How to listen to contemporary classical music | Ksenia Anufrieva | TEDxKulibinPark

[andrewtrovato]

You cant take a narrow sample of music written in the current era and say that is what contemporary music is. There are many musicians/composers like myself who are in complete disagreement with and create works on a very different basis than all the music you show and call "contemporary". There is an infinite valley of artistic expression and human feeling between what you call "contemporary" and what you would probably consider just a "style copy" of the past, which you dont say outright but is the logical conclusion by your exclusion and presentation.

[alirezashojaei]

I think the main problem with contemporary composers is that they thrive to be distinctive instead of innovative. It's possible to be innovative with the use of harmony and tonality.

[ZachPetch]

It is difficult to say where exactly something transitions from being a musical performance and sound-based performance art. But I suspect that there is a great deal of contemporary classical music that doesn't make one wonder whether or not they're listening to music. Consider Arvo Part's 4th symphony ("Los Angeles"), which certainly doesn't contain much (if any) rhythm or motive or chord progression, and is dramatically different from any of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky's work, but is still unmistakably musical. Surely that is more what we ought to consider "contemporary classical music" and not "modern performance art" like holding cello strings attached to plastic bottles and scratching a bow across them.
Of course, I am not a musicologist. So maybe my perspective is flawed.

[wojtekimbier]

This is exactly the discussion that I searched for during my train when a thought came to my mind that the classics can't be where that branch of music ended

[MetalCrull]

For what I understand there's a lot of experimentation involved at the core of this kind of music. Not just the research of new sounds, I think it also pushes the boundaries of what we conceive as being music, like, actually testing how far can you go, where's the line. Someone in the comments used the term "sound-based performance art" and I think it fits well. It's experimentation, abstraction, it's stuff that serves a purpose when it's tailored to enhance film scenes... I guess the problem with it for some people starts when you call it straightforward music.

[apersonlikeanyother]

It’s fascinating how scared some people are of new or different things. We see this in contemporary art too. Partly it’s because of the mainstream media of course, always choosing extreme examples and presenting them as if average. If you are open to the idea of any sound potentially being music your life becomes more joyous.

[spiritualpolitics]

This is I think a fine window into how to experience this modern classical music. The problem that lurks in the background is nobody sane is going to reply those pieces 100 times the way one would the Bach Brandenburg 5, nor should they...

I think there might be a more limited use case for much modern music, which is not to stereotype it all. After all, much baroque and old music is not all that good either.

That said it would be difficult to see any modern composer beating Bach at his best, by furlongs.

[joseazar]

I got into this talk hoping to get some more tools and interest to get into difficult listenings. I found the opposite: this inspires nothing but rejection and a very stereotyped idea of what contemporary composers are doing. And I think that it doesn't make justice to the huge work that musicians like Arvo Pärt, Keith Jarrett, Karl Jenkins and Eric Whitacre have been doing in the past four decades, just to name some of them.
I think that this shouldn't be the kind of sound people ought to think when hearing the term "contemporary music". There are a lot of new technics of composition and interpretation that reachs into the limits of "classical music" realm, and gives a far more enjoyable listening. And an idea of evolution in-between several traditions, like chamber and symphonic music, atonalism, jazz, tango, world musics and even new age. Music is more alive now than ever.

[unknown]

Wow the comments did not pass the test 😂

[googlekopfkind]

i studied this s*** because i love to compose. no one in the class could compose, and certainly not the professor. and they didnt know how to play jazz

[anthonycook]

I think the problem is how to listen to composed music in general. Unfortunately, FM Classical radio (at least in Los Angeles) considers anything written after 1910 as "contemporary, " gives Classical music a fossil in a museum approach, and does not treat music as a living art. The concept of a concert where people may expect something like Haydn and instead get Zappa may have a problematic formality to it, while at the same time, advanced techniques of composition used in movie soundtracks can be related to by audiences naturally. Also, it seems that untrained audiences automatically know how to listen to some music by Phillip Glass, Arvo Part, or Hans Zimmer, where they might need more help with Machaut, Schubert, Brahms, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Cage, or Elliot Carter. In my experience, just being exposed to music in the first place is half the battle. Teaching people where to find examples of music to explore may help, as so much is online today. A great talk, and an important topic.

[nicolamazzoli]

in other words, everything but music. I totally see the water jar piece being the equivalent of Beethoven's 9th in 200 years from now . sadness

[rogerhardy]

There is one simple test for music. Does it sound good? If it has to be explained then there is something wrong. Music should stand on its own two feet, just as does painting or writing. Great music is great because it sounds great and requires the participation of the listener to 'complete the artwork'. The only emotion this contemporary music arouses in me is mild anger and bemusement. Lesson 1. Music should sound good. There is no lesson 2.

[ΓεώργιοςΚ-ζσ]

Good music doesn't need a "strategy to listen" to.

[alanrobertson]

Not my comment but as a young composer put it when there is a requirement to think out of the box, this becomes the box.

[PeterPrevos]

While this music might be interesting at a cerebral level, where is the emotion, the passion?

[dodola]

the thing with bottles is just sound, the thing with the audience is called a happening. most of so called new music could easily be done by AI and probably better.

[invisiblyvisible]

Anyone know where the first song she played on the piano is from?

[Checkmate]

It's easy -- just listen to it. If you like it, great. If you don't, move on.

[C_]

Academic music takes itself too seriously and is obsolete: not because it is a genre (which is an awful barrier concept that is the residual of an old millenium where human inequality was widely endorsed), but because it is an audience, the audience of academia. There is definitively a barrier between entitlement and not-entitlement, not to mention the old ideas of the pre-internet world when knowledge was pretty much an exclusive niche for the affluent. So far, since the birth of mass production and technological mass production, academic music attempted desperately to widen the gap with the "proletarian" audience that had existed since countless centuries. When literacy and technological advancement and music affordability became widespread, academic music basically sought to keep this distance simply by "reducing" its "accessibility" in a desperate attempt at preserving its snob status, therefore the perceived "weirdness" of much vanguarde, but do not get fooled: most avantgarde is as uninspired as the commercial music heard outside the academia, and often penned and produced by major graduates from the most prestigious colleges around the world, in a sublime act of hypocrisy.
Moreover, most of this academic snobbery is pretty much confined to Europe: a lot of world traditions (possibly, most world traditions) do not even have "composers" to begin with, even though it is art music.
Therefore, it is not a surprise that a lot of the current contemporary "art" world is overstressing "inclusivity" themes to dispel the notion of undemocraticness (eg: lots of music seminars and events are unreasonably priced, the "art world" is NOT open to anyone), but do not get fooled, pretty much all high culture is desperately seeking to maintain its hierarchy by alienating its potential fans, self-enclosing in a gerontocratic veil of "superiority". The avantgarde is long dead: future generations, rather than "understanding it", will understand it as a precise historical period where composers were either geniouses alienated by the horrors of WW2 seeking to distance itself from the hipocrisy of the music world (eg: Stockhausen) or, in the worst of cases, were "second-wave" pretentious academics following those footsteps without quite feeling from inside that kind of music of their predecessors.
Most contemporary music, whether academic or not, is insincere in that very aspect.
One for all: most musical revolutions of the last century, from the record to noise to sound masses and so forth, were born OUTSIDE the academia, or were even anti-academic and possibly obstacled. Such a far cry from the contemporary art scene where every rehearsal is a work of genious art as long as it is entitled by itself and its circuit to be so. Early modernists were not even concerned with that and did not expect that.
The more academia reinforce the fact that vitality can come out only of its entitled niche or from corporational tyranny the more we are far from witnessing art. The facts that academia refuses to recognize un-academic music as art and the fact that a lot of conservatory graduates still think of the Beatles as art is the demonstration of how far is all of that stuff from being art. At most, it is business.