Hi, some guy, thanks for your so detailed answer!
Ha ha, very diplomatic you are. (I know that it's so detailed because I so lazily didn't cut it down to size!)
can this new music move you emotionally, or is this a pure intellectual kind of joy? Man, it is so difficult to explain...
No, you've explained fine. I just don't make that distinction. I don't separate my emotions and my intellect.
You know, that the dissonant and consonant intervals in music are not subjective things. They are objective, as having the physical, accoustic nature
What I know, or at least believe, is that while sounds have physical, acoustic natures, that is, while the sounds are objects, our reactions to them, as captured in words like "dissonant" and "consonant," are not. The sounds are objective, but those words describe our reactions, trained, cultural reactions. You say that "each and every person, regardless of culture and education, will describe the third or fifth as harmonic," by which I "pleasant" or "concordant"? But it isn't true, or at least has not always been true--the third used to be considered "dissonant." And I find minor seconds and tritones (and bare sawtooth waves, for that matter) to be quite pleasant.
how can one enjoy ( emotionally ) the music, built predominantly on dissonant structures, without any sign of resolution into some harmonic / tonal centre?
Most of the music I listen to, and enjoy, has nothing to do with tonality, or atonality. It's mostly either the kind of thing that [SIZE=-1]Varèse and others have called "organized sound" or it's the kind of thing that Cage opened up--just sounds, not organized at all necessarily. I've been listening lately to a lot of serial music, and enjoying that quite a lot. It has a kind of old-fashioned, traditional kind of feel to it for me, coming off of Yoshihide or Marclay or Rowe, say. It's very nice. Schoenberg, Boulez, Birtwhistle. Good fun. And only recently because I gave most of the dodecaphony/serial folks a miss first time around. (I went from [/SIZE][SIZE=-1]Bartók to Cage in only four years. And then just kept going, adding Galas and Marclay and Ferrari and Merzbow and and and...[/SIZE]
how can anything in music exist, which many others do understand and I still not? That is the motive. I am just trying to get it.
You know, I said before that I couldn't guess which one would apply to you. But if I'd been forced, this is the one I would have chosen! It's true.
On to your second post, I don't perform any more. But when I did, I played all sorts of everything, including "atonal" I guess. We didn't really separate things like that. We just played different things. The most recent things I was involved in as a performer were not tonal OR atonal, they were either conceptual or indeterminate, i.e., Fluxus works or Cage/Childs/Hobbs kinds of things.
Starting a thread on "atonal" music might be OK. That discussion, as you've already intimated, is a bit out of date. But there are new listeners all the time, and everyone has to start somewhere, so it might be of some help to them. I first started seriously (intelligently, attentively, emotionally(!)) listening to "modern" music in 1972, way after many of the more prominent innovations of the century had already been done. So I was listening to, and talking with friends about, musics that were ten, twenty, sixty years in the past. Many of us do wish all the tired, stale canards about "atonal" and "modern" music could be put to rest once and for all. But these things still exercise people, so "Oh, well!" (We don't any of us get what we want all the time, after all!!)
Corno, I don't know about "valiantly"!! I do love this stuff, so I do know that it IS lovable. When someone makes the mistake of conflating "I don't like this" with "This is crap," I do react, sometimes. But that's more along the lines of disliking illogic than defending new music. Speaking of which, I just got thirteen more of the Musik in Deutschland discs, to go with the ten I already have. Lots of very nice listening ahead!
