A millennial's rant on classical music

[Robin L]

"Oh Sting, where is thy death?"

Seriously—why couldn't Linda Ronstadt be the one to make a Dowland record?

 

[Robin L]

If Beethoven wrote proto-boogie woogie, why didn't he develop it? Did he just miss it despite having music pouring out of his fingertips, or is there some reason why "classical" music didn't take the step of appealing to ordinary listeners? Or is it that the "rules" of the time prevented him from doing that, and we have different rules now? Or is it all a question of the catch-all term of "context"?

Beethoven was deaf, had severe physical problems and was experimenting with a wide variety of musical forms when he came to his final piano sonata. It's got weird meter changes, variation to variation, meters we don't find in "composed" music again 'til Stravinsky comes along. He's an outlier, wrote some astonishingly strange but emotionally affecting music in his final days. Beethoven was researching old music, primarily Baroque, at the time, looking for models that could work in spite of his inability to hear the results. He then deconstructed/reconstructed those polyphonic modes, coming up with dissonances we don't encounter again until the Second Viennese School, though the results resemble Charles Ives even more, another composer that didn't give a shit about the unplayability of his music. So, that syncopated variation is but one of many musical experiments Beethoven conducted at the time.

This is Beethoven's final work for piano:

 

[Robin L]

An expert's opinion:

"I find music of the classical period boring because it reminds me of 'painting by numbers.' There are certain things composers of that period were not allowed to do because they were considered to be outside the boundaries of the industrial regulations which determined whether the piece was a symphony, a sonata or a whatever.

All of the norms, as practiced during the olden days, came into being because the guys who paid the bills wanted the 'tunes' they were buying to 'sound a certain way.'

The king said: "I'll chop off your head unless it sounds like this." The pope said: "I'll rip out your fingernails unless it sounds like this." The duke or somebody else might have said it another way -- and it's the same today: "Your song won't get played on the radio unless it sounds like this." People who think that classical music is somehow more elevated than 'radio music' should take a look at the forms involved -- and at who's paying the bills. Once upon a time, it was the king or Pope So-and-so. Today we have broadcast license holders, radio programmers, disc jockeys and record company executives -- banal reincarnations of the assholes who shaped the music of the past."

Said "Expert" being Frank Zappa. All I can say is, I like his music, but he ain't no Richard Taruskin.

 

[Cosmik]

Beethoven was deaf, had severe physical problems and was experimenting with a wide variety of musical forms when he came to his final piano sonata. It's got weird meter changes, variation to variation, meters we don't find in "composed" music again 'til Stravinsky comes along. He's an outlier, wrote some astonishingly strange but emotionally affecting music in his final days. Beethoven was researching old music, primarily Baroque, at the time, looking for models that could work in spite of his inability to hear the results. He then deconstructed/reconstructed those polyphonic modes, coming up with dissonances we don't encounter again until the Second Viennese School, though the results resemble Charles Ives even more, another composer that didn't give a shit about the unplayability of his music. So, that syncopated variation is but one of many musical experiments Beethoven conducted at the time.

This is Beethoven's final work for piano:

And straight away in the first few seconds, I hear "twee", "twiddly" and maybe some "smug" and "showing off". I am absolutely sure that this doesn't describe the man himself, and maybe it isn't what the audience heard at the time - they were judging it by different "rules". But when a modern listener says they hear storminess, passion, dissonances like Stravinsky etc., I think "pull the other one".

It isn't whether the modern listener "likes" Beethoven, or even "loves" his music - people enjoy things for many reasons. It would be great music for a genteel tea party, for example - with stormy tea and emotionally affecting cakes of the first Kipling School.

It's the florid descriptions that simply don't match the reality that baffle me.

 

[Robin L]

And straight away in the first few seconds, I hear "twee", "twiddly" and maybe some "smug" and "showing off". I am absolutely sure that this doesn't describe the man himself, and maybe it isn't what the audience heard at the time - they were judging it by different "rules". But when a modern listener says they hear storminess, passion, dissonances like Stravinsky etc., I think "pull the other one".

It isn't whether the modern listener "likes" Beethoven, or even "loves" his music - people enjoy things for many reasons. It would be great music for a genteel tea party, for example - with stormy tea and emotionally affecting cakes of the First Kipling School.

It's the florid descriptions that simply don't match the reality that baffle me.

The audience at the time was tiny, most were put off by his "late period" compositions.
This:

 

[Cosmik]

The audience at the time was tiny, most were put off by his compositions.

Yes, that is more weird, and yet it still has the 'genteel tea party rules' embedded in it - which makes it a bit nightmarish. At one level, though, it is reminding me of one of my favourite composers: Michael Tippett.

 

[Ceburaska]

For the OP (and other classical music critics) you’re a bit tame in your rant.
This is how one contemporary (ish) described Wagner (Tristan and Isolde): “Even more immoral…than the plot is this seasick music that destroys all sense of structure in its quest for tonal colour. In the end, one just becomes a glob of slime on an ocean shore, something ejaculated by that masturbating pig in an opiate frenzy!”
[posted while listening to Jessye Norman sing Liebestod, stunning.]

 

[Robin L]

For the OP (and other classical music critics) you’re a bit tame in your rant.
This is how one contemporary (ish) described Wagner (Tristan and Isolde): “Even more immoral…than the plot is this seasick music that destroys all sense of structure in its quest for tonal colour. In the end, one just becomes a glob of slime on an ocean shore, something ejaculated by that masturbating pig in an opiate frenzy!”
[posted while listening to Jessye Norman sing Liebestod, stunning.]

Nicholas Slonminsky's "Lexicon of Musical Invective" is full of this sort of masocriticism. My favorite: "Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop".

 

[Cosmik]

For the OP (and other classical music critics) you’re a bit tame in your rant.
This is how one contemporary (ish) described Wagner (Tristan and Isolde): “Even more immoral…than the plot is this seasick music that destroys all sense of structure in its quest for tonal colour. In the end, one just becomes a glob of slime on an ocean shore, something ejaculated by that masturbating pig in an opiate frenzy!”

But that is interesting in that the comment comes from someone who has not yet been exposed to the freeing up of "the rules". It's very clear they are hearing something completely different from us.

We, on the other hand, have been brought up in a world where those "rules" are gone (or at least replaced with different ones). Are we saying that we can hear 18th century classical music as the audience heard it at the time? Hard to believe.

This is almost the same as saying that we can hear music from another ethnic musical scale entirely and claim to hear the "passion", "storminess" etc. in it. Or that we could hear some ancient Greek lyre music and say we "love" it. The truth would be that we were thinking "Ooh, that sounds like it might make some good novelty background music for the water feature section of a garden centre. I love it."

 

[Island_Kenny]

all i want say is that classical music can be fun. i took my kids out to watch Star Wars in Lincoln Center with N.Y. Philharmonic playing live, a total blast. Lang Lang’s concerts are always fun but he took a lot of criticism over that as well.

Classical music was the pop culture in the days of Mozart, and it should be played in the original spirit rather than the original format. I am sure that Mozart conducting his own piece today would’ve been just as fun to watch live as it was in his days. Some of the modern pieces are written for a very small audience and it is totally fine not to like them

 

[ahofer]

Look, @Cosmik, if you believe people can’t be moved by period music you are wrong. There are many of us here to testify otherwise. I understand you think we are all posers , but it just ain’t so.

As for “the rules”, I don’t believe they function as you suggest. The original tonal harmony rules and cantus firmus were specifically derived from what people found pleasing. The broad use of the pentatonic scale in folk music around the world reflected the fact that it was fairly easy to make music together if everyone stuck to it. But they and the rich harmonic theory that evolved from them have never been a straitjacket by which music you don’t happen to like is inevitably confined.

The great composers were all great because (at least in part) they were able to expand the possibilities of the music tradition they grew up in. Beethoven, Brahms and Dvorak use much more varied and complex harmonies than their predecessors and most any pop song, and their contributions to the harmonic lexicon, combined with spiritual music and Afro-Angolan influences, combined to give rise to jazz and contemporary popular music. Serialism attempted to invent a whole new set of rules.

A lot of popular music follows much more constraining rules about song construction than any piece in the classical tradition.

There are rules for beginners. The greats always made their own. We understand you don’t like music in the classical tradition, that’s your prerogative. But you mustn’t pretend you have some universal explanation for why others can’t really like it, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

 

[Juhazi]

Yes, we Europeans and neo-North-Americans are wonderfully egocentric! In much older music history tonality, scales even compositions were different - in Arabian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolese, African, Aboriginal, Polynesian, Greco-Romanian, native American, Lappland etc. cultures as well as here in Europe before 18th century.

Modern concept of harmony etc. is rather new, but yes pleasant to our ears.

 

[Cosmik]

Look, @Cosmik, if you believe people can’t be moved by period music you are wrong. There are many of us here to testify otherwise. I understand you think we are all posers , but it just ain’t so.

As for “the rules”, I don’t believe they function as you suggest. The original tonal harmony rules and cantus firmus were specifically derived from what people found pleasing. The broad use of the pentatonic scale in folk music around the world reflected the fact that it was fairly easy to make music together if everyone stuck to it. But they and the rich harmonic theory that evolved from them have never been a straitjacket by which music you don’t happen to like is inevitably confined.

The great composers were all great because (at least in part) they were able to expand the possibilities of the music tradition they grew up in. Beethoven, Brahms and Dvorak Use much more varied and complex harmonies than their predecessors and most any pop song, and their contributions to the harmonic lexicon, combined with spiritual music and Afro-Angolan influences, combined to give rise to jazz and contemporary popular music. Serialism attempted to invent a whole new set of rules.

A lot of popular music follows much more constraining rules about song construction than any piece in the classical tradition.

There are rules for beginners. The greats always made their own. We understand you don’t like music in the classical tradition, that’s your prerogative. But you mustn’t pretend you have some universal explanation for why others can’t really like it, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Yes, a very convincing Wikipedia summary, but the thread is ultimately saying "Everyone likes what they like". Well, duh! No one seems interested in exploring deeper. Someone tell me why you like a particular Mozart piece.

 

[StevenEleven]

The audience at the time was tiny, most were put off by his compositions.
This:

I really like this! I really loved Beethoven’s late string quartets as a kid (by that I mean in my 20s). I can’t get into his head, of course, but I would guess that given his extensive fund of knowledge he absolutely knew he was obliterating the conventions of two or three centuries of classical rhythm and of theoretical counterpoint with all of the parallel octaves and unison lines, hitting the second and fourth beats so hard, and the rapid triplet rhythms. This gets us to a rhythm that starts to take me to a more percussive feel. Of course he did not anticipate modern rhythms and harmony intentionally, but he was to my ears reaching out in ways that would become mainstays of popular music from the 1850s forward. Of course the melodic content is a little jarring even by today’s standards but not too far out there. When he stumbled upon things that sound fresh to our modern ears I don’t think of it so much a coincidence as that he was reaching out in so many different directions he was bound to anticipate the future at times.

Just a few points, from my limited little corner of the Universe: I’m sure nearly all know that Scott Joplin was a classically trained pianist and intended ragtime to be an extension of that genre. His very best stuff IMHO was written toward the end of his life and is not typified by “The Entertainer” amd ”Maple Leaf Rag” and whatnot. I think he had a piece called “Solace” (IIRC) that was very deeply affecting and also has some underlying Latin habanera rhythms very cleverly interwoven in it.

Also in my opinion Boogie Woogie is a simplification of ragtime, and blues is a simplification of jazz. Ragtime and jazz were to my ears two of the early seeds.

If you ever get a chance to hear what exists of recordings of North and South American music (and by that I mean the continents) from about 1895-1915 it is utterly fascinating to hear the primordial ooze and the crazy hodgepodge of influences and the bizarre combinations and permutations of the time, from classical to marching bands to African and Latin and Spanish rhythms and ragtime and blue notes and the origins of swing (which were a lot more Latin than you might expect), it is just a thrill ride if you are into that kind of thing. And it takes you into some historical insights too FWIW.

And this is an historical illustration of what @GrimSurfer stated, and was a really excellent and telling point—that musicians (at least most) do not see boundaries in music the way many critics and listeners do. My experience (which I am trying not to bore you with because it is very unimpressive) is that when one expert practitioner of one genre encounters an expert practitioner of another genre what you see is delight and glowing joy and an expression of “how the **** did you do that?”

Some people trace the beginnings of popular Western music to La Paloma and Bizet’s Carmen around 1850. And La Paloma making its way from Spain to Cuba to North America and Europe accumulating a snowball of influences, including the habanera rhythm (an early ingredient of “swing”), the tresillo, the contradanza, Western harmonies and instruments, and some mixing of cultures and influences which, while very fortunate for the development of music, were due in great part to the very unfortunate fact of the slave trade.

And finally, I do very much enjoy listening to any of the three “Bs”— Beethoven, Boogie Woogie, and Britney Spears.

Does Beethoven represent the highest skill level of the three? Well yeah, absolutely. But you don’t have to be always reading Shakespeare. And if someone just plain doesn’t like Beethoven and has a visceral liking for Boogie Woogie or Britney Spears, so what? I get that totally. Honestly, on one level, I personally can feel it in my bones. Sometimes it’s better just to sit back and enjoy and not reflexively detangle or be critical of what is going on in the music. I look at people who are not doing that and think, that’s pretty cool.

Well, one last last thought—I think it is really nice to branch out and test your comfort zone in terms of what you listen to. There’s some real pleasure to be gained from that. So to that extent I’d say you like what you like and just enjoy it is good advice, but also a little pushing of boundaries can be very rewarding.

I could write about ten more paragraphs for each paragraph above, but then—it would be even less interesting. I’ll just say if you want to do a deep dive none of these are original thoughts on my part, there’s tons of reading and listening to do. But then again, as I said earlier, writing about music is like dancing about architecture (not an original thought either)—so I am trying to keep away from a certain type of subject matter that is best appreciated by just listening to the music.

And then as I see another poster just pointed out, there are harmonies and rhythms of other cultures, with more complex tonal scales, more elaborate rythms—Western music is far from the be all and end all.

end of (purported) brain dump

 

[Robin L]

Yes, that is more weird, and yet it still has the 'genteel tea party rules' embedded in it - which makes it a bit nightmarish. At one level, though, it is reminding me of one of my favourite composers: Michael Tippett.

Here's another one example of Beethoven straining against 'genteel tea party rules' while acknowledging them at the same time. You'll note this is another musical moment starting in fury and ending with an offramp that leads to a parodistically genteel ending. You won't hear where the offramp leads but you can hear the adjustment towards the end. Before that, though, Beethoven strains the form to its limit, at least the limit as of the early 19th century.

It's true that there's is a whiff of the salon in this music, but that was the common venue at the time, no Massive PA driven multi-use venues at the time, where it's Taylor Swift today and the Lakers tomorrow. A lot of music was intended to be played at home, like the op. 126 Bagatelles. Beethoven resisted the genteel, but the context where he developed his music is obviously nothing like the present moment. The Diabelli Variations alternate between the salon and outbursts of rage.

There's a moment in his Missa Solemnis, the Dona Nobis Pacem movement, where everything is sweet, light and aspirational, then suddenly there's a sound of trumpets and drums that obliterates what came before. Played on "original instruments" at the tempi Beethoven intended, it makes a sound like the walls of the church are being blown up by an invading army. It's a radical move for the time.

 

[Robin L]

Someone tell me why you like a particular Mozart piece.

I've been obsessed with Die Zauberflöte since the mid-1970's. Ingmar Bergman made a film, translated from the original German into Swedish, where Sven Nykvist has some of his most beautiful lighting/framing, taking full advantage of the staginess of this magic show. It seems the natural precursor of Broadway Musical Theater, with minimal use of recitatives, using dialog instead, and every tune sounding like a highlight, with just about every musical style of the time on display. It's high art mixed with low art and plenty of occult references carefully slipped in between the cracks and the ultimate "Fairy Tale Ending".

 

[strangeskies]

Someone tell me why you like a particular Mozart piece.

After you tell me who the self is that likes or doesn't like Mozart.

Anyway, OP, a few of the Titans of Prog Rock liked Sibelius. You might consider giving his music an earnest effort. I don't know why I like this:

This slow movement from Beethoven's 29th piano sonata has haunted me for decades and has been sort of a go-to in times of personal tragedy when no other "content" could scale with the reality of suffering (that said...I don't know why I like it):

 

[ahofer]

Yes, a very convincing Wikipedia summary, but the thread is ultimately saying "Everyone likes what they like". Well, duh! No one seems interested in exploring deeper. Someone tell me why you like a particular Mozart piece.

Why do you, or anyone, like boogie-woogie? I feel like I’ve answered this several times upthread. I’m obsessed with the rhythmic and harmonic tension of Bach’s English Suites and Scarlatti’s sonatas. Schubert and Brahms chamber music is transporting, and often makes me want to cry, just like a number of Joni Mitchell songs. Brahms first symphony, as he builds up towards an inevitable Beethovenian theme, is sort of like good sex. The Rite of Spring is compelling in the same way Rock Music is.

why, in the specific case of the classical tradition, do you want to know why?

I do recommend the “What Makes it Great” and “Inside Chamber Music” podcasts. They may give you some theoretical and structural answers you seem to crave. And they cover other genres.

I don’t get the “Wikipedia Summary” crack. For the best, I suppose. My intention was to show that many of the ingredients that make popular music *appealing* are derived from the classical tradition.

 

[ahofer]

On the subject of rules and such, consider this very funny video. It pokes fun at the fact that a lot of very popular songs use the same simple chord progression (1-5-6-4-1, and indeed many others use a close relative, 1-5-b7-4. “Lay lady lay”). Indeed, most pop songs use a similar verse-chorus-verse-chorus-Bridge-BIG chorus-verse fade out progression as well, much like a reduced sonata form, but with a bridge instead of the variation section.

I love a lot of these songs. The fact that they lack the harmonic and rhythmic variety of the classical tradition is not a hindrance. I mostly do not get bored.

 

[JJB70]

Why is it necessary to have a reason to like any form of artistic expression beyond the simple ones of emotional engagement, appreciating the aesthetic or just plain taking pleasure from it?

I am not sure I could articulate all of the reasons I like the music I love and even if I tried it would ultimately just come back to whether or not I enjoy listening to it and whether it moves me. My favourite piece of music (at the moment, it changes over time) is Bruckner's 8th, technically I think it is a remarkable work of unsurpassed power that moves between raw power to delicate beauty and with everything in between, with some magnificent melodies and which is not a note too long despite it's length (not even Celibidache's famous recording with the MPO which goes to something like 105 minutes feels a second too long to me). I have multiple recordings, all of which bring something to the table, I think my favourite remains the Karajan performance with the VPO a few months before he died, but I also love the recordings of Schaller, Inbal, Maazel and others (yes, even Celibidache). Do I really need a reason to love this work other than the fact I find it to be profoundly moving, a work of awesome power yet melodic beauty?