ew (unless we're talking jazz)I have a midterm in my 20th century compositional styles class tomorrow.
though out of fairness at least Berg tries to make serialism sound friendly.
no, we're talking Serialism. Webern, Schoenberg, Berg. FML. Combinatoriality is the dumbest fucking word for "takes one hexachord from one row then adds a hexachord from another".
I do like schoenberg. I played his Sechs kleine Klavierstücke
last year and thoroughly enjoyed the confused state of my audiences. I was gonna add a disclaimer that I'm not dismissing Ravel and Gershwin and Bartók and Stravinsky too, but I reserve a tremendous "fuck you" to John Cage and the like. I made the assumption that you were studying them types. sigh, you've brought out the most conservative part of ol' pabs here.
I can admire the music on occasion - Berg's Wozzek is one of the best operas of the 20th century. I simply have absolutely no interest in deeply analyzing the styles of almost any composer, let alone serialist ones. Musical Theorists like to misremember composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Gershwin, Holst, Vaughan Williams, hoping to include them in an earlier century so that they can show the marching progression towards serialism and atonality. They feel the need to justify their style of composition, show it to be superior, the sum of what came before. It's total bullshit and drives me nuts. I think people would be way more willing to approach serial and atonal works if people were more willing to make them less serious and starch-collared. Instead they just use the line "You just don't understand it", because you're not allowed to hate or dislike what you don't understand. Then they patently refuse to explain it. makes me real mad, man.