| My perhaps favourite example of knowing when and how to break the rules is Franz Schuberts "Erlkönig" [1] because it is so stark. If you listen to it without paying attention to the text (based on a poem by Goethe by the same name; both the German text and an English translation is found at [1]), parts of it sounds like horrible jammering and poor harmonies and it's easy to write it off as not sounding very nice. Here's [2] a much clearer rendition (two singers, with much stronger delineation of the three different characters) than the one linked from Britannica. If you do pay attention to the text, it is very clear that the unpleasant parts are very deliberate: The singer(s) switches between the role of a father, his sick dying child, and the Erl-king that occurs in the hallucinations of the child while the father is riding to bring the child to a doctor. The big difference between the unpleasant-sounding parts of this song and a bad composer is the clear intent and delineation - Schubert made things sound bad intentionally explicitly at the points he wanted to illustrate pain and fear, rather than because he didn't know how to make things sound pleasant when he wanted to. The song clearly proves this by setting the childs jammering and the fathers fearful attempts to soothe him up against much more pleasant segments where the Erl-king speaks and tries to seduce the child to come with him. You only get that clear separation if you know how to evoke each effect precisely. Arguably a bad particularly composer wouldn't even know how to make things sound bad the "right way" - there's a big difference between random bad sounds and making things evoke a child in pain. [1] http://www.britannica.com/topic/Erlkonig [2] https://soundcloud.com/sean_contretenor_lee/erlkonig |