What is Classical Music?

[Cato]

   One characteristic of classical music vs popular, folk,or rock etc is that it's often necessary to listen to a classical work more than once to understand it. It's often vastly more complex than other musics,a;though there are simpler,easy to understand classical works,too.
Pop music is geared toward easy instant enjoyment. But compare this to works such as Bach's B minor mass,
Beethoven's late quartets, the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler, Wagner's operas, or the music of such 20th century composers as Carter,Boulez,Babbitt, Schoenberg, etc.  If you bring some one to a concert featuring these works etc who is a total newcomer to classical music,and has no frame of reference, and nothing to compare in context, that individual
will be completely baffled , and the music will mean nothing to him or her.

Imagine you rear a child in complete isolation from all music except e.g. Elliott Carter's.  Or Charles Wuorinen's.

At the child's 14th birthday, you plop a Supertramp rock/Klezmer-clarinet CD into the machine.

Will the child be baffled?   

[jochanaan]

This thread is kind-of silly .. just visit a good library folks you'll find lots there to help you.

James, I respectfully disagree--and this disagreement is truly respectful (at least, so far ).  If nothing else, we have learned just how difficult it is to define or even sufficiently describe the music we're all talking about.

Nah, I went to the library once, it was full of irrelevant quotes

The kitten trolls again!

[jowcol]

This thread is kind-of silly .. just visit a good library folks you'll find lots there to help you.

Excerpts from The Essential James, Critical Edition with Super-Sized Commentary by R. McDonald, (Stockhausen Press, 37 Zawinul Street, Utopia)


Chapter 51: The Fool's Errand of Mercy


This page is under deconstruction....

[Grazioso]

jowcol - while it is somewhat humorous, I frankly think it is beneath someone's dignity to lampoon another poster in this manner, no matter how deserving they are considered by a majority of this community.

Just my two cents.

Uh oh, we have a serious person in the room! 

[jochanaan]

Uh oh, we have a serious person in the room! 

Definitely a crimp in our "silly" style!

[Bulldog]

jowcol - while it is somewhat humorous, I frankly think it is beneath someone's dignity to lampoon another poster in this manner, no matter how deserving they are considered by a majority of this community.

Just my two cents.

I agree except that I didn't find any of it humorous.  jowcol seems to have a little obsession with James as evidenced by his going into GMG posting history to come up with his monologue.

[jowcol]

James, Leon and Bulldog--

Point well taken.   Thank you for having the candor to let me know how you feel.

I think you have a valid point in the way we choose to express ourselves and show respect for others does influence how others will interact with us.  The fact that many of our discussions had degenerated into name calling was the point I was trying to make through  satire,  as the lack of respect in some interactions had frequently crossed my own ethical line in the sand.  Typically, the manta should be "criticize ideas, not people."  But in criticizing a person's style of interaction, I probably crossed that line, although there is not way I could see myself telling people that they are worthless, full of crap, etc.  Nonetheless, in making a point about tolerance  and respect for others, (Repeatedly), I've become another poster child for intolerance and disrespect.   For anyone who really wants to share interests and ideas, it is wise to consider that relationship between flies, honey, and vinegar, and I need to revisit the equation. 

My free time comes and goes- I'm in a feast or famine job.  I must admit I had some help and professional interest in my "research"-- among other applications I've work with with are natural language processing and smart text-crawling applications (think of Google on Steroids) . In the past, we've been trying to identify common authors over message traffic, and currently evaluating tools for identifying disease outbreaks in news feeds and the presence of personal information in doctor's electronic notes.  Looking for common themes and extracting a "theme map" of different topics and the different contexts they are used is pretty straightforward task, and after noticing the repeated themes in a couple of debates, this appeared to be a natural fit.    The upshot of this is, I may have taken a shortcut in coming up with the master index of the Collected works, rather than go through each post laboriously.  But once I had such a nicely cross-referenced index of the key themes I had selected to expand, it was hard not to put that material to use.  And updating was very easy. 

Upshot of this all? 

James-- you've been a pretty good sport about all of this, and I commend you.  The fact is that I consider you a worthy contributor to this forum, and you have every right to disagree with me (or any of the rest of us) on any topic.    We probably share more musical interests then  a lot of others there- but we also differ-- I may be "off base" here and there..   Also, not all of the responses you've provided were on the level of those I parodied-- there were some that very insightful, and I don't believe that the majority of what we discuss is not so clear cut that there aren't valid points to be made on both sides.    I'm a big believer in Hegel, and believe that conflict between ideas and positions helps fenerate new ideas and deeper understanding.

However, the ways we chose to express ourselves  may impact our interactions with others.  If we  choose to use aggressive or disrespectful language/content  towards each other, we may appear offensive, pathetic, unintentionally hilarious, or a combination of the above.  Also, people have memories, and if one skirmishes with other members on one thread, on invites attack on another thread where one hasn't done anything to justify it. Also, given that the postings on this site are indexed by Google, what we say can linger in cyberspace and come back in a variety of ways.

That being said, I'm leaving the future chapters of "The Essential James" to future generations of scholars to pull together.   I've redacted that last one, which did go further than it needed to.  That being said, I reserve the right to get Socratic on you if I perceive a blanket generalization, and may find other ways to tweak you if it can be done more tastefully and situations warrant.  Likewise, you pretty much have carte blanche in any thing you'd like to toss back in my direction, the more warped and creative the better.

My apologies to any of you I've bored, creeped out, or offended.  (Or possibly any weird mixture of the above.)

[Scarpia]

Pffft.

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[jochanaan]

Good!  With James' consent, we'll call that cleared up.   Now we can get back to the serious business of trying--and failing?--to define or describe "our" music.

[Grazioso]

My $.02: the satire and joking have been done in a spirit of brotherly joshing. James may be off base with his blanket condemnations and insults--and that's behavior that deserves to be called out--but he's still part of the family here and cares about music as much as any of us.

[eyeresist]

tl;dr