I pulled up some YouTube videos excerpted from “Quatre chants pour franchir la seuil”, (“Four songs to cross the threshold”) by Gerard Grisey, such as this one of the second movement “Interlude : II. La mort de la civilisation (“The death of civilization”), Catherine Dubosc, soprano, Klangforum Wien, Sylvain Cambreling, conductor.
. There is another Youtube excerpt with Barbara Hannigan (mentioned in Andres’s post) as soprano and the Contemporary European Ensemble, where Hannigan discusses the music, in French. I get the impression tha this music ponders the existential challenges to our sense of self-projection through "civilization", warning us that, like the Maya, we can fail. That's a downer for people who want to be entertained.
In general, the music vaguely reminded me of something like Boulez’s “Pli Selon Pli” (“Fold by Fold”), which I have on a CD somewhere, maybe some harkening back to “Pierrot”. I really didn’t pick up the microtones or quarter tones, but they’d be hard to discern in voice.
The post brought me back to a recollection of my own piano days. In May 1958, when I was finishing the ninth grade, my piano teacher suddenly died of colon cancer at 57, and I was really shocked at the time. I soon continued the lessons with another teacher who liked modern music, and soon read about the modern composers and even encountered the notion of quarter tones as well as formal “twelve tone rows”, which aren’t used as often as people think. In time, my ear would accept something like Alban Berg’s "Lulu" as lush, romantic music; whereas something like Grisey sounds mechanical (“spectral”) to me. (The second piano teacher would eventually go deaf.)
For me, postromanticism was the right transition into modernity. Mahler took us through that (it sometimes seems that contemporary music begins with the first movement of the Mahler Ninth. There is a kind of form, even if the music is episodic, that takes us along. When one comes to Stravinsky, it seems like there is negation of emotion, but not really; in "Sacre", the little episodes of massed sound (with the dancing) carry us along. But somewhere along the way, modern music started becoming what it always was, mathematics for its own sake, a map of the mind of Stephen Hawking (and maybe of some of his dire warnings).
The opening of the “Antennae” movement from Timo Andres’s “Shy and Mightly” is used in the background of a vimeo video from the Kaufman Center Ecstatic Music Festival, as here
Ecstatic Music Festival from Kaufman Center on Vimeo.
I may have heard a bit of this music (“Antennae”) on my car radio on Sirius once or twice; “Antennae” and “Flirtations” seem to catch the ear quickly. (They’re some distance away emotionally from Josh Groban singing “Hidden Away” on the next channel as you go up I-95 [buy that legally here].)
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