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Are modern musical trends creating bad music?


Schu

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When Chopin started out, some people complained about, "Eardrum shattering discords!"  That's probably not a direct quote, but it is in Leonard Bernstein's The Joy of Music.

 

When Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered, there was a near riot, some say with the breaking of chairs.  Stravinsky:  "I said ‘go to hell’… they were very naïve and stupid people.”   Thirty years later, it was tame enough to be in Walt Disney's Fantasia.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/how-walt-disney-got-rite-of-spring-right/2013/06/19/8d008e78-d895-11e2-a9f2-42ee3912ae0e_story.html

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So broadening the conversation a bit from the typical repetition of pop music (which by its own naming convention is popular with the rank-and-file...but perhaps not terribly challenging to listen to--as the speaker admitted openly), it seems to me that the speaker/author gave too little indication that the world of music has always been an artistic blend of repetition and invention. It's the balance of invention and repetition that largely defines music genres.  Take blues, for instance (from which we got rock and all its succession of micro-genres).  It is defined by the sameness of sound but also by improvisation within a strict harmonic framework (i.e., the "blues progression").

 

I didn't see any real measures on the "different-ness" of the non-repetitive sections of music being measured and discussed.  There are such measures--such as variations on fractals and Mandelbrot sets, etc.  I'm also a bit surprised that the TED speaker didn't illustrate something like a jazz standard (i.e., pop music from 50+ years ago) vs. something from bebop, which is differentiated via the observation that there aren't any lyrics by the soloist (or if there are sung parts, they're largely not words but rather vocaleses), and the musical theme(s) are followed by long non-repetitive (and much more inventive) phrases composed on-the-fly by the soloist and backing musicians providing the structure of the composition for which the soloists can freely compose/perform.  There is structure and repetition, just not in the way that many people would identify with popular music. 

 

All music repeats to some degree, unless it's something like "plainsong", which of course relies only on the structure of the words themselves.  So it is more the absence of strict repetition that is the main draw to improvisational genres like bebop, and perhaps also surprisingly classical music, like church organ music and subgenres of folk music that fused themselves into classical.  Improvisation is still a core element in the pedagogy of these genres--which is still taught and used to this day.  

 

Chris

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