[loremipsum]

Quote:

I dont understand drone music.

Try opening your fridge and vacuuming the inside.

 

[bigshot]

Quote:

Give me 20 - 40s jazz and pre 1900 classical.

You got it!
http://www.head-fi.org/t/573820/musical-sharing-thread-1900-1960
 

 

[Edoardo]

Quote:

Complexity of composition isn't what makes music great. Performance is much more important. Here's an example of an extremely simple tune that gives me chills because of the way it's performed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbJJAAVSZY
Old time music has tremendous poignancy, not because of the layers of meaning, but because of the purity. Simple songs can be challenging for a singer because you want to maintain the melodic thread, but you want to introduce subtle variations as well. I sing and play cowboy chords and this can be very difficult for me, even if the melodyand chords are not.

First of all... Thank you very much for the link I love Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell and country music and didn't know that recording...
 
 
 
 
But I think you are missing the point, I think I've been misunderstood.
 
Even in music, we can separe the performance and the composition. Art is not just about performing.
 
How to compose a masterpiece? A masterpiece has to own several "layers of meaning" to be considered such.
 
In fact, an opera is regarded as a masterpiece when it's able to mean something to any people in any age.
That "something" may vary from age to age and from people to people, and may vary to one single person in its lifetime.
That "something" may not have been even intended nor known nor foreseen by the authors themselves, but it's coherent to the opera itself.
 
Beyond that, a composer/artist has to show high command and mastery of its means, may these be  language, breath, pitch, music composition skills, etc...
This may translate into complexity, but as you have reminded, since the 50s the masses have not been educated to appreciate it anymore. 
 
Music could not be more "simple" that it has gone in these latest years, just because what once used to arouse admiration, appraisal, astonishment, amazement, now causes only boredom.
 
This is not only in music: let's take poetry for example.
 
Once upon a time, even philosophical and scientific essays had to be written in poetry.
Until not much more than a century ago, poetry, to be considered such, had to respect very strict metric rules.
Nowadays, any long-haired teenager writing down anything pseudo-romantic is considered "a poet" as any teenager with a couple of softwares installed on his pc is considered a "musician".
As mastery of the language had been lost just as mastery of music composition had.
 
So... In conclusion, I agree with you, but one thing is purity, one thing is randomness.
 

 

[tru blu]

Geez, bigshot…can we back up a second? I don't know what hippies you hung out with, but I think we're about the same age and it hasn't been my experience that they turned into yuppies. Actually, there are measurable reasons why that makes no sense; just do the math. Since by definition, yuppies are "Young UPwardly mobile Professionals", what hippie who was around for say, the Summer Of Love in 1968 would still be young by the mid-'80s, when Reaganite yuppiedom blossomed? More likely, the kids of hippies turned into yuppies, like that TV character that made the actor Michael J. Fox famous on the show Family Ties.
 
Actually, this isn't the first time in this thread (or others) where bigshot's been a bit squirrelly with dates or times (not the kinda specifics he's into), but the reason I commented on this one is he just kept repeating it. I'm out, y'all…
 
 

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Hey bigshot. Mind critiquing this?
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iTlu3STCdI
 
symphonic classical metal.

 

[Nom de Plume]

I understand that I'm late in saying this, but I just feel pressed to say it. Ignore it if you so please.
Most of you seem to neglect, or simply don't understand, that hip-hop is a genre for dance. Whether you hate it or love it, hip-hop has been the breeding ground for countless dance forms - many of which I consider beautiful. To that end, hip-hop is a genre I will always love.
If you sincerely believe hip-hop is mainly characterized by sex, drugs, thugs, police, and the like, you don't know what hip-hop really is. How you could blow your trumpet against hip-hop with such gusto while believing this disturbs me, but to each his own. 
 
P.S. I won't go into this further in the thread. Any replies will be sent via PM.

 

[bigshot]

Hey bigshot. Mind critiquing this?
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iTlu3STCdI
 
symphonic classical metal.

Aside from the cartoon horror show vocals, that's pretty close to the sort of music I listened to in high school... Rick Wakeman Journey to the Center of the Earth, Anthony Phillips, Curved Air, Rennaissance, sort of stuff. It's odd that thirty years later, they're still making it. I suppose that kind of music got me used to the sounds of instruments I would later hear in classical music. Maybe it serves a purpose as an introduction to better things. I'm not sure. I've gone back and listened to the music from my teen years and now it just embarasses me to remember how "superior" I thought I was to the Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Rolling Stones fans. The more straightforward stuff is a lot more honest, even if it is kind of bare bones. It seems that the curse of "progressive" rock music is that it absorbs irrelevant details of classical and jazz and mixes it all up like walnuts and marshmallows suspended in jello. The jello is better without all that.

This stuff shares instruments and some arrangement ornamentation with clasical, but it's really not the same thing. The big difference between "symphonic rock" and real classical music is the structure and context of the music. In symphonic rock, there's always a jumbling of styles, with pre-Classical lutes and recorders right next to Romantic era style strings and weird piano bar finger noodlings. It's like a smorgasbord with ice cream right next to the pickled herring and horseradish sauce. Also, structurally, art rock always seems to be a formless patchwork quilt with five or six totally different pieces of music joined together by the engineer in a meandering formless whole. It was much worse in the late seventies with ELP and Genesis putting out albums with whole record sides that wandered around for twenty minutes and never added up to anything.

But all in all, aside from the uniformly wretched vocals, that isn't too objectionable I suppose. But I'd still rather listen to real classical music than "classical lite".

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Bigshot, What do you think of this song from Blind Guardian.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEi2Ik3I-uo

 

[Cain]

Let me attempt a shot. In return, give me something to listen to, if you want, preferably classical. Maybe I'll get hooked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QM1QdRpFxU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQr9UYN1JbA

Also, I currently loathe hip-hop and rap (my main complaint is that it's monotone. Nothing ever happens, it never takes off.). If any fan of the genre wants to try and convince me otherwise, feel free to link me vids.

 

[Edoardo]

Quote:

Let me attempt a shot. In return, give me something to listen to, if you want, preferably classical. Maybe I'll get hooked.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QM1QdRpFxU&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQr9UYN1JbAAlso, I currently loathe hip-hop and rap (my main complaint is that it's monotone. Nothing ever happens, it never takes off.). If any fan of the genre wants to try and convince me otherwise, feel free to link me vids.

Get Abbado's DG 2001 recordings of these for DG, or Thielemann's on DVD/BluRay if you can enjoy the video section
 
Beethoven 5th symphony, 1st movement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3q3nhqwML0&feature=related
 
Beethoven 9th symphony, 4th movement. The lyrics are those of Shiller's Ode to Joy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_yl8Wkniz8
 

Ode to Joy, translation
http://bhabha.name/
 
 
 

 
Tell us if you have a special inclination towards an instruments so to advice you better
 

 

[Astrozombie]

Don't they say music is there when you don't have the words to express yourself? So why add words to it? The Opera hour on the local KUSC is the worst. You don't need to tell a story, leave it alone or go write a book.

Also why does bcasey go all over this forum trying to vindicate his music taste?

 

[WoahReQQuiem]

Mainstream Hip-Hop / Heavy Metal / Mainstream Rap / Some mainstream pop (some are good, though. I personally like Lights.)

 

[psylon]

I'm not generally one to place myself above others, but I can't help but look down on people with the mentality of disliking entire genre umbrellas. Things as encompassing as 'hip hop' and 'drone' are 2 things I see under fire a lot from pseudo-insightful sheeple. I refuse to believe that anyone who claims they dislike an entire umbrella genre is doing anything but being ignorant and presenting a recycled (or contrived at the least) point. 
 
I don't think I have ever in my life seen someone effectively criticise hip hop, for example. Hip hop is one of my favourite genres, yet a vast majority (if not all) of the shoddy critique I see against hip hop attacks characteristics that I mutually dislike and that a lot of examples outright contradict! I can name scores of songs, albums and artists that totally contradict all of the complaints I hear on a day-to-day basis using hackneyed criticism such as 'lack of lyricism' and 'no originality in production'.
 
Feel free to test me on that last statement, by the way.

 

[Aldighieri]

Simply I don't like lady kaga....

 

[bigshot]

Cain, I added a video for you over in the 1900-1960s thread.