|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
67.160.130.12
and paintings from Expressionism, forward?
You don't need to "understand" Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin to pleasurably listen (of course, the more you know, the more it is intriguing). The dullest adult, the clearest-eyed child can close their eyes and be swept away. Now, put on a late symphony of Mahler. Some Berg songs. Any Ives symphony. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to like these works without some understanding of their inner workings, of the composers' intellectual pursuit.
This is identical to the situation with painting.
Perhaps there isn't an easy answer, after all, as to whether or not "classical" music is dying. If indeed it is diminishing in popularity, perhaps it is only the "post-modern" part that is so? Certainly, in the art world, there continues great public interest in works from Botticelli through Schiele. However, once the representational barrier is exploded, so is public attachment.
This is not meant as a criticism: great art never is strictly derivative, it never copies. Individuality, originality are the touchstones of artists who strive to greatness. In doing so, however, today's artists have had to get far away from the emotive aspects, which appear to have finite forms, and go far afield into abstract, hyper-intellectual models. Relatively few consumers or appreciators, I'd argue, can or want to follow.
At the current trajectory, painting and "classical" music may be non-sustainable.
Follow Ups:
Above average...possibly.
I love and appreciate a lot of 20th-21st century music and a lot of contemporary art (hardly all). I am musically trained, an amateur musician and former organist and choral singer. I consider myself above average, but I'm hardly an intellectual.
It is probably easier to approach Berg and Ives with some musical knowledge, but that's no guarantee of appreciation or enthusiasm for the thornier music of 20th/21st century. With Mahler, who is in fact quite tuneful, it is more a question of focus and stamina.
There's some purely brainy stuff from the middle of the 20th century that I've played, understand the theory of, I don't care for, and will never listen to OR play again.
There is loads of "accessible" modern music, I mean LOADS. We've had lists and lists of them in this forum. How tough is Bartok, really?? Barber? Bernstein? Corigliano? Higdon? Adams? Rouse? Paart? For heavens sake, rock'n rollers were listening to John Cage, Terry Riley et al back in the 60s and 70s.
From the arid extremes of the recent past the pendulum has swung the other way and some of the best known contemporary composers are tuneful, if not necessarily in a "pretty" way. Their music has drama, rhythm, tunes etc...and BTW, lots of people respond to film soundtracks, so why not to neo-romatic music? IMO the music that lasts will appeal to listeners in some way on an emotional or visceral level.
And from my experience in concert halls over the past 20 years I'd say there is plenty of modern music that people really do respond to and like. One of the problems IMO is that people need to hear new pieces more often, to get the music in their heads to truly identify with it. new pieces get programmed once a season, and they ought to be played more often.
I hate Chopin. He can take his fluttering piano riffs and jam in heaven with Jeezus...Thank god he's dead.
Jeez, a pretty elitist outlook for someone who just got done declaiming the sexist, racist VPO.
So, perhaps you can tell us: what is an "intellectual"? And be sure to do this without betraying any of that old dead white male cultural elitism, like they have at the VPO. Please, give us the enlightened, non-sexist, non-Eurocentric view on this.
I just wanted to relate an experience I had with a fellow "audiophile" at work. He gravitates more towards the pop world (admires Shania Twain, etc.), but, because he's an audiophile, he has purchased some classical works, just by virtue of the fact that they came out on SACD, and so he comes to classical music by way of his audiophile interests.
One day, he told me that he had just bought (and listened to) the Telarc SACD of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony and Martinu's Symphony No. 2, with Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony. I remember immediately thinking, "New World Symphony - great choice! That's a symphony that could really get him more interested in classical music - it's so heartfelt, who could fail to be moved by it?"
But his reaction completely surprised me: he was raving on and on about how great he found the Martinu Symphony! When I asked him how he liked the "New World" symphony, he said, "Oh, it was OK - a little on the corny side." So there you have it - it's extremely hard to predict how people are going to react to various styles of music in this day and age.
I agree!
There are a lot of fascinating minds that are in this community.
I wish there were a way of expanding the forum a bit to other countries: one advantage we have is our language. Inarguably, it is the international language of choice. We should have as many foreigners as Americans!
/
No, not the title theme. The opening theme from the last movement of the New World was used under virtually every chase scene, etc. If you watched the show growing up as I did, it would have been burned into your brain!
Yes - the LR show was a great source of classical music! I remember one episode which prominently featured the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Scottish Symphony - played at a breakneck speed of course! I also remember parts of Liszt's "Les Preludes" being used on more than one episode.
Edits: 03/15/11
Ayn Rand observed, “Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”
I would add that most of them are presently unknown. The art of prior times that is known to us today is only a small portion of what was created. Art that fails to strike a responsive chord, or rise to some level of originality or interest, does not endure.
You state, and I agree, "It is very difficult, if not impossible, to like these works without some understanding of their inner workings, of the composers' intellectual pursuit."
In many cases one concludes that it is simply not worth the effort.
But they won't help you get twentieth century music or art. For music, listen. For art, look. On the other hand, if you want to "understand" modern art, then by all means read about it, but it won't help you get it.
He who knows does not say. He who says, does not know.
-Zen platitude.
I have been listening to classical music for about 40 years. In the early going I listened mainly to Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Brahms. I couldn't stand anything composed after about 1890. But over time I got more exposure to 20th century music and enjoyed it more and more. My wife is a professional musician with a conservatory degree in piano performance. I have no formal music instruction beyond playing in the high school band and taking music appreciation in college, but my musical taste is way broader than my wife's. My point is that it is not about formal training and intellectual understanding so much as extensive experience listening to a wide range of musical styles. Gradually it starts making sense and becomes enjoyable. It helps if one is willing to stretch a little beyond the comfort zone. It is worth the effort. But you don't need to read books or go to music school. It may help you enjoy it more, but it is not necessary. What is necessary is a lot of listening experience--especially live performances.
df
I agree. I think experience (cultural, sonic, emotional) physically alters our brains in a way that allows us to feel or get something that might have been completely lost on us years earlier. It is not intellectual.
.
And hearing live performances from time to time is key. There is something about the actual, physical gesture of music making that helps one understand things that are hard to "hear" in recordings. The timing of the decision to break silence, the way the sound breaks open and tears at the air, the sense of living people trying to meld mind with music, the physical struggle to engage the acoustic space in a meaningful way, the muscular responses and emotional expressions of the players, etc.., - these things all work to "fill in the dots". Without the information provided by human bodies in real space, it is hard to understand music.
Edits: 03/13/11
I've always wondered exactly how great a piece of work is if most people have to struggle to "get" it after 25, 30 or even 50 years? Shouldn't great pieces of art speak to the most basic parts in most of us?
First of all, you can't compare person A's enjoyment of a piece of music with person B's enjoyment of that same music. But you can compare the way they relate to the music -- through their senses or their understanding
So, I have often wondered if, I became better educated in in some fields of music, say composition, would that help me to enjoy music more? It would probably help me to understand music a bit more.
And there's the tie: some people enjoy things more if they can understand them and some people don't necessarily.
"What did the Romans ever do for us?"
I personally don't have the intellect to tell the difference..........
It's easy: a non-intellectual is someone who doesn't sit around dreaming up "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"-type subjects to post here.
degreed professionnal singer (retired), I love all Berg, most of Part and find Joan Tower diverting. I love most of Britten, Copland, Bernstein and so on. But I sure don't consider myself an "intellectual", after all, I was a singer. Heh.
"If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them" - Sol Hurok
back when she wasn't such a big shot. A fantastic person, teacher and musician. With people like her around there is hope for the future.
.
"If people don't want to come, nothing will stop them" - Sol Hurok
And if they were, it is surprising that the music of the orient, the middle east and so on has not developed along the same lines as that of Austria and Germany. Our "western" sense of harmony is a historically developed thing. Tonic, fifths, fourths, thirds major and minor, augmentations, diminutions all gradually make their appearance over centuries. The only reason the great classical composers sound so natural to you is that you have been trained to hear them so. Fact is, you DO understand the inner workings of those compositions which you admire.
Other cultures evidence other "nature".
Secondly, I can't speak for Mozart, but much in Bach and Chopin is knotty and thorny - they develop tension by the judicious use of dissonance. Only we've heard it so often that we cease to hear it.
True, much post-1900 music goes further, and can appear to be mere noise. (And that's been said in earlier times, too.) But "I don't get from this what I get from [insert name]" is not a valid criticism - if you want the [insert name] experience, best listen to him then (it WILL be a him). It's no use hoping for a return to some supposed golden age.
We have to leave our preconceptions of how music should progress at the door. When we can do this, there are many rewarding experiences in store.
This said, there's a lot of dross been cranked out by folk armed only with a theory, an academic appointment and cloth ears in the past 110 years. But it has been ever thus.
And I'd not be thinking that there ever was or will be a time when the serious pursuit of music - whether as listener or performer - was more than the interest of the few.
Does the Tao Te Ching or Dao De Jing (道德經), whose authorship has been attributed to Laozi, prove that the Aristotelian syllogism is not natural or innate? I don't think so. Pythagoras discovered the mathematical order of the intervals of the "western" musical scale. Pythagoras was a Greek, and not all music is based on the same intervals. But that does not mean that there is not something 'natural' about structure of western music. There are many alternative natural patterns. The naturalness of the pattern of a snowflake does not mean that the structure of DNA is not natural because it is different from the snowflake.
what I should have made clearer is the other half of it - the implied assumption that anything other than the western tradition (from say 1700 to 1850) is somehow NOT natural
Not to be argumentative, and I see where you are coming from, but...
It was once suggested to me (OK, I actually heard it in a college lecture, but I regarded it only as a suggestion, arrogant little tyke that I was) that it is not so much that non-Western music or at least some of it starts from a different "nature" (because phenomena such as the octave and the minor third are in fact natural phenomena--birds don't have to take lessons in singing a minor third) but rather because non-Western musics reject the Western solutions to "how to write a piece of music" as too simplistic. And it was the groping past do-re-mi, the attempt to square the circle, that eventually gave Western music its amazing dynamism.
Two excellent examples are the refined (really to the point of precociousness) tonality of the pre-modern Gamelan of the Balinese royal courts, and the rhythmic sophistication of early Indian music. These are not "natural" musics but rather highly stylistically refined, highly developed musics that were developed and performed for an upper class that was much farther above the people they ruled than almost any European ruler.
Long story short, it isn't foolish as far as I am concerned to suggest that had you pounded out the opening of Beethoven's Fifth on a piano to a court Gamelan or Raga composer of 200 years ago, I am sure they would have been polite, but they would probably be thinking, that is so primitive and obvious and ultimately stupid. Because their music was not "natural." Whereas the Western music of the time, with lots of octave and minor third harmonies, in fact was closer to natural phenomena.
Cheers,
JM
Ronald Stevenson maintains that the essential strengths of African and Eastern music are rhythm and melody respectively, noting that the Indian scale contains 22 notes to our 12, and that each in their strengths makes western music seem undeveloped. On the other hand, he sees the development of harmony and polyphony as the area in which western music has shone.
But then, you choose Indian as an example of sophisticated rhythm and gamelan, if I read you rightly, as one of sophisticated harmony - so maybe RS is not quite on the money after all.
Still, I wonder how it is that Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Balkan, Scots and other musical traditions have developed with so many bum notes and wrong stresses in them. Those who play and habitually listen to these things don't seem to notice the gross errors of pitch and rhythm involved. It's got me beat.
"Those who play and habitually listen to these things don't seem to notice the gross errors of pitch and rhythm involved."
Because, in those musical systems, they're not gross errors. If that's what you grow up listening to, it sounds "natural", or if you want to argue "natural" then at least "normal", to you and there are no errors involved.
The ability to appreciate music may be innate in humans, but we learn to appreciate the music we hear and I think the music we hear and absorb in childhood comes easiest to us. We don't know, when we're listening to that music in childhood, that there are other musical systems that do things differently and as our familiarity with the music we hear grows, we come to expect music to sound that way. Music which doesn't sound that way sounds "wrong".
David Aiken
Which I suppose was my main point in the first place, only you expressed it far more clearly.
These weird sounds beyond Mozart take some getting used to, but hard listening can get us there. The most difficult part, in my own experience, has been to try to shed my preconceptions about what is and is not "musical".
"You don't need to "understand" Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Chopin to pleasurably listen (of course, the more you know, the more it is intriguing). The dullest adult, the clearest-eyed child can close their eyes and be swept away."
Is that really true for everyone, or only mostly true for people raised in environments where their childhood music exposure is to european/western music. I somehow doubt the truth of your statement for people raised in non-european cultures without exposure to western music. That makes me suspect that pleasurable listening to Bach, Mozart etc is a learned response and has more to do with familiarity than with some innate quality of the music.
I'd say that view is supported by the difficulty and lack of enjoyment many westerners have with non-european based musics such as some traditional asian, arabic, and aftrican musics. We don't "get it" or find listening pleasurable but people from those cultures, raised with exposure to those musics rather than western music, have no trouble enjoying that music.
"Perhaps there isn't an easy answer, after all, as to whether or not "classical" music is dying. If indeed it is diminishing in popularity, perhaps it is only the "post-modern" part that is so?"
I don't see how you can suggest that the popularity of "post-modern" classical music is diminishing. It was never popular. Most listeners to classical music never bothered to become familiar with it and therefore never learned to enjoy it. If anything, I'd hazard a guess that the popularity of some "post-modern" classical is actually increasing slightly as some of the language of that music filters in to places like movie theme music and the general public becomes a little more familiar with it in a diluted form, though my suggestion that its popularity is increasing slightly is certainly not meant to suggest that it has become much more popular.
"…once the representational barrier is exploded, so is public attachment…"
The frequency and distribution of most human likes/dislikes, traits, and characteristics are reasonably accurately defined statistically by a bell curve. What is popular is popular because most people like it—in fact "popular" implies being generally liked. Still, there are always interests that aren't popular, and people who pursue them. There's nothing surprising in the fact that there are limits to what is popular in any art form. I'd suggest that genuine appreciation, rather than mere liking, is dependent upon some sort of familiarity and understanding and that the response of most people to the music of Bach, Mozart, and the popular classical composers is more one of liking rather than appreciating. How many of the people who respond in the way you described in your opening paragraph actually own and regularly listen to recordings of that music (and which pieces, at that), and how many actually attend live performances of that music. Sure, many people respond the way you suggest when they hear that music but do they actively seek that music out when they want to listen to music or do they choose more popular music of some kind? I'd suggest fewer actively seek it out than choose more popular music.
Perhaps you should also consider asking can non-intellectuals, or at least anyone who isn't prepared to put some time and effort into becoming reasonably familiar with the music, really appreciate (rather than merely "like") 19th century and earlier music? In fact I'd even suggest that the incidence of "liking" diminishes once we start looking at 17th century music and earlier. Looked at that way, is the response of the public as a whole all that much different to post 19th century music than it is to 19th century and earlier music?
I'd suggest the 19th century and last quarter of the 18th plus first quarter of the 20th are possibly a special case—the musical language of that late classical/romantic romantic era has in many ways become a major part of our modern musical vernacular, influencing film music, musicals, and even a lot of popular music. The actual music of that period is not the music most people in the west actually listen to when they choose to listen to music of their choice but they like it, rather than appreciate it, when they do hear it because that's the musical sound they hear in film scores and any popular music with a string/orchestral backing, plus the harmonic structure is similar to that of much popular music.
David Aiken
I suggest that the romantic paradigm you mention is increasingly not the basis for movie and TV music. For example, Philip Glass, Arvo Part and other minimalists and post modernists have had a great influence. The Academy and Emmy award winning music for the recent hugely popular TV series "Lost", scored by Michael Giacchino, is a prime example. Glass himself, Michael Nyman and many others have had a major impact on movies and TV.
I figured I'd hinted at that when I said around the middle of my post that: "…I'd hazard a guess that the popularity of some "post-modern" classical is actually increasing slightly as some of the language of that music filters in to places like movie theme music and the general public becomes a little more familiar with it in a diluted form…".
Film music has actually proven to be quite an effective way of exposing audiences to music they would never listen to if you sat them down and gave them a choice of what they wanted to hear.
David Aiken
So that when we do hear certain recent compositions, they may present themselves to the mind's eye as in some way cinematically narrative, tho the pictures are not there, or may conjure emotional reactions - perhaps uncomfortable ones.
Mebbe many of the last 100 years' composers have found less noble subject matter with which to work than did those of the previous 150 years or so. Although we can still respond to the romantic hero individual in say, Chopin, Liszt, Beethoven, theirs are not our times. Iron Foundry or the Blue Danube? (Although the latter retains an ironic relevance to certain aspects of Vienna today - but aren't I being so knowingly post-modern)
On the other hand, we still have the transcendent, whether spiralling beyond the world like Messiaen, or passing right through its smallest phenomena like Takemitsu, so it's not all bash and crash.
Of course they can. As evidenced by my personal experience, and many consider me to be THE village idiot.
A while back MMT discussed on a PBS (I think) program the manner in which newer music presented in an unfamiliar form transitions from being 'noise' to 'music'. That this was the result of the minds acceptance of the new form through exposure to all like music from that period. Just as a mind conditioned to forms of Western music would have to adjust to forms of Eastern music. All one needs to experience this transition is curiosity, not intellect or musical education. IMHO of course.
Evidence Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps which when first played caused a 'riot'. When I first heard it (not the original performance of course!:-) all I heard was noise (dissonance). That was then. Today, if anything, it sounds bland albeit very enjoyable.
I believe that someone new to 20th century music, born to classical music without reference to 18th and 19th century music, would do as we all have done when we were exposed to earlier forms. They'd listen, value some, and reject a lot. Just as we did and we continue to do. Coincidentally I think as we accept newer music we tend to not listen as much to older music. How many folks listen to much music written pre-Bach? I don't, in fact I regularly listen to little music written before Beethoven and the majority was written in the late 1900's to the present.
and Hilliard Ensemble, among other practitioners of early polyphonic vocal masterworks!
Relax! I'm a complete idiot, yet I'm deeply interested in 20th century art, music and literature. I've never let my lack of intelligence or education get in the way of my appreciation of the finer things in life.
However, I don't see how Beethoven's late string quartets, Shakespeare's Sonnets, or Vermeer's still lifes are somehow less complicated, or easier to appreciate or understand, than Samuel Beckett, Paul Klee or Charles Ives. In fact, I've read that Beethoven's late string quartets completely mystified many of his contemporaries, even the well-educated, non-idiot ones.
I find the Mahler 9th engages my emotions quite immediately, much more so than any Brahms Symphony, much as I now love them. Mozart has an immediate appeal, but I always have the nagging feeling I'm missing what's going on under the surface. And Bach could be very abstract. You have to cherry pick to say that he is easier to like than Mahler. Much of Ives is easy to enjoy. I'd also say that much 20th Century music (Prokofiev, Holst, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, etc) is easier for many people to engage with than 19th or 18th Century music.
All this is just to say that you are again trying to form a thesis from feelings and opinions that seem to me hardly universial.
music more on an intellectual level than an emotional level. I am exactly the opposite - if it doesn't "speak" to me I don't listen to it. That does NOT mean I don't like Stravinski, Dello Joio, Janacek or oh so many others.Cacophony is something up with which I will not put (apologies to Churchill)
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
Edits: 03/11/11
All classifications are arbitrary. (I've spent my whole life as an analyst, and I ought to know.)
They thus have costs attached to them. Some of which your friend is being blinkered by.
Intellectuals frequently suffer from categories and classes. Plato and his 'ideal' forms are a complete dead end, you see.
When I listen to music I am hearing the score and feeling at the same time. I also am certain that my response to music at home or at concerts or when performing ..... is very strongly affected by my having performed since I was nine.
When I am singing, I am working on getting my part right -with- the others singing our line/part, and the other singers, follow the conductor, get my cues from the Organ or other sung parts. ALL at once.
I am also at the same time being affected by the whole thing.
Who says men can't multi-task?! ;-)!
20C Western art music simply reflects an increasing sense of ennui, foreboding, anomie, and alienation. All as predicted by Weber.
Mahler, and Spengler both spring to mind.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
http://www.theanalogdept.com/tim_bailey.htm
was mine not his.
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
anyone else.
Separating our thoughts and feelings is pretty hard as Outside and WC obviously and most other fora here subtly demonstrate.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
http://www.theanalogdept.com/tim_bailey.htm
Indeed that is very true. I should probably clarify a bit. I discussed this with him at one time and he disagreed but - interestingly - his wife did not.This fellow's interests were nurtured by my Dad to a great degree but he has taken them far and away beyond. Of course we're talking a 45-year time span as well. (actually 55-years if you include the time before Dad died). His musical knowledge far outstrips mine at this point.
What we were discussing was the fact that he enjoyed a lot of music that I cannot relate to (and vice versa) even tho we shared many experiences growing up. As an example, Stravinski generally reaches me emotionally while Schoenberg, generally, does not. I can listen to and enjoy it but it's on a totally separate plane.
Even at a Symphonic concert, If I am into it, my feet will involuntarily tap. Some folks look at me like I am weird. (OK - perhaps I am).
If I'm not "into" it the only thing that results is a sore ass.
So - I suppose my only real point is that the same music can be enjoyed (or not) by many different people on many different levels/planes.
Did I send you the "Music Inn" link? That was one place where we had a shared interest/experience. Just in case - I'm sending it again. Time and again I wish I had more fully appreciatedd just what we were living through at the time. I thought it would never end.
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
Edits: 03/15/11
I'm not so sure there is a real connection between art and music. I know a lot of people who love modern art, yet they have zero tolerance for serialism, spiky dissonance and other symptoms of modernist assault on the ears. One could make the same sort of assumptions about jazz, and they'd be equally questionable IMO. Just because you love Pollack does not mean you are going to like Coltrane. I'm not a psychologist, but I suspect that there is a big divide between the way people respond to music vs the way they respond to visual arts.
However, I do think there is a definite line in music that marks a division between what is agreeable vs what is not -- for most people. And I don't think it has anything to do with intellect. I think the majority of music lovers today would not characterize Mahler as a unappealing or especially modernist. Mahler still hung his hat on melody, and when he did venture into more complex harmonies and atonal passages, they were not abrasive.
Berg, Schnittke, Boulez, Stockhausen, Gubaidulina, Cage, et al, fall into a realm of unrelenting dissonance, combative cacophony, and just plain noisy noise that I think few people can enjoy as music. In other words, I think it can be appreciated intellectually (as you allude to), but most people cannot just naturally grasp it, embrace it and enjoy it as music.
However, I do not think most "intellectuals" will (or can) accept it either. And that has been the root of the sad demise of classical music, IMO. Even the more knowledgeable classical audiences hated the stuff -- and still do. It has nothing to do with intellect and everything to do with the role of music in people's lives -- the psychological response. Most people just aren't interested in listening analytically. They want to listen emotionally. And for most, that means melody, atonality with very limited tolerance for abrasive dissonance, and structural coherence.
"Life without music is a mistake" (Nietzsche)
upon which to hang any argument, are they?
Would you argue that an exhibition of Ingres, Gericault, David (Jacques-Louis) would draw more than one of Graves, Hartley, and Lewitt?
I think it's absolutely necessary to study art and the artist to even begin to appreciate modern, or more specifically, post-modern art (non-representational). There must be an intermediary, a guru, to lead the spectator. I'd argue the same is true of those composers I mentioned.
I'll widen the picture: film. I don't think it's possible for the "average" viewer, or even film buff, to appreciate Bela Tarr, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, or any other modern stylists, without knowledge of their artistic goals.
I think there exists a chasm between new and older art. The old was (mainly) about beauty, its representation--- even ugly was presented in an attractive way. Much of modern art, otoh, isn't concerned at all with beauty, or the lack of it. Minimalism, for instance, often is the total absence of aesthetics.
Lastly, we come to literature. Plot, character development--- and in some instances, central characters themselves--- all extraneous to the new "novel." Oftentimes, we're left with an encyclopedic listing of facts more akin to a non-fictional description of reality than fictional.
Architecture? Same thing. The explosion of form--- function be damned! Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Liebeskind, Morphosis (Thom Mayne) all would rather go commission-less until the end of their days rather than construct a rectangular or squared shape. For many, the results are puzzling, disturbing. A not unusual comment, "I'd hate to live in something this guy designed!"
Heh. I love it. Very well put; very clearly explained. I agree with what you say. I'd go even further. Look at what the most popular music form is. It's pop music, and any style of it, but especially that which is absolutely dominant now - rap & techno - the very simplest imaginable harmony prevails: one chord. Rap has even taken this trend to it's logical conclusion by eliminating melody [or at least comletely marginalizing it] altogether, while techno produces one or two simple chords over a single [!!!] bass note [it's true - they synth generate a thundering bass tone, and just make it pulse - that's the beat. And it's one, single bass note through out the length of a techno "song"].Does any of that sound like dissonant, complex harmony, etc. etc. etc.? No - it's the opposite. It's the complete opposite. And, even among pop/rock listeners, there's a huge hatred for even mildly complex rock. Except for a tiny minority, ask someone what they think of so-called progressive rock, and they'll respond with contempt.
So, what you say is completely true:
"Most people just aren't interested in listening analytically. They want to listen emotionally. And for most, that means melody, atonality with very limited tolerance for abrasive dissonance, and structural coherence."
And, that's why I think all of the people in the classical world who still cling to the now outmoded and by now old fashioned, old hat 20th century "modernism" [good riddance] are completely out of touch with reality.
Edits: 03/11/11
I'm not sure that Bach, Mozart, Brahms are loved or understood by very many people today. Mahler, Ives, Berg, and other "post 19th century" composers are loved and understood only slightly less, IMO. Classical music makes some people want to barf, there's no telling how music might affect an individual. Post 19th century classical music is described as "inaccessible" and difficult to understand sometimes, but it's almost a moot point because fewer and fewer people are listening to classical music at all any more.
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: