musical followup

[calimac]

In response to my previous post, kip_w suggested that one reason rock songs don't aspire to the sophistication of classical is that they're "designed for airplay" - for instance, "the dynamics are mostly at a single level."

That's certainly true enough. Yet a lot of art rock songs don't exist at a single dynamic level and probably weren't designed primarily for airplay. And some songs which do have that restriction - especially by the Beatles - overcome it, the same way that the finest music for string quartets overcomes the restriction of tone color imposed by being for a single family of instruments. (It's a milestone in one's developing appreciation of classical music when one concludes that string quartets are not always boring.)

Kip also suggests that we should consider a song as a cell, not even so much as a movement, and by "considering an album as a whole, it's possible to get a lot closer to the depth of classical music."

Unfortunately in practice that's exactly the level at which most talented rock musicians fail. Though an album can certainly have great variety in tempo, dynamics, emotional content, etc., I've encountered few if any concept albums or rock operas that have the subtle sense of large-scale structure, expressed through harmonic and motivic language, that one expects of big classical works as a matter of course. I've heard great ten-minute rock songs that hang together that way, but not whole album sides with multiple songs.

I don't believe this is a necessary failing of rock. It could be done, and I'd like to hear it done. Maybe it has been. It's just that in practice the rock music I know doesn't work creatively on that level, whatever its brilliance on shorter scales. It's not alone: a lot of great classical works are miniatures, and many composers specialize in them. A masterpiece by Chopin or Grieg is 2-10 minutes long. They don't do the genius thing at 40-60 as well as Beethoven or Brahms do, and you don't want to hear them try. (And yes, I am thinking of their concertos.)

Going on, fringefaan suggests judging songs by listening to different performances. Again, a wise thought - but to my classically-attuned ears, two different performers doing the same rock song might as well be two different works. (Indeed, in electric folk, which I know best, they tend to use different tunes even when the lyrics are the same.) sturgeonslawyer notes that instrumentation has become "just this side of sacred" in post-Baroque music. That's because of the way it's written, with strongly vertical harmony and much emphasis on tone color. I've heard electronic musicians of the Wendy Carlos school play around with such music, and except for breaking out some piano music (not all) into multiple colors [Chopin yes, Beethoven no], it just doesn't work very well, though it does for Baroque music.

Meanwhile I want to commend sartorias's great screed against the 1950s. She writes of visual ugliness and social conformity, but also of two senses which don't get discussed much when people wax either nostalgic or cynical about old ads: the smell and the feel of things in those days. I remember a little of that, and she's right.

Then there's music. These days any Ken Burns-style documentary on the 50s will be full of sock-hop rock. I loathe the stuff, all of it, and whenever anyone complains about the pop music these days, I just give thanks we're not living in the 50s. In classical music, that was the decade that the serialists took over the academy. But it was the heyday of great musical theatre (My Fair Lady and The Music Man by themselves would prove that), and it was the decade of Tom Lehrer's first two albums. Underneath the serialist radar, a lot of composers were writing great symphonies: Korngold's F#, Arnold's Second, Lilburn's Second, Hovhaness' Second and Fourth, Alwyn's Third, Prokofiev's Seventh, Vaughan Williams's Seventh and Eighth, Shostakovich's Tenth and Eleventh, and Cowell's Eleventh are some of my favorites from that golden decade.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure what your point is here: Some music is good, some is bad, and popularity is not the best way to tell the difference.

All cultures (it seems) produce music/plays/art which are more-or-less driven by the younger generation's desire to really piss off their parents. More generously, everyone needs art which speaks to themselves located in this time and this place, and no one not of that time and place will really ever get it. The latter may not be completely true, but it probably is and there's no question that listeners outside of the culture hear a different song than we do now. Think Carmina Burana.

Our generation (boomers) were the first ones to be able to listen to the same music our parents did. We also hit just the right technological moment: The transistor. The transistor radio meant kids didn't have to listen to the same stuff their parents did. While there were some fairly high quality recordings going back nearly to the beginning of the century, they were very limited up until the 30s and 40s and the 50s ushered in Hi-Fi, and the 60s ushered in Stereo and the 70s ushered in FM stereo. This outbburst of audio technology is unprecedented in human history, and really the next major advance is the recent rise of shared compressed audio (which is an aural step backward as it is a distributed leap forward).

But I digress.

We remember the music of the 50s because we can. There was fine music in the 50s. It was before my time, but I can hear quite a lot of it in pretty good quality. R&B, Harry Partch, Doo-Wop, Chuck Berry, folk music, Alan Lomax recordings and so on and so forth. There was a lot of garbage, but Sturgeon's Law applies. All generations had great music and music that is better forgotten, but for the first time our bad music is still around. And still selling.

Sorry that you don't like "sock hop rock"; I'm not sure what you mean. I'm glad we're not living in the 50s, only because I have so much to choose from that didn't exist then. We Boomers are the first generation that can listen to bad music from 50 years ago, but also have enough good taste to only (well... mainly) listen to the good music.

sartorias' comments are valuable for their personal touch. When entire eras are relegated to a montage in a commercial, it is useful to listen to people who had to live there.

Aside: Like most cultural distinctions, "the 50s" can't be pegged too closely to the calendar years. The beginning of the 50s is either the Post-War era (eg Burl Ives) or the LP or even the rise of the transistor radio; I'm open to suggestion. However, the end of the 50s, musically speaking, was The Beatles. So the 50s includes all three Tom Lehrer albums, The Tokens, Mitch Miller, Lawrence Welk, Ernie Kovacs, etc etc. And, like most cultural distinctions, the line is rather fuzzy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where I said anything about popularity as a key to the quality of music.

A lot of the rest of what you say I don't follow at all either, sorry. Maybe it's very late at night.

Some generations of youth are dominated by rebellion against the elders; some aren't. (The boomers' parents weren't.) And some of us had youths dominated by revulsion against our rebelling peers. I was in my 20s before I listened to rock music at all, and not just because 90% of it was so bad that even Sturgeon would blanch. Time's sorting process has helped me greatly with 60s-70s rock.

But Sturgeon's Law doesn't explain my loathing of 50s rock, which I was too young to know when it was new. It's the stuff that's now being touted as great - Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and so on - that I specifically detest. I do like the music of the great folk boom (and I liked A Mighty Wind, too), but that's not rock. Nor is Harry Partch, a composer who earns my finest accolade, an admiring cry of, "That's weird!"

Tom Lehrer's third album was released in 1965. Of course some of the songs were written earlier. If that's the Fifties by your standards ... shrug. I chose the calendar decade to discuss so there'd be no subjective question about definition of the era.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure where I said anything about popularity as a key to the quality of music.

You didn't, you said the opposite, and I was trying to put your point into my own words for clarity (or at least as a check to see if I understood what you were talking about).

Boomer's parent's music wasn't dominated by rebellion, but they did bring back a lot from WWII that wasn't part of their parent's worldview. Their parents were more accepting of this than some generations due to the same thing happening to them in WWI: "How you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Par-eee!" But their music did have rebellious streaks, with the controversies about Jitterbug and jazz in general. William Bennett could be whining about the moral collapse of the 30s and 40s with much the same language as his finger-wagging today.

When you said "sock hop rock" I thought you were talking about The Letterman, not Buddy Holly. Sorry, I disagree there. Holly/Berry/Elvis was pop, but it was good pop, in a way that the songs on Your Hit Parade (50-59) are not. Remember "Shrimp Boats"? Didn't think so. It was #1 for weeks. An okay song, but forgettable.

Rock (nee Rock and Roll nee R&B) is many things, and I seem to be lumping more into it while you're excluding more. Rock isn't only for airplay. It was mainly dance music, and was played (poorly) in garages and High School Proms all over the country. Your last paragraph expanded the discussion out of pop, so I was continuing that thread. Partch isn't rock, and Lehrer's third album came out in 1965, but the songs came from That Was The Week That Was, a tv show from a bit earlier (though still post-Beatles) based on a British show from even earlier. As I said, the exact dividing lines are fuzzy. Lehrer (one of my favorites) is closer to Allan Sherman/Victor Borge/Flanders & Swann than The Smothers Brothers/Firesign Theatre/Frank Zappa.

Aside: What do you think of Lord Buckley?

Let me try to crystalize my point: The 50s were a pretty despicable decade in many respects (no matter how much certain right-wingers consider it a golden age), but there was good music at the time, though you did have to wade through a lot of muck. I just don't want to tar the good stuff as we're slinging mud at the bad.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But I am slinging mud at the "good stuff," Dave. Fifties rock: I detest it.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Hmm... then we must agree to disagree. Still, I'll make one more attempt: Harry Belafonte. His 1955 album Calypso was the first LP to sell over a million copies, iirc. If you don't like Day-O or Jamaica Farewell then our cultural divide is wide indeed.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Relax; Harry Belafonte is perfectly OK with me. My mind affiliates him roughly with the folk singers, whom I also like.

The stuff I hate is Fifties rock and roll. The stuff that Beethoven was supposed to roll over and tell Tchaikovsky the news about. Elvis. Chuck Berry. Buddy Holly. Jerry Lee Lewis. Little Richard. Anybody like that.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Relax; Harry Belafonte is perfectly OK with me.

*whew*

I like the ELO version of "Roll Over Beethoven". In college, this set me (further) apart from the self-proclaimed Cool People. Tough.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I was working some on "How You Gonna Keep Them..." a day or so ago. I've known the first line or so since childhood. Nowadays, I keep having it go through my mind as "How you gonna keep them down on the farm / After they've seen Pere Ubu..."

Bill Bennett would have been in the crowd whinging about waltzes if he'd been around then. And he'd have been claiming that nobody was writing anything good any more, either.

I remember "Shrimp Boats." It got airplay on the station my parents listened to in the 60s, so I heard it lots of times. I seem to recall it originated in a Disney movie. Jo Stafford was a great vocalist, though I tend to prefer her pseudonymous work.

Lord Buckley mostly bores me. I guess I don't get him.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

While I think I have a copy of "Shrimp Boats" around here someplace (or at least have heard it comparatively recently), I mainly know the stuff about Your Hit Parade from a comedy routine done on tv in the 60s. One of the variety shows had Dom DeLouise mugging about, doing blackouts of different ways to introduce "Shrimp Boats", which was a problem since they needed to come up with different intros and it was a hit for weeks.

Yeah, Bill Bennett and that crowd would have been whiners in any generation.

While a lot of Lord Buckley doesn't work for me, some of it strikes home. His reading of "The Gettysburg Address" is as brilliant as Jimi Hendrix version of "The Star Spangled Banner".

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I like the PowerPoint slides for the Gettysburg Address that I saw on the web recently. Stirring stuff!

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I need some explaining. Think what about Carmina Burana? That it's a modern look at something very old, at times bombastic, sentimental, sarcastic, and altogether listenable? Or side with the academicians who wail that there's nothing in it to analyze? I don't know what your point is.

How can Boomers be the first generation that can listen to bad music from 50 years ago? That option has been available for as long as sheet music has existed, not to mention recordings. I feel like I must be missing something.

I like that "sock hop rock" myself, ever since Mark Radtke used to to the oldie show on KCSU, and all the more once American Graffiti came out.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as long as we're all in this conversation, maybe I should use this icon instead, and belatedly ask barondave if I can use his photo sometimes for my LJ.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Certainly, you may use the photo from Minicon 2005. I'm honored. I probably have a higher res version around here someplace, though you may not need it for an icon.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I have some kind of medium res version of it, and used that to reduce down for iconic use. If you have a right big one, I'd be happy to have it.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Carmina Burana (which I usually use as an example of pre-computer teenage blogs, sort of like church MySpace) is an example of rebellious youths complaining about the older generation (among other things). Dunno how much of that is set to music. It's basically church graffiti of seminary students (iirc). Ask yourself: How much trouble would the authors of Carmina Burana be in if the church elders found out?

Printed music has been around for a while, but the actual recordings listened to by one's parents were unavailable until recently. Recorded sound is one of the bigger paradigm shifts of the 19th Century. Representational art existed for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. But no one even thought of recording sound until sound started to be transmitted via telephone and radio meant you could hear someone not directly in your presence. This is a big deal, and I don't think we give as much credit to how much the gramophone and its descendants changed the world.

Circa 1950, recordings existed from 1900... but not many. The sound from all the Edison tinfoil and wax cylinder recordings that survive could fit on an iPod shuffle with room for every recording of Al Jolson through the 20s. (I haven't actually tried this, but I'd be willing to bet.) Tin Pan Alley sheet music just isn't the same as hearing the actual recordings.

This, I think, is part of the nostalgia and the loathing of sock hop rock: Some people associate the songs with fond personal memories while others tie their lizard brain to the entire sorry era. It's an individual, emotional, response. Stephen Foster or JP Sousa don't generate the same range of emotional responses, because we can only replicate the arrangements, not hear them play. (Okay, we have a little Sousa, but you know what I mean.)

American Graffiti points out another example of how technology impacts this discussion: Mobile music. You could get laid enjoy your favorites while cruising, or parked away from an electrical outlet. This was also not true a generation earlier.

You are exposed to more music in a week than most people pre-radio heard in their life. Churches were important largely because of the organ and the choir, and they would usually play the same hymns every week. No one heard music at home unless they made it themselves, had Uncle Joe bang out a tune on his banjo or mom sang while cooking. Barn Dances/Revival Meetings/Circuses/Operas/etc. were a much bigger deal when they were your sole source of new sounds.

Pardon me for going on, but the impact of technology is One of My Things. The development of recorded sound is more recent than the development of modern medicine. Both changed how we live in profound ways.

[redbird]

I think you're overlooking two points here, connected to time. The first is that if I can hear the same music my parents do, because we're listening to the same musicians play the same songs together, that's more of a shared experience than putting on a record and hearing the same time-slice of the music, twenty or thirty years later. [There's probably a digression in here, about the degree to which different generations have, over time and space, gone to concerts together, but I wouldn't know where to begin.]

Along similar lines, performers often have long careers. There is nothing unusual, across time and culture, in someone listening to a performer who her parents, or great-uncle, or old teacher listened to years earlier. And that performer can be anyone from a neighbor taking out a guitar just for the hell of it some night, to a famous musician or a rock band.

Yes, recorded sound is a major change in how we experience music. That doesn't mean that "[Y]our generation (boomers) were the first ones to be able to listen to the same music our parents did."

[barondave.livejournal.com]

The same musicians is not the same as the same music. I agree it's more of a shared experience, but it isn't the same thing. Traditions, rituals, etc are very strong, but that's not what I'm talking about. Chance are pretty good that if your parents didn't like a musician, they didn't bring you to one of her concerts 30 years later. I can listen to the exact same recording of Elvis that my parents listened to, and I might encounter the same recording of Shrimp Boat. Parents of Boomers are the first generation who's music is almost completely archived and still available in its original form.

The current crop of kids is the first (well, first and a half) generation where virtually everything they ever wrote/bought/looked at online, which is almost everything they ever did, is available to anyone at any time. But that's a different story.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

When I was poring through the sheet music at Boosey & Hawkes, I saw a handsome facsimile volume of the book that included the Carmina Burana. Ohhhhh, man. Not enough money to consider it, but I looked at it over and over. When Joanne Falletta conducted the Orff in Norfolk (not Norffolk), there was a combo doing original versions of the same songs. Quite different. But anyway, now I know "which" Carmina Burana you meant. Somehow, it's hard to find translations of those. I wrote in English versions in my piano/vocal score, using a book of medieval song lyrics that translated a half dozen or so of them, and taking the rest from the subtitles of a TV concert. One line wasn't in either version, and I made my own stab at it. Orff's heirs want money for any translation of the lyrics.

You can find Jolson and others at archive.org. Redhotjazz has some good stuff, not in mp3 format, but listenable. Older things are at Stanford's cylinder project and tinfoil.com and ammem.loc.gov. A lot of these are on my player already -- 600 sides; maybe more, maybe fewer.

Exposure to all that music has had the sad effect of partially inuring me to it. Home music, though, shouldn't be underestimated. Walk down any street a hundred or more years ago, and listen to all the parlor pianos banging away. Go on, try it.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Tinfoil.com is one of those places I'd plum were I to have a lot of money. My browser doesn't know from ammem.loc.gov . Is that the right spelling?

Oh, quite a few people played instruments at home, to greater and lesser extents. People invented instruments and then sold them mail-order or door to door, sort of like The Music Man. Still, not many people were good, and they weren't on tap all the time.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Tinfoil offers CDs of stuff. I mostly just listen to the freebies.

Ammem.loc.gov -- hmmm, I don't know what I've got wrong there. It's the American Memory section of the Library of Congress. Hang on...

...whoops! http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Besides sound recordings, they have sheet music, silent movies, photos, maps, and other pieces of paper with marks on 'em.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

It was also the decade of the Eames chair, the 1950-51 "bulletnose" and 1953 Studebakers, and Clyde McPhatter's time with the Drifters, whose recording of "White Christmas" beats Bing Crosby's all to hell. None of these came to define the decade, of course, the way the visual-ugliness stuff she's talking about did.

[nwl.livejournal.com]

Has anyone pointed out that what we label classical music was the popular music of its day? I believe Mozart would "dumb down" his music for the common nam, but the tunes were pretty much the same.

I think it was in the Romantic period that the composer became an independent performer and had what we would recognize as rock star status. The reason why modern rock performers play the piano facing sideways to the audience is because List wanted women to see his famous profile and played it that way. Up until then, musicians played with their backs to the crowd so they could marvel at their technique.

In 200 years, perhaps the rock music of the 20th century will have some sort of classic reputation.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Popular with certain classes. I don't think the, uh, peasants were in the opera house much. They were listening to what we now call "folk." Maybe in some of the 19th century, there was somewhat of an economy-rate middle class with a piano in the parlor and a daughter who sang sad songs about orphans and consumptives. By about then, though, there was a pop track in the music halls that maybe knew enough classical to make some jokes based on it.

Liszt also found that the piano could be heard better if he sat that way.

On "Futurama," Fry tried to play some Rap for Bender, but Bender wasn't interested in "boring old classical music."

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Hey! I like Grieg's concerto. It even has some of that, whatcha call yer structure, with first-movement stuff showing up in the last. So he wasn't Franck, but I think that one hangs together. Chopin's concertos, I'll grant you, are each basically three pieces of music sharing a room. Good, though. (His "funeral march" sonata, on the other hand, seems to hang together. Perhaps because I've heard it so many times, or maybe it's how Rachmaninov played it that makes it seem so.)

Judging songs by different performances tends to demolish the possible unity of an album or a side, since the different performers put the stuff in their own order, mixing it with other writers and whatnot. Well, it was a thought.

Sacred instrumentation in post-Baroque: I guess that's when composers really started to insist that this was what they meant, and not something else. It was permissible to make changes of scale, though, going from opera or symphony to quartet, trio, duet, or solo versions meant for enjoyment in the home. Then again, there are the Stokowskis of the world who insist that everything sounds better if more people are sawing away at it (introducing severe temporal distortion along the way). Alas, the Stokowskis seem to be winning the war on the radio.

There have also been various recomposings, when Mahler or somebody would more or less say that dear old Beethoven was onto something here, if only he knew as much about the orchestra as I. Do I sound skeptical? A bit, though Mahler's versions that I've heard don't sound like they've hurt anything, and maybe if I knew more about it, they'd sound better to me.

What really gets me irate, though, is supposed classical performers who can't be bothered to play the notes. Gershwin thought up all these great pieces, for instance, and he took the time to write them down in notes, with tempo indications and everything, and because he's an American composer working in the Jazz age, some people figure they can do whatever the hell they want. I'm looking at the Lebeque sisters now, who have recorded farcical versions of his concert music with added piano parts that would make Grieg's "additional accompaniments" to Mozart sonatas sound normal. Basically, one sister seems to be playing Gershwin while the other plays Czerny exercises. Flashy, vapid, and detrimental to the music. Just as bad, in the slow movement of the Concerto in F, where the composer wrote straight eighth notes, they had to put a doo-de-doo-de-doo dotted rhythm in it. Hey, girls! If he'd wanted to dot every single rhythm, he could have! He had the pen right in front of him... he dotted in other places... he chose to write it the way he did! You're not doing him any favors by trying to "jazzify" it more.

On the other hand, Jacques Loussier, tired as his gimmick may be, at least lets it be known ahead of time that he's going to use Bach as a jumping-off point for some manic, gallic jazz, instead of pretending that he's giving a serious performance.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Grieg's piano concerto is fun to listen to, but it's not at all deep, as piano concertos go. Ever heard Grieg's symphony? He wrote it because he thought he ought to. A bad sign. It's a hopeless piece, and he knew it.

Mahler didn't recompose Beethoven et al, he just tinkered with the orchestration a little. Not at all the same thing as Switched-On Bach.

I'm not familiar with these people you mention who muck up Gershwin's rhythms. But it reminds me how much I hate-hate-hate jazz singers who take perfectly good songs and muck up the rhythms and the melodies and everything else till the song is hardly recognizable.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

See, you're the symphony guy. That's an area where my knowledge is distinctly shallow, though I have heard some offbeat ones, and some versions that aren't widely known. Anyway, I think the Grieg may not be deep -- I can't judge it -- but if not, it's at least endearingly shallow, and bears re-listening.

Okay, recomposed was the wrong word. Reorchestrated, I should have said. And he orchestrated one of the quartets, too.

Some jazz singers I like, like Ella Fitzgerald or Nat King Cole. On the other hand, Barbra Streisand gets me riled. She has a lovely voice, and she can do amazing things with it -- like sing Chopin's 'Minute' Valse with words fitted to it -- up to speed, and 100% understandable. And when she sings something like "Tonight," by Bernstein, she sounds like she's throttling a goose. "Tonight, to-ni-hi-hi-hi-HIGHT..." (About the only thing I listen to by her is her Classical album, which to me sounds refreshingly unaffected, compared to trained divas. Unfortunately, that valse isn't on it.)