Originally Posted by Pookie

My Naxos comment was a joke and yes she is pretty amazing isn't she?

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

Demonrail666:

I'm glad I helped you find the identity of your mystery composer. Charles Ives was also a partner in a New York City insurance firm. Does that help?

Originally Posted by fugazifan

gershwin is definitely modern classical. he took sounds and genres that were foreign to western art music and incorporated them into it.
that sounds pretty modern to me (not that classical and romantic composers didnt incorporate popular and folk music into their pieces) but gershwin incorporated the sounds of modern society, in the sense of the bustling cities and street sweepers, and making an opera out of jazz music.

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

Sorry I didn't help you find your mystery composer.

As a consolation prize, here's the New York Philharmonic (James Levine conducting) performing Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man". The video quality is poor, but the sound quality is fine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzf0rvQa4Mc

Originally Posted by Glice

Tristan Murail - Gondwana (spectralism)

Originally Posted by demonrail666

I just finished listening to it on youtube. I'd definitely be into hearing more stuff like that.

Originally Posted by Glice

I was thinking of Kaija Saariaho when I was writing that, but Murail's one of the 'instigators' of spectralism, along with Gerard Grisey. The lineage runs (roughly) from Xenakis, Varése and takes in bits of concrete (which makes it very close to Lachenmann) and sound-art (say, Naumann).

There's a great piece by Horaitu Radelescu, 'Infinite cannot be anti-infinite' which is worth checking out - he split up an octave into something like 140 intervals.

Spectralism is kind of interesting to me because it's the first movement which uses new technology for the experiment, rather than as material. So the 'spectral analysis' - where aspects of a sound are physically interrogated with spectroscopes or whatever they are - are the experiment which informs the resultant music (and necessary slippage between that analysis and what is possibly with the orchestra as is) rather than using (for instance) record players as material (Cage's Williams Mix/ radio stuff). It's a load of geeks in sound labs rather than a load of geeky composers seeking new musical instruments in modern technology.

Originally Posted by Robert Schunk

For whatever it's worth:

I'm now watching the beginning of the film "Seven Days in May" on television, and they just now played a piece (on unprepared piano!) which seems, to me, to be a total ripoff of John Cage's "Music for Marcel Duchamp". (According to my guide, the movie began a little less than half an hour ago, so, if you enjoy independent access to the film, this item would be a little prior to thirty minutes into the film.

Enough of that now! It's time for me to switch channels so that I can watch one of my favo(u)rite films of all time: "Metroploitan". (No, not the German Expressionist film, but, rather, the American navel-gazing film concerning participation in the New York debutante season.)

In many respects the film is accurate, except for the following points:

1) No New York City debutante (at least in my experience) appears at more than one ball. Whichever ball provides the forum for any debutante's debut is the only ball that she (or either of her escorts) attends for the season. There may be several dances during the season, but only one cotillion per debutante.

2) The film shows a lot of dancing and listening to 1950's "Cha Cha Cha"-type music. This is possibly historically inaccurate: although I was part of this scene in the early 1980's (which, NOT coincidentally, was about the time I was getting into Sonic Youth), the film concerns this same scene in the late 1980's (years after my period of participation had concluded), the music we listened to being mostly "Moody Blues" (which I loved, and still love) along with "Foreigner" and "Journey" and Billy Joel (which I simply endured). Once, at a dance, someone played "New Rose" by the Damned, and we all went nuts!

3) The film shows young men walking down the streets of NYC wearing white tie and tails, striped pants and top hats, canes and cigarette holders and white gloves. NOT ON YOUR LIFE!!!! We walked to the dances wearing jeans and dockers (sans socks, regardless of the depth of the snow, of course (except that if the snow was too deep, we wore rubber overshoes)), five-dollar sweatshirts and tweed and various types of topcoats from the Salvation Army, and we carried our dinner clothes in hockey bags. Once we got to the hotel, we went to the public restroom, where we changed clothes with the assistance of the restroom attendant (who was MASSIVELY tipped for his assistance).

4) The highly intellectual discussion regarding philosophy and literature and the such, for the most part, simply didn't exist; almost all the conversation involved Stephen King horror novels, which I wasn't into. I tended to drive the conversation in the direction of Modern Classical music, which my fellows seemed to like, not so much for its own essential beauty, but simply because it seemed wild, and radical, and different.

But, the essential atmosphere of the film is historically accurate, which is probably why it's one of my favo(u)rite films of all time!

P.S.: That phrase "Urban Haute Bourgeoisie" would have been immediately rejected by my set as being redundant, as the term "bourgeois" already connotes urbanism. Further, we would never have referred to a baron as an aristocrat, as a baron is a nobleman (or a "peer" in UK usage), i.e., a member of the class just beneath the aristocracy.