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> With the advent of records and radio broadcasts that sounded half-way decent, not only did you not have to go to a theater to hear orchestra music, you could

> With the advent of records and radio broadcasts that sounded half-way decent, not only did you not have to go to a theater to hear orchestra music, you could listen to it all day long. Schoenberg writes in one of his essays, that the general audience at an orchestra concert in Vienna in the late 19th century, had a fairly sophisticated set of expectations about music -- they understood sonata form, e.g. and could follow along, could recall and even sing or whistle the themes a few days later. Did radio and recordings change this because now you don't have to listen quite as closely -- rewind or wait for the next broadcast? Or does it simply become something you don't really listen to at all, but rather take as a drug to get ready for the night out or get into a work groove? I don't deny my bias towards listening to music, nor do I reject other modalities. A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Presumably most working musicians were more interested in continuing with the keyboard-ready music they have been playing their entire lives, so here the technology clearly followed. On the other hand, I've wondered whether the duration of popular music songs was pegged to 2-3 minutes by convention due to an early popular record format that could support 2-3 minutes a side. I'm sure someone's written convincingly one way or the other on the matter, but I don't know, so take it with a grain of salt. BTW, hadn't seen that "commercial" for the second Viennese school and got a kick out of it. Has anyone done the same schtick for be-bop? (Love them both) EDIT: just recalling the other half of that MIDI critique -- it was commercial interest in following a market that lead to the technology, rather than being artistically-driven à la a Verèse.

WalterBright 4y ago
> A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Isn't that true of any instrument? They're all limited by the nature of their interface to the musician.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  Excellent point! In the context of early electronic music (thinking of Varèse), there was a sort of resentment for the fact a composer was limited to working with the sort of sounds that can be "drawn from horse hair and catgut" or by an octave divided in twelve or any instrument other than the composer's imagination. That's how I understood the criticism (which was also voiced in an academic context).

WalterBright 4y ago

> A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Isn't that true of any instrument? They're all limited by the nature of their interface to the musician.

nescioquid 4y ago
Excellent point! In the context of early electronic music (thinking of Varèse), there was a sort of resentment for the fact a composer was limited to working with the sort of sounds that can be "drawn from horse hair and catgut" or by an octave divided in twelve or any instrument other than the composer's imagination. That's how I understood the criticism (which was also voiced in an academic context).