The World's Most Popular Atonal Crap

[Cato]

Does microtonal crap count as "atonal crap" ?

Some of it can be pretty mellifluous!

http://www.youtube.com/v/lOihGnn6HoE

[Karl Henning]

The key is, that "atonal crap" needn't actually be atonal! It's just a term of derision from someone who had rather be listening to [Almost] Anything Written Before 1897 . . . .

[Brian]

The key is, that "atonal crap" needn't actually be atonal! It's just a term of derision from someone who had rather be listening to [Almost] Anything Written Before 1897 . . . .

My mom once accidentally inverted the usual sentiment by referring to some 20th century composer derisively and mis-scoffing, "I can't stand that tonal crap!"

[jochanaan]

One person's atonal crap is another person's Great Music.

[Mirror Image]

One person's atonal crap is another person's Great Music.

(Raises up glass)

Hear! Hear!

[kishnevi]

The key is, that "atonal crap" needn't actually be atonal! It's just a term of derision from someone who had rather be listening to [Almost] Anything Written Before 1897 . . . .

And to put into perspective, while much 20/21th century music can be described as crap, so can a large proportion of the music composed and performed in the five centuries before then.  It's only that the accidents of time and the aesthetic taste of preceding generations have winnowed out the crap already, and so for us the task for the music of that period is to reverse the process and figure out what music should not have been winnowed out.  Whereas, for the music of roughly the last 100 years, it's up to us to do our own personal winnowing.

As for the actual meaning of "atonal"--well, as Humpty Dumpty says, a word means what I say it means, and I say "atonal" has a rather literal meaning: "does not use a tonal pattern in which the traditional European system of chords (thirds, fifths, sixths, etc.) can be aurally recognized."   That means a work that uses, f.i., an Asian scale as its basis is not necessarily atonal, and a work in which traditional chord structure (such those of the Second Viennese School)  can not be discerned by listening (even if on paper it seems to use such structures) is atonal.  For the vast amount of works composed in the last century which are not atonal, but are also not really tonal (tonal meaning 'traditional European harmony'), I'd just use a chronological reference--modern, contemporary, 20th century, etc.

[ibanezmonster]

Maybe we should be mathematical about this and apply advanced statistics. Perhaps a Honking Index (HI), where 0 indicates nary a single honk and 100 is maximal honking.

Example in a sentence:
"I tried getting through that Boulez notation, but with this hangover my ears can only handle up to 30 HI."

Now you're making me want to write something over 100 HI... because 100 isn't extreme enough.

[Madiel]

The key is, that "atonal crap" needn't actually be atonal! It's just a term of derision from someone who had rather be listening to [Almost] Anything Written Before 1897 . . . .

I'm pretty sure there's some Polytonal Crap in that list.

[Mirror Image]

Now you're making me want to write something over 100 HI... because 100 isn't extreme enough.

[7/4]

I'm a big fan of unpopular music.

[jochanaan]

I'm a big fan of unpopular music.

As one can tell by your handle/time signature!

[aukhawk]

Definitely unsquare.

[some guy]

And to put into perspective, while much 20/21th century music can be described as crap, so can a large proportion of the music composed and performed in the five centuries before then.  It's only that the accidents of time and the aesthetic taste of preceding generations have winnowed out the crap already, and so for us the task for the music of that period is to reverse the process and figure out what music should not have been winnowed out.  Whereas, for the music of roughly the last 100 years, it's up to us to do our own personal winnowing.

I'd like to put in a word if I may for jettisoning this particular metaphor. And not just because "crap" isn't what one winnows. I'd like to see the whole crap thing disappear.

First of all, crap is not a descriptor, so no, none of the music of any century can be described as crap. It can be judged; it can be dissed; but it cannot be described as crap.

Second, why winnow? That's not what music is for. Music is for listening. And, unlike wheat, there is no unequivocal difference between chaff and kernel in music. I.e., winnowing wouldn't really accomplish anything. Of course, you can always find things you don't particularly like. And you can decide not to spend any more time listening to those things. Though who knows? You might come back to those things later and think they're feline bedtime attire. It's happened before.

For myself, I find that listening to music is a very satisfying thing, so satisfying that I also find I have no interest in judging or in ranking or in winnowing or any of the other activities other than listening that so many music lovers seem to engage in with such passion and such fervor.

It seems, sometimes, that music lovers in actual fact love quite a lot of other things quite a lot more than listening to music. Deciding who's the greatest, for instance, Bach or Beethoven. As if listening to anything by either of those guys has anything at all to do with deciding which is the greatest.

I can tell you what I find to be easy. If Beethoven's opus 111 is playing, I'm listening to Beethoven. Bach in that moment does not even exist for me, nor does any other composer. If the St. Matthew Passion is playing, then in that moment only Bach exists, and not even Bach, but that one piece by Bach.

Those are two pieces that other people have decided (having taken a short break from listening to music, I suppose) to call great, so I will add, for their benefit, that the same thing happens with Gunter Becker's oboe concerto. Is it great? Im-pertinent. Is it atonal? Im-pertinent. What's pertinent is that when it's playing, I'm listening to it. Listening to it and to nothing else. It is sufficient.

Well, that feels good to have gotten off my chest. Breathing is so much easier now.

[Karl Henning]

Nice.

[Karl Henning]

Grain, we can winnow. Music, we needn't.

[Madiel]

Sorry, I don't agree. For the simple reason that the number of minutes of music in the world is far greater than the number of minutes available to me to listen to it.

Excluding what I'll do with my spare time in heaven, of course.  But here on Earth, the time available is not infinite. Therefore prioritisation is required.

Some of the people on this forum do appear to listen to truly extraordinary amounts of music every day, but I still strongly suspect that more than 24 hours worth of new recorded music is being released every 24 hours. So you choose.

And that's not even counting all the recorded music that sneaked into the world before I was born, never mind before I was old enough to have a CD player and a credit card.

[kishnevi]

I'd like to put in a word if I may for jettisoning this particular metaphor. And not just because "crap" isn't what one winnows. I'd like to see the whole crap thing disappear.

First of all, crap is not a descriptor, so no, none of the music of any century can be described as crap. It can be judged; it can be dissed; but it cannot be described as crap.

Second, why winnow? That's not what music is for. Music is for listening. And, unlike wheat, there is no unequivocal difference between chaff and kernel in music. I.e., winnowing wouldn't really accomplish anything. Of course, you can always find things you don't particularly like. And you can decide not to spend any more time listening to those things. Though who knows? You might come back to those things later and think they're feline bedtime attire. It's happened before.

For myself, I find that listening to music is a very satisfying thing, so satisfying that I also find I have no interest in judging or in ranking or in winnowing or any of the other activities other than listening that so many music lovers seem to engage in with such passion and such fervor.

It seems, sometimes, that music lovers in actual fact love quite a lot of other things quite a lot more than listening to music. Deciding who's the greatest, for instance, Bach or Beethoven. As if listening to anything by either of those guys has anything at all to do with deciding which is the greatest.

I can tell you what I find to be easy. If Beethoven's opus 111 is playing, I'm listening to Beethoven. Bach in that moment does not even exist for me, nor does any other composer. If the St. Matthew Passion is playing, then in that moment only Bach exists, and not even Bach, but that one piece by Bach.

Those are two pieces that other people have decided (having taken a short break from listening to music, I suppose) to call great, so I will add, for their benefit, that the same thing happens with Gunter Becker's oboe concerto. Is it great? Im-pertinent. Is it atonal? Im-pertinent. What's pertinent is that when it's playing, I'm listening to it. Listening to it and to nothing else. It is sufficient.

Well, that feels good to have gotten off my chest. Breathing is so much easier now.

If you think the word crap is not a useful term in this exercise, I have no problem in refraining from its use.

But I think "winnow" is a valuable term, because we all do it.  You do it, even if you deny you do it.  You choose to listen to that Beethoven piano sonata, and when you do so, you are choosing it in preference to other music--Boulez's piano sonatas. for instance--and Beethoven's other piano works, too.  When you listen to the Bach, you are choosing to listen to it rather than Penderecki.   You  do it when you choose to listen to the Becker concerto instead of an oboe concerto by Vivaldi or the Strauss oboe concerto.   And you will make your own judgments on matters of technical expertise of the composer and emotional communication through the music.  Orfeo is right.  It's not possible to not prioritize, unless you have an Ipod with enough storage to hold all the music ever composed, and put it on "shuffle". 

What you don't do is play the game (and I'm guilty of playing the game myself sometimes, of course) of telling other people that they should agree with you on those judgments.  You do judge and rank;  you simply don't feel it a good thing to force those judgments on other people.  You prefer to let them hear the music and decide for themselves.  So you keep the results of those judgments and ranking to yourself.

[some guy]

I think you may have simplified my reality a bit.

I don't choose based on rankings or judgments. I'm tempted to say I have no idea why I choose to listen to anything.

But that's not entirely true. If I have listened to Beethoven's opus 111 recently, I probably won't listen to it again right away. But how, in its absence, to I choose between all the other music there is?

Well, I'm certainly not aware of thinking "That's a great piece; I should listen to it." I am aware, sometimes, of thinking "that's a piece I like," and then listening to it. I suppose in that situation one could argue that I have done some winnowing. My point about that would be that if I am winnowing, unconsciously, it does not register as an activity. It does not register as necessary. Maybe it just happens. OK. I'm willing to let it just happen. What I'm not willing to do is make it happen, to take it in hand, consciously, and do winnowing on purpose.

For one, what is the end result of winnowing? That one has separated grain from chaff. But, as I've already said, in music there is no grain and chaff. There are likes and dislikes, of course, which change from day to day. (Hopefully, they change. Especially the dislikes.)

I don't approach the situation with the givens that winnowing implies. I approach the situation not to separate, not to rank, not to judge, but to explore. If there's anything besides simply listening--if there's "deciding what to listen to before I can do the listening" (which y'all are making way too much of--really)--then it's exploration. Exploration does not imply knowledge as winnowing does. I don't know what I'll like or dislike. And once I dislike something, I either put it in the "never again" bin and forget about it or I put it into the "maybe later" bin for further exploration.

That's the only categorizing I do any more. And my actions aren't really affected all that much by that categorizing, either. I had put Scelsi into the "never again" bin at one time, if you can believe it. A friend gently suggested that I reconsider. I did. I had put Hanson into the "never again" bin, too. Which, for me, is easier to believe. Then one day, I was innocently driving along in some car or other, minding my own business, when I thought I'd turn the radio on. It was in the middle of some mid-century orchestral piece. Pretty interesting stuff, if I may be allowed to say so without being judgmental ( ).

It was Hanson's sixth symphony. Well. I liked it. Prejudices notwithstanding. So I very sweetly went to my corner record store (remember those?) and bought a copy. I may have prejudices like everyone else, but I'm not married to them.

How I choose what to listen to:

1) Haven't listened to it recently
2) Am on a * kick (so listen to everything by Sibelius in a very short span)
3) Have listened to it and not liked it (the real category there being "I want to like if if that's possible"--i.e., it's unfinished business.)
4) Have not heard it yet.

For me, #4 is probably the option I chose most frequently nowadays, but again. Things change.

Winnowing implies that things don't change. There's grain, and there's chaff, and the purpose is to separate them. Done. That's not how I see the situation with music at all.

And I don't put such emphasis on how and why I choose, either. (I only did it just now for the purposes of this post. I'll probably forget all about it in a what were we talking about?)

What I do is listen. Whatever it is that's playing, however it happened that it was playing--my choice, the radio station's choice, a friend's choice--that it's playing means one thing for me: I listen to it.

Done.

[Madiel]

I don't approach the situation with the givens that winnowing implies. I approach the situation not to separate, not to rank, not to judge, but to explore. If there's anything besides simply listening--if there's "deciding what to listen to before I can do the listening" (which y'all are making way too much of--really)--then it's exploration. Exploration does not imply knowledge as winnowing does. I don't know what I'll like or dislike. And once I dislike something, I either put it in the "never again" bin and forget about it or I put it into the "maybe later" bin for further exploration.

Nope, I still don't agree. Even though exploring in the way you describe is precisely what I do as much possible.

Because how do you make decisions as what to listen to? I doubt it's purely random. It's based on information - things you read, from reviewers, from other fans, friends... You're writing on a message board the purpose of which is basically for other music lovers to say "hey, check this out". There's still a kind of knowledge involved. Are you seriously trying to suggest that you add things to your listening list completely at random?

I don't buy it. Even exploring involves direction. That direction might not be the utterly simplistic "if you like this, you should also like that" that all the automated services try to employ. It might well be based on filling gaps instead - new directions not tried yet - but it is still directed.

None of that requires ranking as such, but it still requires choice.

[Karl Henning]

[...] For one, what is the end result of winnowing? That one has separated grain from chaff. But, as I've already said, in music there is no grain and chaff.

As a listener, I am apt to agree. Because, as a composer, my workplace is the threshing floor . . . .