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]

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.