Hacker News Reader

As a former wanna-be-serious classical musician I heartily echo your sentiment. The general movement in art (the various "modern" movements) seems to have been both to reject traditionalisms and designed to make people feel bad. It also happened in music. I've heard it called the "The Unbearable Irrelevance of Contemporary Music".

There's some kind of draw in the hyper-academic avant-garde-ish arts scene that seems to produce mostly forgettable rubbish. But if you take into account that "90% of everything is crap" then there seems to be (slowly) some interesting art trends emerging. American musical minimalism is something I came across only in my thirties, somehow completely oblivious to it as a movement even though I was familiar with a few notable composers like Philip Glass. Once I dove into it, I found it fantastic, joyful, energetic, and most importantly impactful.

I think the composer I found that most reflects our observation here is Steve Reich, who's early work is semi-interesting academic avant-garde-ish naval gazing. But he eventually finds a real voice and his later works are mesmerizing energetic journeys -- and he's had deep impact on modern music across a number of genres.

They've given me hope that I'll find similar artists in other fields that are producing novel, interesting, and ultimately beautiful and impactful work.

Agreed very much on Reich and feel very similar about Brian Eno’s solo work. What’s the difference between aleatoric music and generative music?

Randomness is just one of many possible algorithms generative music can use.

For example: Music for Airports is built from very long tape loops with different durations. It's completely deterministic, but the results sound like a random-ish stream of constantly changing note patterns.

It only works because no human has a long enough memory to hear the loops as loops. If our short term memories could hold a long loop as a percept we'd have a very different and less interesting listening experience.

Interconnectedness is an aspect of generative music/processes that leads to complex outcomes.

Relatedly, Omri Coen has an interesting video showing his creative process while creating generative music using VCV Rack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBR6LmDb3Uk

So much this. The postwar period was more than a little insane - a combination of bureaucracy, technocracy, and competitive academic over-intellectualisation. Academic music mirrored all of this.

But the aesthetics date back to a 19th century music theorist called Hanslick who was aggressively against emotional expression in music. (He literally said women are too emotional to be good composers.)

Postwar academic composers fell in love with this idea, and the result was a torrent of abrasively pretentious tuneless nonsense, most of which was forgotten almost immediately after being written.

That's where most aleatoric music lives. It's not as clever or interesting as it pretends to be. There's nothing outstandingly effective about using dice or radio channels or the I Ching or whatever to spray notes and sounds around.

In C is a bit different because the randomness is limited to selecting and playing entire phrases that (mostly) fit together. It's a much older, less extreme, and more accessible version that isn't too random because of the phrase content.

> most of the post IIWW ("classical") music that was composed in Europe is so unconnected to - not just wider audience - but what I'd call a physical aspect of music: pulse and resonance

On the contrary, pulse and resonance are two of the most intensively explored themes on post WW2 music!

Just two examples from the top of my head (among uncountable others...):

- pulse: https://youtu.be/qdzvk1BJOBQ (Ligeti)

- resonance: https://youtu.be/1v7onrjN6RE (Grisey)

A big part of avantgarde music is also conceptually connected to the philosophical and artistic movements of their times, e.g. postmodernism so some of what you critique it for might be the declared goal of the people making it.

On top of that the people making something will often find different aspects interesting than the people consuming something. Musicians have different ears when listening because they have listened much more focused to potentially much more music. Just like a programmer can find value in someones weird experimental github repo that seems like a waste of time to the layperson, musicians can find value in music and sounds the typical music consumer finds actively horrible.

Let's not forget the avantgarde is about trying new things out. And those attempts are bound to fail a lot of the times. The professional or academic world might be interested in those attempts. Film students might find interesting ideas in obscure european film makers etc. This is normal, they look for something else in films than someone who seeks some entertainment after work.

> Most of it just makes the audience feel anxious and confused, if they even are able to pay attention.

Yeah, I didn't go into it as optimistic as you, but I remember thinking about Ligeti's "microtonal fugue" music: that just sounds like a swarm of depressed bees. At best it works as a one-off joke.

But then it felt like they were unaware and indifferent to each other's gimmicks as well. Feels like I've heard "striking a tamtam then quickly dipping it in water" (boinng!) from an awful lot of "original" modernist composers .

I agree that American minimalism is the main part of conservatory-guarded prestige music where there's actually something interesting - although it, too, started in some dubious and awfully arrogant theorizing.

Randomness need not cause anxiety and/or confusion. Think of the sound of rain or waves reaching the beach. As always with the musical experience its an interplay between being familiar with a given sound scape and associating it with pleasurable feelings and the composed sound actually intentionally triggering such responses. My guess is that "aleatoric" composers simply have not struck the right random notes yet :-)

> 1: https://youtu.be/DpYBhX0UH04

I got a minute it, and it mostly reminded me of a fugue.

Amazing comment. Are you still involved with music?

Yes. I code for living but still compose music. This of course means I don't have much time to commit for composing but being financially independent has allowed me to compose exactly the kind of music I want. In the spring I had a premier of my orchestral piece at local philharmonic orchestra. Unfortunately not allowed to share the recording but you can find some of my other compositions from Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/henrisokka