there's a quote from some modern composer, i think one of the more famous minimalists, about how the violent changes in dynamics and interpolation between emotional extremes you get in beethoven doesn't resemble the kind of stable emotional life he wants—hence his reliance upon slow, gradual evolutions rather than dramatic gestures and contrasts. seems like that attitude has become very very prevalent these days, not just with spotify mood playlist normies, but even among hipper and more adventurous crowds. people want stasis or near-stasis in their art. homogeneity of affect.
one interesting thing about stockhausen's electronic music is that, in a way, it's a futuristic extension of the hyper-dynamic beethoven approach. it's designed so that the listener encounters not just one extreme, but multiple, opposing extremes (and whatever's in the middle) in a single work
. in some moments almost nothing happens, in other moments everything happens at once. i love this approach because to me it takes you on a more fulfilling journey, an Odyssey, than the minimalist approach. but from reading reviews and comments i get the sense that a lot of people who are into similar music just cannot make heads or tails of this particular style anymore. they either focus on the slow parts and think it's dark ambient, or focus on the violent parts and think the meditative parts are filler, places where he ran out of ideas. (considering that several of these works were originally planned to be way longer, that seems unlikely.) they seem to prefer or better understand, say, radigue, because there's a consistency in how the music's always near-frozen and barely there, or xenakis, which constantly pummels you like a thunderstorm.
similarly, as i think
@dilbert1 pointed out in another thread, the old school rave that seems most popular and most aped these days is the ambient "deep atmospheric" stuff. 90 minutes of relaxing synths over jungle breaks. or there's the breakcore angle, which is just constant distorted bitcrushed excitement. what you don't get as much are the weird stitched together sections that go from ruff to ambient, or the mysterious incongruous samples: some weird unsettling dinosaur noise in a house track, "hey party people" in a darkcore track etc.
on the other hand, the youtube and tiktok algorithms etc have the opposite tendency of smashing together completely unlike things. it's tough to imagine northrop frye and mrbeast standing in the same room but they can easily appear on my youtube feed right next to each other. so maybe the easily classifiable emotional stability of the art itself is in part a reaction or attempt to compensate for the ease and prevalence of channel-surfing. the one area of artistic resistance to this is probably memes... that's what stock would be up to if he was born in the 21st century.
