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

[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.