Scene-level structure: I could see that the scenes were integrated pieces, and the endings were obviously appropriate endings for the sort of material that the scenes consisted of, but it seemed to me that in most cases one could have broken the scenes into 1-2 minute segments, choosing natural break points and adding transitions. You could then have shuffled the middle segments without detracting from the scenes.
The themes were obvious in 1925, but arguably not in 1914 when the opera began and definitely not in the 19th century. OTOH, I don’t think they were handled well at all.
Some artists (I’m thinking of Celine in particular) explicitly have said that they wanted to create ugly work. For that matter, some business-people I know do see themselves as ‘bad guys’, though they probably wouldn’t say ‘evil’.
Yep, complaint was about the vocals.
The point of the discussion was to figure out whether I could believe that the musical establishment is doing the same thing that earlier classical composers were doing. My impression is agnostic and remains agnostic. I’m sure that they are doing something technically difficult, and was already sure of that, but I’m just not convinced that its something worth while. The key question is essentially one of whether Beethoven or Wagner (or Gauss or Hilbert) would consider the history of music (or math) from their day forward to be interesting (and whether Beethoven etc would consider modern academic music more or less interesting than jazz, Indian classical, Pink Floyd, etc,)
Scene-level structure: I could see that the scenes were integrated pieces, and the endings were obviously appropriate endings for the sort of material that the scenes consisted of, but it seemed to me that in most cases one could have broken the scenes into 1-2 minute segments, choosing natural break points and adding transitions. You could then have shuffled the middle segments without detracting from the scenes.
The themes were obvious in 1925, but arguably not in 1914 when the opera began and definitely not in the 19th century. OTOH, I don’t think they were handled well at all.
Some artists (I’m thinking of Celine in particular) explicitly have said that they wanted to create ugly work. For that matter, some business-people I know do see themselves as ‘bad guys’, though they probably wouldn’t say ‘evil’.
Yep, complaint was about the vocals.
The point of the discussion was to figure out whether I could believe that the musical establishment is doing the same thing that earlier classical composers were doing. My impression is agnostic and remains agnostic. I’m sure that they are doing something technically difficult, and was already sure of that, but I’m just not convinced that its something worth while. The key question is essentially one of whether Beethoven or Wagner (or Gauss or Hilbert) would consider the history of music (or math) from their day forward to be interesting (and whether Beethoven etc would consider modern academic music more or less interesting than jazz, Indian classical, Pink Floyd, etc,)