on audience arrogance

[acroyear]

sorry.  i'm a pig-headed elitist arrogant jackass, but THIS attitude just takes the cake...

classical_music: when is "classical" not?:

bunrab : so perhaps composers who want to make a living in music ought to at least take into consideration whether I'd ever pay to hear their "music" again after hearing it once.

"opinion" or not, this attitude here did come across a little more condescending and arrogant than you might have expected.

The day that composers choose to take into account the commercial value of their music over their own artistic needs is the day their music has died within them.

I would rather Reich be Reich than have Reich be someone else merely to collect your hard-earned money. If anything, were Reich to change merely to please you, but you don't give him your hard-earned money anyways, then who has gained and who has lost?

The musician does not get to choose their audient, so don't use "money" as a means of implying that they can, or that you as an audient would be willing to negotiate terms of their performance in such a manner.

If you don't like it, FINE, but don't expect that your money is all that important, or that money is the only means by which the composer can value his work.

Comments

[cyberkender.livejournal.com]

I take it Bunrab listens almost exclusively to New Kids on the Block, 98 Degrees, N'Sync, Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Linkin Park, eh?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

not really. this was on a classical music forum (and, in fact, i was trying to figure out where the minimalists like Reich fit into the genre and get some discussion going on how the labels the future uses to describe the music of our time will be different from the marketing-based labels we use today).

he's just a product of commercialism that has never really thought about music in any other terms than "i buy what i think is good, and if i'm not buying it, it must not be good".

its much the same dopey commentary Fripp writes about, about how because the audience pays, the audience should get what was expected.

[cyberkender.livejournal.com]

I understand. It's just that those are the sort of acts that the artist(producer) focuses on whether or not the audience will like a given piece, over their own creative desires.

Americans tend to have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement these days...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Fripp's experience as a performer/composer is that Europe is worse.

Though not by much.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Here's a related, though somewhat tangential question. Why is the music of Haydn and Mozart called "classical" anyway? In other art forms, doesn't classical mean that it's based on ancient Greek and Roman styles? But if that were true for music, wouldn't we see more Dorian-mode symphonies?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Well, keep in mind it wasn't called "Classical" at the time. The label was given to that era (CPE Bach -> early Beethoven, approx 1730-1820, with the rise and dominance of Sonatta form) somewhat later, after classicisim was applied to the whole era, artistically.

The connection to classicism isn't the specifics of following greek or roman musical styles, as aside from the names of the modes and the fact that we know they developed pentatonic scales (from the first 5 distinct pitches of the harmonic series), we know next to nothing about what their music sounded like.

The thing about history is that we were *rediscovering* the ancient greco-roman world for most of the renaissance, along with a few new discoveries as well. But the 18th century was the great application, the enlightenment, where all of the studying of the past finally came to fruition into the invention of something new as opposed to the rediscovery or reproduction of the old. It was the application of classical knowledge to create something new that made the era one of classicism.

That harmonic series connection is important and critical. That classical attitude led to a peak of mathematical perfection in architecture and other art forms. So too in music, where Bach's 12-tone scale achieved a kind of infinite potential but based out of the same circle of fifths that we know through writing that the greeks knew about, but perfected in Bach's rules of diatonicism which allowed for modulations that the modes simply didn't allow for. Add in mathematical perfection in form, through secondary and tertiary form and finally the contained complexity of sonatta form developed by Bach's son and perfected by Mozart, and you have all of the attitude in contemporary work that they associated with that golden age of Greece.

Graceful, mathematical, perfection.

It was always an idealistic connection between classicism and classical Greece, not a realistic or rationalistic one.

Besides, "Ionian" is a mode named for a greek island (and the more influential one at that) just as much as "Dorian" was. Ionian is the mode of the major scale.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the response! I didn't realize Bach (CPE, not Johann, right?) was responsible for the 12-tone scale. I know there was a better 12-tone scale than what we use now, the well-tempered scale. Is that the one that was mathematically perfect? The current scale is a compromise for fixed-tuning instruments like pianos, if I recall correctly. It's been way too long since I studied theory, and the little music history I have was picked up along the way.

Regarding Dorian and Ionian, I seem to recall that there were seven Greek-named modes, others included Lydian and Aeolian. I'd have to go to Wikipedia to check the others. I used Dorian as an example because I know it was used in the Baroque period.

thanks again!

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

JS wrote for "Well-Tempered" keyboards, of which "even tempering" was one such tuning known at the time, though not the only one, nor the one he used most often. He tempered his for a particular key, so it also got neighboring ones quite well. You would have to change the tuning slightly for each or write music that specifically avoided certain chords, though there were fewer "wolf tones" than before tempering, the kinds of clashes that would happen if you put 3 different keys of whistles playing the same tune.

The then horrid sound of the tritone, the augmented-fourth / diminished-fifth (play C and F# at the same time), a sound which never sat right no matter what tempering you tried (because the notes were simply on the far side of the circle of 5ths from each other) led to it being called the "devil in music" and it was banned as an interval and a chord base by the church at the time.

CPE was more developing form rather than tonality, as he like many felt that what his father discovered hadn't exhausted itself yet. Mozart and Haydn both studied the Well Tempered Clavier almost religiously.

(Modality wouldn't return to music again until Debussy, who also re-introduced the tritone to music in the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and later in La Mer. Stravinsky would in one part of Rite of Spring play not just the C and F# simultaneously, but the C Minor and F# Minor chords, so in effect he was playing 3 tritones at once. No wonder it sounded scary and, like the Debussy, led to a literal riot among the audience...)

back to temperament: even-tempered popularity came later, in the 19th century, which is why Chopin is so impressive; he was the first to write directly for the even-tempered piano, so his music is the first to reveal all the advantages to it and avoid the disadvantages that Mozart or Beethoven would have noticed in an instant.

what we call modes today, post-even-tempered is also different from what modes were in the early church and the baroque. related, certainly, but not the same thing.

there are many 12-tone scales, either perfect for some keys/chords and horrid for others, OR moderately "ok" for most. modern music is usually written for a particular temperament in mind up front, usually even-tempered chromatics. Certainly the serialists were even-tempered, if writing temperamental music. (sorry)

the real key (ugh, the puns continue) in playing historical music, is finding the right tuning and temperament for the work. I'm currently (while not busy catching up on work) reading a book on exactly that, opening with an anecdote about how famed Beethoven conductor Charles von Donhanyi, then of the Cleveland Orchestra (I have his completely cycle, Telarc records), still had a particular transition in the 9th that simply "never sounded right" no matter what he tried.

The temperament was the problem - Beethoven wrote it for a particular temperament in mind, which is even more impressive since it was in his head and he couldn't actually hear it.

critics of even-tempered scales say that basically nothing sounds "right" in them, and mathematically they are correct. i've been wondering if anybody's experimented with programming a keyboard to automatically modulate its temperament as the music modulates through keys and chords...

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Thank you again for the response. I'll need time to digest all of this -- certainly some parts of it spark memories, and others curiosity.

Side note: My theory teacher in high school seemed to enjoy augmented 4ths -- painful in the execution, but the resolution can be sublime. What's the best part of hitting your thumb repeatedly with a hammer? Stopping.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

The tritone is not inherently "ugly", *if* done the right way.

Bach had a fugue that climbed the tritone scale, a fugue that was incorporated into the final 3 notes of the tone-row for Berg's Violin Concerto.

Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun is *filled* with tritone-based harmonies and inferences.

One of the composers tricks is that *inference* - that you don't necessarilly have the augmented 4th chord directly, but you imply it by leading to it or away from it.

This was an extension of the inferences that Wagner was doing (that were pissing Brahms's fans off mightily). The opening 4 bars of Tristan encircles the diminished 7th chord (the four notes appear the most often), yet that diminished 7th chord doesn't actually appear intact at any single instant of time in the entire piece. A whole work, 12 minutes long, all *implying* harmony based on a chord that never actually happens.

So too, the tritone in much of Debussy.

Stravinsky, on the other hand, just went for it.