Wow!
So many things to ponder upon - I'm bound to miss loads of stuff, but here goes:
 Teaflax wrote:
Certif1ed wrote:
It's a bit like saying Right Brain > Left Brain and ne'er the twain... |
Yeah, fair enough. My actual preference is a balance of the two, but there is very little in the way of a cultural movement for "purely intellectual" music, whereas there is a strong and domineering bias for "purely emotional".
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I think that the culture you refer to is and always has been prevalent in popular music, with each successive generation trying to put more emphasis on this obsession.
On the flip-side, the purely cerebral approach is still alive in universities to the point that rigourous compositional methodologies seem to rule, and music-writing per-se is frowned upon.
As you say, a balance is preferable.
Teaflax wrote:
The outlines of Popular music were sketched out half a century ago, not out of some general truth about how music is best performed or appreciated, but often by technical limitations of the times - the 3-4 minute limit on most popular songs comes from the maximum time you could engrave on a 78 RPM record, for instance.
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I would have thought that these outlines reach much further back than half a century - at least a millenia by my reckoning... I also think that 3-4 minutes is most people's attention span.
Teaflax wrote:
That these rules can be found in great measure in a significant majority of all popular music even today is just weird, because these Western "rules" are not in any way universal (excepting maybe the mathematical interval of notes), and non-Western music often has completely different structures, meters, rhythms and tonalities.
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It's not really so wierd - over a millenia ago, Pope Gregory began rationalising Western music so that it could be notated. However, what he was rationalising was not folk music - it was ecclesiastic music, a different animal altogether.
Fortunately, some of the scholarly clerics loved folk music, and notated it using this rational system, and we can enjoy such intricate bagatelles as "Sumer Is I Cumen In", which gives a tantalising taste of just what could be achieved by the "uneducated".
The mathematical intervals were necessary to fit the notation, and were later rationalised using equal temperament - which only really proved that an octave does not break down into 12 convenient steps, and was the point at which music started to become synthetic.
It also became far more manageable, which is what gave rise to the huge wealth that exists in the Western Traditions.
Far Eastern music isn't (to my jaded Western ears at least) quite as diverse, for all the freedom musicians have in terms of the basic elements of music. The distinctions between folk, occasional and art music are less distinct, and the progression from ancient times to modern is not so apparent.
Teaflax wrote:
So, while there's certainly a case to be made for the simple, the direct and the not-overworked and/or clever, it's rather pointless when done within the parameters of the same essentially arbitrary rules and mores that have been handed down through the decades.
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But that's how art works.
You cannot break boundaries unless they've already been defined, and if you simply smash it all up, then chances are you'll sink into obscurity as a freak.
The Avant-Garde of the early 20th century did all that anyway - and even John Cage's "breakthrough" piece 4'33" was essentially no different to Alphonse Allais' "Funeral March for a Deaf Man" written half a century before.
Teaflax wrote:
There's really no reason at all - other than cultural conditioning - why verse-chorus-verse-chorus-solo-chorus-end should be the structure of choice for nearly every song you hear. And the twelve-bar Blues has nothing in it to make it greater or more valid than any other harmonic/melodic scheme (nor worse, you could argue - except that it is so incredibly dominant and overdone)
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No worse, indeed - following on from what I said above. Structures are useful things, and that particular structure has dominated songwriting since the recorded history of songwriting. It also dominated most "art" music until around the late 19th Century.
Teaflax wrote:
I still say that music seems to be the only art form where skill and intellect is often actively discouraged in the hunt for an authenticity that can only really come from the genuinely unaware or unschooled. I understand some of that appeal, but it seems incredibly odd to try to create it in an environment where you - by dint of being immersed in modern culture, having been born into it - cannot help knowing more than you pretend to. |
Art music has traditionally plundered the coffers of music written in precisely that way - it's essential for keeping music alive that the folk tradition of writing "what feels good" is kept alive.
I agree there's too much emphasis on it, just like in academic circles too much emphasis is placed on discipline.
But if you have studied and want to write in a "non-academic" style, then you essentially have to do exactly that - pretend you know nothing and start from a clean slate.
I find it an exciting way to write - you simply don't know what's going to come out in the studio, and you can then go back and rationalise - or not - to your heart's content.
The biggest problem with music since Elvis IMHO is packaging.
Unless it's bigged up and blinged to death, music won't sell except through sheer fluke. The process of bigging up and blinging is a form of alchemy, combined with the world's oldest profession.
And it's the same with the culture you describe - it's like an army of the proverbial chimpanzees with typewriters, except that no-one expects Shakespeare.
Try some of the following;
The Enid
Shu-Niggurath
Autreche
John Zorn
Kronos Quartet
Edited by Certif1ed - June 28 2006 at 07:54
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