It has been a long time since I posted. Years, in fact. I just haven't been listening to much rock music. Mostly old time country. But lately, I've been listening to 20th Century classical music.
I've been reading the book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross, trying to get a better handle on the century that produced Schoenberg, Bartok, John Cage, and Philip Glass. I'm only a about a fourth into the book after a month of reading, because when you read a book about music you spend a lot of time listening to what you're reading about.
I recently read a section about Charles Ives, an early 20th century American composer who worked at an insurance company by day and composed by night. He was an outsider in the American scene, but he was greatly admired in Europe. He composed using tonal and atonal techniques that predate their use in Europe, but no one really knew about it because he was so isolated. He was "modern" before the rest of the world know what "modern" was.
The piece that struck me the most were three tone poems called
Three Places in New England. Read the
Wikipedia entry to learn more about each piece. But if you choose to listen, you'll hear dissonant, haunting, disturbing, and beautiful music that will, if you're like me, stick with you for days. It's famous for it's use of quoting folk songs, spirituals, and patriotic melodies. The third piece, meant to evoke a river in Massachusetts, is a sung folk-sounding melody backed by a swirling, atonal dissonance of strings that curl around your ears like wisps of fog.
