Re: Is lilypond really suitable for composing?

[Guy Stalnaker]

This could have been written about Glass, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Strauss, Puccini, Mahler, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Liszt, or Beethoven.

😀

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018, 8:22 AM Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:

Am 26.03.2018 um 14:52 schrieb Karlin High:
> On 3/25/2018 6:43 AM, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
>> Apparently you haven’t been to any new classical music concerts in
>> the last half-century. It’s*quite* clear that many composers —
>> especially inexperienced ones — have no problem composing dissonant
>> pieces without access to the the actual timbre and overtone
>> composition of the music they’re writing.
>
> "
> There was a time when the first performance of a recent commission
> struck fear into the most broad-minded listener. We used to brace
> ourselves for horror and were rarely disappointed. In those days, the
> struggle to write more atonally than the next man was palpable. No
> self-respecting composer would pen a concord if he wanted to be taken
> seriously by his peers: to do so was to be compared to those who made
> soft-harmony arrangements of famous melodies. Now soft harmony has
> become dignified, with all manner of clever names — tintinnabuli, holy
> minimalism; while popular tunes are quickly identified as being
> ‘chant’, and quoted whole.
> "
> - Peter Phillips
> <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/why-church-music-is-back-in-vogue-and-squeaky-gate-music-has-had-its-day/>
>
>

"Die einen, [seine] ganz besonderen Freunde, behaupten, gerade dieses
Werk sei ein Meisterstück, das sei eben der wahre Stil für die höhere
Musik, und wenn sie jetzt nicht gefällt, so komme das nur daher, weil
das Publikum nicht kunstgebildet genug sei, alle diese hohen Schönheiten
zu fassen; nach ein paar tausend Jahren aber würde sie ihre Wirkung
nicht verfehlen ... [Die Gruppe der wohlwollenden Zuhörer] fürchtet
aber, wenn [er] auf diesem Wege fortwandert, so werde er und das
Publikum übel dabei fahren. Die Musik könne sobald dahin kommen, daß
jeder, der nicht genau mit den Regeln und Schwierigkeiten der Kunst
vertraut ist, schlechterdings gar keinen Genuß bei ihr finde, sondern
durch eine Menge unzusammenhängender und überhäufter Ideen und einen
fortwährenden Tumult aller Instrumente zu Boden gedrückt, nur mit einem
unangenehmen Gefühl der Ermattung den Konzertsaal verlasse."

This is one of my favourite reviews of a first performance. My shot at a
translation:

"One group, the composer's very special friends, proclaim particularly
this composition to be a master work, bearing the genuine style for
higher music, and if people don't like it now, it's just because the
audience isn't studied well enough to grasp all this high beauty; a few
thousand years later it would definitely not miss its effect anymore
[...] Others [the group of benevolent listeners] fear that, if he'd
continue on that track, it might end badly for the composer and the
audience. The music could soon reach a point where anybody who isn't
intimately familiar with the rules and intricacies of the art just won't
get *any* joy from it. Instead they would leave the hall only with an
unpleasant feeling of fatigue, depressed by the amount of disjoint and
cluttered ideas and a continuous turmoil of all instruments."

Unfortunately I don't have the book at hand where I originally copied
this from, so I can't look up the middle section (what the third group,
the vocal opponents, have to say). But I think even with this you get
the gist.

Bets are open what this is about ;-)

Urs


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