People who only love melody have no passion for music.

This is an interesting debate that I had with someone on the internet...

I hate melody. Whenever I hear a melody, I want to chop it up into little pieces and disembody it over huge leaps so that it is unrecognisably distorted. There is nothing worse than humming along to a 'little tune' completely oblivious of the depth of emotion contained in the rest of the music. Give me orchestration/instrumentation any day. A combination of careful tuning and an expert choice of instruments can convey a world of understanding that a bumbling tune would disguise as 'cheerful contentment.

Sounds like an incredibly reductive and primitive view of what can constitute a "melody". Not to diminish the value of expertly done orchestration, but both can co-exist, and the melody certainly doesn't have to be a "little tune", bumbling or cheerful. See: Ravel, Stravinsky.

I wouldn't regard that much of Ravel's or Stravinsky's music contains what I would call a melody. I would call it melodic writing which I admire. Ravel's only sustained melody is that awful piece Bolero which ironically is saved by its consummate orchestration. Stravinsky did exactly what I said I would do to melody; chop it up and distort it.(except for his ill-fated neo-classical period; the saving grace there was that the melodies weren't his own.) I am thinking of Tchaikovsky as a writer of 'bumbling little tunes'. As skilful as he was, he was over reliant on reducing music to its primitive element - the tune and its subservient accompaniment. If you ignore the futility of this aspect of his music, you may find the darkness that lurks inside some of his most cheerful apparel. I am not saying that tune writing is superficial; I am saying that it hides the REAL passion inside the music.

What is Stockhausen's legacy?

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most important composers of the post war era. He is partially responsible for the creation of the post war modernist music. But what is his true legacy? Was he the leading composer in his field? Did he invent the 'timbralist' idea of generating music from a single sound? Well, he did accomplish that concept with "Stimmung'' (Voice) which is completely designed around the single chord of a B flat ninth . But he wasn't the first. Giacinto Scelsi wrote "Quatro pezzi per orchestre" which is based a single note per movement and that work was written in 1959. Quatro pezzi per orchestre - Scelsi I seriously doubt whether Stockhausen knew about Scelsi's achievement when he wrote Stimmung in 1977. Perhaps one of his greatest works is " Gruppen'' (Groups) composed for three orchestras. Did it change the way we use the orchestra? He was a pioneer, especially in the early stages of hi...

In the shadow of a genius.

Recently, I have discovered a fascinating revelation about the composers we admire so much. That behind many geniuses, there usually is a predecessor lurking in the background. It reminds of that often quoted phrase by Picasso A good artist borrows and great artist steals Now, I am not suggesting that the composers who I mention are stealing peoples' ideas - there is no evidence to support that fact. However, I am suggesting that the idea of a genius who came from nowhere may not be accurate. Let's take the case of Ernest Fanelli. Who? You might ask. He is a significant but unknown person in the development of impressionism. He is an Italian born composer living in Paris. He composed a good deal of 'new' music at the end of the nineteenth century. His ideas were quite radical; his instrumentation included harmonics, sul pont., he used wordless choruses. Unfortunately, he wasn't as talen...

Helmut Lachenmann

H elmut Lachen mann is relatively unknown outside of Germany. Nevertheless , h e is a figure wh o is growing in significan ce in modern music circles. Despite his wide experience, h is lack of broad appeal is, in my opinion, largely d ue to the individuality o f his music. He is not easy to categori se in an era which is dominated by trends and cliches. A simple way of describing his music is... *"musique concrète instrumentale". The notion is the creation of a subtlety of transformation of timbre, a manipulation of a continuum from sound to noise, from pitched notes to pitchless textural exploration, and all that in the sphere of (mostly) purely instrumental music. That means that in Lachenmann's music, there's a world of sound that rivals and even surpasses what electronic and electro-acoustic composers can achieve. -Guardian. Essentially , he is a acoustic composer writing electronic sounding music. He is somewhere...

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