Wednesday, February 02, 2005
re: what's the matter with kids today?
Personally, I think it's healthy for people to listen to minimalism, romantic music, atonal, 12-tone, grunge, whatever. What perhaps is not so healthy is for people to be fixated on styles. I'm not surprised that may be a reaction to the more recent trend in less dissonant music, just as minimalism was viewed (perhaps with some validity) as a reaction to the impersonal, academic music of Boulez, Carter, and others from the 60s.
One interesting trend, which I think is a good one, is for people from many different musical backgrounds gravitating to repetition as well as dissonance. I can't explain it, but am gratified that so many people from diverse backgrounds (jazz, classical, rock, etc) are getting interested in Morton Feldman's works. He's not a "minimalist" nor is he academic. Yet his works (particularly the later, lengthier ones) seem to appeal to a lot of people, myself included. I knew very little of his music until last year, and now have 2.5 GB of Feldman alone on my iPod. I even posted a silly list of best Feldman works on my blog.
Many people, however, seem to judge performances of Feldman based on how long they are-the longer the better. I'm not sure this is either appropriate or fair. The Ives Ensemble's performance of Feldman's uninterrupted String Qt #2 (or "FSQ2" for those in the know) clocks in over 5 hours, while the Flux Quartet's recording is just over 6 hours; I like both performances, and neither one is more valid than the other. A work like Triadic Memories has no metronome marking whatsoever, so any reasonable interpretation is valid. Besides, humans are not machines; metronome markings really should be approximate, and open to interpretation.
posted by David Toub
11:01 AM
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