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Assorted items => Coming broadcasts and listen-later links => Topic started by: mugurdavid on September 07, 2015, 11:01:39 pm



Title: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: mugurdavid on September 07, 2015, 11:01:39 pm
Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 for mezzo-soprano, strings and percussion (world premiere, 9/3/2015)

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Hannu Lintu, conductor
Virpi Räisänen, mezzo-soprano

http://areena.yle.fi/1-3004417 (http://areena.yle.fi/1-3004417)

The full concert - including Sibelius' The Oceanides and the early version of the Violin Concerto:
http://yle.fi/aihe/tapahtuma/2015/09/03/thursday-series-1 (http://yle.fi/aihe/tapahtuma/2015/09/03/thursday-series-1)


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Dundonnell on September 07, 2015, 11:57:31 pm
Aho composes faster than BIS has time to catch up recording his new music.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: tapiola on September 08, 2015, 02:30:29 am
Will someone be kind enough to download here as mp3?  :D


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest377 on September 08, 2015, 03:40:59 pm
Did Kalevi Aho's Symphony No 6 ever get released by BIS?   I noticed it was not available on CD.. perhaps on LP?


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Dundonnell on September 09, 2015, 01:40:17 am
Did Kalevi Aho's Symphony No 6 ever get released by BIS?   I noticed it was not available on CD.. perhaps on LP?

No, BIS has not yet recorded the symphony. I seem to recall some story that they tried to do so but the conductor (whoever he might have been ???) found it too difficult.

There is an off-air performance by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jorma Panula available to download.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest128 on September 11, 2015, 12:47:51 am
Egad, - Aho's Symphonic output may well end up exceeding that among all the Finns save one.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: tapiola on September 11, 2015, 10:03:30 am
A most sincere thank you to Elroel!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: BrianA on September 13, 2015, 10:58:07 pm
I'll second that, Tapiola!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Dundonnell on September 14, 2015, 09:37:43 pm
Ditto from me :)


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: tapiola on September 15, 2015, 01:29:53 am
Listening was some very heavy listening. Over 50 minutes of unrelenting sorrow and terror.  The poetess was murdered in Auschwitz and the German texts tells of the "Journey" she was making.  The audience was exhausted I am sure.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Dundonnell on September 15, 2015, 01:28:38 pm
I agree that the Symphony No.16 is harrowing (so too is much of Shostakovich's greatest music).....but very impressive (I am not suggesting that Tapiola is implying anything different!).

I think that Kalevi Aho is one of the finest living composers. He does compose a great deal of music but almost all of it is of a very high quality. And, although not by any means "light music" it is not rebarbative. I know that Osmo Vanska is a great admirer of Aho and I hope that he will be able to record more of the music.

There are very few living symphonists who can still breathe life into the genre. Aho is most certainly one and one wishes he was even better known outside Finland.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest2 on September 16, 2015, 02:05:06 am
Listening was some very heavy listening. Over 50 minutes of unrelenting sorrow and terror.  The poetess was murdered and the German texts tell of the "Journey" she was making.  The audience was exhausted I am sure.

Not so much exhausted as exasperated. Compare the Brahms symphonies. No poetesses, no murders, sonata form, true Art: Absolute Music!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: BrianA on September 16, 2015, 04:14:40 am
Ah!  The old "the-only-worthwhile-music-is-the-music-I-say-is-worthwhile" gambit again.  Move over, David Wright!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 16, 2015, 07:53:17 am
Listening was some very heavy listening. Over 50 minutes of unrelenting sorrow and terror.  The poetess was murdered and the German texts tell of the "Journey" she was making.  The audience was exhausted I am sure.

Not so much exhausted as exasperated. Compare the Brahms symphonies. No poetesses, no murders, sonata form, true Art: Absolute Music!
True Brahms, actually (and wonderful at that). But Aho, of course, is not Brahms, nor does or should he pretend to be. He comes from a different country and a different era. From your "no poetesses, no murders, sonata form, true Art", should it be concluded that you'd likewise deprecate the inclusion of odes to joy in a symphony? And what's so superior about "sonata form" which had in any case developed immensely by Brahms's time from what it had been in Haydn's? The form - whatever it may be in any given work - should, after all, provide a framework for the ideas and not exist as some kind of jelly-mould into which those ideas be poured, as Sorabji would have said. Comparing a Brahms symphony to an Aho one is about as useful as comparing The Bartered Bride or The Pirates of Penzance with Die Soldaten or What Next?; an entirely pointless exercise. If the particular subject matter explored in the Aho is one that you would consider unsuitable for a musical work (which it seems is indeed your view), would you reject Metamorphosen on the same or similar grounds? Do also try to take on board the fact that music is a human expression and that for this very reason there is absolutely no such thing as "absolute music" - i.e. divorced from humanity.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest128 on September 17, 2015, 04:05:14 am
"Absolute music" as contrasted with music designed to expressively depict or at least distill specific and historical human events seems a valid distinction.  Who would ever think absolute music means "divorced from humanity"?
More in the mode of the "essential" as opposed to the "episodic".  Something like that.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 17, 2015, 08:26:46 am
"Absolute music" as contrasted with music designed to expressively depict or at least distill specific and historical human events seems a valid distinction.  Who would ever think absolute music means "divorced from humanity"?
More in the mode of the "essential" as opposed to the "episodic".  Something like that.
I don't think anything of the kind, which is whyt I wrote that there's no such thing; what music is not in some way influenced to some degree by experience, environment, events or other that might (albeit misleadingly) be termed "extra-musical" phenomena?...


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Gauk on September 17, 2015, 12:49:01 pm
"Absolute music" as contrasted with music designed to expressively depict or at least distill specific and historical human events seems a valid distinction.  Who would ever think absolute music means "divorced from humanity"?
More in the mode of the "essential" as opposed to the "episodic".  Something like that.
I don't think anything of the kind, which is what I wrote tht there's no such thing; what music is not in some way influenced to some degree by experience, environment, events or other that might (albeit misleadingly) be termed "extra-musical" phenomena?...

It's easy to overstate such extra-musical influences. There are plenty of examples of composers writing music of a character completely at odds with their personal circumstances; writing joyous music when in the depths of misery and so on. There is a pernicious habit of a certain breed of commentator always to try and relate an art work (not just music) to the situation of the artist at the time of composition, on the assumption that the work must be influenced by whatever was happening to the artist at the time. But composition does not work like that. It does not have to be reactive. A composer is quite likely to approach a new work as an exercise in solving artistic problems without reference to environment or events.

The result will not be music "divorced from humanity" unless the composer is very formulaic (and unskilled), since music must communicate something to its listeners. Even music that might be taken as the height of "absolute" or "abstract" - for instance, a Bach fugue - may actually pack a huge emotional punch.

The distinction here, it seems to me, is just the old question of "programme music", a phrase that has long had negative connotations that I don't think are entirely fair. I don't see a problem in distinguishing between music that has an overt reference to a non-musical subject, whether it be a concentration camp or a walk in the Alps, and music lacking any such reference. I would also suggest that it would not be a good idea to try and dismiss any piece simply on the grounds that it fell into one group or the other. If one tried to restrict oneself only to hearing "abstract" works, one would miss so much.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 17, 2015, 05:14:42 pm
"Absolute music" as contrasted with music designed to expressively depict or at least distill specific and historical human events seems a valid distinction.  Who would ever think absolute music means "divorced from humanity"?
More in the mode of the "essential" as opposed to the "episodic".  Something like that.
I don't think anything of the kind, which is what I wrote tht there's no such thing; what music is not in some way influenced to some degree by experience, environment, events or other that might (albeit misleadingly) be termed "extra-musical" phenomena?...

It's easy to overstate such extra-musical influences. There are plenty of examples of composers writing music of a character completely at odds with their personal circumstances; writing joyous music when in the depths of misery and so on. There is a pernicious habit of a certain breed of commentator always to try and relate an art work (not just music) to the situation of the artist at the time of composition, on the assumption that the work must be influenced by whatever was happening to the artist at the time. But composition does not work like that. It does not have to be reactive. A composer is quite likely to approach a new work as an exercise in solving artistic problems without reference to environment or events.

The result will not be music "divorced from humanity" unless the composer is very formulaic (and unskilled), since music must communicate something to its listeners. Even music that might be taken as the height of "absolute" or "abstract" - for instance, a Bach fugue - may actually pack a huge emotional punch.

The distinction here, it seems to me, is just the old question of "programme music", a phrase that has long had negative connotations that I don't think are entirely fair. I don't see a problem in distinguishing between music that has an overt reference to a non-musical subject, whether it be a concentration camp or a walk in the Alps, and music lacking any such reference. I would also suggest that it would not be a good idea to try and dismiss any piece simply on the grounds that it fell into one group or the other. If one tried to restrict oneself only to hearing "abstract" works, one would miss so much.
Good points here. I think, however, that the crucial word in what you write is "overt" and, whilst it would of course be entirely resonable to seek to distinguish (when appropriate) between works that actively seek to portray, or react to (or against!), events and other phenomena and those that don't, that does not of itself mean that the latter are in any meaningful sense "absolute" or "abstract", because even when the composer might not necessarily be consciously aware of all of the influences that may impact upon a work that he/she is writing or has written, he/she is a sentient human being, my point therefore being that the kinds of creative processes behind composing a musical work are inevitably those that are managed by sentient human beings and so writing a piece of music does not involve shying away from all other aspects of human activity and the human condition.

You write that "even music that might be taken as the height of "absolute" or "abstract" - for instance, a Bach fugue - may actually pack a huge emotional punch" and, of course, they usually do!

You are correct in noting that "there are plenty of examples of composers writing music of a character completely at odds with their personal circumstances; writing joyous music when in the depths of misery and so on"; that can also extend to how a composer might feel about the progress of a work that he/she is writing - witness, for example, the satisfaction that Tchaikovsky felt as his final symphony took shape as contrasted with his emotional state at the time or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the same in the case of Schönberg with his first chamber symphony.

With your observation of the "a pernicious habit of a certain breed of commentator always to try and relate an art work (not just music) to the situation of the artist at the time of composition, on the assumption that the work must be influenced by whatever was happening to the artist at the time" I can only express agreement and feel the same chagrin about it that you do but, to me, it's the sheer arrogantly simplistic aspect of this kind of writing that jars so badly, as though not only is the critic somehow trying, out of what he/she seems to perceive as a matter of duty, to tell the readers that, because he/she says so, it must be correct but also that composers seem to be incapable of writing anything other than as directly and almost wilfully influenced by their recent/current experiences/environmentl clearly, this kind of expression on the part of the critic demonstrates a woeful lack of understanding of how and even why composition works in practice and therefore tells the intelligent reader more about said critic than about what he/she is ostensibly seeking to convey. It's also deplorably patronising.

You write that "composition does not work like that", that it "does not have to be reactive" and that a composer "is quite likely to approach a new work as an exercise in solving artistic problems without reference to environment or events", all of which may well be true but, again, the important word here is "overt"; composers don't have to write in overtly reactive ways or to seek to solve crective conundra without direct reference to external environment or events but, at the same time, "no man is an island" and no composer is either.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest2 on September 18, 2015, 12:27:38 am
. . . "no man is an island" and no composer is either.

Not true. Every artist must be an island.



Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 18, 2015, 12:55:11 pm
. . . "no man is an island" and no composer is either.

Not true. Every artist must be an island.
Were that the case (which mercifully it is not and indeed could not be), how would any of them hope to communicate with others? (by which I mean composers communicating with performers and both communicating with listeners). Yes, a composer needs time to him/herself to prepare his her work, just as performers need the same to prepare performances of it, but that's hardly synonymous with being in "island", in the understood "no man (or woman) is an island" sense!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Gauk on September 18, 2015, 06:27:21 pm
Granted that “overt” is a key word here – but what happens if we start dealing with the non-overt? Firstly, one is in danger of falling into the trap of assuming that a work “must” reflect the circumstances in which it was written, because the composer was “only human”. Surely Mozart’s late music “must” reflect his straitened circumstances? I don’t buy it. Secondly, if the extra-musical influence is not overt, who is to say that it is really there at all? One can get into very sterile speculations that can never be proved or disproved.

Of course, there are no absolutes, so I don’t doubt there are cases where a composer has written works that were particularly sunny because of happy circumstances, even where this was a subconscious reaction and not acknowledged. But what proportion of works are so affected?

Here, it is interesting to look at music composed in Europe in the years 1940-1945. This was the most traumatic period in European history since the 17th century, and few people could have lived through it unaffected. So it is instructive to survey how composers reacted. If, to make it simpler, one restricts the discussion to “major” works (define it how you like), one can consider works under three classes: compositions overtly about war, compositions not overtly about war, but which exhibit violence, despair, unrest and other symptoms of troubled times. (Often it will later be conceded that the work was a product of the composer’s reaction to events.) Lastly, there are works that show no indication whatever of having been composed in wartime.

The impression I have is that the last group is very much the majority. Indeed, it is sometimes startling to turn to works written at times of national tragedy, when you would think, “surely the composer must reflect something of the terrible things happening at the time”, and the music is entirely uninflected by strife.

It’s probably also true to say that the majority of “war” works written in this period are from the USSR, where composers were officially encouraged to write patriotic pieces. There does not seem to have been any equivalent urge to write war music in Germany at the time, and the only German pieces I can think of from the period that do address the spirit of the times are reactions to the destruction at the end of the war.

So if composers during the traumatic times of the Second World War tended not to let it influence their musical output, one can conclude that the influence of less dramatic extra-musical circumstances on composers at other times is probably not very great.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 19, 2015, 08:59:57 am
one is in danger of falling into the trap of assuming that a work “must” reflect the circumstances in which it was written, because the composer was “only human”
No; I did not suggest that it was necessarily possible to codify and identify the specific influences that might impact of the composition of a work, or that any work "must" do that!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Gauk on September 19, 2015, 05:32:58 pm
one is in danger of falling into the trap of assuming that a work “must” reflect the circumstances in which it was written, because the composer was “only human”
No; I did not suggests that it was necessarily possible to codify and identify the specific influences that might impact of the composition of a work, or that any work "must" do that!

I did not claim that you suggested anything, I wrote only in generalities. If one presumes that it is likely that composers are subject to unconscious extra-musical influence in all their compositions, then some people are going to try and look for them. But if such influences are non-overt, and, indeed, unconscious, then, so far from it being possible to identify or codify such influences, any discussion comes down to unsupported assertion. And whether or not such influences exist, they might as well not exist for all the light they shed on anything.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 19, 2015, 06:30:21 pm
one is in danger of falling into the trap of assuming that a work “must” reflect the circumstances in which it was written, because the composer was “only human”
No; I did not suggest that it was necessarily possible to codify and identify the specific influences that might impact of the composition of a work, or that any work "must" do that!

I did not claim that you suggested anything, I wrote only in generalities. If one presumes that it is likely that composers are subject to unconscious extra-musical influence in all their compositions, then some people are going to try and look for them. But if such influences are non-overt, and, indeed, unconscious, then, so far from it being possible to identify or codify such influences, any discussion comes down to unsupported assertion. And whether or not such influences exist, they might as well not exist for all the light they shed on anything.
I agree; this, as you rightly observe, is where potentially misleading and possibly unfounded assumptions may be made about what "external" influences might have impacted upon this, that or the other work in such cases, although there are other instances where it's easier to do this kind of thing meaningfully when, for example, the composer has him/herself stated that certain circumstantial evidence of such influence/s pertain (but such examples are, of course, of the "overt" kind rather than the unconscious/subconscious kind).


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest2 on September 20, 2015, 10:52:01 am
Every artist must be an island.
Were that the case (which mercifully it is not and indeed could not be) . . .

You cannot be serious in your promotion of derivative music! Another term for that is "lift music" is it not? And in books it comes down to the Mills and Boon series, one hundred of which are "released" every month! Just imagine Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chausson, Scryabine or Szymanowski sitting down to write a bit of lift music, or Broch a romantic paperback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon)



Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Gauk on September 20, 2015, 12:48:07 pm
Derivative music and lift music are two very different things. Have a listen to the piece by Morel I uploaded recently to the Canadian music thread. It is derivative - it shamelessly steals from Stravinsky - but there is no way it would ever be played in a lift. Incidentally, two composers who were interested in what we would now call lift music were Satie and Hindemith.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 20, 2015, 04:24:16 pm
Every artist must be an island.
Were that the case (which mercifully it is not and indeed could not be) . . .

You cannot be serious in your promotion of derivative music! Another term for that is "lift music" is it not? And in books it comes down to the Mills and Boon series, one hundred of which are "released" every month! Just imagine Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Chausson, Scryabine or Szymanowski sitting down to write a bit of lift music, or Broch a romantic paperback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon)
Of course I couldn't be serious in such promotion - but then I didn't and most decidedly wouldn't promote anything of the kind! Wrong end of wrong stick again on your part, gerard, I fear! I therefore don't need the unelevating elevator music definitions and references that you have provided, thanks, since they are not pertinent to anything that I have written here; that said, they do offer the opportunity to cite a remark once made by Elliott Carter when he'd just been deprecating the tiresome prevalence of that very kind of music along remarkably similar lines to sentiments expressed by Chopin some 16 decades earlier when bemoaning the fact that musical performance seemed to accompany every activity in the great English houses and that it might not be so very long before it would do so to what went on in the smallest rooms of those houses; Carter was asked how he might react were he to go up or down in a hotel elevator and be confronted with his own music therein and he instantly answered that he'd press the red alarm button...


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 20, 2015, 05:21:24 pm
Derivative music and lift music are two very different things. Have a listen to the piece by Morel I uploaded recently to the Canadian music thread. It is derivative - it shamelessly steals from Stravinsky - but there is no way it would ever be played in a lift. Incidentally, two composers who were interested in what we would now call lift music were Satie and Hindemith.
I'm rather struggling to imagine Trois morceaux en forme de poire or Embryons desséchés - let alone Vexations - being relayed in an elevator; Descriptions automatiques, peut-être? As to Hindemith, well, likewise I'd have trouble imagining Die Harmonie der Welt or The Long Christmas Dinner emerging from speakers in one. No, none of these strike me as potentially elevating musical experiences on the way up to Room 101 on the 101st floor. Perhaps the only plausible candidates for this might be Cole Porter's song Miss Otis regrets or Rimsky-Korsakov's le Coq d'Or (as in "stand clear of the d'Ors" (I've already got me coat)...


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: Gauk on September 21, 2015, 09:21:02 am
Satie called the concept "Musique d'Ameublement" - furniture music. You didn't really imagine I meant ALL Satie's music, surely? You can find a good essay here:

http://www.academia.edu/166786/Erik_Satie_s_Musique_d_Ameublement_some_ninety_years_later (http://www.academia.edu/166786/Erik_Satie_s_Musique_d_Ameublement_some_ninety_years_later)

In Hindemith's case, I am thinking of his early forays into "Gebrauchsmusik" - utility music. "This music is written neither for the concert hall nor for the artist," he wrote. In the "Plöner Musiktag", he compiled pieces beginning with a Morgenmusik, a Tafelmusik, a cantata and an evening concert in accordance with the course of the day at a boarding school in Plön.

As for Chopin's fears about music in the smallest room, it's as well he never lived to experience the gents in an English motorway services.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 21, 2015, 10:59:29 am
Satie called the concept "Musique d'Ameublement" - furniture music. You didn't really imagine I meant ALL Satie's music, surely?
I wsasn't sure quite what to imahine on that.

In Hindemith's case, I am thinking of his early forays into "Gebrauchsmusik" - utility music. "This music is written neither for the concert hall nor for the artist," he wrote. In the "Plöner Musiktag", he compiled pieces beginning with a Morgenmusik, a Tafelmusik, a cantata and an evening concert in accordance with the course of the day at a boarding school in Plön.
For all that I admire Hindemith, I've always felt that he'd somehow confused himself with that one (although that's not to be read as an implied disdain on my part for the music that he wrote under that notion); if certain music is not written either for the concert hall or the artist (presumably meaning the performer), then for whom is it intended? It is presumably intended to be listrened to and, in order for that to be made possible, artists have to perform it.

As for Chopin's fears about music in the smallest room, it's as well he never lived to experience the gents in an English motorway services.
Isn't it just!


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest2 on September 21, 2015, 12:34:50 pm
Thank you Mr. Gauk for that clarification. From our own Mr. Hinton's younger brother Stephen comes this interesting addition about Gebrauchsmusik:

Gebrauchsmusik is a term adopted in Germany in the early 1920s, first in musicological circles and then in music criticism. Within a decade it had become a slogan with international currency, causing some of those who had initially contributed to its prominence either to distance themselves from it or to abandon it altogether.

The term arose from attempts to challenge, or at least to relativise, its conceptual antonym – musical autonomy. Invariably its use implies, if not actually involves, an opposite term as part of a dualistic system of thought. One of the first writers to employ Gebrauchsmusik systematically as one half of a binarism was the musicologist Paul Nettl. In his study of 17th-century dance music he distinguished between Gebrauchsmusik and Vortragsmusik. By the former term Nettl referred to ‘dance pieces that were really danced to’, by the latter to ‘music without any secondary purpose’. With historical developments in mind, Nettl observed an ‘increasing stylization’ that attended dance music’s emancipation in the cyclical suite of mixed dance forms, a stylization that involved a ‘certain removal from popular primordiality [volkstümliche Ursprünglichkeit]’. Around the same time Leo Kestenberg, music adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Culture and Education, used Gebrauchsmusik to describe ‘occasional music’ as distinguished from ‘concert music’. In making this distinction, Nettl and Kestenberg openly expressed a value judgment soon to be widely shared by musicologists, critics and composers alike. Gebrauchsmusik, Kestenberg wrote, ‘is artistically as important as, and nowadays materially more promising than, concert music’. Like other Germans, he was no doubt influenced by parallel developments in France, especially the group of composers known as Les Six.

But it was Heinrich Besseler, in whose work the descriptive and the normative nicely combine, who produced the philosophically most sophisticated account of Gebrauchsmusik at the time. An early-music specialist, he had studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Beyond a scholarly, historical attempt at understanding earlier musical cultures on their own terms, Besseler also raised general phenomenological questions of the kind posed by Heidegger. In his dissertation on the German suite in the 17th century, Besseler noted that ‘the aesthetic access [Zugangsweise] to this music is not through listening but through participation, whether through playing, dancing or singing along; in general, through use [das Gebrauchen]. Besseler pursued this basic perspective further in his Habilitationsschrift, this time focussing on 13th- and 14th-century motets. This music, he stressed, was not ‘created for “aesthetic enjoyment”’; nor did it ‘concern the “listener” in the usual sense, but rather only believers in prayer and observation’. In a much-quoted lecture, delivered as part of his dissertation defence, he addressed ‘basic questions of musical listening’, both from an historical, diachronic perspective and from a systematic one. Acknowledging his debt to Heidegger, he translated his philosophy teacher’s fundamental distinction between ‘thing’ (Ding) and ‘equipment’ (Zeug) into specifically musical concepts: ‘autonomous music’ (eigenständige Musik) and ‘utility music’ (Gebrauchsmusik). The first type he associated with concert music, a relatively recent phenomenon, but one which ‘for generations has counted as the highest and, as it were, solely legitimate form of performing and listening to music’. With the second type, aesthetic contemplation is secondary or even irrelevant. Invoking Heideggerian terminology, one could say that its mode of existence belongs to the sphere of ‘readiness-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit), as opposed to ‘presentness-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit). Besseler defined such music as ‘umgangsmässig’, something analogous to the vernacular in language (Umgangssprache) in the sense of being inseparable from everyday life rather than autonomous. Active participation or involvement is key. The gist of Besseler’s theory is encapsulated in this central passage from his lecture:

For the individual, Gebrauchsmusik constitutes something of equal rank to his other activities, something with which he has dealings in the way he has dealings with things of everyday use, without first having to overcome any distance, that is, without having to adopt an aesthetic attitude. With this in mind we might define the basic characteristic of Gebrauchsmusik as something with which we are directly involved [umgangsmässig]. All other art … in some way stands in contrast to Being as self-sufficient, as autonomous [eigenständig].

In later writings Besseler replaced his original binarism with Darbietungsmusik (‘presentation music’) versus Umgangsmusik (literally ‘ambient music’, a term which has unfortunately become synonymous with background music).

Besseler’s interest in Gebrauchsmusik did not stop with his scholarly work as a music historian; it spilled over into the opinions he held about contemporary trends in composition. Epistemology, aesthetics and cultural politics overlapped. Besseler found himself supporting current efforts to create ‘umgangmässige Musik’, above all in the work of the German Youth Movement, but also in the cultivation of Gebrauchsmusik by composers such as Hindemith, Fortner and Pepping.

Besseler ended the first chapter of his magisterial handbook Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance with an account of the effects of historicism on the present, seeing in the call for ‘community music’ (Gemeinschaftsmusik) the protest of a younger generation against the artistic stance of traditional musical life, against large symphony orchestras and the professional specialization of virtuosos. ‘One avoided patriarchal tradition’, he wrote in a confessional tone, ‘in order to learn from earlier ancestors’.

Although Hindemith was not responsible for coining the term Gebrauchsmusik, as is often asserted, he could maintain in 1930, without too much exaggeration, that he had ‘almost completely turned away from concert music in recent years and written, almost without exception, music with pedagogical or social tendencies: for amateurs, for children, for radio, mechanical instruments, etc.’. One of the principal genres developed to reflect these tendencies was the Lehrstück. The piece entitled Lehrstück, a collaboration between Hindemith and Brecht that established the genre, compromised the composer’s autonomy to the extent that the nature of the performing forces was left open. It was thus less a work designed for concert presentation than one which served the learning process of those actively involved. The audience, too, was expected to participate by singing along in the choral sections. Although a secular piece which ironically defamiliarized sacred traditions, it was intended to function in a manner analogous to a sacred cantata in the 18th century.

Recognizing in 1929 that ‘the idea of Gebrauchsmusik has now established itself in all those camps of modern music that it can reach’, Hindemith’s contemporary and rival Weill asserted the need for music to be ‘useful for society at large’. To this end he and Hindemith collaborated with Brecht on the experimental piece Der Lindberghflug, first performed together with Lehrstück at the festival of new music in Baden-Baden in 1929. The question of quality, Weill said, was a separate matter, one that determined whether what he was doing could be considered art. ‘To have this attitude expressed by a representative of “serious music”’, he went on, ‘would have been unthinkable a few years ago’.



Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest2 on September 21, 2015, 12:39:22 pm
The call for socially useful music did not go unchallenged, formulated as it often was in explicitly political terms and as an implicit critique of the Expressionist isolation commonly associated at the time with the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg himself was especially defensive, often construing the reforms proposed by the younger generation of composers as personal attacks (1976).

One demands New Music for all! Gebrauchsmusik! But it transpires that no use can be found for it. … And what use? For want of a use, many of the business-like Gebrauchsmusiker have become ideal artists. More ideal than those outmoded ones, who may at least hope for success after they die, whereas the involuntary idealists have composed for particular use and have no hope or desire for the future.

No less vitriolic and certainly more extensive were the involved polemics directed against the supporters of Gebrauchsmusik by Schoenberg’s apologist Theodor W. Adorno. With his characteristic ear for the news of the day, Adorno eagerly took up the term, albeit in a derogatory sense, as early as 1924, and he continued to write critically about Gebrauchsmusik for the rest of his life. He began by dismissing the latest music of Hindemith and Stravinsky as ‘fiktive Gebrauchsmusik’ (1924), music with only apparent utility and little expressive value of the kind he associated with ‘absolute music’. By 1932, in his sociological tract ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, Adorno was using Gebrauchsmusik to describe one of four types of contemporary music, the others being ‘modern music’ (Schoenberg), ‘objectivism’ (Stravinsky) and ‘surrealism’ (Weill). He associated Gebrauchsmusik above all with Hindemith, whose music he criticized for identifying itself with a fictitious collective. The only use-value of music in capitalist society, he argued, was that of a commodity (in the Marxist sense). Any attempt to restore pre-capitalist immediacy he dismissed as ideology in the sense of ‘false consciousness’. As he concluded in Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie of 1962, ‘Gebrauchsmusik, is tailor-made for the administered world’.

The idea of Gebrauchsmusik, as the work of musicologists such as Besseler illustrates, derives first and foremost from methodological reflection; it does not so much capture the essence of music as reflect a perspective of the scholar or listener. As such, it identifies a philosophical viewpoint, in this case one indebted to phenomenology. The same piece of music can be viewed both in terms of its use-value and in terms of its autonomous features. These two perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Understood in this way, autonomy must be seen less as an idealistic construct that precludes consideration of social utility than as itself a complex of artistic practices embracing the social, the aesthetic and the theoretical. These three areas overlap. Social autonomy encompasses various aspects of music sociology: the composer’s employment status or sources of patronage, the context of musical presentation and the nature of music’s social function. Aesthetic autonomy also touches on questions of presentation, on how musical objects are approached, as well as on the status of music as a discrete work, on the kind of criticism and interpretation it attracts, and on matters of musical form. The dimension of theory encompasses questions of formal taxonomy and other structural factors. Historically, it is possible to observe a process of increasing ‘autonomization’: composers become their own bosses, freed from direct service to institutions and patrons; their musical works are conceived less for specific social occasions, more as discrete works, independent of immediate social function; and the identity of their works, in formal and structural terms, increasingly resists their being subsumed under generic norms. Autonomy and the postulate of originality are closely linked.

One need not subscribe to Adorno’s negative dialectics, which posits social relevance in artistic isolation, in order to appreciate one principal point of his critique: namely, that proponents of Gebrauchsmusik could not – or rather would not – relinquish certain facets of their autonomy as composers. They remained modern professional composers, with all the aims and aspirations implied by the ultimately irreversible division of labour. The choice, then, was not a simple one between ‘autonomy’ and ‘utility’, concepts which insofar as they denote types of music exist merely as abstract constructs. Even ‘autonomous’ music has its uses. Rather, the call for Gebrauchsmusik functioned historically as a corrective to extreme manifestations of autonomy. Composers in the 1920s were rejecting not the hard-won autonomies of Beethoven so much as the extreme isolation of the Schoenberg school.

In different circumstances, on the East Coast of the USA in the early 1950s rather than in 1920s Berlin, Hindemith spoke of his earlier music as though the attendant politics and struggles had never existed. In the preface to his Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard University in 1950, he appeared to take credit for coining the term Gebrauchsmusik; at the same time he tried to distance himself from it (1952, p.viii). History has proved him more successful in the former venture than the latter.

A quarter of a century ago, in a discussion with German choral conductors, I pointed out the danger of an esoteric isolationism in music by using the term Gebrauchsmusik. Apart from the ugliness of the word – in German as hideous as its English equivalents workaday music, music for use, utility music, and similar verbal beauties – nobody found anything remarkable in it, since quite obviously music for which no use can be found, that is to say, useless music, is not entitled to public consideration anyway and consequently the Gebrauch is taken for granted. … [When] I first came to this country, I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice who had become the victim of his own conjurations: the slogan Gebrauchsmusik hit me wherever I went, it had grown to be as abundant, useless, and disturbing as thousands of dandelions in a lawn. Apparently it met perfectly the common desire for a verbal label which classifies objects, persons, and problems, thus exempting anyone from opinions based on knowledge. Up to this day it has been impossible to kill the silly term and the unscrupulous classification that goes with it.

In the period following World War II, not only was the term regarded as ‘silly’, if not ‘useless’, but in an age that sought autonomy at all costs, even at the expense of ‘public consideration’, Gebrauchsmusik acquired a pejorative connotation. Thus Stockhausen dismissed his modernist colleague Zimmerman as a ‘Gebrauchsmusiker’ because he used pre-existing materials rather than generating totally new and original ones. Lack of absolute autonomy became synonymous with a lack of artistic value. The earlier generation in the inter-war years had thought otherwise; it was for them that the term had had its positive, historically significant meaning.

L. Kestenberg: Musikerziehung und Musikpflege (Leipzig, 1921)
P. Nettl: ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Tanzmusik im 17. Jahrhundert’, ZMw, iv (1921–2), 257–65
T.W. Adorno: ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ (1924), Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann, xix (Frankfurt, 1984), 445–7
H. Besseler: ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, JbMP 1925, 35–52; repr. in Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. P. Gülke (Leipzig, 1978), 29–53
K. Weill: ‘Verschiebungen in der musikalischen Produktion’, Berliner Tageblatt (1 Oct 1927); repr. in Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. S. Hinton and J. Scheber (Berlin, 1990), 45–8
K. Weill: ‘Die Oper – wohin?’ (31 Oct 1929); repr. in Kurt Weill: Musik und Theater: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. S. Hinton and J. Scheber (Berlin, 1990), 68–71
H. Besseler: Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1931)
T.W. Adorno: ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, i (1932), 103–24, 356–78
P. Hindemith: ‘Betrachtungen zur heutigen Musik’ (1940), Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. G. Schubert (Zürich, 1994), 131–76
A. Schoenberg: ‘New Music, Outmoded Music’, Style and Idea, ed. D. Newlin (New York, 1950, enlarged 2/1975 by L. Stein), 113–24
P. Hindemith: A Composer’s World (Cambridge, MA, 1952)
H. Besseler: Das mujsikalische Hören der Neuzeit (Berlin, 1959); repr. in Aufsätze zur Musikästhetik und Musikgeschichte, ed. P. Gülke (Leipzig, 1978), 104–73
T.W. Adorno: ‘Ad vocem Hindemith’, Impromptus (Frankfurt, 1968, 3/1970), 51–87
S. Hinton: ‘Gebrauchsmusik’ (1988), HMT; repr. in Terminologie der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. H.H. Eggebrecht, i (Wiesbaden, 1995), 164–74
S. Hinton: The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik (New York, 1989)

But we still don't know where Brahms comes in do we?


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 21, 2015, 04:35:40 pm
Thank you Mr. Gauk for that clarification. From our own Mr. Hinton's younger brother Stephen comes this interesting addition about Gebrauchsmusik
No, it doesn't; I have no such younger brother - indeed I have no brothers at all.

What you quote is nevertheless of not inconsiderable interest.


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: ahinton on September 21, 2015, 04:37:23 pm
But we still don't know where Brahms comes in do we?
Who are "we"? Why in any case would Brahms be expected to come into this at all, given that we're dealing with a concept that largely developed in the first half of the last century?


Title: Re: Kalevi Aho: Symphony No. 16 (world premiere)
Post by: guest596 on September 28, 2015, 10:28:34 pm
Looking to see if there is a recorded Sym. #16, I discovered this forum.  Anybody live in the Boston, MA area?  I have regular listening gatherings at my home.  Aho is by far my favorite living composer.  Also hoping #6 will be recorded some day.  The recent solo piano album is wonderful.