The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #126

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    Quote Originally Posted by Phil59
    Wrong. Of course you can teach football without playing it well. My whole point.But to teach music, you have to know to play it to some degree, as I made very clear.
    The best teachers are players too.

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  3. #127

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    Quote Originally Posted by BWV
    This is not HIP but is hip (ha my classical music joke no doubt went way over the heads of you jazz cats)




    re Schoenberg, everyone should check out the Piano Concerto, a late, non dogmatic 12-tone piece that is just absolutely fantastic. Beyond the ‘Brahms with wrong notes’ jibe he often gets tagged with

    as for pure serialism (beyond 12-tone, applying serial principles to rhythm, dynamics etc), this is a great piece

    If you want to hear some real music on that album, listen to the George Russell piece "All About Rosie", written before his Lydian Chromatic Concept obsession.
    Gunther Schuller, the conductor of "ALL Set" at that 1957 Brandeis Concert, was amazed to find that Bill Evans was able to sight read the piano part of the piece, even getting the dynamics and articulations right on his first playing.
    The other musicians had to rehearse the piece for hours before they could even come close to a performance. And we're talking about Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, etc...

  4. #128

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    Ha Schoenberg gets a lot of shit. I like the dude. Bloody minded. Self taught. Incredibly annoying to a lot of people. I suppose that says a lot about my self image lol.

    Verklarte Nacht is, I think, an attempt to unify the advanced harmony of Wagner with the formal and contrapuntal brilliance and motivic discipline of Brahms. Those were AFAIK Schoenberg's two main influences. In fact, we can actually see the 12 tone system as a sort of sideways mad scientist sort of encapsulation of those two things - the advanced non tonal harmony mixed with extreme motivic discipline and conservation of melodic material. And then he spent his later years getting ridiculed for writing wrong note Brahms by the young Turks who preferred Webern.

    Anyway, the stuff Schoenberg fans generally actually like the most is the 'free tonal' era, pre 12-tone; so Pierrot Lunaire, Erwartung, Second String Quartet, Five Orchestral Pieces. And they are - utterly amazing, unprecedented bolts from the blue. No-one was writing that stuff. It still sounds out there today. Schoenberg's use of this dissonant musical language to evoke extreme emotional states was actually very influential. Just ask a horror movie composer.

    Schoenberg himself didn't actually believe that only 12 tone music was valid; that was the younger generation. He was tennis doubles partner with George Gershwin after all. And wrote this late in his career...


    If I had to pick something I like about Schoenberg's tonal works it is that like Brahms I find them quite hard to understand at times. There's a lot going on in Brahms's music; I often feel it is much better than it sounds... But his free tonal music has no such issues. Of course, that wasn't enough for him.

    So 12 tone music? Well... I dunno. Best to listen to music with an open mind and ears. I have had some musical epiphanies listening to 'advanced music' - take this for instance. This work is just stunning to me. I have literally no idea how Boulez wrote this and I don't care.


    Here I think I am mostly responding to Boulez's brilliance with orchestral colour. But I actually find it easier to appreciate than a lot of 19th century symphonic writing which is reliant on formal expectations that go completely over my head, and endless connecting tissue and 'development'. Give me some Ariana Grande any day.

    Anyway these dudes are all dead now. We are post orchestra, post minimalism, post everything.

    But dots on paper and attention to form is still a thing for some.

    This is what New Music sounds like now:
    When I studied composition in University, my first teacher (a renowned student of Nadia Boulanger) called Schoenberg's music, "Disgusting", and said he much preferred Webern.
    My next teacher loved Schoenberg, and said that Webern's music sounded like a "Bunch of little farts".
    I listened to a great deal of 12-tone music, and found it all non-musical, until I found a piece by Wallingford Riegger (Sextet For Woodwind Quintet and Piano") whose third movement I fell in love with. THEN I read the liner notes, and it said that the other three movements (which I couldn't stand)
    were written in strict 12-tone style, BUT the movement I loved was written in a purely modal style!
    That was it. I got my degree, and got the hell out of there.