The TRUTH: Why Modern Music Is Awful
In this postmodern cultural marxist age we live in now, even our music has been affected. Just like our cars, just like your kids, just like the lamestream news of the day...everything is the same; a lie, compressed into an equality of outcome instead of an outcome of individual greatness, competence and uniqueness.
The latter is what most of us here, have grown up with and sought to achieve in our own life times.
Lamestream Uniqueness today is an illusion, decorated with bells and whistles. The risk has been removed therefore the value created is mediocre at best.
No wonder why, more and more people today are unhappy; as Robert from Straight line Logic has explained...true happiness comes from seeking wisdom, creating values with increasing competence and attaining Joy in the process.
Do you concur..?
The latter is what most of us here, have grown up with and sought to achieve in our own life times.
Lamestream Uniqueness today is an illusion, decorated with bells and whistles. The risk has been removed therefore the value created is mediocre at best.
No wonder why, more and more people today are unhappy; as Robert from Straight line Logic has explained...true happiness comes from seeking wisdom, creating values with increasing competence and attaining Joy in the process.
Do you concur..?
SOURCE URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII
Or Why Allosaur Listens To The Classic Rock Station
But I think that worse than anything we have been discussing is: Stravinsky! --To me, that is musical obscenity, absolutely poisonous garbage.
What was the music your father liked?
three, four," it was changed to "One--two-three, four--- one--t-three--da,da--d,da----" etc. It is true that rock at least has a beat, and that's about all it's got, but, in a way, swing is even worse.
I'm sorry, I can't give much detail about my father's music, but it didn't generally have much of a tune to excite me much.
As to Sound of Music, yes, I saw it in the movie theater, and it was all right.
The Mexican Hat Dance was more interesting in about the 1st grade, and bands that took such traditional folk music and 'swung' them had different degrees of success in making them at least briefly worth passively listening to in passing (i.e., not going out of your way to turn it off). Do you have an example from youtube? (You're unlikely to find that original 45 and LP but maybe you can easily find something to illustrate what you mean.)
The rock music of the 50s and 60s was mostly not "deadening noise", which came later in great decibels. Do you find the simple 1950s Rock Around the Clock, The Twist, and Elvis Presley -- to the later Beach boys and the Mamas and Papas to be deadening noise?
Listen to the Rite of Spring, a ballet. It was used by Walt Disney in his Fantasia.
As for Schoenberg, when I have something to recommend I will post up immediately ..
The other time was years later; some of it was played on my radio, and after a while I simply pulled the plug.
Now I don't know if it was the same composition in both cases or not. I don't know if it was Rite of Spring or not. But I hope I never hear it again.
My first thought when my friend tricked me into going to a country dance club was that everyone looked good on the dance floor, few if any awkward dancers.
Once I got really good at teaching and dancing I thought...wouldn't it be really nice if Everyone looked Good on the dance floor, dancing to any kind of music.
My friend brought me to some 50's clubs and I was embarrassed to see a lot of people that really shouldn't be dancing in public!...laughing...including me at the time...
That is where I got the idea.
I run away any time I hear it or accidentally bump into it.
There are music channels on TV: when I browse, they pop up inevitably. Luckily, there is a remote. But for a few seconds I get a taste what it is like. Don't these women get bronchitis from all the screaming, yelling?
My collection of CDs is entirely from composers 50-100 years ago. My CD player takes 5 CDs so I listen to them one after the other as the player advances automatically.
My Christmas music is also an old collection.
When I see my coworkers with a headphone and know what they are listening to: no wonder their souls are corrupted.
The majority of todays "singers" are just screamers/yodelers.
I guess that is what my parents thought when I listened to Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets.
There still are some very talented performers though. They just aren't the ones that are foisted on the public as "pop stars."
https://forums.macrumors.com/attachme...
(This should be sarcastic)
They are, skilled, clean, precise, nuanced, uncompressed and unique.
Something the culture craves but doesn't know why.
Anyway- I have just found this article, it hits the nail on the head-
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/r...
Some excerpts:
" Reggae is to be added to the Unesco world heritage list. (!)
the usual crowd of churlish curmudgeons, including me, who will argue that pop music shouldn’t be included on lists of the world’s cultural treasures.
‘…the Left, which …is unrelenting and unsparing in its analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music a free ride’ quoting Allan Bloom "
In the art world they went as far to create anti art and would go farther if it were possible.
They are attempting the same with music, I've heard some stuff lately that would make you puke. Bad vocals, Really bad like listening to the tone deaf singing, bad musical format, and the worst mixing I have ever heard and I know,...I did all the mixing at my studio.
I must confess that I hold a particular fascination for Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and in a totally different category, Jethro Tull.
The earliest body of music we have is from the Renaissance. This was dance music, or song, or very closely derived therefrom. The orchestras were simple, more of a garage band size, and the musicians were classed as 'high level servants' as opposed to professional entertainers. The music was highly repetitive (as is necessary for dancing and/or singing!).
Joseph Hayden moved music from the small band of Elizabethan era performance to what is now called the 'sonata form', which forms the basis of the symphonies of the next few centuries. He also increased the size of the band to that of a small orchestra. Similarly Bach's fugues and meditations move music from dance and song into pure music.
If the video had included music from the 17-18th centuries, it would have shown (I think) the rather simple and repetitive tunes from those eras giving way to the more complex Baroque and Classical works - the reverse of what he shows for the modern music.
After the Classical era, the Romantic era of music began, with huge orchestras playing complex music to a musically educated audience. Even workmen, going to lay bricks at their job, were whistling motifs from the symphonies or singing parts from the operas.
This era ended with the invention of recorded music, which made it socially unnecessary for 'everyman' to know how to play a musical instrument (hence decreasing overall musical knowledge). Increasingly distanced from the common audience, the early 20th century, Classical music drifted off into the appalling hinterlands of dissonance via Scriabin and other such composers, ending in the slo-mo-car-crash 'music' of the current classical music vogue.
It is no wonder that everyman turned away from this dissonance into pop music, which then became the hum and whistle music of everyman.
It is at this point that the video picks up, but if you were to extrapolate what the curve might have looked like were the past of music included, you would probably see a double wave-form, with high points of complexity and sophistication during the 19th Century (for classical music) and the 20th Century (for pop music). I suspect that the height of the wave for pop music is far lower than that of the classical. That would be interesting to investigate, but not so long as the researcher only took a tiny view of a short span of the history of music, as this video unfortunately did.
Jan, a fan of the 19th century's music
As far as a de-evolutionary intention we look to how art and language was purposely confounded by the postmodernist and ask...why not music too! The video shows, at least in the short time frame investigated, that it was intentional on an economic scale but it still begs the question, was it part of our dumbing down or is it just an accidental consequence.
Another type of modern music to consider is 'movie music', which is the only worthy successor to the earlier classical music. You can't dance to it, but people do listen to soundtracks a lot.
Good topic, Carl.
Jan
I think most of us have complained about the music these days but thought it was just a generational thing like what we ourselves went through but now we have reason to think differently.
Another piece of the puzzle.
It's really hard for little local bands to find a place to play also. Hard to find open mic nights etc. Everything is now karaoke, and usually badly done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z8Iu...
My favorite was the William Tel Overture, I would get up at 5am, grab the underside of the key board and pump like mad...The Lone Ranger!
They started in the 40's I think, when they changed from tuning instruments at 432 to 440.
I read a white paper some time ago that showed that healthful and harmful frequencies alternate from the shuman resonance on up and was surprised to see that 432 had a beneficial effect on the bodies cells but 440 did not!
Go figure.
The single frequency of a tuning standard alleged to have killed music has nothing whatsoever to do with the changing styles (due primarily to sense of life) or the large number of factors that go into making musical sounds and their relations, which are much more than a single frequency or associated perceived pitch within a range spanning octaves.
Likewise for the "computer guy" claiming to have shown that "the beat had intentionally been changed to go against what was natural to the heartbeat". A moment's reflection tells you that the human heartbeat varies dramatically between individuals and within the same individual, measured in beats per minute, and that the tuning standard is a single pure tone measured in cycles per second. Claims of his pronouncements are the typical mystical and subjectivist dogma that make no sense.
The "computer guy's" pronouncement, along with similar dogma from mystics appealing to “the heartbeat of Earth” and claims that "432Hz resonates with the golden ratio" are all no better than primitive Pythgorean number mysticism in a new age of irrationalism creeping for dominance in the 21st century as people gravitate to the mystical with no concept of causality and explanation. Please, not on an Ayn Rand forum.
The standards for tuning have varied enormously throughout history. Until around the time of Galileo no standard was possible because there were no accurate clocks and no means to measure the frequencies.
Once comparisons were possible, several different "standards" coexisted in different regions, with some differences so large as to literally cause a clash at the level of playing in different keys, at least a half tone away (one sharp or flat difference).
The frequency standard for tuning -- today 440Hz, adopted by the American Federation of Musicians in 1917, by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and then progressively more accepted -- is a relative standard for consistency, not a departure in 1940 from an alleged Perfection of a mystical "338" as the source of "modern music killing music". One French standard adopting a popular pitch in the mid 1800s was 435, while German orchestras and bands was soon at 440 and the British royal standard was above 1850 and rising during the last half the 19th century.
There are many books on the physics and psychology of music, the role of chord ratios, overtones, different scales, etc., and you can read a summary of the history of the pitch standard in particular at http://capionlarsen.com/history-pitch/
If your father was playing in Big Bands in the 1940s he would be familiar with the early 20th century incompatible "high" 440 and "low" 452-457 pitches for which instruments were built. Brass bands especially were still playing the "high" pitch, and "high" pitch instruments used in jazz were still common. English and Salvation Army brass bands used the "high" pitch until 1964 when production of the instruments stopped. If you buy an antique or old classic instrument today you still have to be careful of what pitch you are getting. (I have a 1911 Holton cornet with two sets of slides and a 19th century French LaLeur sheperd's crook cornet that was professionally modified with longer tubing to drop the pitch.)
But the mystical dogmatism evangelizing for an irrelevant magic "438" has no rational place here and nothing to offer a discussion of musical qualities. The relative standard to which a group of instruments are tuned for consistency has nothing to do with the musical sound characteristics, other than the simple up or down, and which depend on physics and the style and ability of playing, not mystical "resonance with the heartbeat" and other such nonsense.
Sound quality differences due to tuning alone depends on the methods of tuning, including multiple degrees of freedom of the instruments and the nonlinear variations with frequency, temperature, and loudness, which are subtle but can be noticeable, not a Pythagorean mystic's magic number.
This is not a political topic and Ayn Rand didn't try to turn everything into politics either. It has nothing to do with a "stealing of personal freedom".
Musicians adopt a tuning standard for objective requirements of the production of music, including the physical compatibility of the instruments, not to a "concession to Germans" and not for the preposterous Pythagorian number mysticism claiming an impossible "resonance" with a "heartbeat" or "cells".
The tuning standard is irrelevant to the sound of the music one chooses to produce and has nothing to do with Wagner's style. If you want it to sound differently due to pitch then play in whatever style you choose in a chosen octave and key relative to whatever the tuning standard is. You missed the whole point.
The discussion here is about music, specifically in this subthread the function, purpose and history of the tuning standard in contrast to New Age mysticism (that Ayn Rand had no sympathy for at all), all of which you have completely missed. The subjectivist, mystical statements made here attributing a magic status to "438" with nonsensical arguments claimed to be scientific studies are completely bogus.
Responding to that with a tangent on the politics of the Treaty of Versailles, dark accusations about German control, and citing obviously bad musical taste is steam of consciousness irrelevancy that does not address the bizarre "432" claims and not something "Ayn Rand would have been interested in" as an excuse for the tangent.
Human ears and bodies do not respond and differentiate to differences in sound frequency in that way. There are a few people with perfect pitch, they can recognize and reproduce a tone exactly, but that is it.
It is still true that- Modern music is awful.
Why? It is deliberately dissonant. The very big youth market want to keep the olds away by playing loud and awful music - they call it. It is a group solidarity thing.
The older opinion leaders pretend to sophistication, as in modern art, they claim to find meanings not apparent to outsiders.
How is it done? Not by choosing one base frequency over the other but by dissonant harmonies. When sounds of different frequencies are mixed, more sound frequencies are created, the word is harmonics, some mixtures are pleasant, some unpleasant, others arouse interest such as the sound of bells. It is likely that such reactions are universal across cultures. To enhance the awfullness there are supporting measures such as singers not holding a note, not projecting (thus amplification), excess percussion, and the general slovenliness of public performers. All this keeps the olds away, but it has been going on for so long that the olds have their own preferences for ugliness based on (imagined) good times when they were young.
My solution- the young have too much time and money, send them to work not to college, bring back the birch, more discipline and order, etc. (!) Humpff.
It's a little hard to detect but I noticed that when musicians played at 432 here at Hospice...I was more at ease and the music sounded somehow better...I didn't know at first that they were not tuned to 440...I learned that later.
This is not about "forced music standards" and has nothing to do with what frequency range music is written in. But if you want the sounds to be within a particular range of pitches then you had better know what frequencies the notes you write in the score refer to. That is what a tuning standard provides.
Your posts are filled with supposedly authoritative but incoherent pronouncements consisting of false history and mystical appeals arbitrarily pronounced as fact -- boldly going where no fact has been before. It is not science. This is an Ayn Rand forum, not for the dogmas of New Age subjectivism and mysticism. There are no Nephilim alien creatures, magic frequencies in resonance with "cells" affecting human behavior, "unconscious humans" roaming the earth as zombies or any of the rest of it.
Confounding our language started with mistranslations, to meanings, to improper useage and now to their articulation masked by aggravating distortion.
What is increasingly interesting though, is that there is some value to what the ancients thought and expressed. Not all of it was mystical thinking.
There is no magic to a tuning standard of "438", which happened to be one of many choices employed in the 19th century. There is no such thing as a frequency's "beneficial effect on the bodies cells" affecting music as "healthful and harmful frequencies alternate from the shuman resonance on up". That is gibberish. It is your own mysticism, not the "ancients'".
The Big question is: How can we make use of that for healing...I don't think we can.
At least not now...maybe someday in the future.
I see controlling hands of Germany and the UN as part of the equation, of predecessor to our current race relations, which they wanted to smooth out at the time.
Bad music did not come from "the beat had intentionally been changed to go against what was natural to the heartbeat" and there is no such thing as a frequency's "beneficial effect on the bodies cells" affecting music as "healthful and harmful frequencies alternate from the shuman resonance on up". It is all gibberish. Claims of a magical "432" for the tuning standard and blaming bad music on a-historical, false claims about it are mysticism. Wandering off about "the Germans" and what Ayn Rand said about an architect is irrelevant. Stream of consciousness is not a logical "point".
No, it doesn't "all come from the liberal mindsets in the MSM executives" and the solution is not "values of the past". Reason and a proper philosophy are required for choosing values, not "tradition".
American uniqueness has been globally manufactured away.
The "Voice" and other such star search tv programs are not done to benefit the artists who perform. They are a promotional technique used by recording companies, and the winners of such "contests" are pretty consistently encouraged to change their sound to be the same as the rest of the rubbish created by the recording industry. The performers who don't comply are removed from the competition quickly.
Today, even the good music written 50+ years ago is often turned to rubbish by most popular artists.
I love to hear Christmas music. I get joy from singing carols and popular Christmas songs written 50+ years ago.
I tried to listen to some Christmas CDs performed by modern artists on Christmas day. I could not tolerate it longer than 10 minutes.
A few do perform the music in less "modern" arrangements without making up a new melody or doing vocal gymnastics.
Those performances are rare and marvelous.
Thanks for posting, OUC ;^)