4 ms·

Something that strikes me - whenever I've seen pieces like this before, they often seem to ignore that people still write classical music. It's nearly always Mo

by gb 17y ago

Something that strikes me - whenever I've seen pieces like this before, they often seem to ignore that people still write classical music. It's nearly always Mozart, Beethoven, Bach but no mention of any modern or contemporary composers... I wonder why that is. Sure some contemporary classical music is a bit more esoteric and even less likely to appeal to the average listener, but it's certainly not all like that. Maybe I'm slightly unusual in that most of the classical music I enjoy comes from the late romantic period onwards, but I do find it slightly disappointing that often when people "discover" classical music they seem to think it mostly stopped in the 1700s.

snitko 17y ago
That's understandable. Have you heard of any new classic rock bands lately? I doubt that. They do exists though. It's just that people lose interest in new faces playing the same old things. I mean sure, the scores may be different, but still somehow the music sounds the same, because they do combine chord progressions and melody parts in a certain painfully familiar way. Well, most of the time at least, that's what happens to the second generation of the genre followers. Same as in web-apps industry. People like twitter and they are doing a good job. But having yet another one in a different skin would make no sense.
jpwagner 17y ago
This phenomenon is similar to the class of posts that say "why [business] is like [poker]" etc. A vast majority of these posts are by people with amateur-at-best experience with the comparison topic. This article is no exception.
- rinich 17y ago
  And admittedly so.
  - aristoxenus 17y ago
    It's hard to imagine it playing out otherwise -- you need to start somewhere, and that stuff is: a) more familiar to the ear b) more plentifully recorded c) more widely discussed and recommended etc.
    - rinich 17y ago
      b) more plentifully recorded That's a big one. There's some more obscure classical music that I happen to be a huge fan of. Problem is, with that music I came on listening to it as if it were a song and not a composition. When I listen to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, the first music I think to compare it to is Sufjan Stevens, who's a pop songwriter. Or I'll listen to Philip Glass and think of rock riffs. The problem is that for those more modern musicians (and for certain older, less well-known ones) is that we don't have the same conservative respect for them, and we have fewer interpretations of their music. When I listen to Einstein on the Beach, there are only two known recordings, and they're of music that's so innovative that your thoughts aren't about the interpretation, they're about the design of the music period. (I'd also like to add, as an aside, that Hacker News sees the most bizarre stories submitted. Every article I've written that's at all tech-related gets passed over; without fail every article I'm insecure about writing and worry will be passed over finds its way here.)
      - rms 17y ago
        My submission methodology: saw Ed's prediction comment, went to your site, read the last article, liked it, read the second most recent article and decided the classical music one would do better here.
rinich 17y ago
In the 20th century, classical music went a lot of interesting ways. A lot of the really innovative composers were focusing on dissonance and atonality — Bartók, Stostakovich, Varèse, Stravinsky. With that, there starts to be a challenge to find music that grasps you instantly. I tend to find that once I figure out something about a composer, his works start making sense to be, but before then it frequently sounds like noise. When I think about modern composed music, my utterly-amateur mind goes in three directions — jazz, minimalism, and scores. There's a lot of interesting music being made for movies — do the scores of Jaws and Indiana Jones or Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera count as classical music? Certainly musically there are certain things in common. Jazz, meanwhile, is an absolute paradise of talented musicians and musical experimentation. Charles Mingus comes to mind, as does John Zorn as a more modern composer. The only movement I'm really aware of in modern classical music that has a distinct classical taste is that of minimalism. Philip Glass is an obvious first name, but then Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young were all composers whose music emphasized certain kinds of repetition. But when you begin listening to them, you realize how diverse each one is and how it's almost silly to group them together. Riley's music tends toward electronica and unpredictability, Glass eschews the term altogether, and Young's music tends towards categories like "drone", at which point you're talking a genre that includes a lot of rock music, also. Then you look at how Riley influenced bands like the Who (who named a song after him) and how La Monte Young worked with John Cale of the Velvet Underground, and it starts looking like that branch of classical music got submerged in avante garde rock. But that's all the perspective of somebody who admittedly knows less than he wants to. If the classical music scene is different than that, it's done a damn good job of hiding it: I've found no other category of music that might help me understand what's going on today (and I'd appreciate the helping hand of any user who knows more).
jtnak 17y ago
So what? Classical music will never have the same level of prominence that it did before the 1900's. That's his point.
- rinich 17y ago
  Actually, my point was that if we look at classical music and say "So what?" we're losing a vast treasure.
  - jtnak 17y ago
    What I was trying to say in my reply was that "he is ignoring the fact that people still write classical music" is not a valid point. There are 6.7 billion people on this planet; if there are a couple of people with a hobby, that does not prove anything.
    - rinich 17y ago
      Gotcha. But what if those "people with a hobby" are capable of doing incredible things with music? They'd benefit from being in a field of music that's not neglected for being thought of as centuries-old.
- chickamade 17y ago
  That's not his point. His point is that he has connected to the music by listening to what he likes, rather than what he was told to respect. I'd hardly call that result "unexpected", though. As for your point, it is debatable. I think the percentage of people enjoying classical music is greater today than 100 years ago. If you actually meant that the quality of music we write today is lower, that is very hard to for us to judge until maybe 100 years later. Maybe you've heard of John Cage, Luciano Berio, or perhaps György Ligeti -- whose music was used as the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are a lot of people out there writing contemporary "classical" music that are respected in the music community, but virtually unknown elsewhere (and they are respected because we are touched by their music, just like the author has written, and not because they are writing avant-garde, esoteric music). I would admit that the percentage of quality music in the total corpus being performed and listened today is unfortunately lower than it might have been 100 years ago.

by gb 17y ago

snitko 17y ago

That's understandable. Have you heard of any new classic rock bands lately? I doubt that. They do exists though. It's just that people lose interest in new faces playing the same old things. I mean sure, the scores may be different, but still somehow the music sounds the same, because they do combine chord progressions and melody parts in a certain painfully familiar way. Well, most of the time at least, that's what happens to the second generation of the genre followers. Same as in web-apps industry. People like twitter and they are doing a good job. But having yet another one in a different skin would make no sense.

jpwagner 17y ago

This phenomenon is similar to the class of posts that say "why [business] is like [poker]" etc. A vast majority of these posts are by people with amateur-at-best experience with the comparison topic. This article is no exception.

rinich 17y ago
And admittedly so.
- aristoxenus 17y ago
  It's hard to imagine it playing out otherwise -- you need to start somewhere, and that stuff is: a) more familiar to the ear b) more plentifully recorded c) more widely discussed and recommended etc.
  - rinich 17y ago
    b) more plentifully recorded That's a big one. There's some more obscure classical music that I happen to be a huge fan of. Problem is, with that music I came on listening to it as if it were a song and not a composition. When I listen to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, the first music I think to compare it to is Sufjan Stevens, who's a pop songwriter. Or I'll listen to Philip Glass and think of rock riffs. The problem is that for those more modern musicians (and for certain older, less well-known ones) is that we don't have the same conservative respect for them, and we have fewer interpretations of their music. When I listen to Einstein on the Beach, there are only two known recordings, and they're of music that's so innovative that your thoughts aren't about the interpretation, they're about the design of the music period. (I'd also like to add, as an aside, that Hacker News sees the most bizarre stories submitted. Every article I've written that's at all tech-related gets passed over; without fail every article I'm insecure about writing and worry will be passed over finds its way here.)
    - rms 17y ago
      My submission methodology: saw Ed's prediction comment, went to your site, read the last article, liked it, read the second most recent article and decided the classical music one would do better here.

rinich 17y ago

In the 20th century, classical music went a lot of interesting ways. A lot of the really innovative composers were focusing on dissonance and atonality — Bartók, Stostakovich, Varèse, Stravinsky. With that, there starts to be a challenge to find music that grasps you instantly. I tend to find that once I figure out something about a composer, his works start making sense to be, but before then it frequently sounds like noise. When I think about modern composed music, my utterly-amateur mind goes in three directions — jazz, minimalism, and scores. There's a lot of interesting music being made for movies — do the scores of Jaws and Indiana Jones or Sweeney Todd and Phantom of the Opera count as classical music? Certainly musically there are certain things in common. Jazz, meanwhile, is an absolute paradise of talented musicians and musical experimentation. Charles Mingus comes to mind, as does John Zorn as a more modern composer. The only movement I'm really aware of in modern classical music that has a distinct classical taste is that of minimalism. Philip Glass is an obvious first name, but then Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young were all composers whose music emphasized certain kinds of repetition. But when you begin listening to them, you realize how diverse each one is and how it's almost silly to group them together. Riley's music tends toward electronica and unpredictability, Glass eschews the term altogether, and Young's music tends towards categories like "drone", at which point you're talking a genre that includes a lot of rock music, also. Then you look at how Riley influenced bands like the Who (who named a song after him) and how La Monte Young worked with John Cale of the Velvet Underground, and it starts looking like that branch of classical music got submerged in avante garde rock. But that's all the perspective of somebody who admittedly knows less than he wants to. If the classical music scene is different than that, it's done a damn good job of hiding it: I've found no other category of music that might help me understand what's going on today (and I'd appreciate the helping hand of any user who knows more).

jtnak 17y ago

So what? Classical music will never have the same level of prominence that it did before the 1900's. That's his point.

rinich 17y ago
Actually, my point was that if we look at classical music and say "So what?" we're losing a vast treasure.
- jtnak 17y ago
  What I was trying to say in my reply was that "he is ignoring the fact that people still write classical music" is not a valid point. There are 6.7 billion people on this planet; if there are a couple of people with a hobby, that does not prove anything.
  - rinich 17y ago
    Gotcha. But what if those "people with a hobby" are capable of doing incredible things with music? They'd benefit from being in a field of music that's not neglected for being thought of as centuries-old.
chickamade 17y ago
That's not his point. His point is that he has connected to the music by listening to what he likes, rather than what he was told to respect. I'd hardly call that result "unexpected", though. As for your point, it is debatable. I think the percentage of people enjoying classical music is greater today than 100 years ago. If you actually meant that the quality of music we write today is lower, that is very hard to for us to judge until maybe 100 years later. Maybe you've heard of John Cage, Luciano Berio, or perhaps György Ligeti -- whose music was used as the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are a lot of people out there writing contemporary "classical" music that are respected in the music community, but virtually unknown elsewhere (and they are respected because we are touched by their music, just like the author has written, and not because they are writing avant-garde, esoteric music). I would admit that the percentage of quality music in the total corpus being performed and listened today is unfortunately lower than it might have been 100 years ago.