Why do so many of these comments degenerate into nastiness? Live and let live, listen and let listen, and try to imagine that maybe your own limitations are at fault if you can't enjoy something that many other people genuinely enjoy.actually this conversation was very interesting, and im inclined to believe sportulas. twelve tone composition is first of all not very popular now and second of all evolved straight out of schoenberg's predecessors. also rzewski comes right out of the tradition of great composer pianists ie liszt chopin scriabin rachmaninov; he is merely extending what they did in a more modern vocabulary.You're just about the dumbest and most ignorant wannabe intellect I've in a while. What the hell do you know about art and music, anyway? You're just expressing some totally subjective opinion based on total ignorance of music history or aesthetics. Wait wait... Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt and Prokofiev didn't change the rules. They wrote something new, but starting from what their predecessors wrote. Their works are a development in the history of music.On the contrary these contemporary composers changed everything! They write in a completely different way. And if you think well, none of these experiments is working. For example nobody can understand dodecaphony even if it started almost 100 years ago!As a musician, I've played contemporary music. I've studied it with and without instruments. Because of that I think that you are not better than me just because you appreciate contemporary music. On the contrary, I think you are only unother slave of history of music: you simply trust what writers write on books. Think with yor mind.It's too easy to say "You are small minded" or "You are lazy". Prove that contemporary music is good, don't offend Bullshit... You know nothing. Twelve-tone composition is easy to understand and appreciate, assuming that you have a half-decent IQ and sense of aesthetics. And by the way, Schoenberg's early atonal work is a direct evolution from late-romanticism, while his twelve-tone system was originally developed in order to use classical forms a la Brahms once again. Early dodecaphonism was in fact -- at least in the Schoenbergian sense -- quite "traditional".In fact, as you know, everybody appreciate dodecaphonism. I'm the only person in the world who doesn't like it and that considers dodecaphonism a great fiasco. Nowadays even the latest critics are changing their mind, and nobody consider dodecaphonism a success. It's time to stop experimenting. It's time to produce something serious in music!Thank you for offending me. Acting like that you demonstrated who you are. A terribly impolite person.No one has been writing straight 12-tone music since the middle of the 20th century. As far as integral serialism goes, that was over by the 1960s. Remnants of serialism endured for some time after that, and in the present very few composers use that system, except perhaps for folks like Babbitt and Perle (both of whom use it in a very individual manner). No sir, you're full of crap, and you deserve nothing but disrespect for disrespecting the craft of so many great composers. Like I said: STFU.