4 ms·

Why don't they compose music like Bach any more?

53 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

techostritch 2y ago
I always feel like this question begs this elitist perspective on progress and art. I don’t hate classical music, but I also don’t deify it. Classical jazz, other forms of “art” music, they’re great, and maybe they do reflect some kind of intellectual pinnacle, but as someone who was a big clubbed in my youth, I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall. I would like to see some fusion, I like longer works, concept albums, I’d really like to see more of it in modern aesthetics. I keep meditating on the phrase synthwave symphony for my next project.
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
  Synthwave symphony... interesting. Try a Perturbator album maybe ?
- EGreg 2y ago
  Fusion, behold: https://www.bso.org/pops/about/history https://www.bso.org/pops/about/history NY Pops is here too
- graycat 2y ago
  The concert hall environment used to be a practical approach to hearing the music, now is a traditional approach, but due to technology of the past 50-100 years is no longer needed. I'm a super+++ fan of classical music from a little before Bach through Wagner and some since him. E.g., the end of the Republican National Convention had a live performance of Nessum Dorma with none of the environment, e.g., the singer was not on the main stage. I like classical music as art with the definition "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", and according to that definition to me that music has some astounding examples. For Bach, okay, at one point I wanted to convert over from listening to the music to playing some of it, got a violin (easier to carry than a piano), some lessons (Indiana University, where I was a math grad student, with a terrific music school) and got through most of the famous E major Partita and, transposed up for violin, the famous cello piece. Both are very popular sometimes in surprising circumstances, e.g., the cello piece was used in an ad selling bathtubs! Tough to put either piece into words, but a rough attempt is: They start with something simple, not very emotional, but suggesting someone beginning something challenging. Then the pieces move forward with some changes in different parts of the scale but with the rhythm slowly changing as if the person's experience was progressing, developing, but in a way that was close to clockwork, maybe driven, no big interruptions or distractions, even irresistible and inevitable. But in both cases the development leads to a climax of some success or, for the cello piece, some grand success. Well, from that a listener can conclude that they are not the only one progressing on some situation that has some irresistible challenge and ending with a victory. The grand case of this, in words, roughly, moving ahead on a challenge, having a sweet, happy victory (2/3rds of the way through), having a catharsis after the victory, and then slowly reaching a deeply understood resolution is, of course, the Chaconne. It was written for solo violin but is taken seriously in transcriptions for piano and full orchestra -- there is a good Stokowski performance; he seems to really understand the music and presents a good, expressive version. So, I like the music for the effectiveness of the art. Uh, in summary, to write music like, as good as, Bach's have to write not just in his style but with comparable effectiveness in his art. The tough part is the art, not just the style.
  - techostritch 2y ago
    I’m glad classical music has done this for you. I’ve always heard of people appreciating the an ability of music to tell a story, and I’ve wondered if it would make my music better if I used a story as inspiration, and maybe this is the post modernist in me, but I’ve always appreciated music as a form that expressed something you couldn’t put into words, even as you’ve expressed here, the narrative is fairly simple, isn’t there a much richer je ne sais Quias or spirit behind the music? In which case I’ve never really gotten the richest version of that from classical.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall. Don't know about peak, but sure sounds like a more cultured, intellectual, and refined human experience.
  - somedude895 2y ago
    Equating sitting for 90 minutes focusing on a single thing with a single or maybe two senses to jerking your limbs along to droning sounds in a dark room surrounded by drunk people is pure cultural nihilism. Sounds harsh, but that kind of thinking just makes me sad.
    - techostritch 2y ago
      I’m curious why it makes you sad? I feel exactly the opposite. Dancing is an old cultural tradition that has meditative and spiritual qualities. What about that is cultural nihilism. Or maybe I just don’t think cultural nihilism is a bad thing?
      - coldtea 2y ago
        As an American you're raised not to think cultural nihilism as a bad thing. And have been exporting this nihilism to Europe for several decades :)
  - techostritch 2y ago
    I had to second guess myself because I don’t know if I really know what cultured means, but Apparently the dictionary definition of the word cultured is “produced under artificial conditions” so I would say I agree with you. Can’t argue with refined. Probably won’t reasonably argue with intellectual, but then again I think I don’t know that I think that I get into art for intellectual reasons exactly, I would describe them as spiritual reasons.
al2o3cr 2y ago
[flagged]
- surprisetalk 2y ago
  Given that the post is recommending a piece from 2019, it seems like the author is not much of a purist [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark_Passion_(N._Matthes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark_Passion_(N._Matthes)
nabla9 2y ago
Two reasons: 1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach. 2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough. I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172
- filipeherculano 2y ago
  > and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees I'm glad to be on the other side of this, I agree with you and can totally relate with you. I like to view artists as mediums that can channel and manifest art, but that art stands on its own. Bach just happened to be the one in our lifetime to do that with what he discovered. — The strongest evidence to me for this is that art can outlast the artist every single time.
  - jhrmnn 2y ago
    Interesting. To me music is a form of communication. So then obviously I care about who’s on the other side. I guess how people perceive this is quite subjective.
    - filipeherculano 2y ago
      I can appreciate that and I can still agree with that definition, could be just a semantics discussion. — what I call music doesn't sit well with what is music as defined by our language. (Taking the blame here) I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual. The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible, and I love it, I am myself a musician and I rely on it a lot for this matter. — That said though, emotions are deep and complex and there is too much loss when attempting to convert them into a message. — _Maybe this is why there's a lot of copyright out there when artists channel similar sounds trying to express their feelings despite never hearing of those others who came first? Think the language being both extremely rich and poor in terms of what it can offer for this_ It may be that I am being too philosophical about it and like to look at it outside of the human realm. — Similar to the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it,_does_it_make_a_sound%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
Almondsetat 2y ago
Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone, that's why every famous artist in history at one point got fed up from copying the past's masters and finally did their own thing achieving greatness.
- bwanab 2y ago
  Exactly. There are so many questions like this that all have the same answer: why don't they paint like Kandinsky <pick your own favorite>? Why don't they write like <pick your favorite writer>? It's a non-sensical question.
  - sdwr 2y ago
    It's a very sensible question. The real Q being asked is: Is greatness about skill, or about getting lucky (right place at the right time)? and that question is really: Do I matter? Do my feelings (which feel so real to me) affect the outside world?
    - Almondsetat 2y ago
      "Greatness" is a quality we give to a person as a society, Bach himself risked being forgotten because only a small part of society remembered him. Greatness is of course a question of luck, because no matter how skilled you are you are still at the whims of history.
      - rc_mob 2y ago
        .. as long as the people who remember you are wealthy and powerful
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone Never prevented us to have tons of artists doing music the style of other artists... The premise is wrong anyway, people do make music in the style of Bach, both exactly in that style and borrowing from Bach, but also in general baroque/romantic/melodic classical styles.
Aardwolf 2y ago
I got endless streams of synthwave, vaporwave and similar on Youtube, regularly hearing new songs as well, people still keep creating great new music. Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now. Bach clearly was a geek of his time though, and I respect that.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? Because we like it. >We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now. So? Those are mere tools so we can make the music that we like and want to make. Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us.
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    >> Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? > Because we like it. Nothing against that, but there seems to be a group of people who dismiss anything except classical music as if we lost the ability to make acceptable music today. I also like some styles more than others, but I'm not going to make generalizing statements about humanity's abilities due to my personal preferences. > Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us. They most probably do affect the style, just like how 16-color pixel graphics produces a different visual style than playstation-style polygons. And that's a good thing, more styles = more variety, there isn't some particular style of some particular era that's somehow better than others
    - xattt 2y ago
      To add to your comment, music from that time was contemporary and reflected the needs and wants of the general population of the time. Forcing new composers to conform to what old people want from because tradition, damn it is a recipe for creative disaster.
      - coldtea 2y ago
noufalibrahim 2y ago
I don't know about Bach. However, one thing that strikes me is that the easiness of producing something of high quality probably means that it's just high enough to seem so for most people and not really as high as the things that were considered high. Rick Beato had an interesting video on this phenomenon. I'm not very musically literate but I found the general idea quite insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
- nabla9 2y ago
  Beato also talks about easiness of listening. I didn't really get into Bach until after 4 hours of listening BWV 988 (Goldberg Variations), then it just clicked and I could enjoy it deeper than anything before. Mozart does not work for me the same way. It's good, but somehow just clever bullshit at the same time. Music is subjective.
coldtea 2y ago
An answer to somebody asking the title's question would be: They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time. Do you go their concerts or listen to their records? If not, then it's not so much that they don't, as that people don't give them sales, success, and exposure, so you'd know about them. And apparently you didn't even bother to Google about such artists, so...
- Jensson 2y ago
  > They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time. But it isn't that good, what people want is that level of quality not just that style. I think to compose great music the entire culture need to support it, you wont get to the same heights when most of society don't care about what you do.
jll29 2y ago
Bach is timeless, some of his music was sent into outer space, and the old astronomy joke goes one day, they would detect a message using a radio telescope that said "Send more Bach!". If there is life outside of Earth, no doubt there'd be demand for it; they just don't know yet what they are missing... More seriously, if people imitated the music of the Baroque period, it's perhaps more as an exercise to improve rather than a personal opus magnum that will be published, because that time is just over. The same may be true for imitating some specifics of Bach's style (Johann Sebastian, there are many other Bachs that are likewise recommended, e.g. C. E. Bach also wrote excellent organ music IMHO). However, there are also timeless patterns in Bach's music that invoke/exploit recursion, symmetry, variation, reference of others and self-reference that are perhaps mandatory if you want to write the best music ever - see Douglas Robert Hofstadter's seminal book on that topic (and many fascinating others), "Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Basic Books, New York, 1979).
prvc 2y ago
Prokofiev's Op. 25 is not intended to have been a period-accurate pastiche. The "classical" title is meant to indicate a tongue-in-cheek theme, as in a costume party. And to answer the OP question, the social context in which compositions in the past were written no longer exists. From the vantage point of the present, a composition which is restricted to the vocabulary and the techniques of a single past era seems to be arbitrarily excluding possibilities which have since become known to all of us.
defrost 2y ago
We've moved on, we've got Arvo Pärt [1], Steve Reich [2], Wim Mertens [3], and Almost Vinyl [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Mertens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Mertens [4] https://www.youtube.com/@AlmostVinyl/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AlmostVinyl/videos
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
FYI, the article is about Nikolaus Matthes who did actually write a very good (but not as good as Bach best according to critics) Passion in the style of Bach in 2019 and why nobody cares. I think it had to be said because, at the time of me writing this comment, none of the other 16 commenters had apparently bothered clicking on the link they were commenting on.
okaleniuk 2y ago
There is a point of view that all the western music is divided by Bach. The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, and the after era when music is strongly based on elementary theory. Bach himself, interestingly, belongs to the "before" era and as such is a pinnacle of intuitive pre-elementary music. Just yesterday I found an album of Elizabethian remakes of Nick Drake's songs mixed with John Dowland's. The difference in composition is staggering. And Nick Drake was not a typical songwriter himself. Yet a 50 years old song is principally different from a 500 years old even when played by the same people on the same instruments.
- Tainnor 2y ago
  > The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, There's a lot of music theory in pre-Baroque compositions, e.g. counterpoint theory or isorhythm.
  - okaleniuk 2y ago
    Of course. Fun fact, the father of Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Galilei was a musical theorist who, long before Bach, established the idea of equal temperament. I myself don't believe in before/after thing. It's not that one day all the composers in the world agreed to write music by the book. I think things shifted slowly but steadily along with the technological progress. Compared to Galilei's time, in Bach's era there were more books to learn from, more and better developed instruments, and with the rise of bourgeoisie, more listeners (and musicians). Bach is just a convenient milestone.
blueboo 2y ago
Bach was a fashion(-driven) designer like any other artist, reacting to and driving trends of his time. With that framing, they never stopped composing like Bach
- diego_moita 2y ago
  What the banality of your comment says is that you never cared to pay attention to the man and his music. I strongly recommend you watch the excellent BBC documentary about him, by the maestro John Eliott Gardiner [1]. You'll discover a world where music wasn't yet associated with "fashion", where the "market" for music (i.e. concert halls, music publishing, etc) didn't actually exist and composers were paid employees of cities. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZVn9NZqyxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZVn9NZqyxs
  - blueboo 2y ago
    Just because there wasn't Twitter and App Stores doesn't mean there weren't fashions and markets -- they were located in different places in the culture. I don't mean to deflate your lofty romanticizations of the man and his craft. Take another listen to your documentary and observe how his career reflects and reacts to the on-going musical-cultural discourse of his time. In that way, he truly is like any other artist (so engaged.) At the same time, rest assured we can celebrate and enjoy the extraordinary achievements made in that paradigm.
artemonster 2y ago
Have you played Homm3? Paul Romero killed it
motohagiography 2y ago
It's a bit like asking, why don't they do math like Euler anymore? we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271 https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes. It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.
bluenose69 2y ago
My mind went to the novel "Time Pressure" by Spider Robinson (ISBN-10 ‎ 0441809332). It's worth reading, if you like sci-fi.
roenxi 2y ago
I'd suggest the obvious elephant in the room here is that the market Bach is targeted at is quite small - people who understand and appreciate technically good music (that doesn't include me). Most people have music they'd rather listen to that is not composed by Bach. The market has completely changed. Ordinary people listen to music regularly nowadays. Possibly daily. That was never a crowd that Bach did well with. So we probably still have Bach-style compositions but most people neither know nor care.
- enthulhusiastic 2y ago
  Lots of people appreciate “technically good”. Personally I can’t stand all but a few guitar solos. “Technically good”
- aworks 2y ago
  I subscribe to Fanfare Magazine, "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors" i.e. classical. It comes out 6 times a year. The current issue is 512 pages and has about 10 reviews of new or re-released Bach recordings. I'd guess there are modern Bach-style compositions mentioned a couple of times a year. Note that the magazine only has 1102 paid subscriptions!
konart 2y ago
Why don't they listen to music like they the did back then?
strogonoff 2y ago
Asking “why don't they compose music like Bach any more?” is like asking “why don’t they make smartphones like the original iPhone anymore?”. Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels. If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).
diego_moita 2y ago
Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time. The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that. Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable. Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be. Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.
starstripe 2y ago
"And yet no one cares. Have you heard of this work before? How many times will you hear of it from now on?" I think he might have answered his own questino.
coliveira 2y ago
It takes years to learn to compose in Bach's way. However, if you go to a university for this, they will tell that they don't want new compositions in Bach style, they want some "modern" classical music. So what is missing is some kind of Bach academy, where they would promote composers writing new music in this style.
ramesh31 2y ago
It's Highlander rules. There can only be one master.
aczerepinski 2y ago
Because there’s no money or prestige in it. There are plenty of people who understand the craft and could do it. It’s easy enough to imagine some cultural moment - say a popular romance set in the era - bringing it back for a season of baroque hype.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Because they can't. If you mean "like Bach" in terms of the specific stylistic tropes - he literally spent a lifetime developing them, they're exceptionally complex, and there are very very few people with the same combination of taste, cognitive capacity, and book learning who might reproduce them convincingly. And if even if someone did that - what's the point? If you mean in terms of complexity etc - this is an era of shallower, more emotionally direct music. The complexity is all in the production, sound design, and mixing, and not so much in the writing and arrangement. A lot of skill goes into pulling a good mix together, but it's a different, much less obvious kind of skill. If someone wants to experiment with equivalent levels of intellectual complexity - get a copy of Csound or something, pick a language for a front end to generate Csound events using composition rules, and see where you get to. IMO that's the biggest unexplored area in computer music, with the potential to combine new sonic structures - designed with taste and aesthetic awareness, not just for the sake of tinkering - with new kinds of sound design. Is there a market for it? Absolutely not. But so what?
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  This is pretty much it. Music is always a business, and composing things "like Bach" (whatever TFA wanted that to mean) is very hard and time consuming. It's just not worth doing. On top of that, the taste of contemporary music buyers is often toward things that are downright weird rather than things that sound like old music.
f38zf5vdt 2y ago
They still do? One instance is MASTER BOOT RECORD and it's metal styled after Bach's composition styles made on a 486DX. It is very popular. https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/ https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/
mynameishere 2y ago
I believe students of composition will usually "cover" that era and intentionally write music like Bach, but it would be very strange if the teacher then said, "That's it. That's the pinnacle. Now, get working on your resumes."
sotix 2y ago
Howard Goodall has a great analysis[0] of how classical music was dying in the 1950s and 1960s until The Beatles indirectly saved it. It had taken a shift to avant-garde and strongly experimental sounds until The Beatles' influence reminded composers that good composition following the fundamentals could produce great music. I'm not tuned in enough today to know if that still holds true, but it was an interesting analysis. He does a much better job of explaining it than I did. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc
mannyv 2y ago
The problem is that Bach's ideas will never progress any further. That's sort of sad.
- temporarely 2y ago
  Cubism was ultimately a dead-end as well.
tsoukase 2y ago
It's like asking, why they don't paint like Caravaggio or sculpt like Michelangelo. There is a reason why these pieces of art are called classical. The same goes with classical literature. They don't write like Plato.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse / Rick Beato: https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo This might provide part of the answer.
- jemmyw 2y ago
  Not really. I agree with what he says but listen to what he says: he's talking about popular music. He has explicitly stated he's not talking about music subcultures, of which there are many and many are thriving. If there was a Bach like composer subculture that was significant but unable to break into pop then he'd be giving the answer. Bach wasn't popular music when he was alive.
  - 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
    bach wasn't exactly subculture either. i mean back then you played some shingles in a pub or you were in cahoots with the royals who paid you for making music. but i get your point. i've no competent position really, anyway.
jschveibinz 2y ago
The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is a challenging read, but it highlights some of the magical depth in Bach's music. What he accomplished was very unique and brilliantly complex.
davesque 2y ago
As a person with a music degree, albeit not in composition, but I had several friends who were composition majors, my impression is that composers often do write music in old baroque or classical styles etc., which are academically well understood, but they do it more as an exercise. Probably some composers even do compose exclusively in those styles. But the point is we don't know it because there isn't much interest from general audiences in anachronistic music and of course there isn't much commercial interest either. Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).
antoinebalaine 2y ago
The real reason is because we tune instruments differently. Anything about "why would you want to be a copy cat of Bach?" is just non-sense - musicians have been copy-catting each other endlessly since music existed, and still do today. The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time. Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.

53 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

I always feel like this question begs this elitist perspective on progress and art. I don’t hate classical music, but I also don’t deify it. Classical jazz, other forms of “art” music, they’re great, and maybe they do reflect some kind of intellectual pinnacle, but as someone who was a big clubbed in my youth, I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall. I would like to see some fusion, I like longer works, concept albums, I’d really like to see more of it in modern aesthetics. I keep meditating on the phrase synthwave symphony for my next project.

JodieBenitez 2y ago
Synthwave symphony... interesting. Try a Perturbator album maybe ?
EGreg 2y ago
Fusion, behold: https://www.bso.org/pops/about/history https://www.bso.org/pops/about/history NY Pops is here too
graycat 2y ago
The concert hall environment used to be a practical approach to hearing the music, now is a traditional approach, but due to technology of the past 50-100 years is no longer needed. I'm a super+++ fan of classical music from a little before Bach through Wagner and some since him. E.g., the end of the Republican National Convention had a live performance of Nessum Dorma with none of the environment, e.g., the singer was not on the main stage. I like classical music as art with the definition "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", and according to that definition to me that music has some astounding examples. For Bach, okay, at one point I wanted to convert over from listening to the music to playing some of it, got a violin (easier to carry than a piano), some lessons (Indiana University, where I was a math grad student, with a terrific music school) and got through most of the famous E major Partita and, transposed up for violin, the famous cello piece. Both are very popular sometimes in surprising circumstances, e.g., the cello piece was used in an ad selling bathtubs! Tough to put either piece into words, but a rough attempt is: They start with something simple, not very emotional, but suggesting someone beginning something challenging. Then the pieces move forward with some changes in different parts of the scale but with the rhythm slowly changing as if the person's experience was progressing, developing, but in a way that was close to clockwork, maybe driven, no big interruptions or distractions, even irresistible and inevitable. But in both cases the development leads to a climax of some success or, for the cello piece, some grand success. Well, from that a listener can conclude that they are not the only one progressing on some situation that has some irresistible challenge and ending with a victory. The grand case of this, in words, roughly, moving ahead on a challenge, having a sweet, happy victory (2/3rds of the way through), having a catharsis after the victory, and then slowly reaching a deeply understood resolution is, of course, the Chaconne. It was written for solo violin but is taken seriously in transcriptions for piano and full orchestra -- there is a good Stokowski performance; he seems to really understand the music and presents a good, expressive version. So, I like the music for the effectiveness of the art. Uh, in summary, to write music like, as good as, Bach's have to write not just in his style but with comparable effectiveness in his art. The tough part is the art, not just the style.
- techostritch 2y ago
  I’m glad classical music has done this for you. I’ve always heard of people appreciating the an ability of music to tell a story, and I’ve wondered if it would make my music better if I used a story as inspiration, and maybe this is the post modernist in me, but I’ve always appreciated music as a form that expressed something you couldn’t put into words, even as you’ve expressed here, the narrative is fairly simple, isn’t there a much richer je ne sais Quias or spirit behind the music? In which case I’ve never really gotten the richest version of that from classical.
coldtea 2y ago
>I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall. Don't know about peak, but sure sounds like a more cultured, intellectual, and refined human experience.
- somedude895 2y ago
  Equating sitting for 90 minutes focusing on a single thing with a single or maybe two senses to jerking your limbs along to droning sounds in a dark room surrounded by drunk people is pure cultural nihilism. Sounds harsh, but that kind of thinking just makes me sad.
  - techostritch 2y ago
    I’m curious why it makes you sad? I feel exactly the opposite. Dancing is an old cultural tradition that has meditative and spiritual qualities. What about that is cultural nihilism. Or maybe I just don’t think cultural nihilism is a bad thing?
    - coldtea 2y ago
      As an American you're raised not to think cultural nihilism as a bad thing. And have been exporting this nihilism to Europe for several decades :)
- techostritch 2y ago
  I had to second guess myself because I don’t know if I really know what cultured means, but Apparently the dictionary definition of the word cultured is “produced under artificial conditions” so I would say I agree with you. Can’t argue with refined. Probably won’t reasonably argue with intellectual, but then again I think I don’t know that I think that I get into art for intellectual reasons exactly, I would describe them as spiritual reasons.

al2o3cr 2y ago

[flagged]

surprisetalk 2y ago
Given that the post is recommending a piece from 2019, it seems like the author is not much of a purist [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark_Passion_(N._Matthes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mark_Passion_(N._Matthes)

nabla9 2y ago

Two reasons: 1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach. 2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough. I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172

filipeherculano 2y ago
> and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees I'm glad to be on the other side of this, I agree with you and can totally relate with you. I like to view artists as mediums that can channel and manifest art, but that art stands on its own. Bach just happened to be the one in our lifetime to do that with what he discovered. — The strongest evidence to me for this is that art can outlast the artist every single time.
- jhrmnn 2y ago
  Interesting. To me music is a form of communication. So then obviously I care about who’s on the other side. I guess how people perceive this is quite subjective.
  - filipeherculano 2y ago
    I can appreciate that and I can still agree with that definition, could be just a semantics discussion. — what I call music doesn't sit well with what is music as defined by our language. (Taking the blame here) I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual. The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible, and I love it, I am myself a musician and I rely on it a lot for this matter. — That said though, emotions are deep and complex and there is too much loss when attempting to convert them into a message. — _Maybe this is why there's a lot of copyright out there when artists channel similar sounds trying to express their feelings despite never hearing of those others who came first? Think the language being both extremely rich and poor in terms of what it can offer for this_ It may be that I am being too philosophical about it and like to look at it outside of the human realm. — Similar to the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_and_no_one_is_around_to_hear_it,_does_it_make_a_sound%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...

Almondsetat 2y ago

Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone, that's why every famous artist in history at one point got fed up from copying the past's masters and finally did their own thing achieving greatness.

bwanab 2y ago
Exactly. There are so many questions like this that all have the same answer: why don't they paint like Kandinsky <pick your own favorite>? Why don't they write like <pick your favorite writer>? It's a non-sensical question.
- sdwr 2y ago
  It's a very sensible question. The real Q being asked is: Is greatness about skill, or about getting lucky (right place at the right time)? and that question is really: Do I matter? Do my feelings (which feel so real to me) affect the outside world?
  - Almondsetat 2y ago
    "Greatness" is a quality we give to a person as a society, Bach himself risked being forgotten because only a small part of society remembered him. Greatness is of course a question of luck, because no matter how skilled you are you are still at the whims of history.
    - rc_mob 2y ago
      .. as long as the people who remember you are wealthy and powerful
coldtea 2y ago
>Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone Never prevented us to have tons of artists doing music the style of other artists... The premise is wrong anyway, people do make music in the style of Bach, both exactly in that style and borrowing from Bach, but also in general baroque/romantic/melodic classical styles.

Aardwolf 2y ago

I got endless streams of synthwave, vaporwave and similar on Youtube, regularly hearing new songs as well, people still keep creating great new music. Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now. Bach clearly was a geek of his time though, and I respect that.

coldtea 2y ago
>Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? Because we like it. >We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now. So? Those are mere tools so we can make the music that we like and want to make. Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us.
- Aardwolf 2y ago
  >> Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? > Because we like it. Nothing against that, but there seems to be a group of people who dismiss anything except classical music as if we lost the ability to make acceptable music today. I also like some styles more than others, but I'm not going to make generalizing statements about humanity's abilities due to my personal preferences. > Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us. They most probably do affect the style, just like how 16-color pixel graphics produces a different visual style than playstation-style polygons. And that's a good thing, more styles = more variety, there isn't some particular style of some particular era that's somehow better than others
  - xattt 2y ago
    To add to your comment, music from that time was contemporary and reflected the needs and wants of the general population of the time. Forcing new composers to conform to what old people want from because tradition, damn it is a recipe for creative disaster.
    - coldtea 2y ago

noufalibrahim 2y ago

I don't know about Bach. However, one thing that strikes me is that the easiness of producing something of high quality probably means that it's just high enough to seem so for most people and not really as high as the things that were considered high. Rick Beato had an interesting video on this phenomenon. I'm not very musically literate but I found the general idea quite insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo

nabla9 2y ago
Beato also talks about easiness of listening. I didn't really get into Bach until after 4 hours of listening BWV 988 (Goldberg Variations), then it just clicked and I could enjoy it deeper than anything before. Mozart does not work for me the same way. It's good, but somehow just clever bullshit at the same time. Music is subjective.

coldtea 2y ago

An answer to somebody asking the title's question would be: They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time. Do you go their concerts or listen to their records? If not, then it's not so much that they don't, as that people don't give them sales, success, and exposure, so you'd know about them. And apparently you didn't even bother to Google about such artists, so...

Jensson 2y ago
> They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time. But it isn't that good, what people want is that level of quality not just that style. I think to compose great music the entire culture need to support it, you wont get to the same heights when most of society don't care about what you do.

jll29 2y ago

Bach is timeless, some of his music was sent into outer space, and the old astronomy joke goes one day, they would detect a message using a radio telescope that said "Send more Bach!". If there is life outside of Earth, no doubt there'd be demand for it; they just don't know yet what they are missing... More seriously, if people imitated the music of the Baroque period, it's perhaps more as an exercise to improve rather than a personal opus magnum that will be published, because that time is just over. The same may be true for imitating some specifics of Bach's style (Johann Sebastian, there are many other Bachs that are likewise recommended, e.g. C. E. Bach also wrote excellent organ music IMHO). However, there are also timeless patterns in Bach's music that invoke/exploit recursion, symmetry, variation, reference of others and self-reference that are perhaps mandatory if you want to write the best music ever - see Douglas Robert Hofstadter's seminal book on that topic (and many fascinating others), "Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Basic Books, New York, 1979).

prvc 2y ago

Prokofiev's Op. 25 is not intended to have been a period-accurate pastiche. The "classical" title is meant to indicate a tongue-in-cheek theme, as in a costume party. And to answer the OP question, the social context in which compositions in the past were written no longer exists. From the vantage point of the present, a composition which is restricted to the vocabulary and the techniques of a single past era seems to be arbitrarily excluding possibilities which have since become known to all of us.

defrost 2y ago

We've moved on, we've got Arvo Pärt [1], Steve Reich [2], Wim Mertens [3], and Almost Vinyl [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Mertens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Mertens [4] https://www.youtube.com/@AlmostVinyl/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AlmostVinyl/videos

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

FYI, the article is about Nikolaus Matthes who did actually write a very good (but not as good as Bach best according to critics) Passion in the style of Bach in 2019 and why nobody cares. I think it had to be said because, at the time of me writing this comment, none of the other 16 commenters had apparently bothered clicking on the link they were commenting on.

okaleniuk 2y ago

There is a point of view that all the western music is divided by Bach. The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, and the after era when music is strongly based on elementary theory. Bach himself, interestingly, belongs to the "before" era and as such is a pinnacle of intuitive pre-elementary music. Just yesterday I found an album of Elizabethian remakes of Nick Drake's songs mixed with John Dowland's. The difference in composition is staggering. And Nick Drake was not a typical songwriter himself. Yet a 50 years old song is principally different from a 500 years old even when played by the same people on the same instruments.

Tainnor 2y ago
> The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, There's a lot of music theory in pre-Baroque compositions, e.g. counterpoint theory or isorhythm.
- okaleniuk 2y ago
  Of course. Fun fact, the father of Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Galilei was a musical theorist who, long before Bach, established the idea of equal temperament. I myself don't believe in before/after thing. It's not that one day all the composers in the world agreed to write music by the book. I think things shifted slowly but steadily along with the technological progress. Compared to Galilei's time, in Bach's era there were more books to learn from, more and better developed instruments, and with the rise of bourgeoisie, more listeners (and musicians). Bach is just a convenient milestone.

blueboo 2y ago

Bach was a fashion(-driven) designer like any other artist, reacting to and driving trends of his time. With that framing, they never stopped composing like Bach

diego_moita 2y ago
What the banality of your comment says is that you never cared to pay attention to the man and his music. I strongly recommend you watch the excellent BBC documentary about him, by the maestro John Eliott Gardiner [1]. You'll discover a world where music wasn't yet associated with "fashion", where the "market" for music (i.e. concert halls, music publishing, etc) didn't actually exist and composers were paid employees of cities. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZVn9NZqyxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZVn9NZqyxs
- blueboo 2y ago
  Just because there wasn't Twitter and App Stores doesn't mean there weren't fashions and markets -- they were located in different places in the culture. I don't mean to deflate your lofty romanticizations of the man and his craft. Take another listen to your documentary and observe how his career reflects and reacts to the on-going musical-cultural discourse of his time. In that way, he truly is like any other artist (so engaged.) At the same time, rest assured we can celebrate and enjoy the extraordinary achievements made in that paradigm.

artemonster 2y ago

Have you played Homm3? Paul Romero killed it

motohagiography 2y ago

It's a bit like asking, why don't they do math like Euler anymore? we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271 https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes. It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.

bluenose69 2y ago

My mind went to the novel "Time Pressure" by Spider Robinson (ISBN-10 ‎ 0441809332). It's worth reading, if you like sci-fi.

roenxi 2y ago

I'd suggest the obvious elephant in the room here is that the market Bach is targeted at is quite small - people who understand and appreciate technically good music (that doesn't include me). Most people have music they'd rather listen to that is not composed by Bach. The market has completely changed. Ordinary people listen to music regularly nowadays. Possibly daily. That was never a crowd that Bach did well with. So we probably still have Bach-style compositions but most people neither know nor care.

enthulhusiastic 2y ago
Lots of people appreciate “technically good”. Personally I can’t stand all but a few guitar solos. “Technically good”
aworks 2y ago
I subscribe to Fanfare Magazine, "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors" i.e. classical. It comes out 6 times a year. The current issue is 512 pages and has about 10 reviews of new or re-released Bach recordings. I'd guess there are modern Bach-style compositions mentioned a couple of times a year. Note that the magazine only has 1102 paid subscriptions!

konart 2y ago

Why don't they listen to music like they the did back then?

strogonoff 2y ago

Asking “why don't they compose music like Bach any more?” is like asking “why don’t they make smartphones like the original iPhone anymore?”. Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels. If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).

diego_moita 2y ago

Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time. The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean. When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that. Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable. Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be. Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.

starstripe 2y ago

"And yet no one cares. Have you heard of this work before? How many times will you hear of it from now on?" I think he might have answered his own questino.

coliveira 2y ago

It takes years to learn to compose in Bach's way. However, if you go to a university for this, they will tell that they don't want new compositions in Bach style, they want some "modern" classical music. So what is missing is some kind of Bach academy, where they would promote composers writing new music in this style.

ramesh31 2y ago

It's Highlander rules. There can only be one master.

aczerepinski 2y ago

Because there’s no money or prestige in it. There are plenty of people who understand the craft and could do it. It’s easy enough to imagine some cultural moment - say a popular romance set in the era - bringing it back for a season of baroque hype.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

Because they can't. If you mean "like Bach" in terms of the specific stylistic tropes - he literally spent a lifetime developing them, they're exceptionally complex, and there are very very few people with the same combination of taste, cognitive capacity, and book learning who might reproduce them convincingly. And if even if someone did that - what's the point? If you mean in terms of complexity etc - this is an era of shallower, more emotionally direct music. The complexity is all in the production, sound design, and mixing, and not so much in the writing and arrangement. A lot of skill goes into pulling a good mix together, but it's a different, much less obvious kind of skill. If someone wants to experiment with equivalent levels of intellectual complexity - get a copy of Csound or something, pick a language for a front end to generate Csound events using composition rules, and see where you get to. IMO that's the biggest unexplored area in computer music, with the potential to combine new sonic structures - designed with taste and aesthetic awareness, not just for the sake of tinkering - with new kinds of sound design. Is there a market for it? Absolutely not. But so what?

pclmulqdq 2y ago
This is pretty much it. Music is always a business, and composing things "like Bach" (whatever TFA wanted that to mean) is very hard and time consuming. It's just not worth doing. On top of that, the taste of contemporary music buyers is often toward things that are downright weird rather than things that sound like old music.

f38zf5vdt 2y ago

They still do? One instance is MASTER BOOT RECORD and it's metal styled after Bach's composition styles made on a 486DX. It is very popular. https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/ https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/

mynameishere 2y ago

I believe students of composition will usually "cover" that era and intentionally write music like Bach, but it would be very strange if the teacher then said, "That's it. That's the pinnacle. Now, get working on your resumes."

sotix 2y ago

Howard Goodall has a great analysis[0] of how classical music was dying in the 1950s and 1960s until The Beatles indirectly saved it. It had taken a shift to avant-garde and strongly experimental sounds until The Beatles' influence reminded composers that good composition following the fundamentals could produce great music. I'm not tuned in enough today to know if that still holds true, but it was an interesting analysis. He does a much better job of explaining it than I did. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc

mannyv 2y ago

The problem is that Bach's ideas will never progress any further. That's sort of sad.

temporarely 2y ago
Cubism was ultimately a dead-end as well.

tsoukase 2y ago

It's like asking, why they don't paint like Caravaggio or sculpt like Michelangelo. There is a reason why these pieces of art are called classical. The same goes with classical literature. They don't write like Plato.

deleted 2y ago

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2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse / Rick Beato: https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo https://youtu.be/1bZ0OSEViyo This might provide part of the answer.

jemmyw 2y ago
Not really. I agree with what he says but listen to what he says: he's talking about popular music. He has explicitly stated he's not talking about music subcultures, of which there are many and many are thriving. If there was a Bach like composer subculture that was significant but unable to break into pop then he'd be giving the answer. Bach wasn't popular music when he was alive.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
  bach wasn't exactly subculture either. i mean back then you played some shingles in a pub or you were in cahoots with the royals who paid you for making music. but i get your point. i've no competent position really, anyway.

jschveibinz 2y ago

The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is a challenging read, but it highlights some of the magical depth in Bach's music. What he accomplished was very unique and brilliantly complex.

davesque 2y ago

As a person with a music degree, albeit not in composition, but I had several friends who were composition majors, my impression is that composers often do write music in old baroque or classical styles etc., which are academically well understood, but they do it more as an exercise. Probably some composers even do compose exclusively in those styles. But the point is we don't know it because there isn't much interest from general audiences in anachronistic music and of course there isn't much commercial interest either. Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).

antoinebalaine 2y ago

The real reason is because we tune instruments differently. Anything about "why would you want to be a copy cat of Bach?" is just non-sense - musicians have been copy-catting each other endlessly since music existed, and still do today. The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time. Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.