I Ran across the following video and thought about the Sibelius Forum while watching it. . . Which is typically all it takes for me to post a link just in case others might find it interesting.
I didn’t know the development towards perfecting the sonar ping was so closely related to Schoenberg.
I think it's beautiful, and of course not as patternless as is suggested.
James, the sheet music is occasionally glimpsed on the monitor in the background in the video. I suppose with good resolution and a pause button one could grab it in its entirety.
I think the premise of the talk was pretty absurd. Of course we will find patterns. Our perceptions aren't mathematically precise; we will ignore differences in durations in order to perceive a pattern; we will ignore some notes and hear "implied" notes in order to perceive a pattern. I didn't particularly like the piece, but not because there was no pattern. (Maybe because I had to work too hard to perceive a pattern, but not because the pattern wasn't there.)
And the tie-in with Schoenberg was ridiculous. The whole point of a tone row is to create a pattern. The pattern is not dependent on classic tonality, but it is absolutely present. Every note of a true tone row composition is part of the row's pattern. And, or course, much of Schoenberg's music is full of very deliberate rhythmic patterns. The speaker's argument might have been a little stronger if he's picked a more recent composer - Boulez, perhaps - but only a little.
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Patrick O'Keefe
Sib 7.1.3, GPO4, NotePerformer, lots of EWQL stuff
Win7 x64 Pro Intel i7-4771, 3.50Ghz, 16GB RAM
The stated premise was dubious. Interesting, though, that there seems to be an audience sector who can find beauty in just about ANY series of pitches! They must have very happy lives ☺
> The stated premise was dubious. Interesting, though, that there seems to be an audience sector who can find beauty in just about ANY series of pitches! They must have very happy lives ☺
I know I do ;-)
As for the perception of pattern, yes it is of course very true that we will find a pattern any and everywhere - it's what we do. Not to mention we are (probably) analog creatures living in an analog world (maybe) so minuscule variations in rhythm are interpreted more like rubato than actually being different note/pause lengths. In this light, the piece had a very observable rhythmic pattern at times. As for the pitches... A wonderful melody! ;)
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Sibelius 7.1.3, iMac - Snow Leopard 2014.
http://ComposersofSibelius.com
Personally, I found as much beauty in this music as I do in the sound of a pneumatic drill or siren on a fire truck. And of course it is repetitive. Everything is repeated at some time or other. I heard several occurrences of very high notes followed by very low notes. I guess that's some kind of pattern. I have never found beauty in mathematically created tone rows, nor randomly created tone rows. Emotion possibly, but not beauty. Beauty comes from the soul. But then, I guess, so can ugliness.
Well, between soul and the audience's ears comes much technique!
But there's technique as in "Hey! That sounded good! Let's work out what happened so we can do it again!".
Or the tail can wag the dog. "Hey! I'm sick of all this soupy chromaticism. What if we just worked it all out by numbers? At least it will sound DIFFERENT!"
And then some smartass listener comes along and says "I can STILL hear tunes and patterns..." :-)
There are always patterns, but you might have to wait a million years to hear one repeated. I've been wondering how some people can hear beauty in tone rows. I can hear beauty only in intervals, both melodic and especially harmonic. Tone rows don't contain intervals; only pitches. There is absolutely no difference between a Bb and an A# or a maj.6th and a dim.7th in a tone row. So the notes have no compelling direction to take. They can only progress according to whatever sequence of pitches the composer has created. The listener has absolutely no idea what the next note is likely to be, because there is no recognizable tone centre for guidance.
There's a reasonably well-known (perhaps more so in America) piece by Charles Ives called "The Unanswered Question". I understand the concept behind it. I can see a slight justification for performing it as a theatre piece. But it escapes me why anyone would want to listen to a recording.
> There's a reasonably well-known (perhaps more so in America) piece by Charles Ives called "The Unanswered Question". I understand the concept behind it. I can see a slight justification for performing it as a theatre piece. But it escapes me why anyone would want to listen to a recording.
That there is a piece which must be appreciated live. It's an interesting experience. World shattering? Maybe not, but entertaining and certainly enjoyable.
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Sibelius 7.1.3, iMac - Snow Leopard 2014.
http://ComposersofSibelius.com
> There are always patterns, but you might have to wait a million years to hear one repeated.
>
If you have to wait too long for a pattern to repeat, you don't the pattern. But we will find a pattern even an attempt has been made to eliminate all patterns. As said earlier in this thread, that's what we humans do.
>I've been wondering how some people can hear beauty in tone rows. I can hear beauty only in intervals, both melodic and especially harmonic. Tone rows don't contain intervals; only pitches.
Huh? Okay. I understand the point you are making, but I think you are wrong to blame the poor, innocent tone row. A tone row - any tone row - is full of intervals. Any two adjacent notes present an interval as long as the rhythm does not preclude hearing the interval. And multiple adjacent notes can be presented as a chord which is obviously a collection of intervals.
>There is absolutely no difference between a Bb and an A# or a maj.6th and a dim.7th in a tone row. So the notes have no compelling direction to take. They can only progress according to whatever sequence of pitches the composer has created. The listener has absolutely no idea what the next note is likely to be, because there is no recognizable tone centre for guidance.
There have been many composers of atonal music that produced pieces like that. But there have also been many works that have no long-term tonal center but have short term tonal centers that definitely draw the ear.
There are also some tonal (though chromatic) works built on tone rows. The "Faust" motif from Lizst's Faust Symphony is a simple tone row: a chromatically descending set of arpeggiated augmented triads. Bach's A minor Prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book II contains a prominent tone row. And apparently Mozart used tone rows in a number of works, but I haven't listened to them.
The tone row was certainly used to compose atonal music and music without apparent pattern (two very different concepts, by the way), but they had to work at it; they had to find the right rows. A tone row is not automatically going to do that.
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Patrick O'Keefe
Sib 7.1.3, GPO4, NotePerformer, lots of EWQL stuff
Win7 x64 Pro Intel i7-4771, 3.50Ghz, 16GB RAM
