If you listen to the Great Fugue a hundred more times, unless you find something viscerally unpleasant about it (which, make no mistake, some people really do, since it’s pretty loud and screechy)
If what you mean is that Alban Berg was not a composer of tonal music in the 18th- and 19th-century sense, then that is true, but (a) his music contains structure, just not tonal structure;
Perhaps it would have been better to write “not just” instead of “just not”—because Berg’s music in fact contains plenty of tonal structure; there’s a reason he’s considered the most “conservative”, “backward-looking”, “romantic” member of the Second Viennese School (whether or not such a characterization stands up to “proper” scrutiny). The final orchestral interlude of Wozzeck even has a frickin’ key signature.
Yeah, the most complete way I could have put it would probably have been something like “Berg’s music contains structure, but not very much of the kind of structure that would make it sound like the classical tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries.” That’s the intuition I wanted to validate while pointing out that there’s no sense in which there’s “more music theory” in some kinds of music than in others.
Yes, this comes back to questions of quality. I’ve heard and read and looked at art that I thought was ruined by too much theory—typically not descriptive theory that tried to explain why things were good, but prescriptive theory that explained why doing things some other way would be better. The book “Learning from Las Vegas”, which takes Las Vegas architecture as pointing the way towards a new, enlightened postmodernist architecture (rather than as a bunch of random tacky stuff competing for attention) is an example of that kind of theory.
Well the “tacky” stuff in Las Vegas is certainly much better than modern architecture. Furthermore, having to compete for attention at least imposes some minimal constrains of quality, also sadly lacking from modern art.
Such folks may want to try the piano 4-hands or string orchestra version.
Perhaps it would have been better to write “not just” instead of “just not”—because Berg’s music in fact contains plenty of tonal structure; there’s a reason he’s considered the most “conservative”, “backward-looking”, “romantic” member of the Second Viennese School (whether or not such a characterization stands up to “proper” scrutiny). The final orchestral interlude of Wozzeck even has a frickin’ key signature.
Yeah, the most complete way I could have put it would probably have been something like “Berg’s music contains structure, but not very much of the kind of structure that would make it sound like the classical tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries.” That’s the intuition I wanted to validate while pointing out that there’s no sense in which there’s “more music theory” in some kinds of music than in others.
Yes, this comes back to questions of quality. I’ve heard and read and looked at art that I thought was ruined by too much theory—typically not descriptive theory that tried to explain why things were good, but prescriptive theory that explained why doing things some other way would be better. The book “Learning from Las Vegas”, which takes Las Vegas architecture as pointing the way towards a new, enlightened postmodernist architecture (rather than as a bunch of random tacky stuff competing for attention) is an example of that kind of theory.
Well the “tacky” stuff in Las Vegas is certainly much better than modern architecture. Furthermore, having to compete for attention at least imposes some minimal constrains of quality, also sadly lacking from modern art.