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IanB wrote: Hunter T Wolfe wrote: I'm excited. I thought The Drift and Tilt were both excellent, original, challenging pieces of work in their own right. And while I broadly get what you're saying, Ian, I don't particularly see the point in randomly singling Scott Walker out in order to compare him unfavourably to a randomly chosen important avant garde composer from a previous generation. He may not measure up, but so what? Completely different circumstances and all that.
No worries. See my reply above. I picked Berg very particularly because of his choice of subject matter and the time in which he was composing.
I think rock music gets in a mess when it tries to invade territory that belongs to a different kind of discipline. I think "classical music" has the same problem when stretching in the other direction.
Taking influence from other kinds of music is one thing but staking your ground out in someone else's territory is tricky as it means you are going to get held to an altogther different standard. It's like when sprinters try and become rugby league players or whatever. It just doesn't quite work out because whatever unique skills you have to offer the other people doing it have made it their life's work. It's in their DNA almost. Jason Pierce's improv and guitar loops records / performances have a similar effect on me. I just don't believe it.
This is where Macca, Roger Waters and others have come a cropper.
Interestingly Jon Lord's passing and the legacy of his Concerto for Group and Orchestra seemed to get much more sympathetic coverage from the classical media than from their rock peers. Maybe because he worked over time to intergrate rather than impose.
With anything like this it either hits your visceral hot spots or it doesn't. So I am not presenting this a definitive critique. I just don't see this facet of his music having much of an extended life or purpose.
I understand your argument a bit more now. I think I dislike and distrust most pseudo-classical prog rock for similar reasons.
Having said that, I have to admit that I really haven't listened to enough classical music, and certainly not the more experimental composers, to really place Scott's recent albums in context. I just like them for what they are, and lyrically and musically they do seem to have a lot to say about contemporary geopolitics and how we got there. As you say, ultimately it either hits your visceral hot spots or it doesn't- and it does for me!
Also, can Scott be said to be making 'rock' music anymore? Do the territorial boundaries between rock, jazz, avant-garde, classical even mean anything these days, when talking about the kind of challenging, often dissonant music that many come to this site to discuss?
I also think that Scott gets a rougher ride exactly because he once made such great pop and neo-pop albums, and now he's doing something completely different. You really can't compare what he's done since the mid-nineties to his sixties work- which I also love, but he's never going back there.
I think the likes of Robert Fripp or Peter Hammill get an easier ride because they've always made "difficult" music.
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