Two Questions.

[Andante]

A. Is there any type of classical music that you dislike to the point of avoidance.

B. When does music cease to be music.

I realise this will be a subjective topic and may even raise the question of "What is music?"   
   

[Mirror Image]

A. Is there any type of classical music that you dislike to the point of avoidance.

B. When does music cease to be music.

I realise this will be a subjective topic and may even raise the question of "What is music?"   

A. I usually avoid anything prior to the Romantic Era and even in the Romantic Era there's a lot of music I don't enjoy or can't find myself relating to it. The late 19th Century to the mid-20th Century is really where I'm most home.

B. Music ceases to be music when it becomes something you're not moved by and can't relate to. As Duke Ellington said "There are two kinds of music. There's good music and then there's the other kind."

[amw]

A. Not really. Some stuff (like Short Ride in a Fast Machine or w/e) is annoying but I won't go out of my way to avoid it.

B. Music is about intentionality. When a sound is not intended to be listened to musically—i.e. as sound structured in time—it, I guess, is not music.

This does mean context and nuance is important. The song of a bird is not music when you're listening to it out in the forest somewhere. The song of a bird is music when it's incorporated into Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus. Difference is, obviously, the bird didn't intend to create a piece of music, whereas Rautavaara did. Composition is mostly curation of existing sounds and materials that, in and of themselves, are not inherently musical.

[Brian]

I will skip B., which is more theoretical and less personal, and answer A., which for me is very personal and honestly very weird. I don't like music where I can understand what the people are singing. I don't listen to any classical music sung in English, my native language; in fact, 95% of the sung classical music I listen to is purely choral, rather than soloist-based. The result is I'm deaf to humongous swathes of the repertoire, including many operas, nearly all lieder, and a whole lot of baroque-era stuff.

Maybe that is not "dislike". It's just a matter of taste. Honestly, most 12-tone or mid-20th-century avant-garde stuff I do dislike to the point of avoidance. Even there, I like "textural" works that create specific odd or unusual sounds, more than works which fit into the conventional sphere of "music" but without conventional tonality.

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

A. Is there any type of classical music that you dislike to the point of avoidance.

B. When does music cease to be music.

I realise this will be a subjective topic and may even raise the question of "What is music?"   

My thoughts:

A. I dislike excessive sentimentality and bombast in music. I don't think I own a recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (but I do like Tchaikovsky generally), and I haven't listened to Carmina Burana in decades. Thus, I tend to avoid Puccini and verismo opera (and even these guys DID write some beautiful arias). I am not a big opera lover in general, with a few exceptions in the Baroque era, Wagner, etc. I admire Verdi, and think he was a great composer of opera, but I don't gain much enjoyment from opera these days. I find much of Copeland's and Chopin's music too self-pitying and overly-sentimental, but I love nearly all of Schumann's music. I don't care much for Bartok, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, but admittedly this may be more a function of my lack of knowledge and willingness to listen. Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 (WILDLY popular about 20+ years ago) make me want to start throwing things at the nearest speaker.

B. When it devolves into Rock. I realize that every single person on this earth worships and adores rock, and I am Hitler for saying this*, but to a very large degree (99.999%) I find that rock is degenerate, boring, predictable, annoying as hell, dehumanizing, and downright ugly. And I am no classical music snob; I collect and enjoy nearly all types of ethnic music, jazz (incl. free jazz), and various types of pop, funk, electronica, etc, etc.


* Actually, I do hate dogs and eat babies--or is it the other way around? 

[DaveF]

B. Music is about intentionality. When a sound is not intended to be listened to musically—i.e. as sound structured in time—it, I guess, is not music.

My thoughts entirely.  It does raise the awkward corollary that if someone puts a microphone to their guts after dinner and claims that they are creating music, then we'd have to agree - but then we could just move it into category A.

A. For me, just a few 19th-20th-century romantics - Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Medtner.  Purely personal - just the same as not liking (in my case) cucumber.

This is going to be a good discussion - I can feel it already at this early stage.  One eyebrow-raiser for me already has been:

A. I usually avoid anything prior to the Romantic Era and even in the Romantic Era there's a lot of music I don't enjoy or can't find myself relating to it.

B. Music ceases to be music when it becomes something you're not moved by and can't relate to.

which leads to the conclusion, MI, that you don't actually consider stuff from prior to the Romantic Era to be music at all (because you're not moved by it and can't relate to it).  Did you really mean that?  I seem to recall that Merbecke escaped one of Henry VIII's purges because he was "onlie a musitian" - but apparently he wasn't.  Should have been hung, drawn and quartered.

[some guy]

Curious how frequently intentionality comes up.

But it's always the intention of the composer.

What about the intention of the listener? Doesn't that get any consideration?

After all, question one is all about the intentions of the listener. But when we get to question two, those intentions get completely ignored.

Curious.

[Jo498]

A. Is there any type of classical music that you dislike to the point of avoidance.

Not sure about a "type". I admittedly know very little of some types/fields, e.g. a lot of (19th cent. Italian/French) opera and quite a bit of 20th century avantgarde; e.g. I am not sure if I have ever seriously listened to anything by Cage or Feldman but I have heard and quite liked some pieces from both fields. Similarly, I quite dislike Tchaikovsky's Rococo variations and Shostakovich's "Leningrad" symphony but I like other pieces of theses composers and would not say that I generally dislike any epoch or genre. There are some I definitely like less and tend to ignore but not much I'd actively avoid.

B. When does music cease to be music.

I am not sure this is an interesting question. (Or better, it is more interesting as a general philosophical/aesthetic question than as a musical question...)
There are some candidates like the infamous 4'33 or other highly aleatoric or experimental pieces.  I am not sure whether these are music. But one major point of them seems to be precisely to create something we would not consider music at first glance or in the "normal sense" and make us think about what kinds of dis/organization of sounds are music and which aren't.

Is actual birdsong (or whale songs) music? Are these animal intentional enough to make music, or is it just sounds? If there really was music of the spheres as a by-product of some *inanimate* natural process, I think it would be music if it sounded like music to us (or to whatever beings being able to perceive such musica coelestis). So I think I am with some guy here, that the intention of the listener is also important.

[Mandryka]

it's always the intention of the composer.

What about the intention of the listener?


.

We're going to end up rejecting "x is music" as a primary concept, and replace it with "x is music for person P"

So what would it take for me to transform eg the sound of the rain into music? What's the difference between someone who hears it as music and some who doesn't?

And could I transform eg Brandenburg 5, or a Tibetan chant, into something which is not music (for me?), by my intention?

If enough informed people decide that something by ericm is not music for us, when would it stop being music tout court?

[amw]

I don't like music where I can understand what the people are singing.

Same! Though not to the point of total avoidance, to be fair.

I think music activates the same areas of my brain as language does, and when you put the two together, they come into direct conflict with each other. Or something like that. I still rarely listen to most English-language music and especially anything with English narration in it.

Curious how frequently intentionality comes up.

But it's always the intention of the composer.

What about the intention of the listener? Doesn't that get any consideration?

What's the difference between listening and composing? If there is one.

[aligreto]

.... I don't like music where I can understand what the people are singing.

Strange, I have also always felt that way too.

[71 dB]

A. Is there any type of classical music that you dislike to the point of avoidance.

B. When does music cease to be music.

A. Operette. Lieds to some extent. 12-note serial stuff can be too difficult (?) for me to enjoy.

B. Never. Bad music is music, just bad.

[71 dB]

B. When it devolves into Rock. I realize that every single person on this earth worships and adores rock, and I am Hitler for saying this*, but to a very large degree (99.999%) I find that rock is degenerate, boring, predictable, annoying as hell, dehumanizing, and downright ugly. And I am no classical music snob; I collect and enjoy nearly all types of ethnic music, jazz (incl. free jazz), and various types of pop, funk, electronica, etc, etc.

Well, about 50 % of the rock music I have heard in my life makes me wonder in disbelief how music can be so dumb. Rock "devolved" from blues and I must say I don't enjoy blues either. I do enjoy some rock music, especially King Crimson, which I find amazingly smart "rock" music and I also enjoy some ambitious soft rock acts (british Lowgold and danish Kashmir), but hardly 1 % of all rock music has anything to offer to me.

[Jo498]

As most popular music is sung in English, do you listen to any of it or does the problem with understanding the text apply only to classical music?

I have no problems with appreciating music when I understand the sung text but usually neither if I do not understand, e.g. something sung in Russian or only have a vague notion what is going on as in French or Italian.

However, I tend to dislike "classically sung French". I am in a minority anyway that I do not particularly like the sound of that language (and no, I was not forced to learn it at school and hate it therefore, although I tried to learn some recently and I dislike several features of French besides the difficult pronunciation and a relation between written signs and spoken sounds that is almost worse than in English) and I think the nasals and some other features do not go well with classical singing. I have no problems with French (popular) chansons or the like where the more "relaxed" way of singing fits the language better.

I generally don't much care for Rock or most other popular music and its omnipresence in almost all media as well as in physical space (stores etc.) is often grating to me (I usually just ignore it but it is not always possible). But I think that it is obviously music, just often pretty bad music.

[Mirror Image]

This is going to be a good discussion - I can feel it already at this early stage.  One eyebrow-raiser for me already has been:

which leads to the conclusion, MI, that you don't actually consider stuff from prior to the Romantic Era to be music at all (because you're not moved by it and can't relate to it).  Did you really mean that?  I seem to recall that Merbecke escaped one of Henry VIII's purges because he was "onlie a musitian" - but apparently he wasn't.  Should have been hung, drawn and quartered.

Hmmm...this didn't come out the way I had hoped it would have. I'm never good at these things. Let me try again: I'm of the opinion that music is something that should put us into some kind of deep thought and/or tug at our heartstrings, but even sometimes a piece can just be downright fun to hear because it's a sonic spectacular or the rhythms are just so infectious that we can't help but to bob our heads along. Music serves so many different purposes, but if something isn't to my liking or it's something that I can't relate to or become moved by, it becomes noise at that juncture. Of course, music exists outside of these constraints and there's music prior to the Romantic Era. I acknowledge that there's music all around in some form or another for people to be enchanted by, but, given my opinion of what I believe music should do, something doesn't actually become music until we acknowledge that it is. That's why it's my belief that these types of things are purely subjective and is subjective as something like comedy for example. Something isn't comedy until we laugh, correct? Our acknowledgement of whether something is funny or not is based solely off whether we get it and the same applies to any art. I hope I haven't talked myself into a corner here, but this is more or less how I feel about it.

[amw]

As most popular music is sung in English, do you listen to any of it or does the problem with understanding the text apply only to classical music?

I don't usually listen to any of it. I've found that when I do, I can in some cases not register the words at all, but then I rarely find the musical content itself relatable enough to develop strong feelings about it.

Lyrics are highly important in popular music to the extent that it is much more an art form based on interplay between linguistic and musical meaning, than one based simply on sound structured in time. Since popular music is categorically different from classical music in this respect and many others—as different as poetry is from prose, or something—I would guess some people who can't deal with text in classical music do still enjoy popular music.

[Florestan]

A1. In the realm of "classical" music I tend to avoid atonal, serial and avantgarde music. Much as I tried (admittedly, not much enough), such music leaves me completely cold and unmoved. I like --- or rather, I can tolerate --- such goodies as Verklarte Nacht or Berg´s Violin Concerto, but generally speaking 90% of such music is not at all my cup of tea. i hasten to add that it´s all about me and nothing about the music in itself. The fact that I don´t enjoy it in the least should not preclude others from enjoying every bit of it. My taste is strictly personal and emphatically not the universal yardstick by which all music should be judged.

That being said, most of my listening time falls in the 1600-1900 time span.

A2. In my twenties I was a big heavy metal fan. Metallica, Manowar, Iron Maiden, Slayer and Judas Priest were on my daily diet --- alongside, believe it or not, Beethoven, Haydn or Mahler, or Queen and Dire Straits, for that matter.

Today, that is vingt ans après --- twenty years after --- I do not feel the need to hear one single note of those bands. If it happens (rarely) that I overhear them on radio while driving the car, I smile melancholy remenbering my youth --- but it´s been years since I haven´t consciously listened to their music...

B. Music is (1) what composers and performers do, and (2) what listeners (of whatever type of sounds) perceive as such. The rest is silence...

The other night I dreamt a piano tune, as part of a completely unmusical dream. I can hum it right now but I cannot write it down, because I am a musical iliterate. It came to me unintentionally (a dream), nor do I have any intention to write it down. Nobody except me will ever be aware of it. Yet I hear it as vividly in my mind as the latest piano music I have heard (incidentally, some Schubert dances). Is it music, or is it not?

[ritter]

A: I have an irrational aversion to one particular genre, the violin and piano sonata. I can't say why, I just don't like the sound of both instruments together...Of course, there are works for this combination I do admire, but still, I wouldn't even think of attending a violin and piano recital (even if Enesco and Cortot resurrected and came to Madrid to play).

More generally, I am very much in XB-70 Valkyrie's camp. I avoid music that offers excess sentimentality, particularly any music that (as I see it) tries to elicit an emotional response at the expense of an intellectual one.  As an opera lover, this poses some problems  , but I get by...

B: amw's phrase of "sounds structured in time" appears very apt to me, and I have never dismissed any music I dislike as "not being music"... I will say, quite often, I may consider something to be "bad music" or even "ugly", but that is entirely a different issue...

[Florestan]

Vocal music in a alnguage you understand...

Violin and Piano sonatas...

You guys are crazy, crazy I tellya... 

[ritter]

Vocal music in a alnguage you understand...

Violin and Piano sonatas...

atonal, serial and avantgarde music


You We guys are crazy, crazy I tellya... 

There, fixed...