SCG:[AG_post] Re: atonal music for guitar

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Re: atonal music for guitar

To: <cguitar-list@xxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: atonal music for guitar

From: "Angelo Gilardino" <winter@xxxxxxxx>

Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 07:47:05 +0200

> -----Messaggio originale----- > Inviato: venerdì 21 aprile 2000 3.45 > A: cguitar-list@eskimo.com > Oggetto: Re: atonal music for guitar > > I myself am confused. I like Mertz, I like Giuliani, but I also > like Henze, > Martin and Britten. I don't like Berio. I have the Eduardo Fernandez > recording (Avant-Garde Guitar, excellent by the way), I have bought the > score. I do not say, I don't like this piece because it is > atonal, I try to > understand it, openly. I have listened to it, I have tried > playing it, if I > then come to the conclusion that I don't like it, is this a personal > evaluation, or is it an intellectual misinformation? Surely it is not a > preconceived interpretation, due to a personal aversion to modern music. > (What then, is modern music, I assume Mozart and Beethoven in > their day were > "modern"). There is no confusion in your mind, Klaus, and your words suggest - if they do not openly show - quite a line of taste in your preferences with modern and contemporary music. There is a long distance between the (different) ways Martin, Britten and Henze approach composition and Berio's way. This is not the place for a dissertation in musical aesthetics - let alone compositional techniques - but you may rest assured that the fact you like "expressive" composers like the three great authors you mention is in itself an explanation of the fact you may very well not like the work of a composer like Berio who maintains, and consistently shows in his works, that music has no expressive goal (actually, the way he puts the matter is a bit harder, and I avoid to quote here one of his most famous sentences about expression). Anyway, recall just one historical fact: when the Darmstadt school began in the afterwar, all the young first-rank composers were there except one, who took quite a distance from the post-webernian mainstream: his name was Hans Werner Henze. It may be significant the fact that the author of a composition entitled "Intolerance" (Luigi Nono) was seen to leave the hall where the performance of a piece by H.W. Henze has just started. > I cannot explain why I like one piece, and not the other. I am > not formally > musically trained, terms like tonal and atonal have little > relevance to me. You have not to assign too much importance to technical terms. Music - especially composition - has its own vocabulary, and the use of its terms may have a terrific effect on those who are not familiar with them, but there is no secret behind them: a normal, not especially clever, if properly taught, can easily master all the compositional techniques and learning how to use all the devices of music, but this will not enable him/her to write - I do not dare saying a small piece, but even only a musical phrase which may have a significance. Music does not tolerate lacks of invention, of originality, of freshness in thinking: it is perhaps the most unremitting art, in this sense. > People speak of atonality with a negative connotation. I was > shocked to hear > Gilardino speak of his music as, mildly, atonal, because I > personally do not > think in these categories. I study literature and it does bother me that I > have difficulties reading a work without historical, structural and > technical implications. I am trying to keep all this out of my > music. When I > initially picked up the Gilardino Studies I had little ideas, > what they were > about, or what status they had in the "guitar world". I just started > playing, and I deeply liked them. I would wish people to adapt this > attitude, to let the music speak for itself. Let your fingers be > led across > the strings, does the music speak to you? I have little idea who the > composer is, what fuels his music, I am only interested in the > implications > it has towards me. I am sure this is basically what everybody should do. Whether one should deal with a piece - or with the whole work of a composer - it is a question to be answered in the way you do. Of course, if this answer is a yes, then the process of "interpretation" - in the broadest sense of the word - may stimulate the "interpreter" (the figure which includes the performer but also other skills) to get more acquainted with the "world" of the composer. As a literate you surely know how developped are in our time the hermeneutics skills: they are a science in themselves, and go far beyond the subject they deal with. Personally, I prefer very much performers just reading and playing my music, but of course I cannot refuse a dialogue with students of philosophy who want to deal with my work for their doctorate dissertations: I have on my desk the just issued latest number of the Italian guitar magazine "Guitart" - almost entirely devoted to my works - and I cannot hide a sense of shame when reading a biography that deals, in details, with my life, beginning with my parents, the house where I lived as a child, etc... The unavoidable question comes then: is all of this important for the understanding of the music in itself? I have no answer, but a historical evidence is before us: no author of a certain significance has been spared this investigation. It is in itself the work of an interpreter. > No idea, who Koshkin is, but I can endlessly play his > Melody from "The Elves", can this really be devil-music? No, definitely. The devil is much more astute. His dealing with music and musicians aims for much higher targets. Read the dialogue between him and the German composer Adrian Leverkuhn (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus): he does not care if not for a genius. And he does not allow his person to get completely sure of whether the contract has been signed or not. As a literate - again - you will notice that the fifty page dialogue by Th. Mann is an enlarged - and adapted - re-writing of the dialogue between "him" and Ivan Karamazov (Dostojevskji, "The Karamazov Brothers"): "he" is there, and "he" isn't there, who knows? "His" music is recognizable after only two notes. It is winning the listener before the third note comes in. Ciao. AG

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Re: atonal music for guitar