r/SubredditDrama • u/awithrow • Aug 29 '12
Dust up in r/classicalmusic over whether or not Stravinsky ruined modern classical music.
/r/classicalmusic/comments/yzi7o/stravinsky_in_rehearsal_his_energy_is_inspiring/c60b0qe43
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u/Dray11 Aug 29 '12 edited Aug 29 '12
It's like watching the Duke of Devonshire and the Earl of Wessex arguing over who's hand maiden makes the best scones.
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u/tits_hemingway Aug 29 '12
Wessex can sup on a satchel of dicks, Devonshire victorious!
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u/AgonistAgent Aug 29 '12
The nice side effect of SRD is discovering all the different arguments you never expected in a field.
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Aug 29 '12
You seem to either 1) Have a vendetta against Stravinsky or 2) had a professor that had a vendetta against Stravinsky.
that dude had a point. The drama-source guy has a raging hatred of Stravinsky for whatever reason, and won't refute anything that goes against his thought.
Look at the composers writing in twelve tone music. One of which even wrote an article essentially saying that "my music is not for the average music listener and I don't care if you don't like it." [sic] I think it's comments like that, and the mind set like that, that removed classical music as a "popular" art form.
That poster was thinking of Schoenberg, who likened "modern" music to the evolution of transportation from horses to cars. Basically, according to Schoenberg, cars were a superior method of transportation, and even though they skidded on watery roads, people were forced to adapt to them.
He adapted that (in my opinion, unrelated and stupid) metaphor to his music: it's what's new and here, and if you don't like it, it's your fault because this is what music is.
Twelve-tone music is a hideous, a-tonal, mathematical way of creating music, and Schoenberg was famous for it.
I guess OP just hates Stravinsky for being Stravinsky. There were plenty of artists around that time period, that unlike Mozart and Beethoven, (which OP claims that he studied deeply), who were strongly disliked. Stravinsky was writing certain types of music in a period in which they weren't popular in.
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u/LibertyWaffles Aug 29 '12
Twelve-tone music is a hideous, a-tonal, mathematical way of creating music, and Schoenberg was famous for it.
Oh fuck off with that. Have you ever heard Berg's violin concerto? It's just another tool.
I am not a huge fan of total serialism, but 12 tone is fine and has produced good and bad music, like any other system. By the way, what's wrong with atonal?
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u/Gapwick Aug 29 '12
I like how he just throws that monumentally wrong statement out there without any sort of argument to back it up, and then goes on to call everyone else stupid and telling them to "feel free to correct me... if you dare".
"Obama is a space lizard."
"You're wrong."
"If you believe something I've said is inaccurate, please feel free to correct me... if you dare ;)"
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Aug 29 '12
I know nothing about Stravinsky, explain like I'm five what the Rite of Spring was (wikipedia was no help).
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u/tick_tock_clock Aug 29 '12
Generally, the most well-known and famous composers are those who pushed boundaries and did innovative things. Beethoven's symphonies are so different from anything that came before them (and many that came after them), and he is responsible for much of the transition from Mozart-like music into something much more dramatic and emotional.
A lot of other Romantic composers followed his lead, some of them innovating further. But by the end of the 19th Century, Romanticism in music was sort of played out: there were too many sappy waltzes and generic dances, and heart-rending emotion had become expressed in cliché forms.
So people began to innovate. One of the major ways that this happened was through more interesting chromatic possibilities, using all 12 notes instead of just the ones in the scale. Some kept tonality, and some abandoned it (and the latter so enraged that Redditor). But all did something more interesting with it.
This was one of the first modernist pieces. Notice how it's different, still emotional, but in a different way than before. And the tonality is very different, though that's harder to hear on the first listen-through.
At about this time (1910s), Stravinsky wrote three ballets that revolutionized music. Each was very different than anything that had come before (think The Nutcracker).
The Firebird was the first. It's still very much tonal, but it's unexpected for ballet music. People loved it.
So he followed that up with Petrushka. It has the same characteristic modernness, but this time Stravinsky took some more experimental steps with tonality. The main character's theme is in tritones, which are generally considered dissonant and avoided. Here it adds color -- maybe it's not as "pretty" as the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, but it's interesting and well done.
Another great success, so Stravinsky decided to write another ballet. This, the Rite of Spring, was to illustrate the primitive rituals of a pagan Russia. Stravinsky put great effort into creating primitive notes and rhythms, and the end result is something fantastically complicated and vivid: irregular rhythms to represent the not-well-trained village dancers, strange instrumentation to represent the imperfect singers, and violent and energetic rhythms to illustrate the rituals. Here is the famous introduction to the ballet, beginning with a bassoon solo -- but one so high as to shock its audience.
The ballet also had some radical choreography. The dancers imitated tribal rituals rather than traditional ballet. This was too much for the audience at the premiere, and over the scandal of these dancers a fight broke out in the audience.
This is the finale, representing the tribe sacrificing a young girl by forcing her to dance to death. It's ugly, to be sure! But it is so new, so refreshing, so different, and it galvanized another generation of musicians into doing great things.
Some of my favorite pieces of modern-era music, all of which owe something to the move past romanticism:
Candide Overture - Bernstein
Summer Music - Barber
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u/BrokenEnglishUser Aug 29 '12
Metal-as-fuck ballet music that caused very first moshpit in classical music history during its premiere.
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u/UncleMeat Aug 29 '12
It's not an ad hominem. It's just an insult, moron.
Did MeComeFromSRD say something right? Weird.
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u/tick_tock_clock Aug 29 '12
As far as I'm concerned, Stravinsky can speak for himself.
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Aug 29 '12
I saw the Beethoven alien thumbnail on my frontpage and knew the drama would be good. I'm not a fan of a lot of contemporary classical music (I prefer baroque) but I wouldn't waste my time hating on it just because it isn't for me.
tell me, has Justin Beiber premiered his new fugue yet? When will Kanye West improvise on a theme by Albrechtsberger for me? Is Ke$ha planning on conducting her set of variations?
what an elitist comment. Pop music and orchestral music are different and they serve different purposes for its respective audience.
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u/ENovi Aug 30 '12
I'm going to write a micropolyphony piece and name it after you one day.
Oh snap! How does that burn taste?
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u/crackpot123 Aug 29 '12
Obscurity is away from everyone, my friend. Obscurity is the hell where the mediocre go to rot
This is a pretty classic quote coming from what is surely an obscure/unknown musician.
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u/tebee Aug 29 '12
Now we have this... http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-01-14-orchestras14_ST_N.htm[1]
Actually, what's so bad about that? This sounds like an awesome event to me. Something which could have made me, who is not a concert enthusiast, interested in listening to classical music.
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u/IAMA_throwaway_duh Aug 30 '12
In another life this guy would be declaring the Velvet Underground "not music" and saying that it ruined rock'n'roll.
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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '12
this is the fanciest pissing contest I've ever seen. Marvelous!