This came to my mind today when I listened first time Terry Riley´s "a Rainbow In a Curved Air" (that I find really fascinating). I am not sure is Terry Riley categorised as "contemporary classical music" -composer, but that´s not the point. All my life I have seen attitude from "common man" who listens just popular music, that contemporary classical music is just art for art´s sake no-one can really understand. I just wonder, is it same in "common" proglistener (whatever it is)? I suppose proglisteners could be more open also to contemporary classical music. Also, I think it really has influenced less of more at least some progartists.

I have always tried not to have any attitudes towards any music. But have to say I am not also a big expert of the genre of this thread. Also I haven´t seen lots of mentions about it here. Stockhausen has mentioned, I have listened from him Gesang Der Jünglinlinge/ Kontakte -album and I have really liked the first one. Going to listen him more. Only other connection to CCM I have through Sonic Youth, who released album where they played their favorite pieces from that genre (there are compositions from Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, John Cage, Takehisa Kosugi, Yoko Ono, Nicolas Slonimsky, Cornelius Cardew, George Maciunas & Steve Reich. Not my favorite album, but quite interesting anyway). Then I have had less or more interest to artist somewhere in the middle of CCM and popular music as Pekka Airaksinen (my biggest fav of the artists I have mentioned here), Nurse With Wound, Einstürzende Neubauten. Faust is my really big favorite, I think it´s closest from the progartists to CCM.

So how about you? I know many likes for example Tangerine Dream, that I think also have at least some connections to CCM. I made recently a review from Terry Riley/John Cale Church Of Anthrax and noticed reviews made from his albums at least few almost every year, but not seen here any Terry Riley-thread.

"Contemporary classic" is a bit of a misnomer, how did they earn the "classic" tag? It's even worse than prog. But I see that even Wikipedia calls it "contemporary classical", so I'll have to accept that, as I accept the label prog, grudgingly.

I actually listen to quite a bit of this. Big fan of Gyoergy Ligeti. This is a thing of beauty (actually quite accessible):

As always categorisation is hard and there are connections to avantgarde improvised music that I also like, and even to prog - much recent Art Zoyd is actually contemporary "classic" in my view, certainly the Experiences De Vol series, probably also David Sylvian's last album. I also see the Tangerine Dream connection, particularly Zeit. I do like some minimalist stuff as well, e.g. much of Steve Reich. In fact, as well as regarding prog and other music, I tend to prefer those who extend and go beyond the genre borders rather than being safely inside.

Anyway, Stockhausen has some monster material, there's Conlon Nancarrow, etc.

I shouldn't pretend I'm a top expert... I'm not so much looking out for stuff than appreciating what crosses my path, so to say...

 

 

 

but maybe it's time to broaden my listening areas.

Ligeti is excellent.

I don't listen to it as often as I used to, but it has certainly been important to me. I'm a huge fan of György Ligeti, whom I originally discovered through 2001: A Space Odyssey after which I bought a compilation disc of his music by Deutsche Grammophon. The sounds of that disc actually scared me the first time I heard them but I gradually became more enthralled by them and thus my interest in the discipline was born. Reading Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The 20th Century helped me gain better insight in the developments and notable works in classical music during that century.

Out of the post-WW2 avant-garde composers, I count Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Alfred Schnittke, Pierre Schaeffer, Krzysztof Penderecki, Conlon Nancarrow, George Antheil and Helmut Lachenmann among my favourites and if we count the minimalists I'll also mention that the music of Steve Reich and John Adams is of a hypnotic serenity.

Any fans of King Crimson who don't know much about classical music should immediately listen to Béla Bartók's fourth string quartet or Igor Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring.

I'm not remotely convinced that Tangerine Dream, Nurse With Wound, Einstürzende Neubauten or Faust are even tenuously related to anything that could be considered 'contemporary classical' although I do like some of their output but no, I have no idea what the label means either.

I'm very fond of Stockhausen's Gesang Der Jünglinlinge, Don Sebesky's early 70's classical adaptations, Dutilleux's Metaboles, Alberto Ginastera, (some) Xenakis, Charles Ives, Kalevi Aho's 2nd Piano Concerto, Ligeti's Piano Concerto, Lutoslawski, (some) James McMillan, (some) Peter Maxwell Davies, (some) Messiaen, Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Penderecki, Horatio Radulescu, Mark Antony-Turnage & John Scofield's Scorched etc but couldn't really put forward a cogent argument that any are 'contemporary classical' (apart from they're not all dead and none sound like Bach, Handel or Beethoven)

I do sometimes, but mostly by attending concerts with the local symphony orchestra which - from time to other - plays something by contemporary composers.

One of the more recent btw. was the premiere performance of the Concerto for Hammond Organ and Orchestra by the Danish composer Anders Koppel (also known from early Savage Rose among other things).I'm unsure of what to think of it though, especially as it mixes rock cliches into a classical form. So it's a rather odd piece overall.

Apart from that, they occasionally play post-1945 music by Ligeti, Boulez, Cage etc., and I sometimes listen to this myself. I'm particularly fond of John Cage who also happens to be a big inspiration on some of my favourite rock musicians. Another favourite is the Danish absurdist avant-garde composer Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen. I wouldn't call Ligeti, Boulez, Cage etc. contemporary though.

Then there is the term 'classical' which - strictly speaking - refers to music of the classicist period, but in lack of a better overall term, I accept it.

And, the most important to me post here is that I just forgot to mention Harry Partch! I believe there are many that don´t put him into CCM at all (specially in CCM incast) but I think he´s really one of the great ones in 20th century music!

And really, I took that term from wikipedia, just how it was translated from Finnish. Really I can´t say who belongs to it and who doesn´t, all I am interested is how many people listens music that really is too "arty" of the common music listeners.

I consider Stravinskij and Dvorak as contemporary, but in the sense of the post I like Ligety a lot.

Not as much as I would like to, but you can find the likes of Riley, Penderecki, Cage, Ives, Davies and many others in my collection ... but these days, retired, it's hard to spend a wee bit more money on a lot of this music, which is very enjoyable for me, but not my driving force.

A sidebar comment about TD ... for my ears, TD WAS extremely symphonic/classical until EF passed away, and it has become very metallic/methodical/machine oriented since his passing ... his touch was in the area of classical music, always add bits and pieces that made the music better, and this was very evident with the ladies and guitars in it ... the orchestration side of the music, was the highlight ... and this is completely gone.

It says a lot more about their music than we actually thought in my ears.

Even Ligeti is dead though. (I know I brought him up myself... at least he's contemporary enough that I once exchanged  a (very) few words with him.)

In fact, I regard this as one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, and it is not a joke:

Not as familiar with contemporary classical as I'd like.   I do love mid-20th century classical though, e.g. Schoenberg.

 

You may not consider it a joke but I still laugh because a few months ago I said it was one of the most pretentious things ever produced.

 

 

 

Hi,

Goodness ... lots of stuff on ECM by him ... great stuff too!

Fair enough...there's a point where sometimes one has to conclude that something just isn't going to click. I don't find only horror in Saariaho at all - in those pieces I can hear the birdsong, albeit as one might hear it as a bird - vital assertions about territory and survival. And I can feel a linkage to Messiaen there. But all this is completely subjective, of course.

Do you know Tüür at all?  This is my favourite from what I know of his work:

Also features a percussion solo from Evelyn Glennie that absolutely rocks.

Some of my favourites in the contemporary sphere: John Luther Adams (different guy from John Adams; this one's much more about environmental landscapes); Morton Feldman; Giya Kancheli; Arvo Pärt; Einojuhani Rautavaara; Dobrinka Tabakova; Peteris Vasks.

Was lucky enough to see Terry Riley perform live with his son just before the Event shut everything down. It was a remarkable evening of entirely improvised music that you'd be hard put to categorise or even believe was improvised since it felt so composed.

   

I once attended a seminar on the avantgarde movement and Ligeti was one of the co-lecturers. That was when I was still in Hamburg and he was at Hamburg's high school of music, but that one was for the general public. Anyway, in this seminar he performed 4'33" (obviously at the time well known and introduced, but anyway, you hear what you hear), and he told us that he had once used the same idea when invited for a presentation on "The Future of Music". He had stolen it from Cage, but at the time that was very contemporary and hardly known, so Ligeti's "presentation" evoked a big scandal; some audience shouted at each other about whether Ligeti was German and this was therefore "German arrogance", some others (Germans) felt insulted and knew he wasn't. He said it was big fun. After only 2 minutes they took him off the stage. Quite a success if you want. (The guy was a fun speaker, apart from being a supreme composer. RIP!) 

Yeah I guess you could call it a success. But if anything could be considered arrogant, it would have to be audience members making stereotypes based on someone's supposed nationality, just because of what they hear.

An interesting phenomenon btw. is when people from the classical world are trying to turn rock into classical. The results are not always successful. I once heard a CD with orchestral versions of songs from The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon; it was insufferable, and very much felt like a trivialization of the original music to me.

I also very much prefer the original Low album to Philip Glass' Low Symphony.

I am not sure have I even heard Tüür´s name. Will listen it today!

How about you, have you heard anything about Pekka Airaksinen? I don´t think he´s put into CCM at all, but anyway he´s really of his own and hard to compare anybody else. I don´t think this great album is fully into net, but here are some pieces from it (also info about Pekka):

https://www.soundohm.com/product/afrodipankara-1984-lp" rel="nofollow - https://www.soundohm.com/product/afrodipankara-1984-lp

Listened that Tüür-symphony, he´s not also fully my cup of tea, but anyway lot more interesting than Saariaho. Really loved Evelyn´s percussion work in it, it´s really funny I just read again Björk´s book and Evelyn was also in her "MTV Unplugged"-concert! I am not really a big drumsolo-fan, but when it´s as fascinating as it is in Evelyn, I could listen it endless (I think only ones as great I know are Bill Bruford, Neil Peart & Pierre Moerlen). And what´s more fascinating she´s deaf! Really would like to see her play sometime in the future! Also I liked the marimba parts after those great percussion parts. I noticed Tüür´s fifth symphony has electric guitar, I think I will listen it some day.

It took a while to get used to the different sounds and structures but my favourites now are Birtwistle, Boulez, Crumb, Ligeti, Nono, Penderecki, Scelsi, Schnittke, Takemitsu, Varese, Xenakis and a few works of Stockhausen. You might find a few free downloads on archive.org to get a bit of a taster.

I'm a big fan of Philip Glass, so much so that I started a PA blog for him, although my hopes of finding other Philip Glass fans here were shattered like a Glass House.

Hi,

A lot of the earlier electronic music was much more difficult to listen to than it is today ... when a lot in our ears has already listened to enough of it, that it allows the listener to make a comment about the music, but the biggest thing about the early day stuff is that a lot of it was experimental, and I go way back to the FORBIDDEN PLANET soundtrack, and then to the 60's with the likes of Beaver & Krause and even the Tibetan Bells series that came out in those early days which were not electronic, but really, almost had the same feel when you were listening ... what is this all about?

Beaver & Krause were, however, more into making sure that the synthesizer was not strange and could create some sounds that your ear could resolve, a lot of nature sounds, and stuff that became well known and respected by a lot of later generation synthesizer folks ... including TD.

Nowadays, I have not heard enough to make a judgement, however there are quite a few exploratory piano/synth players and their stuff is interesting, but I can not say how it fits with electronic music, although it does not "sound" to me as if it was meant to be a classical styled composition ... since the sound side of things is more important, it seems, than the ensuing music put together ... but this is a bit of another story since the ability to mike and amplify these things, now allows for sound creation that was rarely there before ... like for example, it used to be bad and insulting to use your hands to hit the piano itself (not the notes), but after everyone saw KE do it many times (Rachel Flowers shows it well several times -- much more visible in the piano/organ versions of his music), it became normal ... I have albums by one woman in Japan that does this a lot on her work ... and it is amplified and touched up by sound effects to a small degree.

But, honestly, to me, the stuff that Vangelis does, that Ryuichi Sakamoto does (for the most part), the stuff that Kitaro did (and still does? Haven't listened lately to him), was "contemporary classical music" to my ears, as was Tomita, although some folks have commented that he was just an interpreter not exactly a composer! Even Mike Oldfield fits, although I think that in his last few years he has been more repetitive than he has been creative, and I think he just needs to get out and go smell some flowers and enjoy a little more life, and stop being stuck in the cocoon that mostly allows him to only repeat himself ... even his sister has evolved more, and is now much more interesting than he is.

 

I enjoy classical guitar, and I love how guitarists used to incorporate classical guitar into progressive rock pieces.  It was part and parcel of a lot of 70s prog, but these days there is a tendency toward heavier sounds and more atonal character.  One of the subtleties of classical guitar is that some notes will ring out and remain present during and following chord changes (sometimes they are pedal tones), whereas these days the chord changes are, more often than not, very abrupt and harsh on the ears.  Kitaro!  Now that is a name I haven't heard in quite a long time.  Do you think of Kitaro as being more classical or New Age?  When, you mentioned the person hitting the piano, that reminded me of the late Michael Hedges, who used to do that with guitar to create percussive effects.  I highly recommend his album "Aerial Boundaries", especially the song "Ragamuffin", on which he does use this percussive effect.  

I can't get the link to work, but if anyone is interested, they can copy and paste:

Studio version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv20EbwIhTE&feature=youtu.be

Live version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ulWPVb8t44&feature=youtu.be

I listen to some Philip Glass, also quite familiar with Michael Hedges.  I feel that Kitaro moves in and out of both classical and New Age (and enjoy some of his work as well).  Another composer I enjoy who seems to do both, at least to my ear, is Ludovico Einaudi.  I like some New Age, but want it to not be too airy and light.  I'm not fond of super-discordant modern classical, however, either.

Yes, there is definitely an interface between prog and New Age, as well as prog and classical.  As far as straight up classical guitar goes, I love the usual suspects:  Andre Segovia (RIP), Christopher Parkening, Julian Bream, Scott Tennant, Liona Boyd, Elliot Fisk, Narcisso Yepes (RIP), John Williams (the OTHER one, who incidentally was in a nice Prog band called Sky), Kim Chung, among others.  My all-time favorite is Christopher Parkening, as he could play pieces by Bach like nobody's business.  But, I like different guitarists for different pieces.  Julian Bream plays my favorite Bach piece, BWV1000, really nicely.  Segovia and Kim Chung played Recuerdos de La Alhambra beautifully.  Still, Parkening was so good at changing his tone based on hand position, especially on pieces like Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.

Yes, there is definitely an interface between prog and New Age, as well as prog and classical.  As far as straight up classical guitar goes, I love the usual suspects:  Andre Segovia (RIP), Christopher Parkening, Julian Bream, Scott Tennant, Liona Boyd, Elliot Fisk, Narcisso Yepes (RIP), John Williams (the OTHER one, who incidentally was in a nice Prog band called Sky), Kim Chung, among others.  My all-time favorite is Christopher Parkening, as he could play pieces by Bach like nobody's business.  But, I like different guitarists for different pieces.  Julian Bream plays my favorite Bach piece, BWV1000, really nicely.  Segovia and Kim Chung played Recuerdos de La Alhambra beautifully.  Still, Parkening was so good at changing his tone based on hand position, especially on pieces like Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring.

My husband's mom took him to a Segovia concert when he was five and he asked her if she would get him a guitar.  She did, and also found one of his proteges to teach him (grew up in the Los Angeles area).  We have a boxful of signed Segovia LPs.  We listen(ed) to many of these fine guitarists.  There is a reason why they are so noted! And thank you for remarking on the intersections of these various genres.  

My husband's mom took him to a Segovia concert when he was five and he asked her if she would get him a guitar.  She did, and also found one of his proteges to teach him (grew up in the Los Angeles area).  We have a boxful of signed Segovia LPs.  We listen(ed) to many of these fine guitarists.  There is a reason why they are so noted! And thank you for remarking on the intersections of these various genres.  

Well, we were both very lucky, although he's gone to the other side, now.  Still, I smile every day when I think of him, because of how we changed each other's lives for the better.

Hi,

Born in Portugal and with a lot in my mind, the Spanish Guitar and its use and ability was one of the first things that appears to have appeared in Spain the the era that became known as "progressive", but for my ears it was more about folks adding electric materials to the incredible amount of folk music that Spain already had! 

At that time, I got a handle on ECM, and immediately loved to hear Egberto Gismonti, whose guitar work in those early days is, fantastic, to say the list, and like the exploratory musician he was (and is!), he used it in all combinations, but his work with Jan Garbarek, Charlie Haden, Nene Vasconcellos and a handful of others when he was at the guitar ... was astounding and so beautiful, and it ended up me calling it "Brazilian Guitar" after the Spanish style. Egberto was a bit of an "ambient" player in his early days and the stuff in "Solo", and the releases around that time are incredible ... a sort of welcome to my living room and here we go kinda thing, and it will go for quite sometime. 

And he wasn't the only "guitar" person in ECM ... Terje Rypdal was doing the same "sound spheres" with an electric guitar including the one album with David Darling (EOS) that was the best classical music chamber music with an electric guitar (skip the first cut!!!) ... and it was truly exceptional. John Abercrombie also comes to mind. (spelling!)

Jaketejas wrote: ... Kitaro!  Now that is a name I haven't heard in quite a long time.  Do you think of Kitaro as being more classical or New Age?  ...

I never cared or liked the "new age" thing, as most of its music was formulaic and it was designed to make you think that this and that was the right thing, and for the most part, sometimes I like to refer to it as a "bored housewife" hope for something else ... and something that pretends to be an illusion is always good, and a lot of the music out of it was rendered ridiculous, so a little choir is a bunch of angels, and this and that represents this and that ... and a lot of the music was not exactly composed, but simply based on the sound ... over and out! The music, itself, was no longer important, and calling it "music" like I did in the hip store here in Portland, was insulting the "new music" of the spheres! I merely asked ... but is it music?

Kitaro started out way back when as a regular keyboard artist and had nothing to do whatsoever with the new age stuff ... and I think that he knew his music and work well enough to not need the "new age" folks, but he was at the time one of the best known keyboard artists ... since none of these ladies in this Portland store liked Jean Michel Jarre, had no idea how much classical music and soundtracks Ryuichi had done, or ever heard of Mike Oldfield (too much rock music!!!) ... and so on ... and when I even mentioned Alan Stivell, it was like I mentioned the devil in a store that worshiped the ground that Enya lived on!

it was NOTHING but a control mechanism for their business ... had nothing to do with anything else! And their workshops were an illusion where the "women leaders" got their place in the front and talked about stuff they thought they were interested in but they had a cushy job and husband ... end of story!

Mr. Hedges is very good and deserves all the credit he never really got ... one of the great ones!

Thank you, I probably should have made it more clear in my first post.  I didn't know Michael Hedges was from OK orginally, how wonderful that you were able to see him while he was alive.  He was also taken way too soon from us.  The road he drove off of is very treacherous, on the way to the Mendocino coast from the SF Bay Area.  

Hi,

Agreed, sort of just playing the melody ... but in the case of some rock bands, this clashes with the solo and other parts.

Mortte wrote: ... Anyway I think Purple in their Concerto and the Nice in Five Bridges succeeded quite good. Of course "Atom Heart Mother" is masterpiece, but there isn´t full symphony orchestra.

When that came out, you should have heard the station laugh at DP and how they had "sold out" ... it was sad in many ways, fans not appreciating great music ... The Nice had been doing a lot of stuff that was classical in design, and it carried on some in their follow up REFUGEE ... and things changed a wee bit in ELP, however, they got right back to it with a whole album of Mussorgsky and later their own work.

ATM, for me, is exceptional, and I wish that all the 15 different versions would be released, including the one that Roland Petit used in Paris for the show with ballet and the ATM piece, which I don't know if it is the right one or not, but it sounded like a lullaby all the way through more or less. The sad event, was one that a rock audience trashed senselessly, because they could never appreciate a ballet!

One other album that is excellent is CARAVAN's (The New Synphonia) which has a live orchestra that they had a lot of problems with (time for tea, time for lunch, time for a pee, time to be an as4hole, etc, etc) and in the end they did not want to come out for an encore ... and when Pye apparently said ... fine, we'll do it ourselves ... a minute later the orchestra showed up. The show had some very nice moments and the use of the orchestra was probably one of the best ever done! And the thought that it could have been better ... 

I like ELP's thing, but I'm not sure that comparing it to the original comes out right ... I would rather an orchestra included a synthesizer to augment the strings (for example) and also add some touches that the band would not be able to do ... a sort of the ending 15 minutes of "For Girls That Grow Plump In The Night", which is one of the best and prettiest pieces mixing the two I have ever heard. It's not only composed right, it is mixed right, and the connections work great.

For the most part though, most rock bands are afraid of an orchestra, and vice versa ... many orchestras fear the synthesizer with do away with them sooner or later ... and conversely, with folks doing guitar solos on keyboards (even TD is doing that now sampling EF and BB and JF as well!!!), which is not something that most rock bands like or appreciate.

I think that in the next 50 years, this separation will come together even more ... and hopefully be able to create a lot more music for the annals of time!

One thing that we have not heard, and I'm not sure that it has been released, or that it will be, was an evening of Edgar Froese music done by an orchestra in Germany before he changed to a cosmic address ... and my guess is that it was not that good, or that great, but I think it is a good start ... even KS was invited and he had nice things to say.

But, not sure why, no one else knows or says anything about it ... and my guess is that the music created for it with an orchestra of his material did not work as well as it should have, and my take on this is that the person at the top needed to be familiar with electronic music, and my thoughts are the he wasn't ... but I don't know at all, since there is so little information about it.

Sorry for the confusion. I was just responding to your comment that he wasn't on PA. I'll have to look at that poll more closely though. Why hasn't anyone voted in it yet though? 

When I saw him, he was a bit younger and spun around and around for an incredible length of time.  Here, he is a bit older, but still does some spinning at 1:09:50.  I backed the time up a bit so you could prepare for the moment.  That particular song is off of Taproot, which is my other favorite album by him.

Michael Hedges' music was, thankfully, difficult to categorize.  They threw him in with the New Age bunch, but much of it defies that label.  There is one trick-of-the-trade of his, in particular, that I have always found to be fascinating and quite progressive, and I'm not talking about his percussive effects or harmonics.  It is something that took me years to wrap my head around, so forgive me for not divulging it.

You jogged a memory.  Mum was listening to ... what we used to call "muzak" ... and she was really enjoying this one piece in particular.  I thought "Huh?  I know that tune!  That's Led Zeppelin!"  We teased her about how she was rocker at heart.

Usually, it was "Turn down that awful racket !!  One day, I hope you have a child who is just like you!"  Parental prophecies almost always come true.

Just heard the Keith Emerson Tribute and its orchestration of a lot of Keith's music, is excellent, and probably what I envision to be an orchestra with a rock band, though in this case, it was more "classical" than it was rock music oriented, and it was an excellent way to show Keith's music as a magnificent composer he was, and how well his music will be remembered.

It also helps that someone like Rachel Flowers is helping make this stuff seen as a lot more than just a rock song ... something that is hard for "progressive" folks to relate to because it does  not have the "sound" that it is supposed to have ... I have already heard someone say that if that was released today, without ELP, that it would not be considered "progressive" or that it would NOT get an audience like it can now ... and somehow, that just brought tears to my eyes. The most cynical comment I have heard, from a fanboy, that would not know music from a song, from the disturbing definition of "progressive music" in most websites.

I'd be curious to hear that but I'm skeptical. Edgar Froese is so much about the sound. I can imagine orchestral versions to work (albeit in a quite different way), but then I can also imagine this to go wrong, as it subtracts something essential the music was about.

Another prog musician who released a nice album of (more or less) classical piano music - not really very modern but at least some time around end 19th century "modern" (so should be fine for those who don't like things becoming too atonal).

He's Cardiacs keyboarder who also has some nice folk proggy solo albums, in case you wondered.

EF would be ideal for classical music, since his compositions, even though are about the "sound" are very classically minded which the current TD does not know about or understand since they came up with the machines and not the "music" itself.

EF's material, specially when you see the band in concert from 2000 to 2015, was about adding another bit and piece on top, sort of like adding an instrument to the whole, and my fun take on this is that it was music with 20/25 different lines of music on the musical sheet, where as the average rock band it all fits in 5 to 6 different lines of music, and ... MOVE ASIDE ... here comes the solo!