Amateur night

[ASUmusicMAN]

This is an argument made by many music educators I know, that simply won't give anything contemporary a chance...

Some say modern classical music is so difficult that only professionals should attempt it. Nonsense, says Tom Service - a child could play it. And it's high time they did

Friday March 26, 2004

The Guardian

Today's classical composers have an image problem. They are seen as inhabitants of an ivory tower, writing complex music for a small sect of performers who play for even tinier audiences, and shunning the concerns of "ordinary" amateur musicians and listeners. Composers themselves are partly to blame for this bad PR: it's hard to imagine Pierre Boulez writing something for his local brass band, or Karlheinz Stockhausen composing a Grade 1 piano piece.

But there has always been another side to musical modernism. There is a hidden repertoire of pieces written by 20th-century composers for amateur musicians, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group are celebrating this in their latest concert.

Composer John Woolrich has curated the programme, in which recent works for amateurs by British composers sit alongside modernist classics by Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio and Louis Andriessen (whose piece Workers Union gives the concert its title). Amateur players and groups of schoolchildren - including a 29-strong choir of flutes - will perform alongside the professionals of the BCMG. Yet there is more to the idea than a simple linking of the two worlds. According to Woolrich: "We need to look at new ways of keeping musical culture going, and composers need to think more broadly about how their music is performed, and who is performing it."

Read the rest HERE

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayrevie...1177652,00.html

[Shawn]

I just realized that when it comes to classical, and maybe other areas I don't admit to, I'm a bit of a twit.

I didn't realize people were still composing classical music. I thought it was more about established pieces. :psychofun:

[Kooperman]

Shawn's so full of classical gas.....

[DudeAsInCool]

This is an argument made by many music educators I know, that simply won't give anything contemporary a chance...

That's a silly argument - all music should evolve. Othewise there would be no room fr interpretation by a given conductor...they would just have everyone play the same rote notes at the same tempo

[ASUmusicMAN]

I must admit as a musician I used to feel this way...I hated comptemporary classical music. If you haven't heard any of it, i'll see if I can get some copyright free stuff of ASU doing some ultra modern. I always used to think it sounded like noise (sometimes still does). But along this thought, I had one professor who brought in a book, and it contained the newspaper reviews of all the standard composers when they premiered their work...it was quite an eye opener.

Reviewers absolutely HATED Strauss, Shostakovich, even Tchaikovsky. I remember one quote about Shostakovich from the Chicago Tribune when he debuted some music in America of "If you like the sound of Defecation then you'll love Shostakovich's Symphony No. X (forgot"

I guess it follows that saying of great artists are never appreciated by the masses until their dead.

[Kooperman]

Another view is that music reviewers have always been pompous blowhards who think they know more about music than the musicians do. Some of the old Rolling Stone reviews of albums were utter baloney, making something simple seem like something mysterious and full of hidden avenues. John Lennon said that when he read reviews of some of his music he wouldn't even know it was his if he hadn't read the title.

[ASUmusicMAN]

Another view is that music reviewers have always been pompous blowhards who think they know more about music than the musicians do

that's great :gigglin: