I’m trained as a classical pianist, and I still don’t enjoy Mozart, Verdi, Scarlatti, or pretty much any other of the classical period composers. I love Bach, but I’m not familiar with other baroque composers.
But mainly, I really enjoy romantic and modern classical composers. I’d absolutely agree with the thesis that music has been getting better and better, even limiting oneself to classical music. (Bach is an amazing exception.)
Comparing classical to popular music is very interesting. Perhaps the difference is that classical music requires a very developed ear in order to enjoy, and so it only appeals to a much smaller subset of people—those with training or high musical talent—while still being comparable or superior in quality to popular music. I would compare it to wine, except there’s strong evidence that wine appreciation is almost entirely about status. I’m not sure if there’s anything else to compare it to. Programming as an art form?
I think enjoying poetry or literature is a good comparison. Both take effort and some hard work to be able to appreciate and are considered dull and boring by people with no training/study in the relevant discipline. They all also unfortunately appeal to some people’s shallow sense of “high culture” and thereby encourage inauthentic signaling by lots of people that don’t really enjoy them. It’s easy to understand that if you had no experience yourself, and your experience with a small number of people who profess enjoyment is that they are engaged in false signaling, that you would think there is nothing more to it than that, that everybody who professes passion is just engaged in false signaling.
I’m convinced that most people who took a music appreciation class and studied music theory and ear training for a year, combined with some music lessons, would at the end of that process have a completely different reaction to classical music (assuming they did it all by choice and weren’t forced into it by parents).
Mightn’t that just be because those courses are specifically to teach appreciation of those kinds of music? I expect it’s probably possible to teach people who don’t like rap, or country, to appreciate those genres; but because rap and country don’t fit the shallow sense of high culture, no one is motivated to learn to appreciate them if they don’t already. There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music—there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one’s ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don’t get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres. In the case of classical music, the benefit of learning to like it isn’t really in the form of enjoyment of classical music; it’s in the form of getting to sincerely claim to like classical music, and no longer being left out when highly cultured people discuss classical music.
There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music—there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one’s ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don’t get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres.
That argument only works if we aren’t allowed to enjoy novelty.
We can still enjoy novelty! For instance, I have a near-perfect track record of liking show tunes. There’slots. I can get a steady supply of novelty, supplementing older musicals with the new ones that come out every year and the other sorts of music I like. I don’t need to learn to appreciate entire new genres to do it. Unless you mean that appreciating a new genre is a qualitatively different form of novelty? But then learning to appreciate the new genre is self-defeating. By the time you’ve learned to like it, you’ve already been exposed to lots of it and it’s no longer new.
Do you actually feel this aversion? Because it’s so… foreign to me. Learning to enjoy a new genre of music is always a fascinating discovery. I hear a curious snippet somewhere and go hmmm, gotta investigate deeper, then 24 hours later I’m swimming in the stuff, following connections, reading and listening… sort of like this (warning, that site is like crack for the right kind of person.)
It’s not an aversion. If I had nothing better to do, or had a terrible time finding anything new to listen to, I’d be okay with learning about and learning to appreciate classical music. But as it happens, new, immediately fun music enters my life at a pretty satisfactory rate. I added a new artist to my library just yesterday because my roommate played his CD in the car on the way to the grocery store and it sounded neat. There’s no reason for me to spend extra time on music that doesn’t promptly catch my ear, when I can just hit up friends for personalized recommendations, cruise Pandora, and keep up with the artists I already enjoy—unless I feel like succumbing to the status signals that make classical different from other music!
In the case of classical music, the benefit of learning to like it
isn’t really in the form of enjoyment of classical music; it’s in the
form of getting to sincerely claim to like classical music, and no
longer being left out when highly cultured people discuss classical music.
How would you know this given your admittedly limited experience with
classical music?
Speaking for myself, there is lots of music that I love listening too,
in many different genres, but nothing else has such power to move me as classical music as its best does—for example
—the Confutatis from Mozart’s Requiem, or the Bach d-minor
Chaccone, or in a lighter vein that I think anybody can appreciate and feel moved by, Paganiniani or the vitali chaconne.
I love lots of popular music, and probably listen to popular music about as much as I do classical, but there is a certain kind of ecstatic—almost mystical—experience that some classical music triggers that I’ve never gotten with popular music.
Okay—so you get special, unique value from classical. Meanwhile, I get special, unique value from Phantom of the Opera. Why should I think that learning to like classical music is more worth my time—given that I’m now left bored by most classical, or think of it as pleasant background noise—than pirating more Andrew Lloyd Weber?
I’m not so much arguing for learning to like classical music as for learning to understand classical music. I think most people would enjoy it more if they had greater understanding. Classical music is especially rewarding with greater appreciation/understanding, and especially difficult to enjoy with less appreciation/understanding. Perhaps an analogy will convey my point better.
You write fiction, yes? Have you ever studied creative writing, taken a class, read a book on creative writing? Have you ever had an English class with a skilled and passionate teacher that involved analysis of texts that you gained more and more appreciation for after really careful reading and study? Do you feel that the process of becoming a better writer and/or learning to analyze fiction has increased your appreciation and enjoyment of fiction? Most people find that going through those sorts of processes results in much greater enjoyment and appreciation, and they are also able to enjoy fiction that they formerly would have found boring. I think the process is the same for classical music (and jazz as well, for that matter [it’s true of any art/music/etc., but to different degrees]).
Expecting to either just “like it” or “find it boring” and thinking of it as being just another genre like rock or pop is like approaching Dostoevsky with the same background/expectations/skills/patience as you would a Tom Clancy novel. The fact that Dostoevsky is more difficult than Clancy, that most people find Dostoevsky boring and Clancy (or an equivalent easy read) engaging, doesn’t mean that it’s just a matter of taste which you happen to enjoy more. Some things require considerable experience and skill before it is possible to have an informed judgment about them: the literature classics, for example, and classical music.
As for whether it’s worth anybody’s while to do so, that’s an individual choice.
You write fiction, yes? Have you ever studied creative writing, taken a class, read a book on creative writing?
Yes. No. No. No.
Have you ever had an English class with a skilled and passionate teacher that involved analysis of texts that you gained more and more appreciation for after really careful reading and study?
Hell no. I have a completely unbroken track record of hating every single book that I have ever read for the first time as a class assignment, and have never found that a book I already liked was improved by this kind of dissection.
Do you feel that the process of becoming a better writer and/or learning to analyze fiction has increased your appreciation and enjoyment of fiction?
Not one bit! I have mostly become a better writer by learning related skills (I was allowed to make up my own second major in undergrad, and therefore literally have a degree in worldbuilding), practicing, and emulating the good parts of what I read. I now have to turn off my critical faculties entirely to enjoy any works of fiction at all, even those that are overall very good, because detecting small flaws in their settings, characterization, handling of social issues, dialogue, use of artistic license, etc. will throw off my ability to not fling the book at a wall. Works that aren’t overall good turn on said critical faculty in spite of my best efforts. I can barely have a conversation about a work of fiction anymore without starting to hate it unless I’m just having a completely content-free squee session with an equally enthusiastic friend!
Most people find that going through those sorts of processes results in much greater enjoyment and appreciation, and they are also able to enjoy fiction that they formerly would have found boring.
I guess I’m a mutant?
Expecting to either just “like it” or “find it boring” and thinking of it as being just another genre like rock or pop is like approaching Dostoevsky with the same background/expectations/skills/patience as you would a Tom Clancy novel.
Although I have never read an entire Dostoevsky novel (my reading list is enormous and I haven’t gotten around to it), I have really liked the excerpts I’ve read—immediately, without having to work for it. This is why I plan to read more of his stuff when I get around to it. I’ve never tried any Tom Clancy. Is he worth reading?
Some things require considerable experience and skill before it is possible to have an informed judgment about them: the literature classics, for example, and classical music.
Maybe this is just my idiosyncrasy, but I think making the reader work hard when this isn’t absolutely necessary—in fiction, nonfiction, or anything else—is a failure of clarity, not a masterstroke of subtlety. This isn’t to say that you can’t still have a good work that makes the reader do some digging to find all the content, but that’s true of any flaw—you can also have a good work with a kinda stupid premise, or with a cardboard secondary character, or that completely omits female characters for no good reason, or has any of a myriad of bad but not absolutely damning awfulnesses.
I’ve preferred classical music over other genres since preschool. I think that’s sufficient to rule out any explanation of my tastes involving signaling, because a preschooler’s appreciation of classical music signals nothing to other preschoolers. Neither of my parents was particularly into classical music, so I wasn’t reflecting any expectation of theirs either. I’m in agreement with anonym about the value of music education: it has heightened my enjoyment and appreciation of all music: classical especially, but pretty much everything else as well, other than maybe hip-hop.
However, I also agree with you about literature. Every English class that I had to take in middle school through college completely destroyed my ability to enjoy the subject under study for years to come. I used to love Michener until I had to write an essay about his work during my junior year of high school; I haven’t been able to face him since. I don’t think this contrast reveals anything unusual about my psyche; rather I think it means that the comparison of English education to music education is apples-to-oranges.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that the only reason anyone would like classical music would be because of signaling. If you liked it as a preschooler, it seems to me that’s just your taste, and I’d neither privilege it nor scorn it compared to the taste of someone who, in preschool, liked any other kind of music. I think that the only reason to devote time and energy to learning to like classical music when you don’t already—which I doubt you did in preschool—is for signaling purposes.
What about the desire to make an “aesthetic investment”—that is, to put in some work upfront in order to reap the rewards of a high-quality experience later on? (Why, I wonder, are people so quick to dismiss the possibility of such rewards?)
As regards signaling as a “common” motivation: maybe this works in continental Europe, or in certain idiosyncratic communities where this kind of music enjoys social prestige. In the mainstream of American society, however, an interest in art music buys you little to no status (particularly as compared with a corresponding interest in similarly elevated forms of other arts, such as literature or painting). To be a devotee of this kind of music is to be a nerd of one of the worst kinds. (It’s even considered un-American: witness Bill Clinton’s remark that “Jazz is America’s classical music”.)
You know the cultural asymmetry that C.P. Snow famously described, wherein “well-rounded” educated people are expected to know about more about the humanities than the sciences? Well, it’s dwarfed into insignificance by the asymmetry that exists between what “cultured” people are expected to know about music versus what they are expected to know about other arts.
So be extra cautious when positing status-signaling explanations for the behavior of art music devotees, particularly in America.
I’ve also wondered about the implicit assumption lots of people have that if music were going to yield extreme degrees of pleasure for them, then it would do so without much effort on their part and in quick order. I’ve also noticed the assumption you touch on that because all non-deaf people have a pair of working ears and have known how to use them since childhood, they are all equally capable of judging different types of music and recognizing that there they’re basically all the same, like different flavors of ice cream.
I think you’re spot on about classical music and status in America, at least in my neck of the woods. I work at a well-known company in the SF bay area that has a lot of very smart and very well-educated people, and it would be embarrassing for me to admit at work that Bach is my favorite musician or that classical music is my favorite music. It would be viewed as pathetically old-fashioned and uncool.
ETA: I think the status thing with regard to classical music in the SF area is generational. I’m in my thirties. If I and my peers were a generation older, then I think classical music would be regarded more positively and be less stigmatized. When I go to a classical music event, I see mostly people who are at least a generation older than me. In my workplace, the median age is probably something like 28-34, so the classical music listeners are of my peers’ parents’ generation. To be honest, I completely agree with the accusations of signaling for the vast majority of people you see at classical music events around here. Few of the (mostly older) people I see at concerts seem like they’re there for the music—they spend their time dozing off, fidgeting with things, people gazing and being gazed at, counting the minutes till intermission and then rushing out at the end without wanting to hear the encores. People my age and younger at concerts seem much more sincere, even if there are so few of them.
Here’s a couple more: desire to learn an instrument (because training often uses mainly classical repertoire), or the recommendation of someone trusted. One could argue the latter is about status, but I don’t think it always is.
Hell no. I have a completely unbroken track record of hating every single book that I have ever read for the first time as a class assignment, and have never found that a book I already liked was improved by this kind of dissection.
Maybe I’m the mutant. I know that your reaction is very common, but I attribute it to either the result of bad teaching and/or students being forced against their will to do something that they will therefore be very likely to hate. When I have been in classes with smart, passionate teachers, and the students were there because they were genuinely curious and not to fill a requirement, I’ve seen lots of minds get turned on in a way that extended past the end of the course and positively affected their enjoyment afterwards. I’ve also recommended books like Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers to adult friends that are avid readers and have had only positive feedback, some of it of the ‘profoundly changed the way I read for the better’ variety.
Maybe this is just my idiosyncrasy, but I think making the reader work hard when this isn’t absolutely necessary—in fiction, nonfiction, or anything else—is a failure of clarity, not a masterstroke of subtlety.
I don’t think very many people would disagree with you on that as a general principle. I certainly don’t. Not all difficulty is gratuitous though.
I’ve never taken an English or literature class voluntarily—it’s one of many subjects that I was permanently turned off to in high school and was glad to be rid of after I finished my gen ed requirements in undergrad. (Except English in the sense of fine points of grammar, vocabulary, etc. which I’ve reclassified as “linguistics” to be comfortable with it.) So maybe I was badly taught. But except for the part where I suffered during required English/literature classes and (maybe) developed a block about a handful of books that I might have liked if I’d run into them on my own, I don’t think I’m badly off for not having this sophisticated level of appreciation—given how I react when I exercise what artistic discernment I do have, and given how much fiction I find and enjoy without the help of literature instruction.
Not all difficulty is gratuitous at all! There are plenty of bits of content that would lose their impact if stated directly, for instance. But I think a large portion of the difficulty that is found in so-called classic literature is gratuitous.
Oh, for the love of chocolate-covered strawberries, never again. I spent a week in that sinkhole and am now mostly inoculated—I’ve read the majority of pages that catch my eye on a casual scan and don’t feel compelled to re-read them.
Mightn’t that just be because those courses are specifically to teach appreciation of those kinds of music?
Music theory, no, but the others, yes. (I wouldn’t think music theory would increase classical appreciation more than other genres, though.)
There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music
Disagree. Whatever the genre, more variety means listening is less tiring (because less monotonous) and, on the whole, more edifying. Each genre is enjoyed differently, and stimulates different parts of the mind. And in the specific case of classical music, on the theory that it is deeper and richer than other music (in the same way that set theory is deeper and richer than propositional logic, or Netflix is deeper and richer than Blockbuster) the limit of enjoyment is actually higher.
I took most of a year of AP music theory in high school (dropped out of it because I was being picked on) and never got the impression that we were learning about anything but archaic, old rules of music followed by dead composers. That, and how to take musical dictation, but none of the examples were contemporary. Was my music theory teacher just incompetent? Did I miss the generally applicable parts by leaving the class early?
And while having a variety of music is definitely good, there’s plenty of variety within a genre! It doesn’t seem obvious to me that you can get more valuable variety per ounce of effort by taking classes to learn to appreciate more genres than you can by spending time on Pandora.
I don’t know how I missed this comment at the time, but it demands a reply.
Although it’s difficult for me to mentally organize such a reply, because I simultaneously believe all of the following:
You probably were learning “old rules of music followed by dead composers.”
That doesn’t constitute music theory.
Your teacher’s incompetence was likely not personal, but inherited from the discipline of “music theory” as a whole, which in my opinion has a far from satisfactory understanding of its own subject matter.
However, your objections to the class you took are not necessarily related to this criticism of mine; in particular, the fact that that doesn’t constitute music theory has nothing to do with whether certain composers happen to be dead or alive.
There was probably considerable value in the curriculum they were trying to teach you, both for what it really was (music history; familiarization with art music as a pursuit, distinct from popular music) and as an indirect, nonexplicit (and frankly inefficient) way of teaching music theory (its traditional purpose).
Hence your attitude is probably misguided, even though I wish you had been taught differently; in effect, you’re “right for the wrong reasons”.
Musical dictation, though it may have seemed to you like merely one particular topic on the syllabus, really is the shibboleth for demonstrating understanding of music theory.
You would not want examples from contemporary art music in your first introduction to musical dictation. The reason the examples were old is the same reason the examples in your math classes were old, rather than being drawn from contemporary journals.
What you were really complaining about, probably, was that none of the examples were popular. (I really, really hate when people equate “contemporary” with “popular”!)
However, as I mentioned above, it is among the purposes of such a course to familiarize the student with the pursuit of art music, as opposed to popular music (with which they are likely to be familiar already).
In any case, conventional wisdom to the contrary, there aren’t “separate magisteria” of music theory; the skill of musical dictation is what it is, and it doesn’t matter exactly where the examples were drawn from, so long as they are of the appropriate level of complexity for the student’s level. (Otherwise the theory being used is wrong.)
I’m sorry that the course didn’t communicate this to you, but there exists considerably more intellectual depth to the pursuit of music—in particular art music—than you are likely to have encountered just by living in the general culture, “spending time on Pandora”, and the like.
Please bear these points in mind—in particular, the existence of people like me, who regard the creation of art music as an academic pursuit comparable in sophistication to science or philosophy—when assessing the implications of your own experience in the domain of music.
What readings and activities would you recommend to someone interested in becoming able to compose music, as opposed to learning how to play any particular instrument?
Reading: An Introduction to Tonal Theory by Peter Westergaard.
Activity: Study scores. Copy them out by hand. (This is actually the traditional method of learning composition, believe it or not; it might be compared to tracing drawings in visual art). Make simplified versions (e.g. write out the “main line”, then “main two lines”, etc.). Make analyses of works as in Westergaard. And, above all: attempt to compose, and learn by trial and error.
Oh man I miss Pandora since they stopped streaming to the UK. :(
On topic: I had quite a few years of music lessons (though I wasn’t really much good) and some musical theory, which I really enjoyed. And I do quite like listening to classical music in a vague sort of way, but I wouldn’t say I have an “appreciation” for it: it’s not as though I can pick out features or analyse it or anything. So am I appreciating it without a tuned ear, or am I just unaware of the work my bit of theoretical knowledge is doing behind the scenes?
Actually, I think appreciation and enjoyment are related but not symonyms. Enjoyment is visceral and emotional, it denotes the sheer pleasure of the experience. Appreciation implies recognition of the elements of the music, why those particular elements were chosen, how they might have been different, etc., as well as the extra enjoyment that comes about as a result of that appreciation. Not that I’m trying to say that’s what everybody means by the terms, but that’s how I think of them and how I’ve heard some other people talk about them.
My music theory course only had a slight emphasis on classical music. (Mainly because classical music is more analyzable with theory, I guess.) Probably your textbook was just old or inferior. But I got very little out of the course anyway.
I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily worth the effort to increase one’s appreciation of classical music, given the opportunity cost. (I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to appreciate Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Hegel or Kant or Foucault or Derrida. Or wine, for that matter.) But the easiest way would probably be to pick a CD with some good classical music on it and listen to it many times through until you start to understand it musically. Courses are likely overkill. When I first started learning Bach (around the age of 10) it made no musical sense to me at all. I forget how long until I started to understand it, so I don’t know how long you’d have to listen to start to get it. Maybe too long to bother.
there’s plenty of variety within a genre!
Hmmmmmmmmmmm no. Doubt there’s a good way to resolve this disagreement.
As for learning if coming to it as an adult, I’d recommend resources like Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (and any of his many writings on music, such as The Joy of Music), as well as Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and works of that nature.
The key point in my opinion is that you have to learn to hear more in the music, to be able to hear and follow the different voices in a fugue, or recognize the development of a theme in a sonata allegro form, and this sort of ability only comes about through some offline study and intellectual training that is then applied when listening to music and the knowledge really comes alive.
I don’t get much enjoyment in consciously recognizing long-horizon forms or themes, although I do enjoy many pieces that heavily rely on them, e.g. Liszt’s Sonata in b
I probably lack perspective since I was a decent classical pianist in my youth, but I don’t feel like any formal study is necessary to get a full pleasure-soup response to great classical music. Also, tastes vary; I don’t enjoy a lot of highly regarded classical music (but there are at least a few hundred hours that are really great for me). I doubt my favorite hundred hours are the same as anyone else’s.
Giving up either all music before 1950 or all after would be easy; I’d keep 1950- since there are still many good contemporary “classical” composers crowded out by the higher-status old masters.
Well, I like Bach most of all, and I find that as I’ve learned to hear more, sometimes by following along with a score and doing a bit of musical analysis and kind of hacking away at the piano and butchering parts of the works, I enjoy them more and get more from them. Sometimes it seems that the enjoyment is proportional to how much of it I can keep in mind at the time as I’m listening, how much I can pay attention to (both of which are facilitated through knowledge of the work), as well as how much the distinction between me and the experience disappears and I lose the sense of being a person listening to the music. I enjoy having a kind of high-level cognitive/emotional/musical blueprint of the work as a whole and feeling how the moment relates to the whole, knowing where it’s going and remembering where it came from. Just as we can have a greater appreciation for a moment or portion in the life of a historical figure or in a movie by thinking about the future consequences that we’re aware of, I think we can have the same kinds of reactions to music where the pieces mean more as a whole than as just the sum of the parts, and on multiple levels. I don’t hear that much in Bach relative to what a great and well-studied performer of Bach would, but I hear more than I used to, and far more than I did before I had studied music at all. I think it is probably a matter of personality though, and that many would find my approach would detract from their experience.
Puts me in mind of this quote from Pratchett’s Soul Music:
Lord Vetinari, the supreme ruler of Ankh Morpork, rather liked
music.
People wondered what sort of music would appeal to such a man.
Highly formalized chamber music, possibly, or thunder and-lightning
opera scores.
In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got
played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on
dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and
tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots
and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It
was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much
better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between
yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it
played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit
dribbling out of the end of their oboe … well, the idea made him shudder.
[...] Then he picked up the third movement of Fondel’s Prelude in G Major and
settled back to read.
I wonder if anyone does this with music they’ve never heard played before?
Glenn Gould was said to sometimes analyze and completely memorize works from the sheet music alone before playing them at the piano. His father recalled an instance of him learning an entire concerto from the score alone and then playing it from memory the first time, and Bruno Monsaingeon saw him play an entire movement from memory of a Mendelssohn string quartet after hearing it once on the radio (quoted in Bazzana’s book on Gould).
That pales in comparison though to the fourteen-year-old Mozart transcribing from memory after once hearing the secret Miserere of Allegri, a dense polyphonic work that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel and was forbidden by the Vatican to be transcribed or reproduced under penalty of excommunication.
I’m by no means an expert at the piano, but I’m probably halfway there, and I can without too much trouble get the general gist of complex unfamiliar piano music, and I can easily read simple music. I’d say it’s pretty much analogous to the ability of expert chess players to play blindfolded, which is definitely a well-attested ability. (The record for simultaneous blindfold matches is around 50, played by Janos Flesch in Budapest in 1960.)
I think music theory—including ear training—would disproportionately increase classical appreciation (but would also improve appreciation for other forms too). The reason is simple: classical music is more complex musically, so it rewards a more discriminating ear and a richer sense of harmony, counterpoint, etc.
There’s a lot of popular music that I love and think is very interesting musically, harmonically, etc., but classical music is usually so much deeper and requires much more skill and musical knowledge to create (and also to appreciation). If you want to succeed in the classical world, as a performer or composer, you have to start by the age of 6, you have to be supremely talented, you have to work obsessively until you are accepted into a good conservatory, and then work even harder still. Your entire life is basically nothing but music from a very early age. That was true of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., and it is still true today. The situation with popular music is completely different. You can pick it up as an adult, and if you’re talented, you might still have a successful career. You can pick it up as a teenager, and within a few years have developed enough musically to be on par with almost any other popular band. It seems pretty clear that something that takes decades of study and practice (and involves study of hundreds of years of music history) is going to involve more skill (and make more use of skills acquired) than something that can be achieved in years of study and practice, and when the composer is relying on decades of study and their intimate knowledge of hundreds of years of changes in music theory, counterpoint etc., it is definitely going to take some work on the part of a listener to do more than skim the surface in terms of enjoyment and appreciation.
And in the specific case of classical music, on the theory that it is deeper and richer than other music (in the same way that set theory is deeper and richer than propositional logic, or Netflix is deeper and richer than Blockbuster) the limit of enjoyment is actually higher.
This sounds like a really terrible analogy; if anything, it ought to prove the opposite, that rap could beat classical since rap has access to all the instruments and styles classical does (including, let’s not forget, the human voice which modern classical usually shuns) and much more (electronica?). So rap is more general than classical like set theory is more general than propositional logic. Or something.
the human voice which modern classical usually shuns
What on Earth are you talking about? Seriously, what data is generating this impression in your mind?
rap has access to...more (electronica?)
Same question. Where did you get the impression that electronic media aren’t …central to the recent history of art music?
The fundamental difference between art music and popular music (including rap) is nothing so superficial as instrumentation. It’s complexity of musical structure. Art music is structurally more complex than popular music; just as “art”/”research” X is structurally more complex than “popular” X, for all X.
(By the way, that’s different from what makes something art music vs. popular music. That has to do with memetic lineage. An individual work of art music could happen to be less complex than an individual work of popular music. But the differing lineages differ statistically as described here.)
Seriously, what data is generating this impression in your mind?
Sunday Baroque on NPR.
Is… is this not a good source of modern preferences in classical music?
Also, I feel that we are arguing in difference ways about complexity. I’m thinking in terms of total possibilities (eg. there are only so many 5 minute pieces expressible with 88 keys or whatever), but you seem to have some sort of entropy measure in mind.
Is… is this not a good source of modern preferences in classical music?
I completely misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about actual modern music, not modern preferences in Baroque music. (You did say “modern classical”.)
For the record, there is an abundance of vocal music from the Baroque period; I don’t know how much of it is played on NPR.
Also, I feel that we are arguing in difference ways about complexity. I’m thinking in terms of total possibilities (eg. there are only so many 5 minute pieces expressible with 88 keys or whatever), but you seem to have some sort of entropy measure in mind.
Yes on the latter point. As for the former, I don’t understand what you mean. Are you saying something like “there are fewer possible art compositions than rap songs, because art music is limited to 5-minute piano pieces”? That would be absurd, but I can’t come up with another meaning.
As for the former, I don’t understand what you mean. Are you saying something like “there are fewer possible art compositions than rap songs, because art music is limited to 5-minute piano pieces”? That would be absurd, but I can’t come up with another meaning.
What is absurd about it? It seems pretty apparent to me that rap can generate nearly-arbitrary sounds within the space of humanly-perceivable sounds, while Baroque/classical/classical-style music is limited to the smaller set of what pianos & flutes & etc. can generate.
This is obviously a matter of taste. I really like Ode to Joy, but that’s the only old music that has a ghost of a chance of competing for my affections on a par with my favorite show tunes or other more recent selections. If you like a lot of old music and not a lot of new music, it just means that you a) have common tastes with people who were rich music patrons in the Golden Age of your choice, or b) you’re succumbing to some signaling effect having to do with the perceived absolute quality of old dead white musicians’ work. If there is something like objective musical quality out there (which is a matter of open debate in aesthetics), it’s probably very fuzzy. Maybe Ode to Joy is objectively better than Sk8er Boi, but the jury is out and they don’t seem inclined to come back soon.
Obviously it’s a matter of taste, yes. (And I do think about the signaling effects of my musical tastes from time to time; it is rather an interesting topic.) I was only putting forth my “no good music has been written since the death of Gershwin”* opinion to contrast with taw’s “no good music was written before 1975″ opinion, in order to produce a synthesis that would support gwern’s original contention that enough art now exists that we needn’t subsidize more of it.
I really like Mozart, but I like a lot of techno, and some industrial and goth bands just about as much (it depends a bit on my mood). And for that matter I like a lot of 1940s and 50s big band music, country and western, and classic rock, when I’m in the right mood.
Really? Really? I would put Mozart, Bach or Verdi against absolutely anyone from 1975 to the present.
I’m trained as a classical pianist, and I still don’t enjoy Mozart, Verdi, Scarlatti, or pretty much any other of the classical period composers. I love Bach, but I’m not familiar with other baroque composers.
But mainly, I really enjoy romantic and modern classical composers. I’d absolutely agree with the thesis that music has been getting better and better, even limiting oneself to classical music. (Bach is an amazing exception.)
Comparing classical to popular music is very interesting. Perhaps the difference is that classical music requires a very developed ear in order to enjoy, and so it only appeals to a much smaller subset of people—those with training or high musical talent—while still being comparable or superior in quality to popular music. I would compare it to wine, except there’s strong evidence that wine appreciation is almost entirely about status. I’m not sure if there’s anything else to compare it to. Programming as an art form?
I think enjoying poetry or literature is a good comparison. Both take effort and some hard work to be able to appreciate and are considered dull and boring by people with no training/study in the relevant discipline. They all also unfortunately appeal to some people’s shallow sense of “high culture” and thereby encourage inauthentic signaling by lots of people that don’t really enjoy them. It’s easy to understand that if you had no experience yourself, and your experience with a small number of people who profess enjoyment is that they are engaged in false signaling, that you would think there is nothing more to it than that, that everybody who professes passion is just engaged in false signaling.
I’m convinced that most people who took a music appreciation class and studied music theory and ear training for a year, combined with some music lessons, would at the end of that process have a completely different reaction to classical music (assuming they did it all by choice and weren’t forced into it by parents).
Mightn’t that just be because those courses are specifically to teach appreciation of those kinds of music? I expect it’s probably possible to teach people who don’t like rap, or country, to appreciate those genres; but because rap and country don’t fit the shallow sense of high culture, no one is motivated to learn to appreciate them if they don’t already. There is very little net benefit to learning to appreciate a new kind of music—there is abundant music in most genres, and one can easily fill one’s ears with whatever one can most readily enjoy, so you probably don’t get more total enjoyment from music by adding to your enjoyed genres. In the case of classical music, the benefit of learning to like it isn’t really in the form of enjoyment of classical music; it’s in the form of getting to sincerely claim to like classical music, and no longer being left out when highly cultured people discuss classical music.
That argument only works if we aren’t allowed to enjoy novelty.
We can still enjoy novelty! For instance, I have a near-perfect track record of liking show tunes. There’s lots. I can get a steady supply of novelty, supplementing older musicals with the new ones that come out every year and the other sorts of music I like. I don’t need to learn to appreciate entire new genres to do it. Unless you mean that appreciating a new genre is a qualitatively different form of novelty? But then learning to appreciate the new genre is self-defeating. By the time you’ve learned to like it, you’ve already been exposed to lots of it and it’s no longer new.
Do you actually feel this aversion? Because it’s so… foreign to me. Learning to enjoy a new genre of music is always a fascinating discovery. I hear a curious snippet somewhere and go hmmm, gotta investigate deeper, then 24 hours later I’m swimming in the stuff, following connections, reading and listening… sort of like this (warning, that site is like crack for the right kind of person.)
It’s not an aversion. If I had nothing better to do, or had a terrible time finding anything new to listen to, I’d be okay with learning about and learning to appreciate classical music. But as it happens, new, immediately fun music enters my life at a pretty satisfactory rate. I added a new artist to my library just yesterday because my roommate played his CD in the car on the way to the grocery store and it sounded neat. There’s no reason for me to spend extra time on music that doesn’t promptly catch my ear, when I can just hit up friends for personalized recommendations, cruise Pandora, and keep up with the artists I already enjoy—unless I feel like succumbing to the status signals that make classical different from other music!
How would you know this given your admittedly limited experience with classical music?
Speaking for myself, there is lots of music that I love listening too, in many different genres, but nothing else has such power to move me as classical music as its best does—for example —the Confutatis from Mozart’s Requiem, or the Bach d-minor Chaccone, or in a lighter vein that I think anybody can appreciate and feel moved by, Paganiniani or the vitali chaconne.
I love lots of popular music, and probably listen to popular music about as much as I do classical, but there is a certain kind of ecstatic—almost mystical—experience that some classical music triggers that I’ve never gotten with popular music.
Okay—so you get special, unique value from classical. Meanwhile, I get special, unique value from Phantom of the Opera. Why should I think that learning to like classical music is more worth my time—given that I’m now left bored by most classical, or think of it as pleasant background noise—than pirating more Andrew Lloyd Weber?
I’m not so much arguing for learning to like classical music as for learning to understand classical music. I think most people would enjoy it more if they had greater understanding. Classical music is especially rewarding with greater appreciation/understanding, and especially difficult to enjoy with less appreciation/understanding. Perhaps an analogy will convey my point better.
You write fiction, yes? Have you ever studied creative writing, taken a class, read a book on creative writing? Have you ever had an English class with a skilled and passionate teacher that involved analysis of texts that you gained more and more appreciation for after really careful reading and study? Do you feel that the process of becoming a better writer and/or learning to analyze fiction has increased your appreciation and enjoyment of fiction? Most people find that going through those sorts of processes results in much greater enjoyment and appreciation, and they are also able to enjoy fiction that they formerly would have found boring. I think the process is the same for classical music (and jazz as well, for that matter [it’s true of any art/music/etc., but to different degrees]).
Expecting to either just “like it” or “find it boring” and thinking of it as being just another genre like rock or pop is like approaching Dostoevsky with the same background/expectations/skills/patience as you would a Tom Clancy novel. The fact that Dostoevsky is more difficult than Clancy, that most people find Dostoevsky boring and Clancy (or an equivalent easy read) engaging, doesn’t mean that it’s just a matter of taste which you happen to enjoy more. Some things require considerable experience and skill before it is possible to have an informed judgment about them: the literature classics, for example, and classical music.
As for whether it’s worth anybody’s while to do so, that’s an individual choice.
Yes. No. No. No.
Hell no. I have a completely unbroken track record of hating every single book that I have ever read for the first time as a class assignment, and have never found that a book I already liked was improved by this kind of dissection.
Not one bit! I have mostly become a better writer by learning related skills (I was allowed to make up my own second major in undergrad, and therefore literally have a degree in worldbuilding), practicing, and emulating the good parts of what I read. I now have to turn off my critical faculties entirely to enjoy any works of fiction at all, even those that are overall very good, because detecting small flaws in their settings, characterization, handling of social issues, dialogue, use of artistic license, etc. will throw off my ability to not fling the book at a wall. Works that aren’t overall good turn on said critical faculty in spite of my best efforts. I can barely have a conversation about a work of fiction anymore without starting to hate it unless I’m just having a completely content-free squee session with an equally enthusiastic friend!
I guess I’m a mutant?
Although I have never read an entire Dostoevsky novel (my reading list is enormous and I haven’t gotten around to it), I have really liked the excerpts I’ve read—immediately, without having to work for it. This is why I plan to read more of his stuff when I get around to it. I’ve never tried any Tom Clancy. Is he worth reading?
Maybe this is just my idiosyncrasy, but I think making the reader work hard when this isn’t absolutely necessary—in fiction, nonfiction, or anything else—is a failure of clarity, not a masterstroke of subtlety. This isn’t to say that you can’t still have a good work that makes the reader do some digging to find all the content, but that’s true of any flaw—you can also have a good work with a kinda stupid premise, or with a cardboard secondary character, or that completely omits female characters for no good reason, or has any of a myriad of bad but not absolutely damning awfulnesses.
I’ve preferred classical music over other genres since preschool. I think that’s sufficient to rule out any explanation of my tastes involving signaling, because a preschooler’s appreciation of classical music signals nothing to other preschoolers. Neither of my parents was particularly into classical music, so I wasn’t reflecting any expectation of theirs either. I’m in agreement with anonym about the value of music education: it has heightened my enjoyment and appreciation of all music: classical especially, but pretty much everything else as well, other than maybe hip-hop.
However, I also agree with you about literature. Every English class that I had to take in middle school through college completely destroyed my ability to enjoy the subject under study for years to come. I used to love Michener until I had to write an essay about his work during my junior year of high school; I haven’t been able to face him since. I don’t think this contrast reveals anything unusual about my psyche; rather I think it means that the comparison of English education to music education is apples-to-oranges.
I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that the only reason anyone would like classical music would be because of signaling. If you liked it as a preschooler, it seems to me that’s just your taste, and I’d neither privilege it nor scorn it compared to the taste of someone who, in preschool, liked any other kind of music. I think that the only reason to devote time and energy to learning to like classical music when you don’t already—which I doubt you did in preschool—is for signaling purposes.
Wait, the only reason? Really? I’ll certainly admit it’s a pretty common reason.
Okay, you’re right, that was an overstatement. There could be boredom, or course requirements, or curiosity, or things like that.
What about the desire to make an “aesthetic investment”—that is, to put in some work upfront in order to reap the rewards of a high-quality experience later on? (Why, I wonder, are people so quick to dismiss the possibility of such rewards?)
As regards signaling as a “common” motivation: maybe this works in continental Europe, or in certain idiosyncratic communities where this kind of music enjoys social prestige. In the mainstream of American society, however, an interest in art music buys you little to no status (particularly as compared with a corresponding interest in similarly elevated forms of other arts, such as literature or painting). To be a devotee of this kind of music is to be a nerd of one of the worst kinds. (It’s even considered un-American: witness Bill Clinton’s remark that “Jazz is America’s classical music”.)
You know the cultural asymmetry that C.P. Snow famously described, wherein “well-rounded” educated people are expected to know about more about the humanities than the sciences? Well, it’s dwarfed into insignificance by the asymmetry that exists between what “cultured” people are expected to know about music versus what they are expected to know about other arts.
So be extra cautious when positing status-signaling explanations for the behavior of art music devotees, particularly in America.
I’ve also wondered about the implicit assumption lots of people have that if music were going to yield extreme degrees of pleasure for them, then it would do so without much effort on their part and in quick order. I’ve also noticed the assumption you touch on that because all non-deaf people have a pair of working ears and have known how to use them since childhood, they are all equally capable of judging different types of music and recognizing that there they’re basically all the same, like different flavors of ice cream.
I think you’re spot on about classical music and status in America, at least in my neck of the woods. I work at a well-known company in the SF bay area that has a lot of very smart and very well-educated people, and it would be embarrassing for me to admit at work that Bach is my favorite musician or that classical music is my favorite music. It would be viewed as pathetically old-fashioned and uncool.
ETA: I think the status thing with regard to classical music in the SF area is generational. I’m in my thirties. If I and my peers were a generation older, then I think classical music would be regarded more positively and be less stigmatized. When I go to a classical music event, I see mostly people who are at least a generation older than me. In my workplace, the median age is probably something like 28-34, so the classical music listeners are of my peers’ parents’ generation. To be honest, I completely agree with the accusations of signaling for the vast majority of people you see at classical music events around here. Few of the (mostly older) people I see at concerts seem like they’re there for the music—they spend their time dozing off, fidgeting with things, people gazing and being gazed at, counting the minutes till intermission and then rushing out at the end without wanting to hear the encores. People my age and younger at concerts seem much more sincere, even if there are so few of them.
Here’s a couple more: desire to learn an instrument (because training often uses mainly classical repertoire), or the recommendation of someone trusted. One could argue the latter is about status, but I don’t think it always is.
Those are reasons too—good ones, even. And it probably depends on the motivation behind the recommendation whether it’s about status.
Maybe I’m the mutant. I know that your reaction is very common, but I attribute it to either the result of bad teaching and/or students being forced against their will to do something that they will therefore be very likely to hate. When I have been in classes with smart, passionate teachers, and the students were there because they were genuinely curious and not to fill a requirement, I’ve seen lots of minds get turned on in a way that extended past the end of the course and positively affected their enjoyment afterwards. I’ve also recommended books like Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers to adult friends that are avid readers and have had only positive feedback, some of it of the ‘profoundly changed the way I read for the better’ variety.
I don’t think very many people would disagree with you on that as a general principle. I certainly don’t. Not all difficulty is gratuitous though.
I’ve never taken an English or literature class voluntarily—it’s one of many subjects that I was permanently turned off to in high school and was glad to be rid of after I finished my gen ed requirements in undergrad. (Except English in the sense of fine points of grammar, vocabulary, etc. which I’ve reclassified as “linguistics” to be comfortable with it.) So maybe I was badly taught. But except for the part where I suffered during required English/literature classes and (maybe) developed a block about a handful of books that I might have liked if I’d run into them on my own, I don’t think I’m badly off for not having this sophisticated level of appreciation—given how I react when I exercise what artistic discernment I do have, and given how much fiction I find and enjoy without the help of literature instruction.
Not all difficulty is gratuitous at all! There are plenty of bits of content that would lose their impact if stated directly, for instance. But I think a large portion of the difficulty that is found in so-called classic literature is gratuitous.
I suggest self-study on the TV Tropes Wiki. ;)
Oh, for the love of chocolate-covered strawberries, never again. I spent a week in that sinkhole and am now mostly inoculated—I’ve read the majority of pages that catch my eye on a casual scan and don’t feel compelled to re-read them.
Music theory, no, but the others, yes. (I wouldn’t think music theory would increase classical appreciation more than other genres, though.)
Disagree. Whatever the genre, more variety means listening is less tiring (because less monotonous) and, on the whole, more edifying. Each genre is enjoyed differently, and stimulates different parts of the mind. And in the specific case of classical music, on the theory that it is deeper and richer than other music (in the same way that set theory is deeper and richer than propositional logic, or Netflix is deeper and richer than Blockbuster) the limit of enjoyment is actually higher.
I took most of a year of AP music theory in high school (dropped out of it because I was being picked on) and never got the impression that we were learning about anything but archaic, old rules of music followed by dead composers. That, and how to take musical dictation, but none of the examples were contemporary. Was my music theory teacher just incompetent? Did I miss the generally applicable parts by leaving the class early?
And while having a variety of music is definitely good, there’s plenty of variety within a genre! It doesn’t seem obvious to me that you can get more valuable variety per ounce of effort by taking classes to learn to appreciate more genres than you can by spending time on Pandora.
I don’t know how I missed this comment at the time, but it demands a reply.
Although it’s difficult for me to mentally organize such a reply, because I simultaneously believe all of the following:
You probably were learning “old rules of music followed by dead composers.”
That doesn’t constitute music theory.
Your teacher’s incompetence was likely not personal, but inherited from the discipline of “music theory” as a whole, which in my opinion has a far from satisfactory understanding of its own subject matter.
However, your objections to the class you took are not necessarily related to this criticism of mine; in particular, the fact that that doesn’t constitute music theory has nothing to do with whether certain composers happen to be dead or alive.
There was probably considerable value in the curriculum they were trying to teach you, both for what it really was (music history; familiarization with art music as a pursuit, distinct from popular music) and as an indirect, nonexplicit (and frankly inefficient) way of teaching music theory (its traditional purpose).
Hence your attitude is probably misguided, even though I wish you had been taught differently; in effect, you’re “right for the wrong reasons”.
Musical dictation, though it may have seemed to you like merely one particular topic on the syllabus, really is the shibboleth for demonstrating understanding of music theory.
You would not want examples from contemporary art music in your first introduction to musical dictation. The reason the examples were old is the same reason the examples in your math classes were old, rather than being drawn from contemporary journals.
What you were really complaining about, probably, was that none of the examples were popular. (I really, really hate when people equate “contemporary” with “popular”!)
However, as I mentioned above, it is among the purposes of such a course to familiarize the student with the pursuit of art music, as opposed to popular music (with which they are likely to be familiar already).
In any case, conventional wisdom to the contrary, there aren’t “separate magisteria” of music theory; the skill of musical dictation is what it is, and it doesn’t matter exactly where the examples were drawn from, so long as they are of the appropriate level of complexity for the student’s level. (Otherwise the theory being used is wrong.)
I’m sorry that the course didn’t communicate this to you, but there exists considerably more intellectual depth to the pursuit of music—in particular art music—than you are likely to have encountered just by living in the general culture, “spending time on Pandora”, and the like.
Please bear these points in mind—in particular, the existence of people like me, who regard the creation of art music as an academic pursuit comparable in sophistication to science or philosophy—when assessing the implications of your own experience in the domain of music.
What readings and activities would you recommend to someone interested in becoming able to compose music, as opposed to learning how to play any particular instrument?
Reading: An Introduction to Tonal Theory by Peter Westergaard.
Activity: Study scores. Copy them out by hand. (This is actually the traditional method of learning composition, believe it or not; it might be compared to tracing drawings in visual art). Make simplified versions (e.g. write out the “main line”, then “main two lines”, etc.). Make analyses of works as in Westergaard. And, above all: attempt to compose, and learn by trial and error.
Feel free to inquire further.
Thanks!
Oh man I miss Pandora since they stopped streaming to the UK. :(
On topic: I had quite a few years of music lessons (though I wasn’t really much good) and some musical theory, which I really enjoyed. And I do quite like listening to classical music in a vague sort of way, but I wouldn’t say I have an “appreciation” for it: it’s not as though I can pick out features or analyse it or anything. So am I appreciating it without a tuned ear, or am I just unaware of the work my bit of theoretical knowledge is doing behind the scenes?
I’d say appreciation is really just a synonym for enjoyment. You can be a world-class performer without knowing any theory at all.
Actually, I think appreciation and enjoyment are related but not symonyms. Enjoyment is visceral and emotional, it denotes the sheer pleasure of the experience. Appreciation implies recognition of the elements of the music, why those particular elements were chosen, how they might have been different, etc., as well as the extra enjoyment that comes about as a result of that appreciation. Not that I’m trying to say that’s what everybody means by the terms, but that’s how I think of them and how I’ve heard some other people talk about them.
My music theory course only had a slight emphasis on classical music. (Mainly because classical music is more analyzable with theory, I guess.) Probably your textbook was just old or inferior. But I got very little out of the course anyway.
I’m not suggesting that it’s necessarily worth the effort to increase one’s appreciation of classical music, given the opportunity cost. (I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to appreciate Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Hegel or Kant or Foucault or Derrida. Or wine, for that matter.) But the easiest way would probably be to pick a CD with some good classical music on it and listen to it many times through until you start to understand it musically. Courses are likely overkill. When I first started learning Bach (around the age of 10) it made no musical sense to me at all. I forget how long until I started to understand it, so I don’t know how long you’d have to listen to start to get it. Maybe too long to bother.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm no. Doubt there’s a good way to resolve this disagreement.
As for learning if coming to it as an adult, I’d recommend resources like Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (and any of his many writings on music, such as The Joy of Music), as well as Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and works of that nature.
The key point in my opinion is that you have to learn to hear more in the music, to be able to hear and follow the different voices in a fugue, or recognize the development of a theme in a sonata allegro form, and this sort of ability only comes about through some offline study and intellectual training that is then applied when listening to music and the knowledge really comes alive.
I don’t get much enjoyment in consciously recognizing long-horizon forms or themes, although I do enjoy many pieces that heavily rely on them, e.g. Liszt’s Sonata in b
I probably lack perspective since I was a decent classical pianist in my youth, but I don’t feel like any formal study is necessary to get a full pleasure-soup response to great classical music. Also, tastes vary; I don’t enjoy a lot of highly regarded classical music (but there are at least a few hundred hours that are really great for me). I doubt my favorite hundred hours are the same as anyone else’s.
Giving up either all music before 1950 or all after would be easy; I’d keep 1950- since there are still many good contemporary “classical” composers crowded out by the higher-status old masters.
Well, I like Bach most of all, and I find that as I’ve learned to hear more, sometimes by following along with a score and doing a bit of musical analysis and kind of hacking away at the piano and butchering parts of the works, I enjoy them more and get more from them. Sometimes it seems that the enjoyment is proportional to how much of it I can keep in mind at the time as I’m listening, how much I can pay attention to (both of which are facilitated through knowledge of the work), as well as how much the distinction between me and the experience disappears and I lose the sense of being a person listening to the music. I enjoy having a kind of high-level cognitive/emotional/musical blueprint of the work as a whole and feeling how the moment relates to the whole, knowing where it’s going and remembering where it came from. Just as we can have a greater appreciation for a moment or portion in the life of a historical figure or in a movie by thinking about the future consequences that we’re aware of, I think we can have the same kinds of reactions to music where the pieces mean more as a whole than as just the sum of the parts, and on multiple levels. I don’t hear that much in Bach relative to what a great and well-studied performer of Bach would, but I hear more than I used to, and far more than I did before I had studied music at all. I think it is probably a matter of personality though, and that many would find my approach would detract from their experience.
Puts me in mind of this quote from Pratchett’s Soul Music:
I wonder if anyone does this with music they’ve never heard played before?
Glenn Gould was said to sometimes analyze and completely memorize works from the sheet music alone before playing them at the piano. His father recalled an instance of him learning an entire concerto from the score alone and then playing it from memory the first time, and Bruno Monsaingeon saw him play an entire movement from memory of a Mendelssohn string quartet after hearing it once on the radio (quoted in Bazzana’s book on Gould).
That pales in comparison though to the fourteen-year-old Mozart transcribing from memory after once hearing the secret Miserere of Allegri, a dense polyphonic work that was performed only in the Sistine Chapel and was forbidden by the Vatican to be transcribed or reproduced under penalty of excommunication.
I sometimes found piles of sheet music sitting around in my high school’s music room, and I’d read them once in a while.
I’m by no means an expert at the piano, but I’m probably halfway there, and I can without too much trouble get the general gist of complex unfamiliar piano music, and I can easily read simple music. I’d say it’s pretty much analogous to the ability of expert chess players to play blindfolded, which is definitely a well-attested ability. (The record for simultaneous blindfold matches is around 50, played by Janos Flesch in Budapest in 1960.)
Perhaps there are some genres with more or less variety than others? Or we’re counting genres differently?
I think music theory—including ear training—would disproportionately increase classical appreciation (but would also improve appreciation for other forms too). The reason is simple: classical music is more complex musically, so it rewards a more discriminating ear and a richer sense of harmony, counterpoint, etc.
There’s a lot of popular music that I love and think is very interesting musically, harmonically, etc., but classical music is usually so much deeper and requires much more skill and musical knowledge to create (and also to appreciation). If you want to succeed in the classical world, as a performer or composer, you have to start by the age of 6, you have to be supremely talented, you have to work obsessively until you are accepted into a good conservatory, and then work even harder still. Your entire life is basically nothing but music from a very early age. That was true of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., and it is still true today. The situation with popular music is completely different. You can pick it up as an adult, and if you’re talented, you might still have a successful career. You can pick it up as a teenager, and within a few years have developed enough musically to be on par with almost any other popular band. It seems pretty clear that something that takes decades of study and practice (and involves study of hundreds of years of music history) is going to involve more skill (and make more use of skills acquired) than something that can be achieved in years of study and practice, and when the composer is relying on decades of study and their intimate knowledge of hundreds of years of changes in music theory, counterpoint etc., it is definitely going to take some work on the part of a listener to do more than skim the surface in terms of enjoyment and appreciation.
This sounds like a really terrible analogy; if anything, it ought to prove the opposite, that rap could beat classical since rap has access to all the instruments and styles classical does (including, let’s not forget, the human voice which modern classical usually shuns) and much more (electronica?). So rap is more general than classical like set theory is more general than propositional logic. Or something.
What on Earth are you talking about? Seriously, what data is generating this impression in your mind?
Same question. Where did you get the impression that electronic media aren’t …central to the recent history of art music?
The fundamental difference between art music and popular music (including rap) is nothing so superficial as instrumentation. It’s complexity of musical structure. Art music is structurally more complex than popular music; just as “art”/”research” X is structurally more complex than “popular” X, for all X.
(By the way, that’s different from what makes something art music vs. popular music. That has to do with memetic lineage. An individual work of art music could happen to be less complex than an individual work of popular music. But the differing lineages differ statistically as described here.)
Sunday Baroque on NPR.
Is… is this not a good source of modern preferences in classical music?
Also, I feel that we are arguing in difference ways about complexity. I’m thinking in terms of total possibilities (eg. there are only so many 5 minute pieces expressible with 88 keys or whatever), but you seem to have some sort of entropy measure in mind.
I completely misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about actual modern music, not modern preferences in Baroque music. (You did say “modern classical”.)
For the record, there is an abundance of vocal music from the Baroque period; I don’t know how much of it is played on NPR.
Yes on the latter point. As for the former, I don’t understand what you mean. Are you saying something like “there are fewer possible art compositions than rap songs, because art music is limited to 5-minute piano pieces”? That would be absurd, but I can’t come up with another meaning.
What is absurd about it? It seems pretty apparent to me that rap can generate nearly-arbitrary sounds within the space of humanly-perceivable sounds, while Baroque/classical/classical-style music is limited to the smaller set of what pianos & flutes & etc. can generate.
You are severely underinformed.
This is obviously a matter of taste. I really like Ode to Joy, but that’s the only old music that has a ghost of a chance of competing for my affections on a par with my favorite show tunes or other more recent selections. If you like a lot of old music and not a lot of new music, it just means that you a) have common tastes with people who were rich music patrons in the Golden Age of your choice, or b) you’re succumbing to some signaling effect having to do with the perceived absolute quality of old dead white musicians’ work. If there is something like objective musical quality out there (which is a matter of open debate in aesthetics), it’s probably very fuzzy. Maybe Ode to Joy is objectively better than Sk8er Boi, but the jury is out and they don’t seem inclined to come back soon.
Obviously it’s a matter of taste, yes. (And I do think about the signaling effects of my musical tastes from time to time; it is rather an interesting topic.) I was only putting forth my “no good music has been written since the death of Gershwin”* opinion to contrast with taw’s “no good music was written before 1975″ opinion, in order to produce a synthesis that would support gwern’s original contention that enough art now exists that we needn’t subsidize more of it.
*not actually my opinion, but close
I really like Mozart, but I like a lot of techno, and some industrial and goth bands just about as much (it depends a bit on my mood). And for that matter I like a lot of 1940s and 50s big band music, country and western, and classic rock, when I’m in the right mood.
For me, and as far as I can tell vast majority of other people, they’re just not terribly enjoyable.