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What are the most annoying things about modern composers?

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Author Topic: What are the most annoying things about modern composers?  (Read 4400 times)
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ahinton
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« Reply #90 on: August 19, 2017, 07:49:23 am »

The single most annoying thing about modern composers is their giving silly names to their works of music, instead of simply identifying the form. Hundreds of examples of this can be found on the B.B.C.'s modern music programme. Some one once said something about the "land without music" did not he, and this business of the silly names is part of what he meant.
"Identifying the form" is something that can only be done if there is a term for it and, even then, it doesn't tell the listener much in advance; "Piano Sonata", for example, can cover the work of Scarlatti (no slouch when it came to writing them), Beethoven, Liszt and Szymanowski and can also embrace a work such as Sorabji's Opus Archimagicum, the "silly" title that you might consider him to have given to his fifth and last one.

Would you prefer Liszt to have entitled his symphonic poems "Symphonic Poem No. ×" or Elgar to have called a work "Oratorio No. 1" rather than The Dream of Gerontius? Who in any case is to decide - and on what grounds - whether or not a title is "silly"? Should I re-entitle my Sequentia Claviensis "Piano Piece in Six Movements"? (that's a rhetorical question, incidentally, since I intend to do no such thing). And how would "String Quintet" be expected to denote that the piece includes a double bass (still less than a solo soprano in its finale) in cases when it does so?

Whoever it was that coined the phrase "land without music" did so long before some of what you might think to be the "sillier" of titles were penned in any case.
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