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You call that music???

14K views 166 replies 44 participants last post by  Pugg 
#1 ·
Thinking of my long-departed father tonight, who was a traditionalist. When confronted with music of a modernist bent, he would often say, “You call that music?” I admire and respect his position, although he actually grew to like some Stravinsky late in life. A weakness perhaps.

How about you? Are there specific pieces or composers that lead you to risk the scorn of experts and cry out, “You call that music”? Let us know – if you dare!
 
#2 ·
I don't really have a line in the sand. If a composer, modern or otherwise, is inspired you can hear it in the music he/she composes. I find Ligeti's music to be interesting and inspired but not Hindemith's music.

Perhaps Xenakis would be my answer though... from what I've listened to I find it kind of disturbing. People are free to listen to and like whatever they want. But it's not my cup of tea.
 
#5 ·
I give the popcorn a skip, at least in theaters. I only eat buttered popcorn, and what they use is non-hydrogenated soybean oil that's been colored and flavored. Each tablespoon contains about 130 calories. You call that popcorn? Be warned!
 
#58 ·
geramar's mother: "Not only do I not call that music, but I call it a dangerous invitation into the void! The void is counter-productive! Our sons and daughters will be sitting in the lotus position instead of vigorously preparing themselves to be assimilated into the mechanism of productive society! As I said years earlier, Don't listen to the Beatles! Don't do the twist!"
 
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#59 ·
Oh, but I just got Etudes Australes, and it is such beautiful music! So much space for my mind to relax in, and be entertained and occupied. It's crystalline….
 
#23 · (Edited)
Isorhythm's views in several posts above speak for me too. I too see no point in declaring "That's not music!" about anything others are listening to as music. Likewise, the issue for me is always whether I find it to be interesting music that is worth my time and intention.
 
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#24 ·
EB my friend, you make an important point. Do some works not have high value in themselves even if the listener does not fancy the music? Some work is great by nature. There are many pieces "worth our time" that will probably never be given the attention they deserve. From time to time genius does impose upon music. I say this is when we ought to pay the most attention.
 
#52 ·
I would say that a phrase like "became great" still hints at the idea of greatness being an external thing, so I don't agree with the example as phrased. How I would phrase what you said is "The St Matthew Passion became considered great after Mendelssohn promoted it, it wasn't considered great before" (well, that second part is arguable anyway, but for the purposes of this discussion let's let it go). Hopefully you don't see this as a distinction without a difference.

Not sure if I can word this so that I'm being unambiguous, but I'll try: to me, the idea of "great" is completely reliant on people being able to make an assessment; if no assessment has been, or can be, made, then it makes no real sense to talk about greatness. If, to take Ingélou's example, there was nobody left on Earth to hear music, then it's not that all the great music suddenly stops being great, it's that the very idea of great music ceases to have any meaning.

Additional comments, to make it clear that I don't want to get the usual tarring of extreme subjectivist:
Back to the St Matthew Passion - there's certainly enough tacit agreement (and has been since before it was composed) among interested parties (experts and the discerning audience) about what might get to be called a great piece of music that it's reasonable to say for practical purposes that as soon as Bach wrote the St Matthew Passion it was a great piece of music, even if no one had heard it, but at bottom this presupposes such agreement.
But what about a completely novel work that doesn't conform to what have been agreed as the general parameters for what's expected from a "great" work? This will rely on the judgement of history; it depends on whether the novelty prompts an expansion of what those parameters are. Some novel ideas get accepted and some don't, and I don't think it's because the former have some inherent greatness in them that the latter lack.
There is only one St. Matthew Passion - and one Eroica, and one Tristan, and one Sistine Chapel ceiling, and one King Lear, etc. etc. There's a good reason for it. That reason is that most human beings can't produce these things, or even imagine them. These are great achievements. Great. Period. It doesn't matter how many people know it.

I do not understand the point of removing the entire context of human existence in which the concept of greatness arises and has meaning, and then saying that without that context nothing is "really" great. Well, gosh and golly! Nothing is anything out of context!

In this universe - the only universe we know - we are human beings, music is always produced by human beings, and some music is produced by extraordinary human beings with extraordinary faculties operating at an extraordinary level of competence, and that music is perceived to be extraordinary by other human beings capable of so perceiving it. We call such music great music.
 
#73 ·
In this universe - the only universe we know - we are human beings, music is always produced by human beings, and some music is produced by extraordinary human beings with extraordinary faculties operating at an extraordinary level of competence, and that music is perceived to be extraordinary by other human beings capable of so perceiving it. We call such music great music.
I'd leave the universe out of it and stick to our solar system, especially since exoplanets are now being discovered at a prodigious and ever accelerating rate. We are in the multiple thousands at this point. Intelligent life is probably as common as dirt out there. It seems not unlikely, therefore, that highly intelligent species with the capacity and desire to create music could number in the thousands or millions in our galaxy alone, let alone in the universe as a whole. So, the question I would ask is: When, one hundred million years from now, alien beings sift through the great archives preserving the record of our long dead cultures' achievements, will they manage to reconstruct the significance of the WTC and affirm the eternal greatness of Bach? Is the well-tempered or equal tempered system easily-enough extrapolated from the physical and mathematical bases of sound that it will have been discovered by millions of different cultures across the universe? I think that would be a great topic for a thread - which is why I never start threads.
 
#26 ·
The Cage piece posted above doesn't sound at all random to me, in fact to my ear it has a great sense of gesture and flow. I was not familiar with the series before now, but a cursory glance shows that in fact the work is deliberately, almost excessively detailed and precise, pointing towards New Complexity with its density of performance information.

I think with Cage, people tend to see the word "chance" and assume this means "random," which I think is an understandable error. The piece posted above was apparently composed using controlled chance processes, but the performance itself does not involve chance. Chance in performance is something he used extensively in many of his major works, but it is still entirely prescriptive, because Cage uses systems which limit possible outcomes to a determined set, whether large or small. How exactly one composes using the I Ching, I don't know, but that is a mystery to which I do not personally seek answers.
 
#27 ·
Almost the entirety of Stockhausen's oeuvre. I call it "noise" rather than music. Of course, when I say this the usual counter is that I simply "don't have the listening skills" to appreciate it. Pretentious, nonsensical cop-out. I've given it multiple opportunities to grow on me but I normally end up regretting the experience. I feel the same way for much of John Cage as well, who seemed to write stuff just for attention.
There is a lot of modern pop music that seems to just BARELY qualify as music, but I won't really go there.
 
#31 · (Edited)
I only have a "you call that music?" reaction to rap.

There are other music genres I dislike, but I acknowledge most of them as music. Rap is a different critter though. For me it seems to be more about attitude than about organized sound and I am singularly underwhelmed, though I confess to only hearing snippets of it against my will when some trunk rattling testosterone poisoned juvenile drives around with his windows down in the dead of winter trying to force me to listen, trying to shock me, but failing.

Modern music never really gives me such a reaction. If I don't like it or don't quite get it, it merely bores me or mildly annoys me. This happens less and less these days.
 
#82 · (Edited)
I want to believe, however, when you realize the extremely unlikely/random chain of events and numerous conditions that were needed for intelligent life to arise here on earth, (earth-like) life and especially intelligent life, may not be so common at all. The exoplanets show there's potential, but we will need to learn a lot more before we can assume intelligent life is as common as dirt. It's possible that "our" composers are the only ones in the universe, which would make them (even more) special.
 
#88 ·
Why extremely unlikely? Just based on the number of planets we've already discovered in the Goldilocks zones in other systems, it seems likely there are millions if not billions of planets in the universe capable of sustaining life. Moreover, I take the fact that fairly advanced intelligence has developed in multiple evolutionary lines in numerous species on our one planet as a suggestion that the evolution of advanced intelligence might be almost inevitable on worlds similar to ours. Consider the fact that eyes evolved independently over 40 times on this planet. I think it staggeringly unlikely that advanced intelligence is not a commonplace development.
 
#89 ·
What strikes me about that piece is the profligate waste of labor. ;) One can get a similar effect with a single electric guitar and a looper, as Robert Fripp often did in the introductory soundscapes of King Crimson concerts.
 
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#91 ·
Thinking of my long-departed father tonight, who was a traditionalist. When confronted with music of a modernist bent, he would often say, "You call that music?" I admire and respect his position, although he actually grew to like some Stravinsky late in life. A weakness perhaps.

How about you? Are there specific pieces or composers that lead you to risk the scorn of experts and cry out, "You call that music"? Let us know - if you dare!
Pretty much the "raw" experimentalism music that perpetuated in the 1950s and 1960s, which by now sixty years later, is clearly outdated in spirit. I really don't see much lasting value in their idiom but I do value their boldness and invention to charter well beyond traditional models. It was worthy as an exploratory journey but that's about it.
 
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