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A millennial's rant on classical music

Chris A

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Having your title be a clickbait does not automatically invalidate the content.
It doesn't help, however, in making his point. I didn't want to watch it, but I did...twice. I think I get what he's saying, and I think he's basically right, but it doesn't make much difference in reality. I'll explain:

I thought that by now all this angst with "music genres" would be so subdivided into so many buckets of musical belief systems that no one would pay much attention to a particular genre--whether or not they "should like it". Apparently, this hasn't happened yet. Nor has many other things about people getting "better" as promised in Star Trek. Alas... I think that everything we call "school" is going to change--dramatically. The question is: "when will everyone begin to see what the pedagogy problems are?". Everyone needs to be able to read and do basic math, and the country in which you live needs citizens that are cohesive enough in their support for societal order. After that, that's where the current education system begins to lose relevance to reality: the real world. Everything else can change in education...and probably will in your lifetime.

If you go to one of the sources that was posted earlier (Wikipedia) and start down the list of composers, I think your jaw will drop. You've heard some of these people's music--trust me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_21st-century_classical_composers This means you listen to classical music in some form. It may not be the pedagogy of classical, however. And that's what everyone seems to be arguing about here. I don't care about pedagogy at this point, nor do most others nowadays. There is FAR too much music to listen to...to argue. (I question the motives of those that do.) Just pick one piece from each composer in the Wiki list that I linked. It will take you some time to get through those--trust me.

Perhaps you can understand the viewpoint that I'm attempting to share... When I was preschool age, my mother was a church (pipe) organist who was doing a masters in musicology. Since I was her youngest child, I became her "student in musicology"--starting at age 5. Later on, I became a good musician and got a scholarship in the major--which I took for one semester before I realized that I needed to make a living. So I switched to engineering. (Not important stuff, but perhaps revealing on how I see things.) I learned this one the hard way: if you think in hard-and-fast terms about music genres (like my mother still does) you get into these sort of quandaries, and thread like this one become long and winding ones.

One more thing: we all know people that watch TV talk shows, eat only at fast food franchises (and argue about the different types of catsup tastes, or Coke varieties), smoke cigarettes, and get married at age 16 after having their first child and going to jail at least once--possibly involving illegal firearms, drugs, extramarital relations, and/or liquor. That's a sort of life ethic that--I don't know--I was taught to avoid. Their musical tastes can be inferred from that sort of upbringing, too. Some of these people do really well on general intelligence tests--really well. I don't want to live like that, however, but I'm sorry to have to admit it here.

Music is what it means to you...and nothing else (unless you're trying to make a living at making it). If you are worried about what others think then you're being conscious of the societal impact of what each of us do. That's a step in the right direction. But don't let that sort of thing get out of control. Like what you like, but also dare to expand what you do like. I find life gets better when I do (within reason).

Chris
 

Chrispy

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My dad was a big classical fan, and may have something to do with me wanting something else generally :) ....but he did also introduce me to Janis Joplin and Big Brother & The Holding Company's Cheap Thrills and Emerson, Lake & Palmer's first album as well as a few others outside of his attempts to get me to listen to classical music he enjoyed. I do listen to some classical, but probably my least listened-to genre aside from C&W (as my dad used to snark, I only dislike two types of music....country and western). I have fairly eclectic tastes even within classical, altho I don't care for opera much at all. I don't feel any need to want to like it any more than I do, tho. Interesting rant, tho.
 

Zog

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I've experienced a few classical music snobs, but very rarely among the performers, who are usually also interested in new music of various sorts. Most people "into" classical music are also interested in lots of other types of music.
I would be an example of that. (Two exceptions; the only genres I cannot abide are Country and Western.)
 

KeithPhantom

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About classical, I can't listen to it unless it is a ballad (I don't know if you consider that classical, but it has a lot of the same instruments and compositions). The voices and the lyrics give the music something that the old (pre-1900) classical music doesn't have. For me, it doesn't have a rhythm to follow and it isn't musically sound. Now, when it involves singing, I'm all in (depending on how my ears like the music).
 

scott wurcer

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I would be an example of that. (Two exceptions; the only genres I cannot abide are Country and Western.)

My version of excruciating musical torture is the modern Steven Sondheim style musical (which IMO has had a huge influence even in Disney movies), a little less night music please.
 

Robin L

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My version of excruciating musical torture is the modern Steven Sondheim style musical (which IMO has had a huge influence even in Disney movies), a little less night music please.
I can abide most anything. I know people like to say that music is a universal language, but that's a lot like saying "I can talk to my cats and they know how to talk back." I've attempted to get something out of all varieties of music, I like the notion of musical diversity. But I don't enjoy things equally. Beethoven is at the top, along with Bach and lot of other music that is in no way related, like some Country and some Broadway. With things like "Outside" Jazz and other avant-garde noises, it often is more like tolerating or "appreciating" than enjoying. But the older I get, the more I appreciate Bach. And the Carter Family.
 

scott wurcer

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But the older I get, the more I appreciate Bach. And the Carter Family.

Folks who know me put my musical tastes at the limit of extremes, but I have no problem excluding some I don't subscribe to total open minded relativism. +1 on the Carter Family BTW.
 

Sal1950

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My favorite performances of Bach was that done by Dr. Anton Phibes
 

DeepFried

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It seems to me that our tastes and preferences are more to do with our psychological make up than our ability to judge 'quality', if there is such a thing, in a subjective topic like music. I can trace back all my deep seated preferences in music to formative experiences and periods in my childhood, for me classical music was something that i discovered in the midi sound track of the game Frontier Elite 2, and that one obscure LP I dug out of my fathers collection that he never played. So because i 'discovered' it myself I could form my own impression i suppose, I bought my own albums, I 'discovered' classical radio stations etc, it was something I made my own.

We're all full of prejudices and preconceptions about all sorts of things and music isn't exempt from that. Yes classical culture can be pompous, and stuffy, and condescending, and superior, and upper class etc - but none of that has anything to do with the actual sounds you're listening to.
 

Robin L

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My favorite performances of Bach was that done by Dr. Anton Phibes
I'm pointing to this excerpt because it's probably my favorite Bach, because the sound grows so immense, because of the notion of dancing to the grave, a quality Ton Koopman draws out due to his attention to rhythm. Although this YouTube link is of the first half of this epic work, the opening chorus [starts 2:15, ends around 9:10] gives one a taste of the work. It also might be the best part, so, my favorite performance of Bach. This, to me, is as close as anyone ever got to "Music of the Spheres".

 

Guermantes

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I'm amazed how many apologists here can't bother to listen to a 15-minute talk and follow its arguments, not even only to refute them. I thought the many experts here won't have any issues pointing out the problems in his analysis without resorting to ad hominem or outright dismissing his right to even make a claim.

I found the transcript to that video if someone prefers to read it:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17cgUdS29Z5jjoMFMgn1BM2X8oonUym6S56vBjIjMEnI/edit

I don't see why I need to re-iterate his points, I think he made them very clear to anyone who bothered to pay attention. And I'm not looking to prove that he is right, I just wanted to hear a second opinion on what he said, as long as it addresses the core issues he talked about.

And to all boomers reading – yes, of course this title is a clickbait, a very self aware one. Having your title be a clickbait does not automatically invalidate the content.

I read the transcript rather than watching the video. Thanks for that.

Actually I agree with a lot of what he says. Music institutions are among the most conservative around -- the term "conservatory" is quite apt -- and the canon of Western Art Music is rarely questioned or criticised. Yes, it's a long list of mostly German white males, unless you've grown up in France or Italy where their canons are populated with mostly French and Italian white males. What gets left out is as significant as what gets put in.

If you want to read an account of that canon that treats it critically while still reluctantly engaging with it, try Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. You'll still find that Beethoven casts a long shadow over the 19th and 20th centuries but Taruskin believes that some of the big pieces of the canon are ideologically "dangerous" (Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is a favourite target). Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise also deconstructs the canon of 20th century masters.

Even Harold Bloom, one of the Western (Literary) Canon's most vocal defenders, disliked the idea of a canon as a list of trophies for hegemonic elites. He was of the view that these were works for personal aesthetic enrichment. For Bloom, it's not about reading or listening to what you like, it's about gaining a deeper insight into the human condition. Still, others would counter that the personal is the political.

But we like building canons. They mark out those things with which we want to build our cultural capital. Think of the hagiography that surrounds The Beatles. This is the stuff that's important to us! That's what Rolling Stone magazine does when it publishes its "greatest" lists:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/500-greatest-albums-of-all-time-156826/
Or Rick Beato's series of What Makes This Song Great:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9B0aiM7ryfXV_

Or perhaps we are like Walter Benjamin's angel, wanting to sift through the debris of history for the gems that will make all that chaos seem worthwhile:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

And don't call me "boomer". Now get off my lawn!
 

Vapor9

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One of the things I think about when hearing classical music is the context of the time. Imagine a world without TV or movies or any type of electrical reproduction of sound. It must have just been magical to hear a live orchestra in that era. It's easy to see why such long and complex pieces were written for the audiences of those days, those composers and musicians were creating a fantastic evening out in the way most people go to the movies today.

The experience of religion back in the day was also a powerful event. Imagine the grand cathedrals filled with art and music from many of the same composers.
 

Robin L

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Or perhaps we are like Walter Benjamin's angel, wanting to sift through the debris of history for the gems that will make all that chaos seem worthwhile:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

And don't call me "boomer". Now get off my lawn!
 

RayDunzl

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ahofer

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I found another fun thing to watch for you guys:


I'm not sitting through that For 44 minutes. I suspect the video is engaging in “offense archaeology”, if the title isn't just clickbait again. And, of course, you guys are just posting this stuff to create agita now. I just listened to enough to hear his idea of substitution of "Harmonic Style of 18th Century European Musicians" for Music Theory.

Nope, that's only a subset of the discipline. Music Theory, as a subject, covers much more than that, it's a toolset for figuring out how a piece is put together and/or improving your ability to put together something different. He might have used "Tonal Harmony" and been more on target.

I took Theory at Berklee College of Music and Yale. The advanced curriculum at Yale has very little to do with 18th century, and Berklee barely touches it.
 
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Robin L

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