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Challenging music is a tough sell because there has been about a hundred years of a critical mass of composers who took the metric of "challenging" and made it
by jancsika 3y ago
Challenging music is a tough sell because there has been about a hundred years of a critical mass of composers who took the metric of "challenging" and made it a target.
That created a lot of noise that's not of the compelling type. And while it's not so pretentious that, say, the music accidentally sounds outside of the human frequency range, it's pretentious enough to make non-musickers question whether there's really any there there.
Music cognition is still a young enough science to leave questions lingering about what is and isn't happening on a musical-perception level.
Also-- not sure I've ever seen this talked about, but music perception shares sensory apparatus with one's general sense of hearing. So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. It's difficult to be open to new, unfamiliar musical forms, and probably impossibly so if one is grumpy because the delivery format makes one feel as if the music is actively hurting one's ears.
- munificent 3y ago> So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. That describes a lot of techno and heavy metal and a lot of people seem to really dig it.
- dcsommer 3y agoTechno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. Sure, the instruments have massive distortion and new sounds, but the "big blocks" are completely familiar to the brain, unlike avant-garde classical music which can completely abandon recognizable rhythm and 12TET.
- a-french-anon 3y agoNot all of it, obviously. Stuff like Blut Aus Nord's MoRT or Meshuggah's I come to mind when talking about the weirdest bits of metal.
- munificent 3y ago> Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. This depends very heavily on which subgenre of techno you're talking about. Melodic techno tends to use functional harmony, yes. But there is a lot of techno out there that has no recognizable harmony at all. It may have a root note, but bass and/or melodic lines, if present at all, can be completely chromatic. Rhythm is almost always 4/4, of course, but it's hard to deviate too far from that with dance music. Within that, techno tends to do a lot of interesting polymeter stuff. Whether you consider that traditional or not is, I guess, open to interpretation.
- anon291 3y agoTechno is mostly old school classical like melodies with novel timbres. It is extremely tonal and very rhythmic.