Does too much Bach ruin you for many other things?

Damn! I drafted a long reply and deleted it!

In retrospect, I withdraw the epithet 'twat' which was uncalled for. The 'pretentious' did not refer to rock vs classic music (I actually like both genres) but to endless rambling discussions about which particular performance of WTC is best. Mostly these versions are on harpsichord, which as Beecham said sounds like 'two skeletons copulating on a tin roof'. I guess I was partly whinging about the Bach-dominated nature of discussions here. Mozart seems to me at least as good, yet he seems to go mostly unmentioned.

I don't see why one can't say that, in each genre, there are examples of the good, the mediocre and the bad, and that different criteria can (and maybe should) apply in each. Is Shakespeare better than Bach? Is St Paul's cathedral more important than Turner's 'Rain, Steam and Speed'? Is a Hitchcock film better than a Rodin sculpture?

My deleted reply was mostly about 'good rock', and rather than retype it, I'd suggest an exploration of the following discs:

Elvis Presley: The Sun Sessions
Chuck Berry's Golden Decade
The Beatles: Revolver/Sergeant Pepper/White Album/Abbey Road
The Kinks: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
The Velvet Underground: First album/White Light White Heat
The Stooges: Fun House/Raw Power
Jimi Hendrix: Electric Ladyland
The Who: Who's Next
Patti Smith: Horses
Television: Marquee Moon
The Smiths: The Queen is Dead
The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses
Julian Cope: Floored Genius
The La's: The La's
Boo Radleys: Wake Up!

If you don't like any of them, fair play to you, but any one of them is considerably better that the maudlin introspective waffle that is Radiohead.

 

Dear Pe-Zulu:

I share the feeling of confusion: I don't really understand it (but then I never tried to play Frescobaldi).

I don't know the ensemble Canzonas, and I don't like the counterpoint pieces because they depress me. My fault, probably, but I always feel uneasy listening to Frescobaldi.

 

I am thoroughly sick and tired of these crude, reductionist anti-broad-bean tirades on this thread.

If you don't like broad beans, what are you doing on this forum anyway?

I am expecting an apology.

Turing to the relatively trivial waters of aesthetics, I wonder whether it might be helpful to disentangle a number of issues which seem to have got mixed up to the point where I for one have lost track of who is talking about what:
1 Whether listening to Bach removes one's desire to listen to or at least significantly diminishes one's appreciation of other composers
2 Is rock/pop music crap?
3 Is some rock/pop music crap?
4 What does it mean to say Bach is better than Madonna?
5 Is [and, for bonus points, is this the same as saying that] all "Classical" music is better than all pop music?
[5a What Chopin? get real.]
6 Are people's musical tastes more narrow than their taste in visual art?
7 Is all modern "classical" music horrible?
8 Is the crap/horribleness of rock/pop/new music symptomatic of some general decline in society
9 Is this the fault of the Americans?
10 The "beanism" issue (I'm still waiting...).

I have a number of observations to make, all of which are either pretentious, boring or hypocritical
A. whether or not wholly objective value comparisons can be made between artists or works, these judgments themselves can be made for more or less cogent reasons and may be more or less cogently and lucidly expressed. The process of formulating expressing, questioning and revising these views is not only an inevitable by-product of contemplating art, but part of The Point.
B if all aesthetic views are either
i) just statements of unanalysable personal opinion; or
ii) statements of objective and obvious fact
there is not much to talk about either way. Similarly it is, in my opinion, cheating to make unqualified and rather controversial statements which one then defends as "just my opinion" when challenged to justify them.
C where two artists or works are very far apart in time or genre, a unqualified value judgment between them, setting out no terms of reference, is unlikely to be a helpful point of discussion.[I think this is probably the same point Joe was making in his third paragraph]
D I am not convinced that popular taste very often coincides with what is usually identifed as Great Art (by Those who are Inclined to Pronounce on Such Subjects) and probably hasn't much over history. The fact that the masses do not live for Great Art is not a sign that we are living in a new Dark Age.
E (I'm sure you could see this coming, if you're still reading) some "Classical" music is Great Art according to TIPSS, but a lot of it isn't. Some popular music might well be. It is of course fine to like stuff that is not Great Art.
F Some writers about pop/rock music, and even some pop/rock musicians, write interestingly and intelligently about their subject and have the nerve to talk about it as though it mattered like Proper Music.
G A friend of mine (whose stories I trust) told me a very interesting story that when Radio 3 began, it was the official view within the BBC that all other radio stations were there to educate listeners to the point where they would start listening to Radio 3.

 

Joe, thanks for your list of good rock – much appreciated. There are a few names I recognise and several that I definitely don't. Are there perhaps one or two CDs that would exemplify indispensable, archetypal, great rock? In a way that say Beethoven's 9th symphony does for classical.

I actually wholeheartedly agree with you about the endless pontificating on the minutia of performance that tends to dog the classical world. Those endless comparisons of different versions of Beethoven symphonies. Pianists routinely spend far longer studying, and practising a Mozart piano concerto than Mozart took to write it in the first place. A gaggle of critics then laboriously compare the details of the performance with umpteen others. I wish more of that energy went into exploring new repertoire.

I actually had a maudlin introspective waffle for breakfast today, and yeah it did taste a bit, well, Radiohead…

 

Adamdea, yes of course you're right. I unreservedly and abjectly apologise for my miserable and despicable failure to cherish and embrace the poor, humble, defenceless broad bean. Oh God, I loath them with a ferocious passion. I dream of charging through broad been plantations brandishing a flame thrower, screaming “drink hot shit you beans of Satan!â€Â

You see my tragedy is that I'm married to a fully paid-up member of the Royal Broad Bean Society of Great Britain. A typical diner table conversation goes something like this: Mummy – “Alice, eat up your lovely broad beansâ€Â. Alice – “ooooo but they taste 'orrible and Daddy is not eating HIS broad beans!†Mummy (with menacing stare) – “Daddy, eat your broad beans!â€Â

I mean Chopin wrote a Raindrop Prelude and a Minute Waltz – right. But is there a Broad Bean Mazurka? No there is not. Chopin was a man of rare sensitivity.

Right now we've got that out of the way, I can turn to the rest of your post. Look you're confused, I'm confused, everybody's confused. The basic mistake is to expect any semblance of consistency and coherence – just go with the flow man!

 

I know you didn't ask me but
http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/nmes_100_best_albums.htm
Is quite interesting place to look. Rolling Stone does a similar list every so often. The positions on the list change from time to time, but the usual contenders are surpisingly consistent looking back over the lists for the lasty 20 years or so.

 

Yes, that list looks good to me for the most part. Three from there that I missed in my first list that rank amongst the best are:

Love: 'Forever Changes'
Beach Boys: 'Pet Sounds'
Rolling Stones: 'Exile on Main Street'

Add from my original list 'Revolver' 'Fun House' 'The Queen is Dead' and the Velvet Underground's first album and you've got the best rock/pop albums ever made.

 

Dear Adam:

Humour apart, do you wish these questions (some of them) to be really discussed or did you write the post as a joke?

 

Well, a bit of both really. It is easy to get carried away. Issue 10 may be ignored.

I thought it might help to clarify what we were talking about, and stimulate some more nuanced responses.

For what it's worth my views are
1 Not really
2 No
3 Obviously
4 Very little unless the statement is placed in some context.
5 Definitely not on any of the meanings of "better" that occur to me.
6 It's a bit of a wild generalisation, but I think so in the sense that I think more people have time for (at least some) modernist visual art than have time for modern classical music. It's quite uncommon in joined-up-handwriting circles these days to say you think Picasso was a fraud and couldn't paint; you can say what you like about Schoenberg though. Also you will never ever ever pick up a girl as a result of discussing Schoenberg.
7 No
8 No
9 Almost everything is the fault of the Americans.

Anyway, maybe I've said enough. As you will have gathered I do like some rock music, and think it artistically significant. I also think Madonna to be a significant figure, although not necessarily as an artist.
My taste in rock music has not changed much for about 5 years or so, but my taste in "classical music" is very catholic.
I have just spent a bit too long listening to nothing but Wagner in the run up to the Covent Garden Ring cycle and am now in a sort of Wagner detox consisting mainly of
1 Haydn string quartets
2 Handel's Ode to St Cecilia's day
3 Bach keyboard music
4 Bob Dylan

I am planning on going to Harrison Birtwhistle's Minotaur and Punch and Judy next year. I have a theory incidentally that people who like "difficult" rock music are more likley to like modern classcal music than people who like pop music or only like classical music

I agree with most of Joe's choices, and wonder whether it would be an idea to start a separate thread entitled "what sort of rock music do you like if you also like Classical music?". Or something.
My favourite album is Lou Reed's Berlin.

 

It's interesting that you should say this. I recently bought, on spec, a record of Bela Bartok's string quartets, with a health warning that they were 'difficult' and 'challenging'. Expecting the worst, I placed the needle in the groove and – no problem. A bit jerky and quirky, not free-flowing like Haydn or Mozart, but certainly not difficult (for me) to listen to.

I like (some) difficult rock music too, particularly the Velvet Underground's more 'crunchy' stuff (eg the White Light/White Heat album). But there is an outer limit beyond which I don't venture; I can't really enjoy the more free-form types jazz or atonal classical music. To drop into philistine mode, it just sounds like a lot of noise to me. Maybe people find difficult modern music harder to appreciate that modern visual art, because music connects more directly with the brain, so it's harder to hear through the difficulty than it is to visually interpret non-representational art.

The poet Browning once made an interesting point. Asked whether his poems were not deliberately obscure he responded 'I do not intentionally make them hard to understand, but they are not meant to be a substitute for smoking a pipe'.

 

Yes I agree with most of this. I used to love the Velvet underground, although i rarely venture into side 2 of the second album anymore. Mind you, if you can bear Sister Ray, I can see no reason to fear atonal music- or to dislike anything because it's noise. The problem for me is when it's boring noise.

Of course John Cale was well versed in avant garde music, as was Frank Zappa. Also Trout Mask Replica, which is pretty strong stuff by anyone's standard. But here we are probably getting some way from classic rock.

I have a theory that the receptiveness of people brought on on rock music is one reason why Stravinsky's ballet music appears to have lodged itself in "the repertory" so emphatically.

If you have that sort of taste I wonder if you ever listen to Late Junction which is the real eclecticist's paradise. I don't think that anyone in the world would like everything they play: I personally have a bit of a problem with anything that sounds like the musician is wearing an Aran jumper, and have limited interest in Zimbabwean water drum music. But no one else would play a Tallis motet, followed by Scott Walker followed by a John Cage piece for child's toy piano. There is a rather good avant garde page on the radio 3 website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/experimental/

If you like the Bartók String quartets, I would recommend trying his piano concertos which I think are splendid, as of course is Duke Bluebeard's castle not to mention ligeti's études (and his string quartets if you are feeling brave.) Forgive me if you already know these pieces.

I agree that most people get off the bus at some point on the road to the cutting edge of experimental music. It's also worth bearing in mind that one can admire music, and even think it not only worthwhile but possibly enjoyable (in a way) to see live once in a while, without really wanting to listen to it while sitting on the sofa on a Sunday afternoon in mid November (possibly a reformulation of the Browning distinction.)

 

The composer Arthur Jarvinen has commented on how he and other contemporary composers were influenced by the "difficult" rock music of his youth, in particular the music of Captain Beefheart ("Lick My Decals Off, Baby"), and also Frank Zappa.

His comments can be found here under the date of 16th October 2007.

 

Thanks, that was a very interesting link. Has anybody heard any Arthur Jarvinen?

 

There is an interview with him which can be heard on his website, which has some excerpts, as well as Scarlatti and Beefheart.
Other than that I haven't heard him, but i'm interested in hearing him too.

 

Sorry if I go back to one of the first questions:
Does too much Bach ruin you for many other things?

Since music and art in general is a sort of communication, the fact that a group of people perfer to hear one and only person saying something, has very much to do with the type (character, knowledge ..) of the recipient and very little about the sender (in this case the composer or artist). This especially when there are lots of other people who don't condivide the importance of the sender.
So just find the "problem", if you can consider it as such, in yourselves ....

 

So the kernel of the question seems to me to be that there is no easy way to say what is best.

This is, of course, true unless one believes that there is a God given sense to the universe. If we do not believe in a God given order (I am using 'God' in the broadest sense) there is, I think, only one conclusion.

That is that all that exists outside us has no intrinsic value. That is to say, when we say that something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, even true or false we are stating a judgment, we are tacitly affirming that there is sense and that we can decode it and judge upon it.

This is, I believe, wrong. All judgments, as far as I can see, are made by us.

So every act of knowledge, or of artistic appreciation is, in fact, an act of interpretation, that is, of hermeneutics.

Very simple rules of interpretation consist only of 2 points: good or bad; others are more nuanced.

I think it would be interesting to know what the rules of interpretation are, but this is, perhaps, the most complex problem of all philosophy and science (Kant springs to mind). There are spatial rules (we see in three dimensions) more specifically perceptual rules (pitch, volume, colour), cognitive ones (complexity, existence of identifiable patterns) and so on.

Some of them stem from the genetic build up of the species (say three-dimensionality) others are more cultural (counterpoint, for instance).

However, the fact that culture is important does not mean that there are no universal aspects (because there are, even in music).

Because of all this it is extremely difficult to state whether Bach is more satisfying that, say, Mozart. It is even difficult to say that Bach is actually better than rock. Better for what?

In my mind, all we can say is that for complexity, emotional density and variety, structural sense (the patterns and higher order patterns) and even unpredictability, the so called great composers - many Renaissance composers, probably Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner and Wagner really are much richer than the rock I know (I noticed Sargent Pepper and Chuck Berry were mentioned as great but, from the standpoint I am outlining here both are crap).

Of course if one likes music for other reasons (NOT for melodic/ harmonic integration and higher order pattern building) of course anything can be better. If you care only for the excitement, rock is of course better.

What people like me might say is that excitement is, in itself, a lesser property than complexity and integration.

Why is it less satisfying? Because it is harder to achieve. It is exactly more satisfying in the sense that Shakespeare is better than 'Carry On'. Carry On is gross, Shakespeare is deep.

That is my opinion. That is why rock does not interest me: for me it is simple, primitive, gross and dull. Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner really interest me and arouse me far more that whatever springing monkey distorting sounds with his guitar accompanied by pitch-less noises.

I am perhaps being blunt, but if I do, sorry.

 

Well, everything is America's fault - they did help us win the war against the Nazis...

I agree that both Madonna and rock are significant. The Beatles, even if they did seldom produce music (IMO) are extremely significant. Even Cassius Clay was significant. I can well understand that if one has been exposed to rock from youth one can listen to it with interest. In fact, a few years ago I tried to study black metal and I think I understood it a little; I also studied Little Richard and fully understood the intensity.

I also understand that you need to detox from Wagner (Gardiner used to call his music 'Pollution', much as Nietzsche did, but in a different manner). But Bach's keyboard work is, perhaps, not the ideal - at least it is not on the same level as Dylan and Haydn. But you probably expected me to say this...

 

As far as appreciation of the complexity of classical music is concerned, you're probably right. Some classical music (eg Bach, Mozart) can be appreciated on the most basic level; ie it sounds 'nice' and has recognisable tunes. At this level it may be equalled by the simplest pop music. At the higher levels; the ' melodic/ harmonic integration and higher order pattern building' that you refer to, clearly most classical music has much greater depth and richness than most pop or rock music, though I would argue that some rock music (eg Love's 'Forever Changes') does have that sort of complexity.

However, as you acknowledge, complexity is not the only virtue. Shakespeare can be gross, as well deep. Poetry can be complex or simple. I can get pleasure from simple blues music, and from a Sibelius symphony, and would find it difficult to say that my enjoyment of one was on a different level from my enjoyment of the other. That's quite possibly because I lack the musical understanding/education to fully appreciate classical music, and am just enjoying it on the 'it sounds nice' level, but I can appreciate both complex poetry and simple verse for their distinct virtues. [I am reminded of the passage in 'Brideshead Revisited' where Sebastian Flyte is reading Clive Bell's 'Civilisation' and quotes 'Does anyone feel the same emotion on seeing a butterfly and seeing a cathedral?' to which he replies 'Yes. I do.']

 

I'm sure that's partly tongue-in-cheek, but that's what I don't 'get', the need to put composers in some sort of ranking order, as if it really matters (or indeed as if it can ever be settled one way or another) whether Mozart is better than Bach, or Scarlatti is better than Haydn. That's the bit that makes me think 'pretentious'.

It's the same in literature where, rather than accepting that a range of authors have produced a range of great literature, some critics feel the need to praise George Eliot at the expense of Charles Dickens, or James Joyce at the expense of Virginia Woolf. In a way, it's dragging art down to the level of a sports' league (where there is at least an objective way of measuring of which team is 'best').

 

I think it’s difficult to even start answering the question ‘what is good music, and what is bad music’ without getting bogged down in philosophical navel gazing. Perhaps I can suggest a possible reason for this from my experience FWIW.

I’ve worked on designing software for Robotic systems (not as impressive as it may sound, usually just aiding part of a manufacturing process). One of the things you quickly learn is that there is an inverse relationship between what is generally thought of as intelligent and what in fact turns out to require intelligence.

Take chess, thought by most people to be a brainy game only clever people can play well. Creating software to play chess effectively is actually comparatively easy – it comes down to a particular class of pattern matching. However, to write software that would enable a robot to play football or tennis (let alone actually building the bloody thing) is wildly complex and simply not within our current capability. Yet most people would say kicking a ball about a field is an easy thing that anyone could do. Another example is threading a needle – this ‘simple’ task actually requires massive computing power, extraordinary but true.

I suggest our appreciation of music, as it’s such an abstract emotional language, is rather like that. A “simple” melodic line in a folk song or a pop song can have extraordinary effects on people. It can lodge in their minds for ages; remind them of a particular period in their lives, or a place, or a person, etc. And do this in a singularly powerful way. I shamefully can’t remember the name of the famous author who wrote about ‘the extraordinary power of cheap music…’

Yet think of all the complex academic symphonies that have been written. Or all those highly complex, intricate 12 note pieces that were written in the middle of the last century. Most submerged in the sands of time. Apparent complexity may be mere artifice that does not connect with us in sophisticated and multivariate ways. Whereas ‘simple’ music can have profound effects on the human psyche that no one begins to understand.

Having said all that, I still love Bach and Mozart, and I’ve just got Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy now out on the NMC label. What was that Walt Whitman said about contradiction?