Let's face it, who actually sat down and listened to Webern for the first time and thought "that is absolutely brilliant!!!!"? Have any of you?
My dissonant emancipation started in my first year at university. In their infinite wisdom they started the first year of our music degree with Music of the 20th Century and an instruction to read Erno Lendvai's book about Bartok's string quartets before we even arrived. At the time I considered Vaughan Williams to be dangerously avant-garde so for a time I really did question my decision to study music.
I told Bojan Bujic, my tutor at the time, and someone who had been taught by someone had been taught by Schoenberg, that the music of the 20th century "hurt my ears". No, really, these are the words I used. I just didn't get Bartok, let alone Webern and Berg. Or Boulez.
However, experiencing a variety of music outside lectures and tutorials helped enourmously. I was gently coerced into being on the committee of the "Oxford Contemporary Music Festival" and ended up being one of the performers in Erik Satie's Vexations (which isn't really all that dissonant or atonal, just odd) and working front of house in a performance of Messiaen's Des Canyons aux Etoiles. I don't remember much about the piece but I do remember finding the timbres, if not the melodies, fascinating. I've spoken in an earlier blog about the effect Stravinsky had on me - and it was after one of these committee meetings that I first heard Rite of Spring - but it was meeting other people, other youngsters like me (well, except the working class Welsh part) which made me reconsider what I considered to be "not really music".
Singing avant garde vocal works also helped. Hideously difficult though it was, Jonathan Harvey's Come Holy Ghost was an amazing piece to learn and perform (even if I totally murdered the tenor solo in my final year) and is one I still use to teach aleatoricism. Even Tippett's St John's Service had good points (eg it was brief if nothing else). Of course, like most new things it was exposure to atonality, electronic music, music theatre (no, not Lloyd Webber and Les poxy Mis...Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle etc) and so on that allowed someone like me to start to not only appreciate but to enjoy what was, at the time, still fairly avant garde music.
I've come full circle now. I rave to my pupils about Bartok and force them all to listen to and study the score of the last book of Mikrokosmos if they are struggling for a role model in composition. I get my first year pupils to listen to Pierrot Lunaire and Berio's Sequenza for Voice to learn about using the voice expressively. We also listen to parts of 8 Songs for a Mad King and Curlew River and compare the use of voice and flute in duet. All fairly weird stuff but, at 11/12, the pupils don't yet fully realise that it is "weird". With older classes I also blackout a room and play them Threnody: The Victims of Hiroshima. I'm not saying that they all dash to amazon.com to try to buy Penderecki's greatest hits at the end of the lesson but their ears and minds have been opened a little and a lot earlier than mine were. And there's always one or two who do want to borrow the cd and have a listen, get hold of the score, find out more...
Older generations always complain about the music of younger generations. Listening to the grindcore metal (or whatever its called) of some of my pupils it reminds me of music I listened to as a first year undergraduate. Loud, dark timbres - imagine Varese played by guitars detuned down a 5th with heavy distortion and you'll get the idea. How can these kids not like dissonant music?
Dissonance is relative. The church bells I heard on Sunday morning near Milan on tour in 1989 sounded incredibly dissonant as I was hearing the wrong overtone (they were playing Ave, ave, ave Maria which I knew in the carol arrangement by Andrew Carter). Gamelan music sounds dissonant to most "western" ears. Quite a bit of medieval choral music sounds dissonant due to the rules and characteristics of music at that time. A 7th is dissonant but does a dominant 7th chord sound dissonant? A suspension is a dissonance and, back in the day, an unprepared suspension was only a close 2nd to murder (to music theorists at least) but the suspensions make the resolutions so powerful and meaningful.
So, open your mind and ears and listen. There is no such thing as bad music.
Except country and western
No comments:
Post a Comment