Do you know contemporary music?

03/06/2007 | 0 comment(s) | E-mail this article | Comment this article

Lutoslawski, Xenakis, Britten, Carter, Penderecki, Kurtág, Lindberg, Dutilleux, Eötvös, Ligeti, Murail, don't all these names say anything to you? You surely do not listen to music known as “contemporary”. Said “contemporary” because it is quite obvious that any music was one day contemporary. But when one speaks about contemporary music, it's especially about the music written since the second world war.

The contemporary music, is sometimes even been sulky by certain listeners, or worse by the musicians themselves which do not understand it and drop it before to have made an effort of comprehension. Because there the problem is. Our ear, little accustomed to this type of music, grew with the variety and the classical music and assimilated completely the music known as tonal, without really realizing it (by the cinema, publicity…). But this said, the gaps of our ear as regards music of today can be filled. By listening to contemporary music, one discovers unknown sound landscapes and of a very large variety, but this one requires on behalf of the listener an active listening and a small research.

To penetrate in the world of the contemporary music, it is to agree to enter the field of "unexpected". The listener can sometimes be diverted by the lack of melody, but this traditional structure of melody/accompaniment is called here into question by certain composers. I would say that the contemporary music is a research on the language. If this research seems to you ineffective or non-esthethic, initially calls in question your way of listening, and remembers, that at a certain time the sharps and flats did not exist, that the increased quart was regarded as “diabolus in musica”, and that all these elements which we now find in classical music and variety were regarded as noise and an atrocious cacophony. At their time, Wagner wrote noise, Mozart also.

Many works composed for more than fifty years by musicians of classical education could reach an audience larger than the current one. Fault of the keys which make it possible to appreciate them, the listener does not manage to enter this “unusual” world, but more serious, by being sulky he threatens its existence. Wonder about the composers, if the law of the market must manage musical research, therefore to know if the composer must write for the public, or if the composer is free to transcend the “law” to reveal his genius, whatever says the public which does not know this music.

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Do you know contemporary music?

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