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In Reply to: RE: Bizarre twist in musical taste (long) posted by Emsquare on July 03, 2012 at 21:53:22
That's a question that's troubled me ever since I was a kid. Why was the greatest music written over 150 years in the past? Why don't we have our own Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven? Surely, a society that is more technologically advanced, better educated, richer, and has more people in it should be able to produce better music than 18th-century Germany? And yet nothing we create today -- either in the popular realm or the conservatory -- holds a candle to it.
The best I've come up with is a shift in the primary audience that accompanied a shift in purchasing power from the aristocracy to the middle class to the masses. It isn't a sraightforward matter of education, although that plays a role (both negative and positive) in the change.
In any case, I agree that great music will survive. My main concern is that as it has become increasingly a dead art and fallen out of our culture, fewer and fewer children are being exposed to it. I'm saddened when I see friends who have the IQ to appreciate Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but who never get to know their music during the crucial childhood period when musical syntax is mastered. Life without Mozart seems like no life at all.
Follow Ups:
"Surely, a society that is more technologically advanced, better educated, richer, and has more people in it should be able to produce better music than 18th-century Germany?"
Perhaps it tells us that technological advances have nothing to do with producing great music (or great art in general). And having a college degree is not the same as being educated.
At best, technology seems to facilitate art. Scientific and mathematical understanding though have played an interesting role in the development of great artistic traditions, e.g., the development of the Pythagorean scale and equal temperament, or the use of solid geometry in perspective painting. What I think is perhaps strangest about our current situation is that we have abandoned some of the knowledge that was so painstakingly accrued over centuries, even millennia.
I wonder too whether composers of an earlier era didn't benefit from the absence of a formal early education, which freed them to spend more time on music. But it's hard to say. Bach, for example, attended the gymnasium, where he excelled academically. He was able to send his sons to Leipzig University; CPE Bach had a degree in law. Interestingly, Bach himself appears to have been largely self-taught in music.
Why not try some NEW music.
listen to the following artists
The Silent comedy, Hugo, Iron & Wine, and Bon Iver..
Matter of probabilities, I think. I haven't heard any music written in my lifetime that equals the best of the old. There's much that I enjoy, but I find myself enjoying the old stuff more -- and we're talking a tiny sliver of that. More than half of what I listen to is Bach.
"Why don't we have our own Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven? Surely, a society that is more technologically advanced, better educated, richer, and has more people in it should be able to produce better music than 18th-century Germany? And yet nothing we create today -- either in the popular realm or the conservatory -- holds a candle to it."Perhaps we will come back around to it someday. I cannot pretend to answer that particular observation. I can only make some obtuse guesses as to why the music culture is where it is. The conservatories are in the hands of the wrong people? Perhaps instead of living in front of a keyboard dreaming about compositions they're distracted greatly by the 256 million voicings they have to draw from a really cool synthesizer? Or, far worse, todays Mozart is addicted to on-line gaming or trolling audio forums. How's that for obtuse? : )
I would think that it has more to do with the music wanting to change. We just can't do the same thing over and over again. Each generation has a need to differentiate itself from what has come before. To seek its own identity. And I think this is accelerating in the modern era. If we are smarter than our forfathers it has a lot with what they have already figured out for us.
Edits: 07/04/12
But the curious thing about today's music is that we *aren't* smarter than our forefathers! We're vastly more advanced technologically, and yet there is no one alive today who is writing music of the quality of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven's (or painting pictures of the quality of Rembrandt's, writing poetry of the quality of Milton's -- this phenomenon isn't limited to music).
It doesn't surprise me that we have a simpler music for the masses -- there always was, a pre-literate folk tradition based on simpler scales. Art music was the music of the elite. But what has happened to the quality of the art music?
Broadly speaking, it seems to me that there are two forces at work.
One is that modern society, which is ideally predicated on social mobility, tends to frown upon hereditary class distinctions and so encourages a "one-size-fits-all" culture, rather than culture stratified by class. Kids in particular feel pressure to listen to pop tunes rather than the music of the elite.
Another is that as the art tradition shifted out of the hands of the aristocracy into the hands of the newly ascendant middle class, it took on a pedantic quality that exhibited contempt for the audience. At its worst, this meant that the concert audience was to be exposed to dental drill atonal music, and if they didn't like it, the problem was with their understanding, not the music itself. This followed from the middle class concept of improvement through education, and the belief that to be valuable, something must have a medicinal quality.
At the same time, as the old ways of life and belief died away, serious artists bought into the dogma that art was some kind of science experiment. And yet this was done without the understanding which every scientist has that, as you say, we build on what has already been done. Avant-gardism eventually devolved to unthinking rejectionism, as well as a quest for novelty that, after a while, was no longer genuinely novel. What the rejectionists didn't understand is that the structures of art as developed so far weren't arbitrary. Tonality, for example, is a consequence of basic physics. There are multiple scales, but they aren't arbitrary, and whether an interval will be perceived as consonant or dissonant depends upon the scale and the overtone series of the instrument.
We were left, then, with the curious phenomenon of music that didn't really work, and the assertion that those who didn't like it must surely fail to understand it. And so fewer and fewer people cared about new art music, and without new music, art music became increasingly a historical matter.
Yuo get into a loaded question when you seek to rank the quality of art. It's my contention that the talent is no less now than then. It's that it us expressed in a different way. The masters that we lament were, in part, a product of their culture. Can you possibly imagine the Handel's Hallelujah Chorus being penned and performed as a new work today? I just wonder how that would be received? Who's to say what would have come of Beethovan being born as a contemporary of our times? I certainly don't forsee another Leonardo Da Vinci or a Nikola Tesla. Tesla might even be an alternative example of what we may be discussing here. I have no taste for making less what these people did. It was glorious. We should be inspired by brilliance when we recognize it.
I find myself searching for some sort of advice that I can offer that would make you feel better about this but I just don't have any. Sorry. As a futile effort I will leave you with the relevant words of the Poet...
There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.
Nothing you can make that can't be made.
No one you can save that can't be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.
It's easy.
Nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
It's easy.
John Lennon
If anything, I think there must be more talent today than there was then. It's just directed down different avenues. In music, towards popular art. Perhaps outside of music and art, in other creative directions. Certainly, we're enormously creative scientifically and technically. It's a rich time for that.
I think it's also true that creativity in certain areas varies from time to time and place to place. The philosophers of ancient Greece, the painters of the Italian renaissance, the poets of Elizabethan England -- there are just special times and places in history. Arguably, we've experienced two such eras in popular music, the jazz era and the rock era of the late 60's/early 70's.
But I think the question you pose is a good one. Suppose a talented composer did want to write a work to equal the Messiah? Even if he had the genius and skill, would modern forms support such an effort? I don't think they would.
There was a time in the 20th century when writing music that didn't assault the ear was a way to get expelled from the academic/critical establishment. It was a given then that a composer who dared to use melody or harmony wasn't being serious. Things have I think backed off some from the extremism of that time, but even so, a work in the style of Handel or Beethoven would be an archaism, and what style today allows the creation of music that sublime?
There's plenty of wonderful music to mine, but it would be special indeed if we could hear the new oratorio by Handel, or Beethoven's new symphony.
I just want to chime in and say what an insightful and thoughtful conversation you're having Josh358, EMsquare, and Willkayakforfood!!!
As a musician, I get what y'all are saying, and appreciate the time you've taken to write your posts in such an organized and thorough manner. I wish I had your writing skills.
To add a thought, I've always felt that the greatest melodic themes already exist in nature, and that it's the awareness, insight and genius of the composer which enables them to compose masterful realizations of them.
Also, regarding "simple, popular" music versus the great compositions of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and company, there is more creative genius in the first three minutes of the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony than in all of the albums made by the Backstreet Boys, Hanna Montana, the Hansons, the Beastie Boys, Cool Snoopy Dog, and Michael Jackson combined.
I will, however, cut some slack for Eric Clapton, ZZ Top, and Pink Floyd.
Carry on!
:)
inate 51 just commited musical heresey when he added Michael jackson and the beastie boys as being devoid of genius after mention Hanson and Hannh montana.
Nobody listened to hanson, so it cant be counted as music.
"To add a thought, I've always felt that the greatest melodic themes already exist in nature, and that it's the awareness, insight and genius of the composer which enables them to compose masterful realizations of them."
I think so too. In fact, I've come to think that what they are are the symmetries that underlie/are physical law, mathematics, and thought. The composer begins by apparently breaking a symmetry, e.g., by moving from the tonic, and then restores it by revealing a larger symmetry, ideally a clever and novel one. And that symmetry, once learned by the listener, becomes part of what the psychologists call crystallized intelligence, and can be applied when that broken symmetry is encountered in life.
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