> With the advent of records and radio broadcasts that sounded half-way decent, not only did you not have to go to a theater to hear orchestra music, you could listen to it all day long.
Schoenberg writes in one of his essays, that the general audience at an orchestra concert in Vienna in the late 19th century, had a fairly sophisticated set of expectations about music -- they understood sonata form, e.g. and could follow along, could recall and even sing or whistle the themes a few days later.
Did radio and recordings change this because now you don't have to listen quite as closely -- rewind or wait for the next broadcast? Or does it simply become something you don't really listen to at all, but rather take as a drug to get ready for the night out or get into a work groove? I don't deny my bias towards listening to music, nor do I reject other modalities.
A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Presumably most working musicians were more interested in continuing with the keyboard-ready music they have been playing their entire lives, so here the technology clearly followed.
On the other hand, I've wondered whether the duration of popular music songs was pegged to 2-3 minutes by convention due to an early popular record format that could support 2-3 minutes a side. I'm sure someone's written convincingly one way or the other on the matter, but I don't know, so take it with a grain of salt.
BTW, hadn't seen that "commercial" for the second Viennese school and got a kick out of it. Has anyone done the same schtick for be-bop? (Love them both)
EDIT: just recalling the other half of that MIDI critique -- it was commercial interest in following a market that lead to the technology, rather than being artistically-driven à la a Verèse.
>Beethoven wrote music from the 17th-18th century, and Brahms in the 18th. That's essentially modern music, when the comparison is with the 11th century. It's recorded on paper, and we can reproduce it easily.
Totally wrong. It wasn't recorded electronically, and you needed a whole orchestra of highly skilled musicians to reproduce it. Your average guy on the street in 1885 did not have this. Your average guy on the street in 1985, however, could just turn on his Sony Walkman and listen to a cassette tape of whatever music he wanted to, or to FM radio. This makes the music industry entirely different. The ability to record sound and play it back on a mechanical (or electronic) device without any musicians changed everything, and brought music to the masses in a way they never had access to it before. Before this, the average person either had to pay to attend a concert (probably not a frequent occurrence, just like attending concerts isn't exactly a daily activity for people today), or maybe he had his own (not very high-end) instrument and tried to play some things by himself or with some friends. That's an entirely different culture than one where people can listen to professional musicians play music at almost any time or place thanks to stereos, headphones, etc.
> Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.
You are grossly underestimating the effect that technology had on music. Rite of Spring couldn't have been performed until the 20th century so there was no point in writing it.
Bach's children and Mozart (mid 1700's) were the first products of music pedagogy. Paper didn't become common until the 1800's. Interchangeable parts and factory practices made musical instruments much more consistent and available in the late 1800's.
All of this means that the average orchestral musician improved dramatically in capability over the course of less than 200 years.
> When you listen popular music on a timeline (70s, 80s, ...), you can at the same time see to the evolution of synthesizers and music production software.
I wonder how much of this is just due to taste or lack of familiarity? Not that you're wrong but for whatever reason I actually feel like classical music has a much greater variation of sound than pop music.
I'm curious whether you feel like there's a lack of diversity among these pieces (which happen to be a few of my favorites =)
I admit though that I probably am biased, because frankly I enjoy the sounds of the instruments very much. If anything I suspect that having people listen to recorded music probably makes them less likely to appreciate classical music.
> Chopin, Liszt, and Beethoven were absolutely writing to put bread on the table, and absolutely did not play to the score as written.
Is whether or not you play the score as written an issue? How do we even know this about composers that predate recording technology?
I'm not wondering if maybe the advent of recording technology might be the source of the modern distinction between classical, pop and jazz.
Something that struck me from the bit you quoted from the article:
> > In general, a classical composer uses music to express his deepest emotions and experiences.
I think that might actually be more true of some forms of jazz and pop. Much classical music is very much an intellectual exercise, whereas blues and rock tend to be far more emotional. But again this varies wildly within each genre. Hardly a meaningful distinction.
There's a massive difference between pre-20th century classical music, which was very much the pop music of its day, and modern classical music, which is often far less accessible and more elitist. (Though there are still many beautiful and accessible modern classical pieces. Interestingly, many draw inspiration from jazz.)
> Sometimes it’s music, like a full orchestral score
For me it's usually something like a full orchestra. I assume that is because our brains are already trained on the erratic arrangements and multitude of different sounds of a real orchestra - it pattern matches the noise better than say smooth jazz.
> Is whether or not you play the score as written an issue?
It's a question discussed extensively in the essay, and one that the essay sees (ahistorically, but perhaps descriptively true in modern practice) as defining the distinction between classical and jazz.
> How do we even know this about composers that predate recording technology?
Accounts from people who saw multiple performances, evidence of composers reworking written pieces after experimenting during performance, composers' own diaries...
> I think that might actually be more true of some forms of jazz and pop. Much classical music is very much an intellectual exercise, whereas blues and rock tend to be far more emotional. But again this varies wildly within each genre. Hardly a meaningful distinction.
Yeah, agreed. Indeed I'd say pop often expresses the emotions that are most fundamental and deeply held (which by the same token are often the simplest and clearest).
>>> ... the productivity of classical music performance has not increased
Maybe it has, or maybe wages are not the same, or it's not really the same product. I'm a jazz musician, and my gig pay has stayed steady at about $100/night for 40 years, though my skill has improved. A lot of people who would have been classical musicians during the classical period are now working as church musicians for peanuts, or playing for free. Musicians playing in front of crowds of thousands didn't exist during the classical period -- the instruments weren't loud enough yet. And "classical" music has gotten harder to play.
The article mentions teachers. My teacher taught me BASIC. Today's teacher teaches Python, which is considerably more productive and valuable. College is increasingly being taught by adjuncts.
Doctors and nurses. A century ago they mostly poisoned people. Today, my primary care clinic has a "doctor" who oversees multiple nurse-practitioners and nurses, and who I see only once a year.
> I always wondered why musicians keep up with the
> conventional musical notation system, and haven't come
> up with something better (maybe a job for a HNer?).
Before starting down that path, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the wide range of music notations that already exist and continue to be used, and then the ridiculously varying plethora of failed alternative music notations that have been invented over the centuries, and why they failed to see wider adoption.
And, of course, it's fascinating to study the evolution of the existing "standard" music notation, and see the changes that have been adopted, and the ones that weren't. For all its apparent stasis, it has definitely evolved over the centuries, in response to the changing needs of musicians.
> The way people (like me) listen to classical music is different from the way they listen to other kinds of music. For example, I might want to listen to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 12. This has four movements, and I want the player to play from movement 1 through movement 4 once I touch the play button. This is very different from wanting to play (say) Price Tag by Jessie J which is one track.
How is this any different from listening to an album or any other logical grouping of tracks with an order?
>This is neat, of course. Yet, being classically trained myself and a software engineer, both for 30 years, I have yet to find an alternative music notation system that would make me proclaim I would use it.
Emm, this is not an "alternative music notation system" meant for musicians to read music in.
It's an entry method for writing MIDI (and therefore alo getting standard notation output).
>Someone more qualified on the subject can probably explain why it is our brains have evolved to be "tuned" for notation.
They haven't. You're just used to it. Tons of self-tought musicians can't handle it, even though they're virtuoso
players on their own.
Besides, the brain doesn't "evolve" in the Darwinian sense in the span of mere centuries that we have had our modern music notation. It takes tens of thousands of years for something like that -- and only if reading notation provides any evolutionary benefit to not reading it.
> but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.
Conducting an orchestra is an important role but the music is mostly a result of first of all the composer, and then the conductor / arranger's interpretation as well as the skill of the musicians. I really don't see the similarity to a human input of "GNU license, sad, jazzy." The resolution is just way too rough.
In fact, imagine comparing the experience of reading Snow Crash, to reading the sentence, "Cyberpunk story with sci fi elements, VR universe, pizza delivery guy with samurai sword."
I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea.
One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example:
>Also, I think people would have heard lots of music. Pubs in Britain used to have pianos, Irish pubs are known for having musicians, folk dancing was common, etc.
How often did these pub-goers hear Brahms or Vivaldi? Probably never. They heard whatever music that local musicians played, or whatever they figured out how to play as amateurs, and that was about it. They didn't have companies finding talented musicians in different regions, countries, or continents and marketing them, recording their music, and making it available for them to buy a copy so they could listen to it while driving to work.
> Other genres like classical are different though -- a 25-minute long symphonic movement obviously takes ~5x as much work to both write and record than a 5-minute one.
This makes sense. Every time I listen to 4’33” I am moved to tears and the thought of losing even a few seconds of that composition is abhorrent.
It has never been clear to me what the goal of home playback is supposed to be.
Let's simplify from a full orchestra to just a solo piano. Is the goal
1. to sound like it would if that piano was being played in my living room, or
2. to sound like what I'd have heard if I was there in the concert hall sitting in a good seat when the recording was made, or
3. to sound like what it would sound like if a replica of my living room was built inside the concert hall but with walls that do not transmit sound, with my speakers replaced by speaker-sized holes in the wall behind where the speakers normally sit, and I was sitting in that replica living room during the concert?
> Are you doubting the ability of the model trained on thousands of classical compositions to reproduce a fully structured classical piece that sounds well and has a few leitmotifs?
Yes, I am. It turns out to be immensely difficult to do basic compositional tricks, like writing acceptably good classical counterpoint, or harmonising simple chorales.
Writing a full scale piece is a whole other level of difficulty. Writing a full scale piece that's going to be played over and over is a level or two beyond that.
David Cope's EMI is probably the state of the art:
Listen to the Bach and Chopin. If you know anything about music you can hear that they sound like what they are: randomised cut and paste mash-ups of elaboration techniques and motifs that lack the musical narrative logic that the original composers were so good at.
Basically they're competent but mediocre pastiche, glued together out of little bits and pieces, lacking any overall form or drive.
Now - you're supposed to learn this stuff at composition school, and getting a computer to do it to this level is certainly an achievement.
But it's still some way short of being interesting and memorable music.
I don't think pop is any easier. E.g. trance and progressive house sound totally formulaic - until you try to copy them, and realise that getting something good is harder than it sounds.
So no - it's in no way a trivial problem. And a naive Markov approach is in no way a good enough answer.
>Is there no value to listening to a pianist play Moonlight Sonata live?
There is no value to it. Some claim that listening to music is enlightening. If that is so one can listen with headphones. And in fact most people do. Yet I do not beleive music is enlightening; it is just another primitive desire. If going to to a live concert truly changes people for the better then we can say it has value. But I believe it is really just pretentiousness, and the few who truly feel that they have gotten any benefit beyond the pleasure of the music are caught up in a mawkish placebo. There is no difference between classical music and pop music in terms of value, and in fact the latter is more popular (hence the name). And one can read in the comments of music videos on youtube that the isteners get goosebumps the same as the wasteful ticket buyer, listening to "inferior" and "uncultured" music on cheap earbuds. Only intellectually stimulating forms of entertainment have any chance of holding true value.
>The idea that “we already have enough art” seems folly and absurdly reductionist.
Please explain why. is the last 400 years of art too "old" for you to consume? Has it expired? At this point, consuming a given art is just at the expense of not consuming another. I can chage my statement to "only really good new art has value, because it has to compete with the old art and win." But as I implied earlier I don't think art has value to begin with. And I believe this is evidenced by the collapse of academic art, after which "art" loses all pretexts and becomes pure pretentiousness.
>I’m sure we can find people who conversely say we already have enough technology.
What do you mean? Technology is a tool, not a type of entertainment. Using a computer for a cash register only needs RPi level of performance. Using a computer as a web server or to run some complex calculation needs more performance. And there are uses of technology that have no value, such as video games. Although here at least any use of technology drives that technology to improve. For example games made GPUs a thing and supported nVidea for many years. Now GPUs are used to fold protiens. But the act of playing a video game has no value.
Schoenberg writes in one of his essays, that the general audience at an orchestra concert in Vienna in the late 19th century, had a fairly sophisticated set of expectations about music -- they understood sonata form, e.g. and could follow along, could recall and even sing or whistle the themes a few days later.
Did radio and recordings change this because now you don't have to listen quite as closely -- rewind or wait for the next broadcast? Or does it simply become something you don't really listen to at all, but rather take as a drug to get ready for the night out or get into a work groove? I don't deny my bias towards listening to music, nor do I reject other modalities.
A critique of MIDI is that is is optimized for keyboard instrument input with the result that the sort of music you are funneled to make with MIDI is the sort than can be rendered by keyboard. Presumably most working musicians were more interested in continuing with the keyboard-ready music they have been playing their entire lives, so here the technology clearly followed.
On the other hand, I've wondered whether the duration of popular music songs was pegged to 2-3 minutes by convention due to an early popular record format that could support 2-3 minutes a side. I'm sure someone's written convincingly one way or the other on the matter, but I don't know, so take it with a grain of salt.
BTW, hadn't seen that "commercial" for the second Viennese school and got a kick out of it. Has anyone done the same schtick for be-bop? (Love them both)
EDIT: just recalling the other half of that MIDI critique -- it was commercial interest in following a market that lead to the technology, rather than being artistically-driven à la a Verèse.
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