There are at least three things wrong with this comment:
(1) It isn’t relevant. Even if one were grant to that the reason modern music isn’t popular is because modern composers lack some well-defined “hit-producing” skill that past composers possessed, that wasn’t the specific skill being discussed. The specific skill being discussed was the ability to vividly imagine the sound of music.
(2) Your categories are wrong. On your (implicit) analysis, most of Mozart’s value derives from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (and maybe a few other “hits”), and most of Beethoven’s value derives from his Ninth Symphony. In fact, it actually implies that most of the value of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony itself resides in the “Ode to Joy” setting in the last movement; and furthermore, since I bet you’re really talking about a specific passage within that setting (the famous “tune”), it seems to follow that you believe Beethoven is a great composer (if you do) because one particular 2-3 minute passage of his music is commonly played on radio commercials and the like. I reject this out of hand, as would pretty much anybody else with a serious interest in music.
(3) There is a peculiar irony in your position. On the one hand, you take it for granted that the popularity of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is the result of a specific compositional skill (which apparently Mozart wasn’t exercising when writing, say, the Jupiter symphony), rather than having to do with random cultural processes. But then, on the other hand, you go around saying that e.g. Joshua Bell’s reputation isn’t the result of superior violin skills, but instead is due to socio-cultural “hype”. Do you not detect any tension here?
(1) It’s relevant to the question of whether modern academic composers (MACs) are learning skills that are entangled with ivory-tower-independent reality, that make distinctions carving reality at its joints, and that simply aren’t about impressing an insular clique.
(2) Those examples certainly did not imply (nor were intended to imply) that all of e.g. Mozart’s value comes from e.g. EKM. The point is just that someone today can appreciate something like EKM enough to voluntarily listen to it on their own time (when doing so wouldn’t enhance their status) or to put it on ringtones, etc.; and that—this is important—they do all these things without first having to be indoctrinated by a special priestly order (as someone can appreciate commercial air travel without having to be indoctrinated into aerospace engineering).
(3) I think you’re sticking with a misrepresentation of my position that I corrected last time. I don’t dispute that Bell is (by the appropriate, unfakeable, non-parochial) metrics better than most other violinists. What I claim is that achieving the skill difference between him and the bottom of the e.g. 95th percentile is way past the point of diminishing returns—that, while better, it is not so many times better to justify anything close to his proportionally higher income (on musical talent alone).
Therefore, this additional earning power is due to hype: and it is proven, by Bell’s very own admission in how no one cares about him when they have something even slightly important to do, or when the Queen hasn’t already ponied up $1,000/minute.
What it looks like when someone is hit with the harsh reality of life without your, um, “musical skill” having been “social proof”’ed:
“It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . .”
The word doesn’t come easily.
″… ignoring me.” [...]
“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute. [...]
Before he began, Bell hadn’t known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.
“It wasn’t exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies,” he says. “I was stressing a little.”
Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?
“When you play for ticket-holders,” Bell explains, “you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence …”
There are six moments in the video that Bell finds particularly painful to relive: “The awkward times,” he calls them. It’s what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn’t noticed him playing don’t notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord—the embarrassed musician’s equivalent of, “Er, okay, moving right along . . .”—and begins the next piece.
He lived, in other words, how I live every day—without people being magnetically attracted to me because of hype. He learned what it’s like to be without all that pre-validation.
Side comment: I don’t like that the article repeats the myth that Stradivarius has not been excelled. He has; people have reverse engineered several of his tricks (and developed new ones) such that new violins have been produced that are judged equal or superior to his violins in blind tests. (His violins have also not fared especially well in blind tests historically, suggesting quality differentials may be small.)
Of course, as mentioned elsewhere, even if modern violins are superior to Strads it will be almost impossible to erase the history and cultural weight of those Strads. That’s one of the reasons I think it silly to compare MACs to the historical greats; the historical greats have history behind them. Of course they’re more popular.
My position differs from komponisto’s, though, in that I think that if a MAC produces music laymen don’t enjoy, they’re going about music the wrong way. (That is, it seems to me that if the reason humans like music is it’s a superstimulus / augments emotions, those are the right metrics to judge music by, and other metrics shouldn’t call themselves measuring musical quality, but something else.) But that’s a separate discussion we probably don’t need to have now.
My position differs from komponisto’s, though, in that I think that if a MAC produces music laymen don’t enjoy, they’re going about music the wrong way. (That is, it seems to me that if the reason humans like music is it’s a superstimulus / augments emotions, those are the right metrics to judge music by, and other metrics shouldn’t call themselves measuring musical quality, but something else.) But that’s a separate discussion we probably don’t need to have now.
Why not? That opinion komponisto has that differs from yours is the basis for the rest of his arguments on his topic—so it’s pretty damning that he’s constantly searching for arguments he can deploy for why MACs can’t write popular music. “Because they don’t want to escape the poverty that music theory that grad students normally live in?” Sure...
Why not? That opinion komponisto has that differs from yours is the basis for the rest of his arguments on his topic—so it’s pretty damning that he’s constantly searching for arguments he can deploy for why MACs can’t write popular music.
I don’t think this is the right way to look at the issue.
komponisto appears to differ from both of us on how one should judge musical quality. But I agree with him that popular success is not a good metric to use, and am not surprised that he is repeatedly searching for counterarguments to your point if you won’t abandon it.
His argument, as I understand it, is that MACs don’t write popular music because they aren’t trying to write popular music; they’re trying to write music according to their highly specialized standards. My argument is that even if they were trying to write popular music, they would find it very difficult for reasons independent of their quality as composers. It’s telling that of the best-known artists playing classical instruments, the ones that aren’t playing historical greats are playing Metallica. Composers are in a rather saturated field (which explains why they would retreat into specialized standards), and a large component of popularity is popularization rather than raw talent (which cements that specialization as a reinforcer of internal popularity and diminisher of external popularity).
Interesting example about Bell. I’m not entirely confident that I could tell the difference between someone with a fairly advanced violin training (for example, my parents’ friends’ daughter from Toronto, who is now 17 and has been playing violin since about age 5) and someone with elite world-class talent. I can tell the difference in singing, but that’s because I have some training, just enough to know that it’s ridiculously hard to project loudly enough to fill a whole opera hall and still stay in key, or to sing fast classical passages, or to get exactly the right tone color to make a particular emotional impression… My speculation is that people with no musical training probably can’t tell the difference between someone with moderate violin training and someone like Bell playing the same piece. (Maybe Bell could play a much harder piece, while the mediocre player would flounder utterly, and maybe to someone with violin training his tone and expression would be noticeably better, but not to the average Joe hurrying through the Washington Metro.)
(Maybe Bell could play a much harder piece, while the mediocre player would flounder utterly, and maybe to someone with violin training his tone and expression would be noticeably better, but not to the average Joe hurrying through the Washington Metro.)
If I remember correctly, Bell did play some truly challenging pieces. No one noticed, except that one guy.
If I remember correctly, Bell did play some truly challenging pieces. No one noticed, except that one guy.
A few of the people who worked there noticed; of particular interest is the shoe-shine lady, who has the police on speed dial to remove street musicians, but decided to let Bell play because he was pretty good.
I thought he was allowed to stay there because the experimenters made an arrangment with the operators of that area beforehand? (Not sure if people were updating on the fact that a musician was strangely not being removed.)
If that is true, it was not mentioned in the article. The relevant section:
On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.
What about Joshua Bell?
He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: “He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn’t call the police.”
Again, to someone with no training, what is the difference between a moderately and an extremely challenging piece? I’m not sure if I can tell, beyond a certain level; all I can say about pieces is “I could sight-read that”, “I could sing that with a lot of work and practice”, or “there’s no way I can sing that at this level of training”. I’m sure that the repertoire of pieces in the third category is huge, and they’re not all the same difficulty level, but I’m not sure I could tell the difference if I heard them sung.
Also, a piece that’s extremely challenging isn’t necessarily catchy. People tend to react emotionally to songs they know, not obscure-but-difficult violin solo pieces.
First, a remark addressed to the two people who downvoted the grandparent: your behavior makes no sense at all. My best guess is that you disapprove of discussion of music on LW. But not only is that an unreasonable position to take, it wouldn’t explain why you didn’t downvote neighboring comments.
(I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments. I can understand if some of the “mathy” types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are “fluffy” and unprestigious, but what I’ve never been able to understand is why this perception doesn’t seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly “mathy” but also interested in art and music.)
Now to Silas’s comment:
(1) On “insular cliques”: not all cliques are equal. There exist “insular” (which I suppose means low-population) cliques such that impressing them has value.
(2) Those examples certainly did not imply (nor were intended to imply) that all of e.g. Mozart’s value comes from e.g. EKM. The point is just that someone today can appreciate something like EKM enough to voluntarily listen to it on their own time …. or to put it on ringtones, etc.
Well, then where does the rest of Mozart’s value come from?
You’re hiding the work of your argument behind the phrases “someone today” and (especially) “something like”. Who counts as an eligible appreciator? What music counts as “something like EKM”? After all, on my view, the work of MACs is like EKM (and inherits prestige thence). A distinction that places Mozart and Lady Gaga on one side and Schoenberg and Salieri on the other doesn’t carve musical reality at its joints. (To do that, you’d have to put Mozart and Schoenberg and Salieri on one side, and Gaga on the other.)
(3) I don’t dispute that Bell is (by the appropriate, unfakeable, non-parochial) metrics better than most other violinists. What I claim is that achieving the skill difference between him and the bottom of the e.g. 95th percentile is way past the point of diminishing returns—that, while better, it is not so many times better to justify anything close to his proportionally higher income (on musical talent alone).
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you “the market has spoken” with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of “justification” are you appealing to here?
I can understand if some of the “mathy” types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are “fluffy” and unprestigious, but what I’ve never been able to understand is why this perception doesn’t seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly “mathy” but also interested in art and music.
This may be a perception that some people have, but I’ve always perceived music as a) very mathematical, and b) not at all unprestigious. In the high school I went to, people who were smart academically and also talented in music were much higher-status than people who were only involved in academic subjects. (I’m not saying this is a universal perception, or even a good perception to have, but it’s what I’ve observed.)
(I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments. I can understand if some of the “mathy” types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are “fluffy” and unprestigious, but what I’ve never been able to understand is why this perception doesn’t seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly “mathy” but also interested in art and music.)
My impression (at least, why I dislike these conversations even though I generally don’t downvote them) is that it’s a manifestation of the general anti-academia sentiment on LW. It isn’t that people don’t like music or current composers, but that they resist any measure of composer quality besides what they like. If I listen to some Philip Glass and get bored and learn he has a reputation as a great modern composer, I downvote reputation rather than upvoting Glass.
It isn’t that people don’t like music or current composers, but that they resist any measure of composer quality besides what they like
That’s not a reason for resisting discussions of possible measures of composer quality. (To say nothing of other music topics.) Instead, it’s merely a reason for taking a particular position (“what I like”) within such a discussion.
It would be like saying that the reason people don’t like discussions of ethics is that they resist any measure of ethical behavior other than Theory X. But that’s not a reason for downvoting discussion of ethics, it’s a reason for arguing for Theory X.
I get the impression you (and others who think similarly) may not be reading these comments carefully. That’s certainly true if you think that I’ve somehow been arguing positions on the object-level question of which composers are better than others. To the best of my recollection, all I’ve ever engaged in here are (1) meta-level prolegomena to such a discussion, usually in response to people taking nontrivial theories for granted without realizing it; and (2) awareness-raising of the existence of MACs—which is badly needed, as your own comment demonstrates. (You cited Philip Glass, who does not have a high reputation in academia; it would be only a mild exaggeration to say that he is closer to Lady Gaga than to the kind of people I’m talking about.)
Please do not downvote comments without reading them carefully, especially if they’re from established users.
That’s not a reason for resisting discussions of possible measures of composer quality.
It is, though. If you saw a comment thread discussing possible measures of color quality (i.e. forest green is the best color and should be your favorite), how would you react? I would be concerned. If people think musical preference is like color preference, then any statement about how people should value academic music more sounds like an argument about how people should value orange more.
(I am moderately guilty of this. But my argument is essentially that gardeners should focus on flowers that are pretty in the visual spectrum rather than flowers that are pretty in the ultraviolet spectrum, and that strikes me as superior to staking out a particular part of the visual spectrum.)
It would be like saying that the reason people don’t like discussions of ethics is that they resist any measure of ethical behavior other than Theory X. But that’s not a reason for downvoting discussion of ethics, it’s a reason for arguing for Theory X.
You can perform thought experiments along these lines and I think the results will be similar. If I put together some comments arguing that the Muslim way of treating women like property to be protected is probably better for them than the American way of treating women like sexually liberated people, I expect those comments would not be voted as highly as my normal comments, even if I polished them to the same level of quality.
That is, people often seem to use downvotes as an argument against a position that seems to be beyond the pale, and it’s not clear to me that’s entirely a bad thing. There are cases where it hurts, but also cases where it helps (instead of getting into a heated political argument, one would just downvote and walk away).
If you saw a comment thread discussing possible measures of color quality (i.e. forest green is the best color and should be your favorite), how would you react?
I would be curious. I would want to know what the arguments were, and if in particular there were points involved that I hadn’t considered. And if, after reading the arguments, it turned out that I disagreed with one or more of the participants, I might post a comment saying so, and explaining why; in particular, what I wouldn’t do is downvote on the grounds that people somehow “ought to know” that of course discussions on the merits of colors are pointless.
All this, by the way, without regard to whether the discussion was object-level (“green is the best color because...”) or meta-level (“it may be possible for there to exist a best color because....”). And even if I for some reason had low opinions of “the sort of people” who argued about the object-level question (and for some reason I thought those reasons also applied on LW), I would not regard that as sufficient reason to disapprove of (and downvote) a discussion of the meta-level question (which is all that has been occurring here with regard to music).
If people think musical preference is like color preference,
Again, this is a belief that they may turn out to be wrong about! In fact, as I would argue, this is a very poor analogy indeed. I don’t understand why you would disapprove of my making the argument that this is a poor analogy. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to point out, for example, that the analogue of color preferences in music would be the sounds of particular instruments, rather than the experience of an entire musical composition, or (still less) type of composition? That, if you wanted a visual analogy, you would do better to compare it to the experience of particular paintings, or styles of painting?
Seriously, how much total time did you spend thinking about this question, before you came to the conclusion that musical preference is obviously just like color preference, and that therefore not only is it pointless to argue about musical preference, it’s pointless to argue about whether musical preference is like color preference?
(I know that you didn’t technically say that that was your position, but I do get the feeling it is, and the question certainly goes for anybody whose position it actually is.)
Have you considered the possibility that you might have some belief-updating to do in this region of question-space? Have you asked yourself what data might be generating my comments (which, I repeat, are not actually about what music is “better”, except insofar as I have happened to mention, in passing, [aspects of] my own preferences, being careful never to argue that anyone else should adopt them), and whether you’ve already taken that data into account in forming your current beliefs?
That is, people often seem to use downvotes as an argument against a position that seems to be beyond the pale
Why anyone would think that any of my comments on the subject of music have been in any way “beyond the pale” is utterly beyond me.
Why anyone would think that any of my comments on the subject of music have been in any way “beyond the pale” is utterly beyond me.
Don’t know about pale but certainly beyond the point where responding with actual words is likely to have any benefit.
I did not downvote you earlier. I just ignored the discussion entirely after the first dozen comments a while back made it clear I was going to learn nothing new.
For what it is worth: Paintings are definitely a better analogy. There are objective aspects to musical or artistic performance as well as subjective ones. Most notable are:
Technical difficulty for the human brain to produce certain types of patterns.
The extent to which a piece triggers an underlying general mechanism in the naive human brain. (Where the trained brain component is a mix of subjectively arbitrary and that which is covered in the below point.)
The extent to which the artist predicts the response of the intended audience and elicits desired behavior from them. The ability to predict what people want when they are not quite sure about it themselves. This can be measured via fiscal rewards or proxies for status.
People should not value orange more. Orange is horrible.
Agree. I actually suspect there is some objective basis behind that judgement. Just like red really does make you look like you’re driving faster and generally winning more.
I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments.
Did you notice that your comments (and those agreeing with you) nonetheless score higher than your critics in such discussions? (And whoever’s modding you down in this thread, it’s not me—I don’t use downmods against opponents when my investment in the discussion might be compromising my judgment.)
(1) It matters when determining whether a clique is learning the structure of reality or just replaying inside jokes. If the clique judges designs based on useful models that carve reality at its joints, and that use objective, unfakeable (e.g. through consensus) metrics, we should care what they think and we should be impressed those who can hit narrow targets in the design space they define. If the clique has to keep checking on whether the rest of the clique already likes something, because there really isn’t a successful model … then none of that applies. Which category do MACs fall in?
(2) Well, then where does the rest of Mozart’s value come from?
From the other stuff that people still like, voluntarily listen to, etc. after hundreds of years and no indoctrination.
As bad as Lady Gaga might be, where’s the Music Theory PhD can that can demonstrate a superior understanding of the mind-music relationship, rather than just whine about how reality won’t bend to fit his theories?
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you “the market has spoken” with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of “justification” are you appealing to here?
The ability to make a judgment without having to first be told what your judgment should be. Layfolk who get recordings of EKM aren’t doing it because it’s the hot thing right now among their friends and the elite cultural arbiters told them to.
In contrast, the royalty really wouldn’t tell the difference if Bell flubbed and “only” performed at the 95% percentile. While the market has spoken, it is not announcing a victory of the characteristics you claim are important: it is showing that people will buy based on hype, and we know it’s hype because their market value changes when the hype is removed (as the Bell experiment showed—no wealthy person said, “Holy s***! Let me hire you to be my personal performer! You’re way undervalued here!”)
It should really raise a red flag for your when you’re basing your opinion on “but rich people like this stuff when they’re duped!”
I am fairly “indoctrinated” in classical music (my parents have been taking me to the symphony since I was small, and I sing the stuff) and I like Lady Gaga. Whatever sense in which she is awful doesn’t have much effect on her popularity. Yeah, her music isn’t as complex and challenging as Mozart’s, but maybe that just shows that complexity isn’t the only thing that makes music pleasant to listen to...in fact, if anything I think simple music is funner to listen to, since untrained people can sing along and enjoy the tune for themselves. (I enjoy classical pieces 20 times more when I know them well enough and am in a venue where I can sing along.)
Did you notice that your comments (and those agreeing with you) nonetheless score higher than your critics in such discussions?
This isn’t true today! At the moment, you are being upvoted and I am being downvoted. (And actually downvoted, as in negative scores, as opposed to merely being upvoted less.)
As bad as Lady Gaga might be, where’s the Music Theory PhD can that can demonstrate a superior understanding of the mind-music relationship, rather than just whine about how reality won’t bend to fit his theories?
I don’t know actually know any music theory Ph.D. who whines in the manner you describe, though it’s not exactly clear what you mean. What theories, and what aspect of reality isn’t bending?
What would they have to do in order to demonstrate a “superior understanding of the mind-music relationship”?
And let me be clear: neither I nor any MAC-type I know is after Lady-Gaga-status. I would settle for slightly greater respect specifically among technically-minded science types. (Enough to be acknowledged as existing, say.)
The ability to make a judgment without having to first be told what your judgment should be. Layfolk who get recordings of EKM aren’t doing it because it’s the hot thing right now among their friends and the elite cultural arbiters told them to.
Are you kidding? Of course they are! I would assign a high probability to the hypothesis that the overwhelming majority of the popular interest in eighteenth-century music is driven by status-signaling.
And if you’re tempted to say “Hm, you’re right, I guess that means that only Lady Gaga is what people really like”, I’ve got some bad news there too: most people who like Lady Gaga do so because it’s what their friends like.
Mind you (and I think you may be missing this point), these status perceptions are capable of really, truly affecting people’s actual enjoyment—rather like how people really, truly find the same jokes funnier when told by higher-status people. In the case of people without a specific interest in music, signaling probably accounts for most of their tastes. Even in the case of someone like me, I would probably like Mozart (or Schoenberg) almost, but not quite, as much, if I didn’t know “who he was”.
In contrast, the royalty really wouldn’t tell the difference if Bell flubbed and “only” performed at the 95% percentile
Maybe not on a single occasion, but over the long term (i.e. if Bell descended to the 95th percentile consistently), they surely would. More specifically, elite musicians and critics would notice, and the “royalty” would follow their opinion.
This isn’t true today! At the moment, you are being upvoted and I am being downvoted. (And actually downvoted, as in negative scores, as opposed to merely being upvoted less.)
Look again, woe-is-me-sto. Most of my comments have gone negative, almost none of yours have. Someone recently came by and downmodded everything I posted—someone who isn’t justifying it anywhere (which is about the level of justification MACs can give for their field). (I’m not going to insult you by suggesting you would dip to these tactics, of course; I have far too much respect for you.)
I don’t know actually know any music theory Ph.D. who whines in the manner you describe, though it’s not exactly clear what you mean. What theories, and what aspect of reality isn’t bending?
What would they have to do in order to demonstrate a “superior understanding of the mind-music relationship”?
The very same thing that I or Michael Vassar or anyone else mentions whenever this topic is brought up: if higher-level students of music theory really do know the secrets of the music-mind relationship, why can’t they take that skill, pair it with existing record companies’ hype machines, and outcompete existing, non-academic hitmakers, without having to tell people in advance “you should like this because the elite ivory tower deems it good”?
Are you kidding? Of course they are! I would assign a high probability to the hypothesis that the overwhelming majority of the popular interest in eighteenth-century music is driven by status-signaling.
A high proportion of people with a broad, indiscriminate collection of classical music might be, but those weren’t the ones I was using to make the point. You’re using the presence of hype victims I wasn’t referring to, to deny the significance of the non-hype victims I was referring to.
I was referring to the everyday mouthbreather who for the first time hears EKM (perhaps in the Movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), then decides to add it to their playlist, not knowing which elite endorses it. Such people continue to listen to it privately even in the rare case that their friends disapprove of it. Or to the person who hears Paganini’s Op. 1 in a similar context and wants it on their playlist, not realizing it was written ~200 years ago (because it sounds creative and experimental).
(But yes, there are cases where a member of the elite will decree that some long-unknown composer is now high status again and you better get on the bandwagon. I believe this is what happened to Bach—IIRC, most of his fame now is due to someone reviving interest of him in the 19th century, after he had been forgotten. Which itself is proof of the ephemerality of the boundaries MACs draw.)
In any case, I agree that there can be information cascades in which fame builds on itself. The difference is that I find the fame derived this way uninformative, while you seem to be willing to defend this arbitrary, artifical set as indicative of a fundamental aspect of reality about music (rather than social phenomenon) … at least, when it supports compositions you approve of.
Maybe not on a single occasion, but over the long term (i.e. if Bell descended to the 95th percentile consistently), they surely would. More specifically, elite musicians and critics would notice, and the “royalty” would follow their opinion.
Only if experts (who have pointlessly wasted time making measurements this precise) alert them that this music isn’t high enough in status. The point is, it has nothing to do with the musical quality itself, just conspicuous consumption. Joshua Bell agrees that his income—and indeed, self-worth—come from pre-validation, and not from some widely, objectively-discernable measure of his performance quality. Why won’t you?
Most of my comments have gone negative, almost none of yours have. Someone recently came by and downmodded everything I posted—someone who isn’t justifying it anywhere (which is about the level of justification MACs can give for their field). (I’m not going to insult you by suggesting you would dip to these tactics, of course; I have far too much respect for you.)
Yes, the scores have changed since I wrote that. And no, not due to me; like you, I generally avoid downvoting my opponents in a discussion. (I don’t make it an absolute rule, but exceptions are rare.)
if higher-level students of music theory really do know the secrets of the music-mind relationship, why can’t they take that skill, pair it with existing record companies’ hype machines, and outcompete existing, non-academic hitmakers
Because that skill doesn’t suffice for that task. In order to reliably produce “hits”, you have to do a lot more than be able to imagine music in your mind; in fact, you have to do a lot more than imagine music in your mind that you yourself like (already harder). You have to have to have a detailed knowledge of the psychology of large groups of other humans, so that you can produce music that they will like (actually a lot more than “like”; you have to get them to “pass it on”) in large numbers. That, as far as I know, is an unsolved problem. And if you think the field of music theory (or any field I know of) claims to have solved it, you’re mistaken.
In any case, I agree that there can be information cascades in which fame builds on itself. The difference is that I find the fame derived this way uninformative, while you seem to be willing to defend this arbitrary, artifical set as indicative of a fundamental aspect of reality about music (rather than social phenomenon)
Just the opposite: I’m trying to identify particular groups of people whose opinions are atypically informative.
Joshua Bell agrees that his income—and indeed, self-worth—come from pre-validation, and not from some widely, objectively-discernable measure of his performance quality. Why won’t you?
The pre-validation is ultimately a result of his performance skill. I agree with you to the extent that I may not necessarily prefer Bell’s playing to someone slightly less popular. His fame has some information content; it may not be enough for my purposes.
Similarly, the fact that EKM is more “popular” than the Jupiter symphony wouldn’t have been informative to me, because (as good as EKM is) I like the Jupiter symphony better. At most, EKM’s fame might tell me that Mozart is worth looking into.
There’s very little that I’m familiar with which meets that standard—possibly some Christmas carols.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Ode to Joy, Water Music, The Four Seasons, Flight of the Bumblebee, Flight of the Valkyries, …
What do you mean by indoctrination?
Being taught throughout schooling that “This is good music, high status people produced and listen to this music”, plus, in the case of higher learning, the inferential distance chain you’re taken through that results in you liking obscure academic classical-style music.
Alternatively, being taught throughout schooling that, “Being [religion X] is good, high status people belong to this religion, you will be high status if you’re faithful”, plus only getting good grades/promotion if you can master the doctrines of a religion.
Popular classical music isn’t as high status as difficult modern and contemporary classical music, but it’s still pretty high status.
“No indoctrination” is a high standard. Also, is there a difference so far as indoctrination is concerned between “high status people like this” and “normal people like this”?
Also, is there a difference so far as indoctrination is concerned between “high status people like this” and “normal people like this”?
Not in terms of the uninformativeness it injects into the fact of their popularity. That is, if something’s popular without that kind of in-school promotion (like Halo), that says a lot more about it then whether people “like” something (but continue to doze through any actual performance until the part where they get to sleep with their date) that is promoted in school, such as Shakespeare.
There are at least three things wrong with this comment:
(1) It isn’t relevant. Even if one were grant to that the reason modern music isn’t popular is because modern composers lack some well-defined “hit-producing” skill that past composers possessed, that wasn’t the specific skill being discussed. The specific skill being discussed was the ability to vividly imagine the sound of music.
(2) Your categories are wrong. On your (implicit) analysis, most of Mozart’s value derives from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (and maybe a few other “hits”), and most of Beethoven’s value derives from his Ninth Symphony. In fact, it actually implies that most of the value of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony itself resides in the “Ode to Joy” setting in the last movement; and furthermore, since I bet you’re really talking about a specific passage within that setting (the famous “tune”), it seems to follow that you believe Beethoven is a great composer (if you do) because one particular 2-3 minute passage of his music is commonly played on radio commercials and the like. I reject this out of hand, as would pretty much anybody else with a serious interest in music.
(3) There is a peculiar irony in your position. On the one hand, you take it for granted that the popularity of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is the result of a specific compositional skill (which apparently Mozart wasn’t exercising when writing, say, the Jupiter symphony), rather than having to do with random cultural processes. But then, on the other hand, you go around saying that e.g. Joshua Bell’s reputation isn’t the result of superior violin skills, but instead is due to socio-cultural “hype”. Do you not detect any tension here?
(1) It’s relevant to the question of whether modern academic composers (MACs) are learning skills that are entangled with ivory-tower-independent reality, that make distinctions carving reality at its joints, and that simply aren’t about impressing an insular clique.
(2) Those examples certainly did not imply (nor were intended to imply) that all of e.g. Mozart’s value comes from e.g. EKM. The point is just that someone today can appreciate something like EKM enough to voluntarily listen to it on their own time (when doing so wouldn’t enhance their status) or to put it on ringtones, etc.; and that—this is important—they do all these things without first having to be indoctrinated by a special priestly order (as someone can appreciate commercial air travel without having to be indoctrinated into aerospace engineering).
(3) I think you’re sticking with a misrepresentation of my position that I corrected last time. I don’t dispute that Bell is (by the appropriate, unfakeable, non-parochial) metrics better than most other violinists. What I claim is that achieving the skill difference between him and the bottom of the e.g. 95th percentile is way past the point of diminishing returns—that, while better, it is not so many times better to justify anything close to his proportionally higher income (on musical talent alone).
Therefore, this additional earning power is due to hype: and it is proven, by Bell’s very own admission in how no one cares about him when they have something even slightly important to do, or when the Queen hasn’t already ponied up $1,000/minute.
What it looks like when someone is hit with the harsh reality of life without your, um, “musical skill” having been “social proof”’ed:
He lived, in other words, how I live every day—without people being magnetically attracted to me because of hype. He learned what it’s like to be without all that pre-validation.
Side comment: I don’t like that the article repeats the myth that Stradivarius has not been excelled. He has; people have reverse engineered several of his tricks (and developed new ones) such that new violins have been produced that are judged equal or superior to his violins in blind tests. (His violins have also not fared especially well in blind tests historically, suggesting quality differentials may be small.)
Of course, as mentioned elsewhere, even if modern violins are superior to Strads it will be almost impossible to erase the history and cultural weight of those Strads. That’s one of the reasons I think it silly to compare MACs to the historical greats; the historical greats have history behind them. Of course they’re more popular.
My position differs from komponisto’s, though, in that I think that if a MAC produces music laymen don’t enjoy, they’re going about music the wrong way. (That is, it seems to me that if the reason humans like music is it’s a superstimulus / augments emotions, those are the right metrics to judge music by, and other metrics shouldn’t call themselves measuring musical quality, but something else.) But that’s a separate discussion we probably don’t need to have now.
Why not? That opinion komponisto has that differs from yours is the basis for the rest of his arguments on his topic—so it’s pretty damning that he’s constantly searching for arguments he can deploy for why MACs can’t write popular music. “Because they don’t want to escape the poverty that music theory that grad students normally live in?” Sure...
I don’t think this is the right way to look at the issue.
komponisto appears to differ from both of us on how one should judge musical quality. But I agree with him that popular success is not a good metric to use, and am not surprised that he is repeatedly searching for counterarguments to your point if you won’t abandon it.
His argument, as I understand it, is that MACs don’t write popular music because they aren’t trying to write popular music; they’re trying to write music according to their highly specialized standards. My argument is that even if they were trying to write popular music, they would find it very difficult for reasons independent of their quality as composers. It’s telling that of the best-known artists playing classical instruments, the ones that aren’t playing historical greats are playing Metallica. Composers are in a rather saturated field (which explains why they would retreat into specialized standards), and a large component of popularity is popularization rather than raw talent (which cements that specialization as a reinforcer of internal popularity and diminisher of external popularity).
Thanks for the link the the song, it’s nifty :)
You’re welcome! It’s my favorite thing by them at the moment.
Interesting example about Bell. I’m not entirely confident that I could tell the difference between someone with a fairly advanced violin training (for example, my parents’ friends’ daughter from Toronto, who is now 17 and has been playing violin since about age 5) and someone with elite world-class talent. I can tell the difference in singing, but that’s because I have some training, just enough to know that it’s ridiculously hard to project loudly enough to fill a whole opera hall and still stay in key, or to sing fast classical passages, or to get exactly the right tone color to make a particular emotional impression… My speculation is that people with no musical training probably can’t tell the difference between someone with moderate violin training and someone like Bell playing the same piece. (Maybe Bell could play a much harder piece, while the mediocre player would flounder utterly, and maybe to someone with violin training his tone and expression would be noticeably better, but not to the average Joe hurrying through the Washington Metro.)
If I remember correctly, Bell did play some truly challenging pieces. No one noticed, except that one guy.
A few of the people who worked there noticed; of particular interest is the shoe-shine lady, who has the police on speed dial to remove street musicians, but decided to let Bell play because he was pretty good.
I thought he was allowed to stay there because the experimenters made an arrangment with the operators of that area beforehand? (Not sure if people were updating on the fact that a musician was strangely not being removed.)
If that is true, it was not mentioned in the article. The relevant section:
Again, to someone with no training, what is the difference between a moderately and an extremely challenging piece? I’m not sure if I can tell, beyond a certain level; all I can say about pieces is “I could sight-read that”, “I could sing that with a lot of work and practice”, or “there’s no way I can sing that at this level of training”. I’m sure that the repertoire of pieces in the third category is huge, and they’re not all the same difficulty level, but I’m not sure I could tell the difference if I heard them sung.
Also, a piece that’s extremely challenging isn’t necessarily catchy. People tend to react emotionally to songs they know, not obscure-but-difficult violin solo pieces.
Sure you can: Did a rich person pay $1,000/minute for a famous violinist to perform it for them? Then it’s hard.
The problem is that this classifier didn’t come from nature, but is just a local cultural construction.
First, a remark addressed to the two people who downvoted the grandparent: your behavior makes no sense at all. My best guess is that you disapprove of discussion of music on LW. But not only is that an unreasonable position to take, it wouldn’t explain why you didn’t downvote neighboring comments.
(I have in fact noticed that comments of mine that discuss music score consistently lower than my other comments. I can understand if some of the “mathy” types of people that populate this site have a perception that topics relating to art and music are “fluffy” and unprestigious, but what I’ve never been able to understand is why this perception doesn’t seem to get updated once they run into people who are similarly “mathy” but also interested in art and music.)
Now to Silas’s comment:
(1) On “insular cliques”: not all cliques are equal. There exist “insular” (which I suppose means low-population) cliques such that impressing them has value.
Well, then where does the rest of Mozart’s value come from?
You’re hiding the work of your argument behind the phrases “someone today” and (especially) “something like”. Who counts as an eligible appreciator? What music counts as “something like EKM”? After all, on my view, the work of MACs is like EKM (and inherits prestige thence). A distinction that places Mozart and Lady Gaga on one side and Schoenberg and Salieri on the other doesn’t carve musical reality at its joints. (To do that, you’d have to put Mozart and Schoenberg and Salieri on one side, and Gaga on the other.)
In the present context, this is a distinction without a difference. The point is that I could simply say to you “the market has spoken” with regard to Bell, just as you are wont to do with EKM. What criterion of “justification” are you appealing to here?
This may be a perception that some people have, but I’ve always perceived music as a) very mathematical, and b) not at all unprestigious. In the high school I went to, people who were smart academically and also talented in music were much higher-status than people who were only involved in academic subjects. (I’m not saying this is a universal perception, or even a good perception to have, but it’s what I’ve observed.)
My impression (at least, why I dislike these conversations even though I generally don’t downvote them) is that it’s a manifestation of the general anti-academia sentiment on LW. It isn’t that people don’t like music or current composers, but that they resist any measure of composer quality besides what they like. If I listen to some Philip Glass and get bored and learn he has a reputation as a great modern composer, I downvote reputation rather than upvoting Glass.
That’s not a reason for resisting discussions of possible measures of composer quality. (To say nothing of other music topics.) Instead, it’s merely a reason for taking a particular position (“what I like”) within such a discussion.
It would be like saying that the reason people don’t like discussions of ethics is that they resist any measure of ethical behavior other than Theory X. But that’s not a reason for downvoting discussion of ethics, it’s a reason for arguing for Theory X.
I get the impression you (and others who think similarly) may not be reading these comments carefully. That’s certainly true if you think that I’ve somehow been arguing positions on the object-level question of which composers are better than others. To the best of my recollection, all I’ve ever engaged in here are (1) meta-level prolegomena to such a discussion, usually in response to people taking nontrivial theories for granted without realizing it; and (2) awareness-raising of the existence of MACs—which is badly needed, as your own comment demonstrates. (You cited Philip Glass, who does not have a high reputation in academia; it would be only a mild exaggeration to say that he is closer to Lady Gaga than to the kind of people I’m talking about.)
Please do not downvote comments without reading them carefully, especially if they’re from established users.
It is, though. If you saw a comment thread discussing possible measures of color quality (i.e. forest green is the best color and should be your favorite), how would you react? I would be concerned. If people think musical preference is like color preference, then any statement about how people should value academic music more sounds like an argument about how people should value orange more.
(I am moderately guilty of this. But my argument is essentially that gardeners should focus on flowers that are pretty in the visual spectrum rather than flowers that are pretty in the ultraviolet spectrum, and that strikes me as superior to staking out a particular part of the visual spectrum.)
You can perform thought experiments along these lines and I think the results will be similar. If I put together some comments arguing that the Muslim way of treating women like property to be protected is probably better for them than the American way of treating women like sexually liberated people, I expect those comments would not be voted as highly as my normal comments, even if I polished them to the same level of quality.
That is, people often seem to use downvotes as an argument against a position that seems to be beyond the pale, and it’s not clear to me that’s entirely a bad thing. There are cases where it hurts, but also cases where it helps (instead of getting into a heated political argument, one would just downvote and walk away).
I would be curious. I would want to know what the arguments were, and if in particular there were points involved that I hadn’t considered. And if, after reading the arguments, it turned out that I disagreed with one or more of the participants, I might post a comment saying so, and explaining why; in particular, what I wouldn’t do is downvote on the grounds that people somehow “ought to know” that of course discussions on the merits of colors are pointless.
All this, by the way, without regard to whether the discussion was object-level (“green is the best color because...”) or meta-level (“it may be possible for there to exist a best color because....”). And even if I for some reason had low opinions of “the sort of people” who argued about the object-level question (and for some reason I thought those reasons also applied on LW), I would not regard that as sufficient reason to disapprove of (and downvote) a discussion of the meta-level question (which is all that has been occurring here with regard to music).
Again, this is a belief that they may turn out to be wrong about! In fact, as I would argue, this is a very poor analogy indeed. I don’t understand why you would disapprove of my making the argument that this is a poor analogy. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to point out, for example, that the analogue of color preferences in music would be the sounds of particular instruments, rather than the experience of an entire musical composition, or (still less) type of composition? That, if you wanted a visual analogy, you would do better to compare it to the experience of particular paintings, or styles of painting?
Seriously, how much total time did you spend thinking about this question, before you came to the conclusion that musical preference is obviously just like color preference, and that therefore not only is it pointless to argue about musical preference, it’s pointless to argue about whether musical preference is like color preference?
(I know that you didn’t technically say that that was your position, but I do get the feeling it is, and the question certainly goes for anybody whose position it actually is.)
Have you considered the possibility that you might have some belief-updating to do in this region of question-space? Have you asked yourself what data might be generating my comments (which, I repeat, are not actually about what music is “better”, except insofar as I have happened to mention, in passing, [aspects of] my own preferences, being careful never to argue that anyone else should adopt them), and whether you’ve already taken that data into account in forming your current beliefs?
Why anyone would think that any of my comments on the subject of music have been in any way “beyond the pale” is utterly beyond me.
Don’t know about pale but certainly beyond the point where responding with actual words is likely to have any benefit.
I did not downvote you earlier. I just ignored the discussion entirely after the first dozen comments a while back made it clear I was going to learn nothing new.
For what it is worth: Paintings are definitely a better analogy. There are objective aspects to musical or artistic performance as well as subjective ones. Most notable are:
Technical difficulty for the human brain to produce certain types of patterns.
The extent to which a piece triggers an underlying general mechanism in the naive human brain. (Where the trained brain component is a mix of subjectively arbitrary and that which is covered in the below point.)
The extent to which the artist predicts the response of the intended audience and elicits desired behavior from them. The ability to predict what people want when they are not quite sure about it themselves. This can be measured via fiscal rewards or proxies for status.
People should not value orange more. Orange is horrible.
Agree. I actually suspect there is some objective basis behind that judgement. Just like red really does make you look like you’re driving faster and generally winning more.
Oh look, honey, someone just went through and voted down all of my comments on this topic, leaving komponisto’s untouched!
That’s nice, dear.
Did you notice that your comments (and those agreeing with you) nonetheless score higher than your critics in such discussions? (And whoever’s modding you down in this thread, it’s not me—I don’t use downmods against opponents when my investment in the discussion might be compromising my judgment.)
(1) It matters when determining whether a clique is learning the structure of reality or just replaying inside jokes. If the clique judges designs based on useful models that carve reality at its joints, and that use objective, unfakeable (e.g. through consensus) metrics, we should care what they think and we should be impressed those who can hit narrow targets in the design space they define. If the clique has to keep checking on whether the rest of the clique already likes something, because there really isn’t a successful model … then none of that applies. Which category do MACs fall in?
From the other stuff that people still like, voluntarily listen to, etc. after hundreds of years and no indoctrination.
As bad as Lady Gaga might be, where’s the Music Theory PhD can that can demonstrate a superior understanding of the mind-music relationship, rather than just whine about how reality won’t bend to fit his theories?
The ability to make a judgment without having to first be told what your judgment should be. Layfolk who get recordings of EKM aren’t doing it because it’s the hot thing right now among their friends and the elite cultural arbiters told them to.
In contrast, the royalty really wouldn’t tell the difference if Bell flubbed and “only” performed at the 95% percentile. While the market has spoken, it is not announcing a victory of the characteristics you claim are important: it is showing that people will buy based on hype, and we know it’s hype because their market value changes when the hype is removed (as the Bell experiment showed—no wealthy person said, “Holy s***! Let me hire you to be my personal performer! You’re way undervalued here!”)
It should really raise a red flag for your when you’re basing your opinion on “but rich people like this stuff when they’re duped!”
I am fairly “indoctrinated” in classical music (my parents have been taking me to the symphony since I was small, and I sing the stuff) and I like Lady Gaga. Whatever sense in which she is awful doesn’t have much effect on her popularity. Yeah, her music isn’t as complex and challenging as Mozart’s, but maybe that just shows that complexity isn’t the only thing that makes music pleasant to listen to...in fact, if anything I think simple music is funner to listen to, since untrained people can sing along and enjoy the tune for themselves. (I enjoy classical pieces 20 times more when I know them well enough and am in a venue where I can sing along.)
This isn’t true today! At the moment, you are being upvoted and I am being downvoted. (And actually downvoted, as in negative scores, as opposed to merely being upvoted less.)
I don’t know actually know any music theory Ph.D. who whines in the manner you describe, though it’s not exactly clear what you mean. What theories, and what aspect of reality isn’t bending?
What would they have to do in order to demonstrate a “superior understanding of the mind-music relationship”?
And let me be clear: neither I nor any MAC-type I know is after Lady-Gaga-status. I would settle for slightly greater respect specifically among technically-minded science types. (Enough to be acknowledged as existing, say.)
Are you kidding? Of course they are! I would assign a high probability to the hypothesis that the overwhelming majority of the popular interest in eighteenth-century music is driven by status-signaling.
And if you’re tempted to say “Hm, you’re right, I guess that means that only Lady Gaga is what people really like”, I’ve got some bad news there too: most people who like Lady Gaga do so because it’s what their friends like.
Mind you (and I think you may be missing this point), these status perceptions are capable of really, truly affecting people’s actual enjoyment—rather like how people really, truly find the same jokes funnier when told by higher-status people. In the case of people without a specific interest in music, signaling probably accounts for most of their tastes. Even in the case of someone like me, I would probably like Mozart (or Schoenberg) almost, but not quite, as much, if I didn’t know “who he was”.
Maybe not on a single occasion, but over the long term (i.e. if Bell descended to the 95th percentile consistently), they surely would. More specifically, elite musicians and critics would notice, and the “royalty” would follow their opinion.
Look again, woe-is-me-sto. Most of my comments have gone negative, almost none of yours have. Someone recently came by and downmodded everything I posted—someone who isn’t justifying it anywhere (which is about the level of justification MACs can give for their field). (I’m not going to insult you by suggesting you would dip to these tactics, of course; I have far too much respect for you.)
The very same thing that I or Michael Vassar or anyone else mentions whenever this topic is brought up: if higher-level students of music theory really do know the secrets of the music-mind relationship, why can’t they take that skill, pair it with existing record companies’ hype machines, and outcompete existing, non-academic hitmakers, without having to tell people in advance “you should like this because the elite ivory tower deems it good”?
A high proportion of people with a broad, indiscriminate collection of classical music might be, but those weren’t the ones I was using to make the point. You’re using the presence of hype victims I wasn’t referring to, to deny the significance of the non-hype victims I was referring to.
I was referring to the everyday mouthbreather who for the first time hears EKM (perhaps in the Movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), then decides to add it to their playlist, not knowing which elite endorses it. Such people continue to listen to it privately even in the rare case that their friends disapprove of it. Or to the person who hears Paganini’s Op. 1 in a similar context and wants it on their playlist, not realizing it was written ~200 years ago (because it sounds creative and experimental).
(But yes, there are cases where a member of the elite will decree that some long-unknown composer is now high status again and you better get on the bandwagon. I believe this is what happened to Bach—IIRC, most of his fame now is due to someone reviving interest of him in the 19th century, after he had been forgotten. Which itself is proof of the ephemerality of the boundaries MACs draw.)
In any case, I agree that there can be information cascades in which fame builds on itself. The difference is that I find the fame derived this way uninformative, while you seem to be willing to defend this arbitrary, artifical set as indicative of a fundamental aspect of reality about music (rather than social phenomenon) … at least, when it supports compositions you approve of.
Only if experts (who have pointlessly wasted time making measurements this precise) alert them that this music isn’t high enough in status. The point is, it has nothing to do with the musical quality itself, just conspicuous consumption. Joshua Bell agrees that his income—and indeed, self-worth—come from pre-validation, and not from some widely, objectively-discernable measure of his performance quality. Why won’t you?
Yes, the scores have changed since I wrote that. And no, not due to me; like you, I generally avoid downvoting my opponents in a discussion. (I don’t make it an absolute rule, but exceptions are rare.)
Because that skill doesn’t suffice for that task. In order to reliably produce “hits”, you have to do a lot more than be able to imagine music in your mind; in fact, you have to do a lot more than imagine music in your mind that you yourself like (already harder). You have to have to have a detailed knowledge of the psychology of large groups of other humans, so that you can produce music that they will like (actually a lot more than “like”; you have to get them to “pass it on”) in large numbers. That, as far as I know, is an unsolved problem. And if you think the field of music theory (or any field I know of) claims to have solved it, you’re mistaken.
Just the opposite: I’m trying to identify particular groups of people whose opinions are atypically informative.
The pre-validation is ultimately a result of his performance skill. I agree with you to the extent that I may not necessarily prefer Bell’s playing to someone slightly less popular. His fame has some information content; it may not be enough for my purposes.
Similarly, the fact that EKM is more “popular” than the Jupiter symphony wouldn’t have been informative to me, because (as good as EKM is) I like the Jupiter symphony better. At most, EKM’s fame might tell me that Mozart is worth looking into.
Ha! I will use this.
Thanks for catching the error, but what makes it an accidentally-clever pun?
There’s very little that I’m familiar with which meets that standard—possibly some Christmas carols. What do you mean by indoctrination?
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Ode to Joy, Water Music, The Four Seasons, Flight of the Bumblebee, Flight of the Valkyries, …
Being taught throughout schooling that “This is good music, high status people produced and listen to this music”, plus, in the case of higher learning, the inferential distance chain you’re taken through that results in you liking obscure academic classical-style music.
Alternatively, being taught throughout schooling that, “Being [religion X] is good, high status people belong to this religion, you will be high status if you’re faithful”, plus only getting good grades/promotion if you can master the doctrines of a religion.
Popular classical music isn’t as high status as difficult modern and contemporary classical music, but it’s still pretty high status.
“No indoctrination” is a high standard. Also, is there a difference so far as indoctrination is concerned between “high status people like this” and “normal people like this”?
Not in terms of the uninformativeness it injects into the fact of their popularity. That is, if something’s popular without that kind of in-school promotion (like Halo), that says a lot more about it then whether people “like” something (but continue to doze through any actual performance until the part where they get to sleep with their date) that is promoted in school, such as Shakespeare.