Turk wins European composer award
OrchestrasThe Europäischen Komponistenpreis 2024 has been awarded to a young Turk, Ege Gür. He is 26.
Berlin’s Culture Secretary Sarah Wedl-Wilson presented the 5,000 euros award to the composer on Monday in the Berlin Konzerthaus.
Gür’s latest orchestral work ‘the image of the invisible’ commemorates victims of last year’s Turkey and Syria earthquakes.
Want attention for your piece? Hang it up to some dramatic news item, of not too long ago, and people will have something to think about while they are listening.
This well-scored piece should not need an earthquake to get some money.
We haven’t gone much further than Berg’s Lulu have we.
Music does not progress like science.
Is Beethoven ‘further’ than Bach, or Monteverdi? Is Mahler ‘further’ than Wagner or Chopin? Is Debussy ‘further’ than Wagner? Etc. etc….
The only progress in the arts consits of two things:
1) qualitative progress: some works are better than other works in terms of artistic quality, and that has nothing to do with the language used or with ‘modernity’
2) the accumulation of means: today composers have so much more sources to learn from and to borrow from than ages ago
We perform music not for its historic value but for its capacity to ‘speak’ to us. Audiences listen aesthetically, not historically, or with concepts like ‘progressive’ or ‘modernity’ in mind.
The idea of musical languages ‘progressing’ is a fallacy, as is the idea that music develops towards ever more complexity, or ever more dissonances. It is a myth born from 19C romanticism which projected progress from politics (more freedom, more democracy) and science (more and better understanding of nature). The first to give conceptual form to this myth was Schönberg, who thought that there was a ‘main historic line’ from Bach and Beethoven via Brahms & Wagner via Mahler towards HIMSELF who emancipated ‘the dissonance’, thinking a dissonance was a thing that could be liberated from the constraints of tradition which had burdened Bach, Beethoven etc. etc.
A hughe misconception of what ‘structure’ and ‘language’ means in music.
Hence so many composers who got stuck with the idea that all the fantastic works that make-up the central performance culture are museum pieces in the museum, while players and audiences experience them as living music, forever contemporary. And they continue to chew upon the poor ideas of the last century thinking they are modern, and have to be modern to be taken seriously.
Bravo, John!
Schoenberg had a predecessor in conceptualizing music history in terms of progress: Liszt, who consciously tried to “hurl his lance into the future” with his late works — and who would also sneak advanced elements even into the potboilers of his virtuoso years (e.g., a whole-tone passage in his Grand Galop Chromatique). Many of Liszt’s late works were very self-consciously experimental in nature, and while I love them, I also see them as predecessors of too many 20th-century works that were all experiments without much expressive content (which was never lacking in Liszt’s output).
Yes, all of that is very true.
In spite of his premodernist misconception, some of his late pieces are very beautiful like ‘La Lugubre Gondola’, or ‘Unstern’.
He explored new territory in terms of means, but made the mistake to label it as ‘progress’. Every composer of talent creates something new, in terms of personality. Brahms with all his traditionalism created a new personal style: the Brahms style, exclusively to be used by Brahms himself.
Together with Wagner, Liszt tried to sculpt a position of avantgarde artist for himself, and while they were truly great artists, that stance created an immense mental barrier in the next century, where nitwits looked-down upon composers like Sibelius and Shostakovich.
I’m glad I’m not the only person with a thum-down! All music since Boulez is wonderfully modern when it follows his example.
Sally
Free association when listening to ‘Efaced Figures’: An excruciating manifestation of the despair of modern life, pain as a Platonic entity, pure, death does not forget you, it will catch you one fine day, soon. Very appropriate for our time. I hope I never have to hear it again.
Who gives the ‘European Composers Prize’? Shouldn’t you be European to win it?
(This is not a joke/sarcasm, it’s just a question.)
Maybe this Turk is a European one. Europe is full of them.