Micro Music Laboratories, Avant Garde Music 03

Avant Garde Music
New Insights – Old Errors

JOURNALIST: And the work of the new toners doesn’t possess natural life?

PETER HUEBNER: As the harmonical framework is missing among the new toners, these compositions are unable to breathe natural life, because harmony is the inner trait of natural life.

Therefore, not one of these pieces of work has achieved success with the simple listener.

All the vast sums of money, which opera houses, cultural offices, governments and music academies have asked the citizen to pay to support this music, and that is particularly in Germany, have not produced a single piece of work which only a thousand plain people in our country like.
That must even give the most persistent representative of such music cause for thought.

JOURNALIST: And so what about the craft of the new toners?

PETER HUEBNER: The missing of a harmonical framework also has its effect on the compositional craft of the new toners: you can, e.g., meet the demands of twelve-tone music with simple calculations.

I can explain these demands in a few days to a person of average musical talent – let’s say i.e. an employee at Volkswagen or Philips, and after a very short time, he will be able to deliver the most complicated musical drawing-board constructions which correspond in every way to the requirements of the avant-garde.

If, in addition, he now also starts calling himself a musical avant-gardist for everyone to hear, and finally eagerly and astutely begins to build up good connections to the avant-garde critics and presenters – who have also often studied composition, but who have not managed to come out as composers, and who have for that reason joined a newspaper or radio broadcasting –, you have here the typical level of a very large circle of avant-garde musicians and their supporters.

As for some, it is great to be a composer, and atonal music does not require any natural musical talent at all, a number of chaotic people, with the need for recognition, have chosen the profession of a musical avant-gardist, and have today occupied the official sector of “serious contemporary musical development”, in which, according to their own rules, they need not achieve anything else, but to create long-winded music constructions, which they then explain in a complicated way.

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