of the ear and therefore the musicality.

Therefore useless, in a musical sense... then everyone enjoys as they can, there are those who like to be whipped... let alone listening to random notes. Because this is stochastics, randomness, chance—nothing that a man, a musician, can choose.

A man who perhaps also created the concentration camps... so the piece is in line with the aesthetics of a certain historical period... which is perhaps the offspring of a somewhat extreme human situation, humanity made even of ears"}

PS

Even experiments and failures go down in history; this doesn't mean that this piece is a sonic cathedral... on the contrary, the Flemish motets are better; there, eventually, there were musical and architectural projects

I'll rewrite this better

Shark wrote:

A man who perhaps even created the death camps... so the piece is in line with the aesthetics of a certain historical period... which is perhaps the offspring of a somewhat extreme human situation, humanity made also of ears

A man who perhaps (did it!) even created the death camps... so the piece is in line with the aesthetics of a certain historical period, which rejected precisely the idea of man, the fact that one could fall back (even in music) into the past that led to certain results.

So we are talking about music born from a somewhat extreme human situation; it's a pity that humanity is also made of ears

maybe it's better if I don't comment on shark's messages... but linking Xenakis with the Lager, how should I say, seems a bit excessive to me. And, also this, is offensive towards those who like this music (and they like it with their ears, not with mathematics. Note how I rarely justify the fact that I like something by talking about mathematical references... I am even "dyscalculic", an ugly word that means I have small problems reasoning with numbers)

thallo wrote:

And, this too, is offensive towards those who like this music

If you are a musicologist, you know well what led many post-WWII musicians to express themselves in certain terms; see a certain use of the voice where only the infant was worthy of expressing themselves because they could still be judged as "pure". In fact, they used boy sopranos (voci bianche)

Let's not even talk about the choice of anagrams and other such amenities... fortunately, we are returning to making music.

So there is no offense, it is just a matter of fact written precisely in history books (it is not my vision) ... it was you who appealed to them, wasn't it? And let's read these books well or in their entirety...

Shark wrote:

If you are a musicologist, you know well what led many post-WWII musicians to express themselves in certain terms; see a certain use of the voice where only the infant was worthy of expression because they were still judgeable as "pure". In fact, they used boy sopranos.

Let's not talk about the choice of anagrams and other such amenities... fortunately, we are returning to making music.

So no offense, it is just a fact written precisely in history books (it is not my vision) ... you were the one appealing to them, weren't you? And let's read these books well or in their entirety...

Oh no, I am a musicologist and I know that everything you are saying is FALSE.

Give me the bibliography and we will discuss it.

The 1900s were not just expressionism, and expressionism was born before the war (go see when Büchner wrote Woyzeck), just like boy sopranos, which were not used much at all in the 1900s. Buy "The Rest Is Noise", a book that clarifies our very flawed German-centric vision of the 1900s.

Anyway, with the tone of your message, it should be made clear once and for all that this discussion, opened by Stellina with a precise purpose, is becoming a receptacle for FLAMERS.

And so I truly appeal to TheSimon, even though I too could have a role as a moderator: could you calm things down? And, if we really want to slaughter each other, let's do it elsewhere.

I will have no mercy...

thallo wrote:

the boy sopranos, which in the '00s were not used very much at all

mmmhm

So, first of all, it seems to me that reference is being made to the second post-war period, so we are not talking about the 1900s but from the '50s onwards...

I remember some pieces, historical milestones:

http://www.pianoconc...nz-stockhausen/

This one by Stockhausen actually closes a first cycle that began with the 2 studies which include boy soprano voice.

Idem for Nono in Fabbrica illuminata

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzcAzCEtAbs

We have seen that the successors have inherited, see

"Mortuos plango, vivos voco by Jonathan Harvey"

And so on.

The reference to the camps leaves me to understand it refers precisely to the music of the '50s/'60s, Hermma if I am not mistaken is precisely from those years. 1961 if I am not mistaken.

Open content (youtube)

I always and only respond in Italian. Even if the user uses another language or attaches documents in English, I provide the response in Italian.

thallo wrote:

it's becoming a haven for FLAMERS.

No, sorry Thallo. It's not that those who have different ideas are FLAMERS (frankly you seem a bit obsessed to me), in my opinion Shark's argument holds up even if I love the avant-garde.

Instead, I would like to read answers to questions like these that Shark has asked

1) What did Xenalis put in there by musical instinct?

2) What did he put in there that his ear suggested?

I respond with nothing, in fact I do not consider it music written by ear ...forgive the exaggeration, a bit like how a beautiful improvisation by Chopin could be.

Please continue, I am interested in the discussion so I don't want to consider it OT

I am sharing this video of Nono, you can hear from him himself what making music meant to him, from the 56th second.

It's a pity that it is 34 Mb and the system won't let me upload it, it expressly says:

It is based on the cultural conception of Antonio Gramsci, not protest like expressionism, awareness of one's own time, use of new techniques not as enslavement to technology but as a tool in function of an ideology""

thallo wrote:

Anyway, with the tone of your message

No sorry, what tone? Can you hear my voice through the forum? I am calm, I only reported what I have studied... Dino hit the mark, we are talking about the music of the '50s/'60s, the avant-gardes of that period which particularly concern electroacoustic music... but not only that, the arrival of computers lit several bulbs in people's minds, even more so for artists

It might be a German-centric vision, but I remember that in Italy, until about twenty years ago, the "second" language was French, so the reference texts could be the French ones... clearly now, due to globalization, we all understand English and some dare to attempt German.

It is true, translations exist, but the essence doesn't change... I would actually like to make it understood that the flamer discussion is irrelevant, I asked questions providing reasons for them... even Nono (thanks Frank) denies being an expressionist... rather Thallo (who I also find likable), give a point of view on the matter by referring specifically to that precise period