Micro Music Laboratories, Avant Garde Music 03

Avant Garde Music

New Insights – Old Errors

JOURNALIST: After having rejected the avant-garde, your compositions started to reflect the described musical and human knowledge, and you decided to introduce the musical change of direction towards naturalness to the music lovers.

You couldn’t have expected the experts to understand you; because you decided to take the same step as Richard Wagner had so successfully laid down. You turned direct to the audience with your musical work: the public.

Under the title “Enjoy I”, you went with friends on a concert tour through Germany, which was unparalleled in the field of contemporary serious music.

Young people, in particular, streamed to your electronic concerts, and 800 to 1200 visitors per concert were normal – and this at a time, when German premieres of world-famous new toners could only pull just about 150-200 listeners by the skin of their teeth.

The success of your tour “Enjoy I” with the audience, showed you had been right. But what did the experts say?

PETER HUEBNER: It made some think, others were outraged.

In order to understand this, you must consider the conditions, the avant-garde had created: they had opened the doors to musical chaos – whereas music, in particular, has always been the classical discipline to present natural orders, and to revive them in the listeners.

As the natural and inevitable harmonical structures of the microcosm of music have no standing within atonal compositions whatsoever, the assessment of the quality of such music only takes place intellectually.

Well – quite a few chaotic people have made the greatest efforts to establish the system of modern music, they blather on intellectually, fabricate complicated constructions on their compositional drawing-board, and cheekily proclaim, with a lot of good connections, them to be “music”.

And up pops an individual, all on his own, without the intellectual protection of the mass of new toners, and thinks he can simply ignore all these modern dissonant achievements!

In a piece of work that is committed to natural harmony, everybody hears, whether the composer at least masters his tool: if he infringes on the laws of harmony, it sounds out of tune, and as a human being was given the feeling for musical harmony at birth, even a child can identify such mistakes – without any intellectual musical training.

That doesn’t really say anything about the artistic value of such a composition – but it certainly does about the composer’s quality of craft.

Besides, there are quite a number of further criteria for assessing the craft of a harmonious composer: how he deals with tonality, harmony, rhythm, with the counterpoint, and many other things provide objective information on the composer’s skills as a craftsman.

The harmonical framework prescribes the harmonically composing tone creator clearly outlined working conditions with which he can carry out his craft. If he leaves this framework, he doesn’t understand his craft, and, as is well-known, every child will hear this.

The person approaching music from the outside, in whose inner being music doesn’t grow naturally, who has, however, decided to produce complex harmonious compositions, will usually fail the demands of the harmonical, and will be at risk of getting stuck with the classical slushy song – as in the drastic case of Richard Wagner’s son.

In how far a harmonious composition breathes natural life, is largely independent from the outer craft, and only shows itself, when the music in the listener’s world of experience is able to naturally set subtle and fulfilling fields of life in vibration – which makes him want to hear this work again and again.
The extent of natural life only determines the artistic level of a composition.

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