musical followup
Aug. 16th, 2006 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn response to my previous post, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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 commendsartorias'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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-17 07:00 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-17 03:28 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-18 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-18 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 03:25 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 08:25 am (UTC)*whew*
I like the ELO version of "Roll Over Beethoven". In college, this set me (further) apart from the self-proclaimed Cool People. Tough.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 01:53 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 08:31 am (UTC)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".
no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 12:00 pm (UTC)