Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

But that's not all they do.

Look up "abstract nouns" and then get back to me.

But these things that we use abstract nouns for exist as well. For us sentient, moralistic beings, abstract nouns exist because we wish to communicate things that aren't as tangible as a table (for example). Abstract nouns are even useful when describing the things we imagine or feel when listening to music! Which is rather fitting, because these things are abstract by nature.

[Madiel]

But these things that we use abstract nouns for exist as well. For us sentient, moralistic beings, abstract nouns exist because we wish to communicate things that aren't as tangible as a table (for example). Abstract nouns are even useful when describing the things we imagine or feel when listening to music! Which is rather fitting, because these things are abstract by nature.

I'll have 2 glories, 3 angers and a small pile of angst, please...

A philosopher would have a field day with your assertions of what "exists". They are ideas. As I've said, words are pictures of ideas on paper.

Music is a language for communicating ideas. The fact that the ideas are quite abstract and difficult to put into words is an explanation of why it was smart to use music rather than words to communicate. But it is a mistake to conclude that because the ideas were too abstract to put into words, they don't "exist".

[some guy]

Quoting yourself is not usually good form, but this is actually extremely important.

Yes, it's extremely important to distinguish between what sounds can do and what letters can do.

Or, that is, between sounds doing what sounds do and letters doing word things. Letters can do sound things, too, as we're about to see.

I think there's a powerful argument that the reason some modern classical music fails to connect with listeners is that some composers stopped selecting the tools available to them on the basis of what they were trying to communicate. They stopped being interested in communicating anything.

This is all my grandmother's eye.

Number one (I can't believe this is still even a thing), modern classical music does not fail to connect with listeners. It connects with some listerns. There is no type of music that connects with all listeners. This is a non-point.

Number two, if you want to "communicate" then surely language is much better at that than music. It's pretty sucky at that, it's true, but it's much better at it than music is. Music has other things to do. Composers never stopped making music do the kinds of things music does. And some listeners will be able to connect to whatever composers come up with.

I couldn't help thinking, after writing that last comment about selecting keys on my keyboard, about what would happen if I treated my keyboard like a 12-tone row. Here's my starting row of letters:

f i g w a p e b d m q l z c v r j y t s u h x k o n

If only you had thought something else, namely that notes and letters are different.

And now, if I perform a series of transformations on that row, are you, as a reader, going to get anything out of it?

You never know. Depends entirely on how possessive you're going to be about that "anything out of it" thing, isn't it? I've already gotten figwapebdm, out of it, which I quite like, starting out with a recognizable word and then moving through a word-like collection of letters to letters as simply sounds.

For although music is not a language, language definitely does have some musical qualities. But, and this is crucial, it's not that those letters "mean" in your "row" the same way that letters usually mean, in words. It's that you have transformed letters into sounds, in which event, they are now musical entities and will behave, and be able to be perceived, as such.

What is still not true is that sounds mean in the same way the letters mean. That's false. Sounds mean like sounds. Sometimes letters can be divorced from their usual context of making up words and simply experienced as sounds. But then they're no longer units of language. They're now units of music, and will stand or fall as units of music, not as failed words, which is what you seem to be trying to suggest.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

I'll have 2 glories, 3 angers and a small pile of angst, please...

A philosopher would have a field day with your assertions of what "exists". They are ideas. As I've said, words are pictures of ideas on paper.

Music is a language for communicating ideas. The fact that the ideas are quite abstract and difficult to put into words is an explanation of why it was smart to use music rather than words to communicate. But it is a mistake to conclude that because the ideas were too abstract to put into words, they don't "exist".

But this is what I was saying all along. :|

[Madiel]

Some guy, what exactly is it that you think letters are?

The letter 'm' in no way correlates to a diagram of lips and tongue showing how to make the sound that you and I know that a 3-branched downward pointing squiggle represents.

And language is not onomatopoeia, except for the particular words that we describe with that term.

[Madiel]

PS Given talk of aliens and languages and so forth, surely people have seen "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

Music is language. It's highly abstracted language, but it shows many of the same traits. We process it in the same part of the brain - that's scientific fact. Learning music actually helps you acquire a second language faster.

[some guy]

Wow, first Florestan tries to get me into a nice, innocent game of "heads I win/tails you lose," and when I decline proposes that we chase ourselves some red herrings.

Then orfeo thinks "hey, yeah. Let's chase ourselves some red herrings."

Whatever happened to sticking to the point? To addressing what one's interlocutors actually say rather than making up things for them to have said?

Wait, what am I saying? Sticking to the point? No one does that. Well, one or two traditionalists, maybe. But this is the freewheeling world of the internet, where one summarily destroys one's opponents' points by making a couple of straw men and smashing them to bits.

But orfeo, bold as your assertions may seem, no one has claimed that the letter 'm' correlates to a diagram, nor that language is onomatopoeia (except for the exceptions, of course). I feel like my next move in this game is to boldly assert that music is not like radishes.

OK, there's my rebuttal to you, orfeo: music is not like radishes.

There, I run circles around you, (il)logically.

[Gurn Blanston]

We, the barren, the dry, the emotionally remote, the socially detached, as near sociopaths without empathy, compassion, or passion, must hang together or the romantics will try us, condemn us, and burn us at the stake. 

The Enlightened World was destroyed by Romantics...

[Cato]

The Enlightened World was destroyed by Romantics...

When you get Romanced, the lights usually go out!   0:)

[Madiel]

Wow, first Florestan tries to get me into a nice, innocent game of "heads I win/tails you lose," and when I decline proposes that we chase ourselves some red herrings.

Then orfeo thinks "hey, yeah. Let's chase ourselves some red herrings."

Whatever happened to sticking to the point? To addressing what one's interlocutors actually say rather than making up things for them to have said?

Wait, what am I saying? Sticking to the point? No one does that. Well, one or two traditionalists, maybe. But this is the freewheeling world of the internet, where one summarily destroys one's opponents' points by making a couple of straw men and smashing them to bits.

But orfeo, bold as your assertions may seem, no one has claimed that the letter 'm' correlates to a diagram, nor that language is onomatopoeia (except for the exceptions, of course). I feel like my next move in this game is to boldly assert that music is not like radishes.

OK, there's my rebuttal to you, orfeo: music is not like radishes.

There, I run circles around you, (il)logically.

They're not red herrings. This is a fundamental debate about the nature of music, which is crucial to a conversation whether or not a particular kind of music is 'working' or not.

A claim that music is somehow fundamentally different from other art forms and, unlike other art forms, is not designed to be communicative has huge implications. I'm looking to explore those implications. How the very nature of music as compared to visual art or to writing can ever be a red herring is quite beyond me.

And the obvious reason for using writing as the comparative art form is because it's the form we can easily use on this message board.

[Madiel]

To put it more succinctly, I am trying to explore what appears to be a claim that a sequence of letters is inherently representational and communicative, but that a sequence of notes is inherently not.

Neither side of that dichotomy seems very satisfactory to me.

[Monsieur Croche]

Music is language.

No, language is language; an analogy in language to relate the idea music communicates something does not abracadabra presto-chango magically turn music into language. If music were a language, why is their an utterly different word for music which in meaning is distinct from the meaning of language?

It's highly abstracted language, but it shows many of the same traits.

The only thing the two have immediately in common is sound: pitch [determinate or indeterminate] duration, intensity.
Cadence, rhythm, and dynamic contour are musical terms people apply to those other more nuanced parts of the sound of speech.

It's highly abstracted We process it in the same part of the brain - that's scientific fact.

Whose science?  As long as I can remember, neurologists have claimed that music comes from one hemisphere, speech from the other. Otherwise, how do we account for all those stroke victims, paralyzed on one side and rendered incapable of speech, and the standard and often effective therapy where they can learn to sing words to retrieve the ability to verbally communicate once they learn to access the unaffected hemisphere of their brain?

Learning music actually helps you acquire a second language faster.

More is the certainty of when, i.e. early childhood, just like many of the most advanced concert soloists commenced their musical training between the ages of two to four, around the same time they were becoming cognizant of speech, so it is with languages. There are plenty of musicians who neither have a knack for those dubiously alleged two other easy talents which accompany being a musician, a knack for languages and a readier facility for maths... that's pretty much bunko pseudo-science.

[Monsieur Croche]

To put it more succinctly, I am trying to explore what appears to be a claim that a sequence of letters is inherently representational and communicative, but that a sequence of notes is inherently not.

Neither side of that dichotomy seems very satisfactory to me.

I think you're getting nearer to correct on some things there, including your dissatisfaction and recognizing their is a dichotomy [at last, sigh.]

Syntax is another shared word from the linguistic arena also used as an analogy when speaking about music, but analogy only it remains. The accepted conventions of language have particular sequences of letter signifying and accepted as words with specific meanings.

Just because notes have been, for the sake of convenience only, assigned alpha names, that does not impose anything like the requirements or restrictive parameters of language on notes. Those seven note names [which, with the addition of the flat and sharp symbols total twelve discrete pitches] can fall in any order a composer wishes, or the same for any group of less than twelve, and still make a 'musical sense.' Having nothing to do with how language functions, that newly ordered group of notes does not have to wait to be generated by the collective usage of the general population, nor wait for approval to be entered in to the dictionaries as an acceptable word and its definition agreed upon.

Choose five notes, choose any one of the high number of permutations of the order they can be presented in, add the possibility of repeating some of those five before all five are used, add the myriad possibilities of an assigned rhythm, and or varying that rhythm, add the many dynamic possibilities, and you have all those permutations immediately acceptable as 'resonating with meaning' in a staggeringly greater variety and quantity than the conventions of any verbal language allows.

I'd highly recommend accepting that just about every term used for language when applied to music is an analogy and not a literal statement, and accept that communication can be non-specific and non-verbal, and many is the instance where never the twain shall meet.

[Monsieur Croche]

The Enlightened World was destroyed by Romantics...

Nothing like a bit of salted chicken fat [Schmaltz] to clog up your arteries and cloud up your thinking.

[Gurn Blanston]

Nothing like a bit of salted chicken fat [Schmaltz] to clog up your arteries and cloud up your thinking.

  Oh so true, and a most appropriate analogy too. I tried to tell Florestan that years ago, but he wasn't having it.

Ah well, one surely must be able to see the Modern as a backlash from all that and a return to the Classic? A rejection of Romantic Bloat, both in philosophy and in music. Just as the Classic itself was a backlash to the Baroque?

The thinking process became muddled over 200 years ago when the philosophes were invited to the party. I have noticed that those who love Romantic music the best, and who thrive on this word-playing, also seem most attached to philosophies too. Funny how that goes. 

[Monsieur Croche]

PS Given talk of aliens and languages and so forth, surely people have seen "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".

Music is language. It's highly abstracted language, but it shows many of the same traits. We process it in the same part of the brain - that's scientific fact. Learning music actually helps you acquire a second language faster.

The scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind to which you refer is rather charming, and built upon that also rather endearing quote about "music is the universal language of mankind" -- which in itself uses an analogy to express the communicative powers of music.

Even if that scene has as a translating aid a massive bank of computers, the idea that one linguist could quickly understand everything the computer spews out about the 'alien language using tones,' and that the linguist would so instantly surmising how the language works, to then readily say, 'try this sequence' and then name it as if he were dictating a solfege exercise... oh, lol.

[What of the fact they 'just happened' to use the western diatonic scale, what a coincidence that coming from a place with a different density of atmosphere, huh?]

What are the odds he would really 'communicate' and not instead bungle it and 'talk nonsense' or say something inadvertently which was so insulting that the aliens fried the lot of'em right then and there?

It is a movie, a fantasy, and that scene is but a conceit. An incident from a sci-fi film does not conclusively illustrate that 'music is a language with specific meaning.' That was the conceit, as much as we accepted it and likely wished it were, or could be, true.

[Mirror Image]

How about we all take a deep breath for a minute and remember this quote from good ol' Charlie Ives:

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

[Monsieur Croche]

  Oh so true, and a most appropriate analogy too. I tried to tell Florestan that years ago, but he wasn't having it.

Ah well, one surely must be able to see the Modern as a backlash from all that and a return to the Classic? A rejection of Romantic Bloat, both in philosophy and in music. Just as the Classic itself was a backlash to the Baroque?

The thinking process became muddled over 200 years ago when the philosophes were invited to the party. I have noticed that those who love Romantic music the best, and who thrive on this word-playing, also seem most attached to philosophies too. Funny how that goes. 

Amen to this, brother, and pass the hat!

On another forum, I saw this question, "When did composers become philosophers?"
The naivite of it is genuine. Though I retired from that forum, or more or less 'fired the staff,' I was sorely tempted to sign back on and give this answer:

"When they transfer their pen from music manuscript paper to writing paper and write things philosophical. ~
Nothing more, nothing less."

Because of course that is when the egregiously fallacious notion that music could directly express ideas like words do, that music is words / words are music, first clawed its way out of the lampblacked sooty stinking sulfuric pit of intellectual vanities of the netherworld and crawled toward musical Bethlehem. 

[Wakefield]

The Enlightened World was destroyed by Romantics...

I believe Francisco de Goya thought differently, and I agree with him: 



The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleep_of_Reason_Produces_Monsters

[Elgarian]

For me it´s never just the music (pace Gurn). Rachmaninov once said that "A composer's music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves... My music is the product of my temperament". Well, I think the same applies, and even more forcefully, to us as listeners. The way we perceive, feel about, and experience, music is a product of our temperament and personality and is affected by a lot of extra-musical things, like for instance the country of our birth, our love affairs, our religion (or lack thereof), the books which have influenced us, the paintings we love...

Sign me up for this manifesto! For it to suit me perfectly I'd like to modify that 'never' (highlighted) to 'often not', and the 'should' (also highlighted) to 'may', but the general thrust of what you say describes my own approach pretty well.

I've discussed this sort of thing enough with some guy to know that he really does revel in music as a pure world of sound, and he's gone a long way towards improving my understanding of the way he listens. It's an exciting approach for him, but it couldn't work for someone like me: the making of extramusical associations isn't something I can stop doing. It happens (as you imply above) automatically/ intuitively; and it's an important motivation for why I listen to music at all. I don't wish to pare away the extramusical. I want the whole package, including the extramusical free gifts that come with it. It feels like a very natural approach, and it seems to provide me with a lot of apparently meaningful experiences - but then of course it would, given what I've been saying! I know that some guy feels much the same about his approach, and he's a passionate advocate of it. But I don't think (even though he may be waiting just around the corner with the custard pie at the ready) he sees my extramusical associations as delusional, or on a par with being misled by parlour tricks. (Does he?)