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NancyLebovitz comments on Making History Available - Less Wrong
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We've had this discussion before.
People seem to be turning up a little more detail.
There's one new thing I'm very interested in-- a composing prodigy named Jay Greenberg. His Fifth Symphony is available online, and while it's not the best thing ever, I'd say it's a real pleasure and he published it when he was only 14. I see some hope both for the music he's going to write, and for the idea that new classical music can legitimately be accessible and enjoyable for the general public.
This is exactly what I was talking about here. There are (and long have been) tons of composers just like Greenberg. But they never seem to acquire the prestige of the pre-WWI masters.
And I suspect that's because they're not significantly advancing the art beyond what those folks did (and as those folks were doing in their own time). Greenberg's Fifth Symphony is a perfectly nice piece, but there's nothing adventurous about it; it would have been conservative even if it had been written 100 years ago.
Were those tons of composers like Greenberg doing that sort of work at age 14?
Greenberg on the lack of anything really new in classical music. I think this is publicly available--let me know if it isn't.
Tentative hypothesis: people mostly get hooked by melody and rhythm, but classical has been exploring timbre (to the extent that it's exploring anything) for quite a while.
That's not necessarily fair. As I was taught, "nobody composes in a vacuum." Art and Science constantly evolve so you need to learn what came before, which means it will take longer and longer for prodigies to flourish.
Nobody performs in a vacuum either, for obvious reasons. Unless they are performing Mister Holland's Opus.
Some were, of course (even I wrote symphonies at 14, though never published or performed). But what does it matter what age they were, unless you're talking about the ability to generate publicity? If someone's music is considered interesting only because of their age, does that really count?
Unless you mean that the fact that Greenberg wrote such pieces at 14 means that he has great potential for the future; sure, I'll grant that. But then something like the Fifth Symphony should be considered a student exercise, like the inventions and fugues he's probably been required to write in music school. (Who knows, maybe that's exactly how he thinks of it.)
It's been exploring everything, melody and rhythm perhaps above all.
Re-reading Greenberg's article makes me want to compose some classical dubstep.
If he can't find the avant-garde, then that means that either (a) he has completely absorbed the musical contributions of the most advanced composers of today into his subconscious, and thus he himself is the avant-garde, or (b) the level on which he is listening to things is so superficial that only novel surface gimmicks and "effects" qualify as "revolutionary" (in which case, yes, the 20th century probably exhausted that).
His available music indicates that he is not the avant-garde. On the other hand, (b) is an exceedingly common syndrome.