[timoth3y]

The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.

For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.

[madaxe_again]

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

[giraffe_lady]

Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.

It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.

[shermantanktop]

Settled, or ossified? Sure, there’s modern classical with more adventurous instrumentation, but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.

The music of the classical canon is unbelievably fantastic, and it deserves respectful treatment, but the genre has lost the audience for cool new sounds. It’s very unfortunate.

[giraffe_lady]

Yeah I actually used that word as I wrote it, and then switched it so I wouldn't come across as judgmental or anticlassical or whatever. I think it's a valid view of it. But my perspective here is that this kind of music is basically german-french elite traditional ethnic music. And as I don't negatively judge for example gamelan or carnatic or gagaku music for being settled/ossified I shouldn't judge traditional european music for that either.

It's simply not the role of any one musical practice to be at the forefront of experimentation forever. What we now call classical passed its torch on generations ago, and rock & jazz have now settled in too. We have hip hop and electronic music taking this role now, and eventually they will bind up into their own conventions and some descendant of theirs will push on.

[somat]

I have this same ontological debate with myself, I settle it by having a rather stricter definition of classical music. Classical music is popular music that has remained popular for longer than two generations of listeners. Music that follows that certain large scale form is orchestral music.(or whatever sub genre it is)

This annoying behavior does not win me any friends but remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.

[giraffe_lady]

> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day.

I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current knowledge base about these periods, and whose writings are of course focused primarily on their own interests. We can't really see what they didn't see, or didn't care enough to write about.

But contemporaneous with this elite music there were european folk music traditions, taught and performed ad hoc by individuals or small ensembles in homes and gathering places of the vast majority of "normal" people (peasant farmers, later urban laborers), and including some traveling performers who were known by reputation.

So yeah the great classical composers were wildly popular among the people who listened to the kind of music that they composed, but that was an extremely small part of the population. We don't have very much information at all about what was going on musically with the greater part of the population, but it appears to have been a completely separate thing, it's doubtful the great composers had any name recognition among the vast peasant masses.

[wileydragonfly]

What does this hair split accomplish? We have to settle on something.

[madaxe_again]

Neither, I’d argue. The greats that we look back at were the outliers, the madmen at the fringe. For every Beethoven or Mozart there were a thousand thousand nobodies cranking out the same stuff that their grandfathers wrote. Rachmaninov was seen as nouveau trash in his time, Holst derided, Gershwin hackneyed. Eno perhaps falls into the same category.

Hell, in a century you’ll see string quartets banging out Aphex Twin at elegant soirées. The real connoisseurs, of course, nod knowingly and mutter that drukqs is “early period”.

Similarly, plainsong was seen as “classical” music for many centuries, and was also a largely rigid form, but there exist some absolute bangers in the canon, mostly unattributed because monks.

It’s hard to see the sweep of history from within it.

[mr_toad]

> but that’s not what the moneyed retirees down at the opera house want to hear.

The last (well only) time I was in an opera house the retirees were listing to Blue Öyster Cult.

[copperx]

Classical and jazz just stopped trying and standardized the instruments. Other types of music are more open to incorporating new instruments. At least that's how I feel.

[giraffe_lady]

FWIW the jazz tradition is still alive and well, it just isn't normally called that in the interest of not being confused with the still-extant "traditional" jazz and because many of the musicians consider themselves to be primarily part of some other community.

But there is an absolutely thriving collaboration- and improvisation-based music form grounded in jazz but open to novel & experimental instrumentation and ripe with influence from other contemporary forms like pop, hip hop, funk, reggaeton, metal. I'm thinking of people like thundercat, kamasi washington, nuclear power trio, tigran hamasyan, robert glasper, sungazer, domi & jd beck, louis cole etc.

If you like the sound of old school jazz, the standup bass the piano the brush drum shuffle, this stuff will be alien and hostile and won't feel like jazz to you. But if you like the musicianship of jazz, watching masters collaboratively invent new music in real time, this is where that ended up.

[dahart]

Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.

[rectang]

Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.

But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.

[Synaesthesia]

I really like the 2 Bach synth albums by Marco Rosano.

[Barbing]

Awesome, thanks. Had an inkling whatever Spotify came up with wasn’t right—thank you TIA for Wendy Carlos’s 1968 original!:

https://archive.org/details/wendy-carlos-witched-on-bach

(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.

[Barbing]

Update:

Wendy Carlos is still with us at 85 years of age, but apparently hasn’t been able to press CDs for two decades, and hasn’t licensed her music for streaming. Her site links to CDs on Amazon, w/o new copies available. She sounds dope, even being an “accomplished solar eclipse photographer” per Wiki.

If anyone knows her I’m curious if someone could help her preserve/distribute these beautiful sounds. (Maybe they’re all preserved but just not distributed, and maybe she’s chillin’ and doesn’t need another cent so it’d just be hassle—wanted to throw it all out there for y’all.)

—

…thanks OP for the great art btw, since I haven’t mentioned it yet. Stood the test of time!

[KerrAvon]

Well, it’s either mental issues, or this is the way she wants it. I assume the latter. She had connections. There are people even today who would throw themselves at her feet to make it happen. She was instrumental in helping Bob Moog make the synthesizer workable for musicians, according to Bob Moog. She did the original Tron soundtrack.

[Barbing]

Awesome.

& I’m going with your assumption! Thanks for the positive perspective & background.

[sovietswag]

You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is so much beautiful music in the world

[dahart]

I definitely listened to a lot of Tomita as a kid, I used to check out vinyls of his albums from my local library. The one that sticks with me most distinctly is his very unique rendition of Golliwog’s Cakewalk. https://youtube.com/watch?v=dPQ9d10fnko But yeah, lots of other great stuff from him too.

[ddingus]

Oh wow! I have not heard that name in a while! ( and yes, I know I still haven't heard it outside my own head, but that is just a nit to pick..)

Mars. That track is so great! All of them are, but that one shows off so many great synth techniques. One passage is noise that ramps. The spectral distribution changes, from emphasis on low notes to emphasis on high notes while the overall energy remains close to the same.

I remember it because I have never heard anyone else do that in a composition.

Recommendation seconded!

[copperx]

Way too much, in fact, if we go by daily Spotify uploads.

[drewlesueur]

This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.

https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46

[libraryatnight]

Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.