[viccis]

>Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.

Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time, mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the working class heard his works were in the occasional public concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or snobbery.

I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess, good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste production via algorithms.

Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music is what our current day and age needs more of!

[Krasnol]

Well, in the end, the only thing this snobbery does is that it makes you look/sound old.

Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork anymore.

I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now and this is a good thing.

Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.

[viccis]

>Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.

Yeah McLuhan and Postman were pretty clear about all of this. Enjoy the content you desire to consume.

[gosub100]

It's not art. It's democratization of crap.

[Krasnol]

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

[viccis]

Cool, a movie quote. Nice.

[Krasnol]

How was your opinion more profound?

[defrost]

Pity the movie wasn't Lisztomania, 'cause, like, you know, Liszt used to be a bit like a pop musician.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisztomania_(film)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peJ_ncxXung

[viccis]

Liszt was a very different musician in a very different time than Handel, and he was mostly just cribbing off of Paganini when it came to these antics.

[moritzwarhier]

I did not want to argue in favor of AI-generated music (although of course, an artist can use any tool).

Regarding Händel, I think you are misunderstanding my argument.

What I meant is that, to my knowledge, his music was, at his times, a lot more pleasing to the popular tastes among his audience than, for example, Bach's.

The size or class of that audience was not my point, or that the production and commissioning of music was happening under different circumstances than today. I am well aware of that, and not sure why you think I wouldn't be.

In the end, there still was a metric of success, elite or not.

And it is simply not true that the main purpose of art is to "challenge". That can be a part of good art, but is not the primary purpose.

Art is also for enjoyment, by an audience (even if it is an elite audience), and also by the artist! I say that as a person who enjoys a lot of music that others might find obscure or unenjoyable.

But being "challenging" is not a value in itself. Twelve-tone music is as challenging as Freejazz or IDM or baroque music, all in different ways.

Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.

I was not making an argument for AI-generated slop, I was making an argument against ungrounded snobbery in defining what "art" is.

The societal circumstances you describe are not changing anything about my point. Among the wealthy, Händel was famous and a "crowd-pleaser" (for the wealthy elites, the royals, the clerical elites, it doesn't make a difference here), not a "challenger".

That was my point.

There was a discussion of "E-Musik" vs "U-Musik" recently on here, when a list was posted that reduced electronic music to Stockhausen and academic electroacoustic music.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik

There is no translation of these German terms, as far as I know. But that's no loss.

It attempts to split music into "serious music" and "entertainment".

"E-Musik" was meant to differentiate classical music from music aimed at being easy to listen to. And while efforts to create new "E-musik" in the 20th century led to some interesting music and experimentation, it also led to the funding of loads of boring snobbery (in my ears).

It's a good example for what I consider wrong about the definition I was answering to.

[viccis]

>Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.

I agree and would include 12 tone music (and specifically the Darmstadt School) in this category, as well as others like Xenakis. I think they should have been laughed out of performance halls and shunned, just like so many hack musicians were pre-20th century before classical music lost its gatekeepers (almost all art did with the death of modernism and the fragmentation of cultural narratives)

I think Handel is still a rough choice. He was more popular than Bach, but only because Bach was writing in somewhat outmoded styles for his time. Handel worked for aristocratic (and sometimes royal, see: the backstory of his Water Music as a way to repair relations with the new king of England) patrons and thus had to keep up with fashion. It was never about mass appeal but about making the person with the purse strings happy for Handel.

[moritzwarhier]

I see your point there regarding the money/power of the audience being a substitute for popularity with different interests, weakening my claim that Händel would've been "like a pop musician" at his times".

Sure, the comparison was probably painted with a brush that was too broad, thus flawed.

I should have gone into some more detail there regarding the music patronage demography