What are you reading, watching and listening to? - All languages

[Qwynegold]

Hmm, I hope it will eventually be possible to watch it elsewhere too. But first I need to rewatch the old seasons...

[Salmoneus]

Just a note on the Veronica Mars front: a good night for the show at the Oscars. Krysten Ritter (Gia Goodman on VM) presented the Oscar for live action short to Jaime Ray Newman (Mindy O'Dell (the dean's wife) in the third season of VM). Two awards later, it was Tessa Thompson (Jackie on VM) handing out the original score oscar. Sadly Kristen Bell didn't present anything so not quite peak-VM... although since she hosted the SAG awards last year she was probably on the shortlist to host the oscars, if they'd had a host.

It's always gratifying when alumni of something you liked go on to do well...

[Salmoneus]

I recently watched The Clinton Affair. It's a six-part documentary about, well, what it says. It's pretty good; I don't know if it's something you have in the US (it was on C4 here), but if you see it, it's worth watching.


However, it suffers from a major storytelling problem: it doesn't know what story it's telling.


There's a whole bunch of stories you could tell. There's the story of Clinton's affair with Lewinsky. There's the story of Clinton, the accused serial abuser. There's the story of Clinton, the brilliant politician. There's the story of Whitewater. There's the story of the Star Report. There's the story of being inside the White House during the Star Report. There's the story of being Lewinsky during the Star Report. There's the story of the right-wing conspiracy to trap Clinton, and to sell the stories to anyone who was buying. There's the story of the impeachment. There's the story of the media coverage of all of the above. There's even the story of Al Gore and the 2000 election.

"The Clinton Affair" tries to tell all these stories (except the al gore and aftermath story, which is kind of a problem, because it leaves us with "and the impeachement failed. the end!"), and as a result couldn't tell any of them as well as it deserved.

In particular, while many of these stories can be roped together in a common narrative, the series ends up torn between two, competing narratives, which combine to weaken the structure of the series as a whole. Is it the story of Lewinsky's experiences... or is it the story of Star's experiences?

One is the story of a naive young woman who stumbles into a remarkable romance, until everything turns sour and she's dragged down to hell by every monster Franz Kafka could summon. The other is the story of the investigators who, step by step, get closer to reveal a massive hidden truth. It's not a problem that these two put your sympathies in different places. But it is a problem that the two stories require different structures. Star's story requires us to find things out at the same time as the investigators, as we inch closer to the core of the conspiracy. But Lewinsky' story requires us to know everything that happened right from the start, years before Star's report concluded.

So we're left cutting from snippets of Whitewater to what's going on in the Oval Office, and these feel like totally different stories, and each one undermines the other. Lewinsky's story feels unimportant because her silly fling, what presents she was given when, how often he called, seems unimportant next to the guys who are trying to overthrow the government - particularly because very little actually happened in the affair itself. But the investigation feels pointless when we're told all the information at least twice, everything is 'spoiled' an episode in advance, and we know that Whitewater is a red herring.

---------

The obvious story to tell is the investigation - you can't go wrong with it. But actually, it's Lewinsky's story that works by far the better. The highlight of the series is the episode or two pretty much devoted to Lewinsky's experiences as everything was blowing up around her; but from the point of view of the investigation narrative, this is all pretty unimportant (we know the facts, they know the facts, this is just crossing the ts). While I'd have liked a good, thorough, detective's-eye documentary about how they caught clinton, what I ended up wishing it had really been was just Lewinsky's story from start to finish - that's the story that the audience don't know as well, it's the story that feels more lastingly important in the end for all the issues it raises about society and politics, and it also benefits from the extensive interviews with Lewinsky, who is arguably the most impressive figure in the series - a woman with intelligence and self-awareness and great articulacy, who manages to convey her pain without avoiding her own portion of responsibility, and while also conveying her strength and resilience.


Mostly what I took away was the fact that Ken Star was a disgusting, appalling, horrifying piece of shit. So were a lot of his underlings - although there's a great irony when the guy you immediately peg as Bad Cop, the one who looks and talks like he's a mafia hitman who's been hired as a macho dinosaur cop, is actually the one to resigned from the job in moral outrage, while the 'nice' guys carry on.

In particular, a suicidal Lewinsky was held without a warrant and without access to legal advice, in a hotel room, while clearly having a mental breakdown of some sort, being interrogated for over 12 hours. It's horrifying that that could be allowed in a developed nation, let alone carried out by a man with a personal mandate from the national legislature. It's witchfinder stuff.

[kodé]

Munching popcorn to 538's review of the Michael Cohen hearing (which I also munched popcorn to):
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/po ... n-hearing/

[chris_notts]

Just saw Justice League. The film itself was a bit mediocre and far too dominated by bad CGI, but it did contain a cover of "Everybody Knows" by Sigrid which I hadn't heard before. I've always struggled a bit with Leonard Cohen, not because of the bleakness of the songs (my parents say "music to slit your wrists to on a fine spring morning" when he's mentioned), but more because I don't like his voice at all. Hearing the voice of a young woman sing doom and gloom is more pleasant somehow.

[Salmoneus]

Hearing the voice of a young woman sing doom and gloom is more pleasant somehow.

Oh, you should be a classical music fan then!

Flow My Tears (

More: show

Never may my woes be relieved, since pity is fled, and tears and sighs and groans my weary days of all joys have deprived... And fear and grief and pain for my deserts are my hopes, since hope is gone... Happy, happy they that in hell feel not the world's despite

) (the world's favourite pop song three hundred years ago).

Addio, del passato (

More: show

The joys and sorrows will soon be ended; the tomb confines all mortals. No flowers or tears will rest on my grave; no cross will bear a name, to cover my bones. Ah, smile on the hopes of a fallen woman; for pity's sake, grant her pardon; O God, take her to you! Ah, all, all, is finished.

) (it's a lovestruck, heartbroken prostitute dying of tuberculosis... or Peak Romanticism as it's otherwise called).

[chris_notts]

Hearing the voice of a young woman sing doom and gloom is more pleasant somehow.

Oh, you should be a classical music fan then!

I did try the links you posted, but it's not really my style to be honest. Maybe my ears not attuned to it, but I feel about it the same way I feel about a lot of really heavy metal and rock, that it all sounds a bit samey (not enough variety in the underlying music) and it's a bit hard to make out the lyrics due to the style of singing (or screaming in the case of much really heavy metal and rock). Flow My Tears I had to google to confirm that the woman was actually singing in English and not, say, Italian...

This isn't to criticise classical music, but I think like anything you need to work at gaining an ear for it, and the question is always whether it's worth the investment or not.

Just to give you an idea what I typically listen to, here's what I've recently played in Spotify: Sigrid, The Pierces, Nick Cave, Sia, Morcheeba, Queen, Aerosmith, Portugal. The Man, Bjork, America, King Crimson, Johnny Cash, Florence + The Machine, Genesis, Alan Parsons Project, dEUS, Hozier, Led Zeppelin, Marillion, Radiohead, Tori Amos, Warpaint, Pink Floyd.

[Salmoneus]

No offence, but if you hear those two as 'a bit samey', you have a rather blinkered ear!

For context...

"Flow my tears" is an English lute song from the late renaissance (it's from around 1600). Like most renaissance music, it's polyphonic - that is, its colour and structure come from the interplay between three independently-moving voices. In this rendition, one voice - the one with the lyrics - is sung by a human woman, fairly quietly (this sort of music is intimate, designed for small rooms) and in a natural singing voice, while the other two voices accompany her on a lute. There's little sense of harmonic motion in the modern sense, and instead much use is made of suspensions and cadences, including several phrygian cadences (rarely found in more modern music); in general, there's a lot of dissonance. The melody is syllabic (each syllable has its own note) and closely matches the rhythm of the words; as a result, the rhythms are constantly changing, and the melody is highly asymmetrical; a sense of order and coherence is instead produced from the manipulation of the distinctive 'tear' pattern in different forms, and the closeness of music and words, with the use of 'word painting' (where the music attempts to directly indicate the meaning or emotion of the words being sung at that particular moment). It's modal, although as it's primarily in the aeolian it's not that far from the modern minor.

"Addio, del passato" is an Italian operatic aria from more than a quarter-millennium later (the late 19th century, so later Romanticism), from an era when both polyphony and the lute were extinct outside of academia and niche enthusiasts. It's much closer to modern pop music in many ways (structurally, though in performance style it's more distant). It's diatonic - rather than the eight modes, it employs only two, the major and minor, although as it's late romantic it also uses chromatic textures outside of those keys for effect. It's not polyphonic - there is one melody line, and the accompaniment mostly just provides harmonic context (and the occasional ornamentation). It is driven by harmonic progression, an ordered passage from one harmony to another, and is mostly consonant. The rhythm and melody are largely symmetrical, employing balanced phrases and question-answer patterns. The music takes priority over the words - the words are contorted to fit the melody (some syllables take several notes), and while the music emulates the general mood of the lyrics, it rarely tries to directly match the sentiment of specific words (the exception being the turn into the refrain, where the music becomes rousing to indicate the turn from despair into temporary defiance and hope). The melody is mostly sung by an opera diva in full flight, at a volume that can fill a 2,000-seater auditorium unamplified, and cut through the full symphony orchestra that's accompanying her - as a result, the timbre of her voice is somewhat different from the more natural style seen in the first song; likewise, the rich and complex timbre of the orchestration is a great contrast from the plucking of the lute.

Literally the only things these two songs have in common are that they're both sad, they're both sung by unamplified human females, and neither is a pop song written in the last few decades (although Sting did at one point try to popularise "Flow my tears"...). Everything else - timbre, rhythm, melody, harmony, relationship with the lyrics, structure - is totally different!


Certainly, compared to the differences between those two songs, the pop music you mention is written in an extremely narrow range of styles. There are certainly good things that can be said about pop music, but "so much more varied and original than the rest of music!" is hardly one of them...


[I'm surprised you single out the diction. This certainly can be a problem, particular with operatic singers - I don't speak Italian, but even I can tell that Netrebko here does blur out a few sounds - but I'm really surprised you think that about that 'flow my tears' recording. With one-syllable-per-note, very soft accompaniment and a natural singing style, I think her diction is very clear (albeit with obviously a mild Argentine accent - one 'problem' with classical music is that as it's much more multicultural, you do have to put up with a lot of non-native accents; this is less of a problem for English people, as so few lyrics are in English anyway, but I imagine it annoys the Italians somewhat...). On the other hand, I think this is a pervasive problem in pop music - singers adopt strange, made-up dialects and highly artificial singing timbres, persistently blurring words together and frequently drowned out by their own instruments, which in 90% of the songs (outside the more singer-songwriter-y stuff) makes it very hard to make out any of the words... hence all the famous mondegreens!.]




On the broader question you raise - "whether it's worth the investment" - well yes!

Let me rephrase that question: "sure, it's the entire musical culture of all Europe and European-derived societies around the world across the whole of the last millennium or more (and of lots of people from non-European cultures too in later centuries), with the arbitrary exclusion of the products of the American phonographical industry in the last few decades, but is there anything there really worth the effort of paying attention to?" - and again, well yes.
It's like asking "since I've got twenty years of webcomics to read, is it really worth investing the effort to find out about these 'book' things?" - I mean sure, I like some webcomics, there's nothing inherently wrong with webcomics as a genre, but "the entire sum of human achievement in literarature outside of webcomics" does have one or two things to offer, I think.

Of course, for someone with zero interest in any music, investigating classical music may be pointless. But if you're interested in the 1% of music similar enough to fit within the narrow boundaries of commercial pop music, why NOT explore whether the other 99% of music may also have something of value in it?

For what it's worth, though, if your question is "yes, it's the entire musical culture of Europe and European-derived societies across the whole of the last millennium or more, with the somewhat arbitrary exclusion of American popular phonograph recordings of the last sixty years and their immediate emulators, but is it really worth the investment?", then the answer is "yes". It's like asking "I have nearly twenty years of webcomics to catch up on, so is 'the whole of literature that isn't webcomics' really worth investigating?" I mean, I like some webcomics, sure, there's nothing inherently wrong with the genre, but on the other hand, "all of the rest of human literary endeavours throughout recorded history" does probably have some good stuff too.




[Footnote: both these songs, as it happens, were pop songs in their day. "Flow my tears" was adapted dozens of times, and its lyrics repeatedly referenced in literature, for much of the following century or more - the composer, John Dowland, even took to signing his name "Jo. dolandi de Lacrimae" (that is, it was literally his 'signature piece'). A quarter-millennium later, Verdi was simultaneously the Steven Spielberg and the Michael Jackson (in a good way) of Europe, and this was one of the headline songs in his most popular work (though certainly not THE best-known song from the opera...). Indeed, on average there's till more than two performances of that opera every day, somewhere in the world, not counting amateurs, revues, etc. Today apparently it's the turn of Aachen, Duisberg, Duesseldorf, St Petersburg and Kyiv; tomorrow it's Chicago, Tuesday Prague... it's Bucherest on Friday, and Minsk and Reykjavik on Saturday...]

[Salmoneus]

Anyway, my original post wasn't meant to seriously tell you to listen to classical music. Just pointing out that "sad women singing incredibly depressing things" is a staple part of the tradition. In particular, heartbroken, occasionally disabled prostitutes with tuberculosis are the core of 19th century culture...

[alice]

Anyway, my original post wasn't meant to seriously tell you to listen to classical music. Just pointing out that "sad women singing incredibly depressing things" is a staple part of the tradition. In particular, heartbroken, occasionally disabled prostitutes with tuberculosis are the core of 19th century culture...

Your time-travelling self must have a sizeable fund of fascinating stories to tell.

[chris_notts]

No offence, but if you hear those two as 'a bit samey', you have a rather blinkered ear!

To start with: I'm not a musician, just a listener, so all of what follows is my subjective experience as a listener, not as an expert in music.

I don't necessarily mean the two songs sound the same, what I meant was that each song sounds to me quite flat and samey within itself. I feel like, having heard one minute, I've heard the whole thing and I'm then forced to rehear it again and again until the thing finally ends.

To take "Flow My Tears" as an example: the lute isn't really doing much at all, which means the woman is trying both to use her voice to make sure there's actually a musical event happening in the first place (instead of a guy half-heartedly plucking at some strings) as well as to communicate something. And that voice goes up, down, up down, but does seem to vary much or build to any kind of climax. There's a bit of a rhythm there, maybe, but... like I said, heard one cycle and you've heard the entire thing.

I also think the overwhelming reliance on a single instrument (her voice) for both the notes and the words means it does neither job well. I prefer songs where must of the musical structure and rhythm comes from a diverse range of instruments, which frees up the voice to enunciate more clearly and also to focus more on conveying emotion. I think, having thought about it, that this is what I dislike about opera: excessive use of the voice as an instrument for hitting notes instead of as a voice.

Classical music without vocals doesn't suffer from that problem, of course, although a few more percussion instruments wouldn't go amiss to give it a bit more of a beat.

Certainly, compared to the differences between those two songs, the pop music you mention is written in an extremely narrow range of styles. There are certainly good things that can be said about pop music, but "so much more varied and original than the rest of music!" is hardly one of them...

Is that really true? I realise that all the artists I listed sit in a broadly defined rock / pop genre, but to me as a non-musician Radiohead and The Pierces don't sound that similar really. Of course maybe technically they're built of similar elements at a fundamental level, but you can make anything from a human being to a stick insect with the same 4 letters of DNA, so that doesn't necessarily mean that the overall sound is similar.

Perhaps I'm being a bit dismissive of opera by saying that, to me, the two songs you linked to, while they were obviously not the same song, seemed much more similar than they do to you. But I think maybe you're maybe underplaying a bit how much variation in feel there is in modern music as well, regardless of the fact that (maybe?) the core building blocks of a pop/rock act are quite standardised.

Let me rephrase that question: "sure, it's the entire musical culture of all Europe and European-derived societies around the world across the whole of the last millennium or more (and of lots of people from non-European cultures too in later centuries), with the arbitrary exclusion of the products of the American phonographical industry in the last few decades, but is there anything there really worth the effort of paying attention to?" - and again, well yes.

Measuring by time is misleading, though, because probably about 12% of people born in the last 2000 years are alive right now, and the percentage who've lived through the era of modern music but maybe are now dead would be higher (say 20%+). And given that a great singer or songwriter today has both more access musical theory than a medieval peasant would have, and a better avenue to disseminate their music instead of dying in obscurity in a village somewhere, and I'd argue that modern music has a good chance of representing at least 40 - 50% of all recorded music actually potentially of value, not the 60 / 2000 = 3% that a pure time based measure would suggest.

On that same demographic basis I'd argue that music from other cultures, including modern non-Western music, is a more interest place to mine for diversity than historical Western music.

Of course, for someone with zero interest in any music, investigating classical music may be pointless. But if you're interested in the 1% of music similar enough to fit within the narrow boundaries of commercial pop music, why NOT explore whether the other 99% of music may also have something of value in it?

See above for a quibble about the 99% / 1% thing. But for what it's worth, I did enjoy Phantom of the Opera, both in person and on the big screen. I'm just not sure if that counts as an opera or not.

[Vijay]

"Vo Kuch" by Kiran Ahluwalia, a ghazal in Hindi/Urdu by a singer who's from India (Bihar) originally but grew up in Toronto and now is in NYC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOchPhrQlO0

"La romnjasa" by Kalyi Jag, a Balkan-style Romani song from Hungary (maybe in Lovari?):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTvArQg-as0

"A twenty-dollar gold piece," an American Kalderash Romani song that's in both English and Romani:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDm4naQI62A

[Salmoneus]

No offence, but if you hear those two as 'a bit samey', you have a rather blinkered ear!

To start with: I'm not a musician, just a listener, so all of what follows is my subjective experience as a listener, not as an expert in music.

Surely it's the listeners who are the experts?

I don't necessarily mean the two songs sound the same, what I meant was that each song sounds to me quite flat and samey within itself.

OK, that makes more sense. Although it's still an unusual complaint from a fan of pop music - a genre famous for its strophaic nature (most pop songs are literally just the same thing again and again with minimal variation. By contrast, classical songs outside of opera are usually (though of course not always) through-composed (that is, continually varying to follow the sentiment of the words).

I feel like, having heard one minute, I've heard the whole thing and I'm then forced to rehear it again and again until the thing finally ends.

Exactly my frustration with pop music!

To take "Flow My Tears" as an example: the lute isn't really doing much at all,

Err... the lute is doing a lot. To be fair, looking more closely at it, it seems it's transitional between polyphony and homophony, in that the lute only has truly independent melodies at times. Nonetheless, it does imitate polyphony, in that the lute plays semi-independent melodic lines at two different pitch ranges, plus additional accompanying notes, so it's very busy.

I'll admit, though, lutes are famously hard to capture on microphones - like guitars but more so. So some of the resonance, particularly in the lower notes, is lacking. [you can combat this by bringing the mike closer, but then, as with guitars but more so, you get a lot of ugly noise too. There are good lute recordings, but it's not easy recording live like this video.]

which means the woman is trying both to use her voice to make sure there's actually a musical event happening in the first place (instead of a guy half-heartedly plucking at some strings) as well as to communicate something.

"A guy half-heartedly plucking at some strings" while someone sings describes, give or take a drummer in case the other two can't keep time, at least half of all pop songs and probably more.

And that voice goes up, down, up down, but does seem to vary much or build to any kind of climax.

What variation would you like, other than the emotional variation, and the variation in pitch, and the variation in rhythm?
I'll agree that it doesn't build to a climax - but of course, that's also the big problem in pop music, and in short genres in general - you can't reproduce the affective power of a symphony over three minutes! In this case, though, it's also because Dowland wasn't intending you to feel a climax - that would kind of be out of keeping with the words. Instead, this is a short piece meant to evoke a tragic and melancholy feeling, rather than something containing a narrative - the narrative is in the words, not the music (just as in most pop songs).

There's a bit of a rhythm there, maybe, but... like I said, heard one cycle and you've heard the entire thing.

In this case, factually, no, you haven't. There are three different cycles in this song (i.e. AABBCC), marked by big shifts in emotion.

In the aria, on the other hand, that is true - but the music is only repeated twice. That's much less than most pop music!

I also think the overwhelming reliance on a single instrument (her voice) for both the notes and the words means it does neither job well. I prefer songs where must of the musical structure and rhythm comes from a diverse range of instruments, which frees up the voice to enunciate more clearly and also to focus more on conveying emotion. I think, having thought about it, that this is what I dislike about opera: excessive use of the voice as an instrument for hitting notes instead of as a voice.

So, you're a big rap fan, I take it - using the voice for conveying the lyrics, rather than the melody? Fair enough, but most Western music instead gives the melody to the singer. It's true that modern singers generally aren't very good, so they're given very boring melodies without 'going up and down' or 'hitting notes' as you put it (particularly in the last decade or two, it seems as though a lot of pop hits have about 50% of the sung notes be the same pitch...)- but of course that just removes more variety!

"Enunciate more clearly" must be a joke, given the distorted and unintelligible moanings that pop singers use. Which, fair enough, because have you seen the lyrics? OK, Bob Dylan might have written poetry, and Leonard Cohen had some good lines, but in general pop music is not noted for its lyric content. So it makes sense that they wouldn't care too much about making their words clear.

Classical music without vocals doesn't suffer from that problem, of course, although a few more percussion instruments wouldn't go amiss to give it a bit more of a beat.

Classical music generally doesn't need large drums, because it already has a beat. You need drums when the beat is not already powerful in the music itself (or when your performers can't keep time).

Certainly, compared to the differences between those two songs, the pop music you mention is written in an extremely narrow range of styles. There are certainly good things that can be said about pop music, but "so much more varied and original than the rest of music!" is hardly one of them...

Is that really true? I realise that all the artists I listed sit in a broadly defined rock / pop genre, but to me as a non-musician Radiohead and The Pierces don't sound that similar really.

Really??
I just picked two songs at random, not knowing anything about either of them - Radiohead's "Karma Police" and The Pierces' "You'll Be Mine", just because both of them were among the first couple of results on youtube.

Differences: The Pierces are women, so they're a bit higher in pitch. Their song is a bit more upbeat, as a result of both the harmony and their vocal style (whereas Radiohead are going for 'drunk depressed person mumbling'). The Pierces have a slightly faster drumbeat, and their intro has an evocative unusual-timbre instrument (processed voices?), but they drop that once the song gets going. The Pierces' have fatuous lyrics I can just about make out*, whereas Radiohead seem not to have any lyrics, but only a drunken mumbling.

Similarities: The timbres (other than the intro) are basically the same - very similar, affected and amplified singing style, same guitars mechanically running through the same sort of time-filling patterns**, similar melodies (kept within a similar, very limited range, to accommodate the limitations of the singers - not exactly something you could hum!***), with similar rhythms on similar drums.

*"we could bring a blanket for the grass / cover up your ass / so you don't see. / If you let me go / I'm running fast / one two three / one two three." I think they just forgot to fill in the blanks on the form they were given for that last bit? I can see why you want to leave the voice free from having a melody, so that it can convey this excellent poetry! Although it seems in the case of both these songs, the singer is more or less free from having a tune, but nobody else in the ensemble is playing the tune either. It's like trying to turn the human voice into ambient electronica...

**to be fair, that's a problem of accompaniment in any genre, where the demands of the genre require the accompaniment not to be too interesting. There's more variety here than in an alberti bass. But still, the two guitar tracks are very similar...
Of course maybe technically they're built of similar elements at a fundamental level, but you can make anything from a human being to a stick insect with the same 4 letters of DNA, so that doesn't necessarily mean that the overall sound is similar.

***marking these out as more modern pop. Older pop often did have hummable, and more varied, tunes.


I suppose my point could be made more concisely by saying: if you took The Pierce's song, and had a guy sing it, more slowly, and in an even mumblier way, you'd have something that sounded very like Radiohead's song...


Sadly, I can't be more precise, because pop music scores aren't free. Classical is rather more democratic in that respect...

Perhaps I'm being a bit dismissive of opera by saying that, to me, the two songs you linked to, while they were obviously not the same song, seemed much more similar than they do to you. But I think maybe you're maybe underplaying a bit how much variation in feel there is in modern music as well, regardless of the fact that (maybe?) the core building blocks of a pop/rock act are quite standardised.

Would you like to give examples of what you mean by variation in that sense?

I mean, obviously there are some variations - minor/major, fast/slow, male/female. Differences in timbre are the big thing in distinguishing pop music subgenres it seems (eg woman-with-acoustic-guitar vs guys-with-electric-guitars-and-drums vs synths).

But those are the variations you find in any genre. What you don't get much of is any variety beyond those basics - variety of rhythm, of harmony, of melody, of structure.

For instance, here's two pieces of classical music by the same composer, two years apart (both pieces that can't be mistaken for anything else in the repertoire: the Great (4th movement) and Nacht und Traeume

[or indeed this, this (sung in English translation here by Frank Sinatra, but the notes are still Tchaikovsky) and this...

Or more recently, this, vs this.

Or an even more recent composer: this vs this vs this...]

And yet, in general, once you've listened to a bit, you can immediately hear the era and nationality of a piece of classical music, and if it's a great composer you can identify the composer themselves, even if you've never heard the piece before. I strongly suspect that if you changed the singers, most people would find it very difficult to identify the original songwriter of most little-known popsongs! (indeed, that's intentional - songwriters are meant to make themselves anonymous through collective imitation).

Measuring by time is misleading, though, because probably about 12% of people born in the last 2000 years are alive right now, and the percentage who've lived through the era of modern music but maybe are now dead would be higher (say 20%+). And given that a great singer or songwriter today has both more access musical theory than a medieval peasant would have, and a better avenue to disseminate their music instead of dying in obscurity in a village somewhere

I think what you're neglecting there is the lack of intensive musical education these days. Middle ages, sure, but once you get into the early modern period, vast numbers of children would have been trained intensively in music from within a few years of birth - a far larger percentage of the population was involved actively in music production (indeed, almost the entire population to some degree!). For quite a lot of people this would involve training in composition, or at least its elements - every church needed someone who could not only play, but transcribe and improvise. One indicator of this is how many child prodigies there used to be in composition - whereas now there are effectively none.

, and I'd argue that modern music has a good chance of representing at least 40 - 50% of all recorded music actually potentially of value, not the 60 / 2000 = 3% that a pure time based measure would suggest.

I think that's nonsense, but in any case, I think you're missing something important: time (and geography). It doesn't matter how many people are alive, if they all belong to the same culture. Whereas even if the number of pieces surviving from any given nation and time-period is small, they can represent a greater breadth of creativity than a larger number of people all writing in the same time and (more or less) place. Just look at how dramatically music changed in european history, each movement genuinely shocking to those who came before (and often wildly different in different areas). By looking at pop music, you're looking at just one of those movements - no matter how many variations on the twelve-bar blues it's produced!

On that same demographic basis I'd argue that music from other cultures, including modern non-Western music, is a more interest place to mine for diversity than historical Western music.

I agree that non-Western music is valuable. But as pop music is the latest evolution of European traditional music, the beginning is likely to find it easier to 'understand' other music from that tradition first. I mean, sure, most young people these days wouldn't love that Tchaikovsky/Sinatra song, but most would find it more immediately accessible than Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank. Because while that has an undeniable beauty (and it's just a gorgeous timbre!), it's clearly from a far more distant tradition.

On the other hand, it's worth pointing out that there's only a few cultures who have developed sophisticated musical cultures and committed to writing a sizeable corpus of pieces in a way we can now read (purely aural transmission only allows a relatively small repertoire to survive, and nothing to be resuscitated) - Europe makes up a huge part of that.

Of course, for someone with zero interest in any music, investigating classical music may be pointless. But if you're interested in the 1% of music similar enough to fit within the narrow boundaries of commercial pop music, why NOT explore whether the other 99% of music may also have something of value in it?

See above for a quibble about the 99% / 1% thing. But for what it's worth, I did enjoy Phantom of the Opera, both in person and on the big screen. I'm just not sure if that counts as an opera or not.

Yes, it's an opera, but some snobs would deny it, for various ad hoc reasons. I'm glad you enjoyed it.


While we're at it, another famous sad woman singing sadly. I've linked to the beginning of the song itself - the previous minute and a half is intro. It's early Baroque but still in debt to the Renaissance, a through-composed (i.e. non-repeating) song against a basso continuo with pseudo-polyphonic episodes with the backup singers, and achingly emotional. You'll probably hate it.

[Nortaneous]

The importance of differences in timbre makes classical music that much more unapproachable - it's all pianos and violins! And those aren't the only differences between genres...

- Subject matter. If it's about parties, it's probably some variety of pop. If it's about Satan, it's probably rock or metal. But what if it's about parties and Satan? OK, it's probably glam metal, from the '80s.

- Structure. There are a few different structures that can be present. Sometimes you have a buildup-drop structure; this is most elaborated in dubstep, where you'll have a structure along the lines of introduction -> melody -> buildup -> drop -> elaboration on the drop -> outro, where the melody -> drop cycle is repeated and elaborated on throughout most of the track, joined by bridges. (Of course, there are other defining features of dubstep - the drop has to have a specific structure and timbre and so on - but the structure is very important.)

- The relative importance of melody and rhythm. Rap usually doesn't bother to have a melody. If there is a melody, it matters who's carrying it - usually this is the singer, but in many subgenres of metal, the vocals are present strictly for rhythm, and the melody is given completely to the guitar, as in Liturgy - Harmonia, or a synth, as in Alatyr - Hviezdy.

For example:
- Skrillex - Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites ([melodic intro/theme -> secondary theme -> very short buildup -> [drop -> theme] repeated and elaborated on a few times] x2 -> resolution of the themes -> outro)
- James Egbert & Schoolboy - Hero Down (intro -> melodic theme -> buildup -> drop -> buildup within the drop -> meta-drop -> bridge restating the melodic theme -> drop -> buildup within the drop again -> outro restating the intro)

This can get a little weird - Spag Heddy - Get Scared consists of elaboration on a single arpeggio! This isn't really dubstep, although it has the buildup-drop structure - but Spag Heddy mostly does dubstep, so.

Compare that to 'instrumental' electronic music that isn't dubstep, like Infected Mushroom - Manipulator, which has more of a 'staircase' structure - a theme is introduced and elaborated on, then a new, related theme is introduced on top of it, ratcheting up the tension almost continuously. There's one bridge-buildup-drop from about 2:36 to 3:49, and a much shorter one from about 4:30 to 4:45, but otherwise it keeps rising until the resolution at the end. I'm not really sure how psytrance is defined, but it's not dubstep, and I don't think it's defined by its structure.

Or Venetian Snares - Ion Divvy, where most of the tension modulation is the presence or absence of the rhythm section - and it's in 11/4, I think. Venetian Snares is breakcore, which is defined by emphasis on elaborate, high-tempo rhythmic patterns and (sometimes) widespread sampling; another example of breakcore is Igorrr - Unpleasant Sonata, which is based on a harpsichord piece called Les Cyclopes by Jean-Philippe Rameau.

If it has a guitar solo, of course, it's rock; and if most instruments get a solo, it's probably some variety of folk or jazz. Metal doesn't have guitar solos.

Sometimes you can have two genres with common themes and structures, but different instrumentation. Skrillex's brand of dubstep developed out of screamo, which is played with standard rock instrumentation. Dungeon synth developed from black metal (which itself developed out of Tangerine Dream-style new age, at least to some extent) - because Varg Vikernes, the Burzum guy, couldn't get a guitar in prison, but could get a Casio. Later on, he re-recorded some of the tracks from his synth albums as metal - compare Daudi Baldrs to Belus Dod.

(Adaptations of a song to a different genre are a useful way of learning the differences between the genres. For another example, compare Mack Murphy and the Inmates - Lately to Rome - Querkraft. It's the same song and the same singer, but he went from post-punk to neofolk.

Now, as for this:

And yet, in general, once you've listened to a bit, you can immediately hear the era and nationality of a piece of classical music, and if it's a great composer you can identify the composer themselves, even if you've never heard the piece before. I strongly suspect that if you changed the singers, most people would find it very difficult to identify the original songwriter of most little-known popsongs! (indeed, that's intentional - songwriters are meant to make themselves anonymous through collective imitation).

Once you've listened to a bit, you can immediately hear the genre and era of a piece of popular (as in "not classical") music. It's readily obvious to me that Lately is post-punk and Querkraft is neofolk. It's also readily obvious to me that Predator Technique - Nostalgia is referencing '90s PC game music, Rob Hubbard - The Last V8 is imitating Jarre, Liturgy's entire discography is about trying to forge a uniquely American (and especially NYC) style of black metal by taking in influences from classical minimalism and rap, and so on.

[alynnidalar]

I also think the overwhelming reliance on a single instrument (her voice) for both the notes and the words means it does neither job well. I prefer songs where must of the musical structure and rhythm comes from a diverse range of instruments, which frees up the voice to enunciate more clearly and also to focus more on conveying emotion. I think, having thought about it, that this is what I dislike about opera: excessive use of the voice as an instrument for hitting notes instead of as a voice.

You and I have precisely reverse tastes in music, I think. I strongly prefer music where the vocals are actually doing something interesting, not just saying words with minor variation in tone. This is probably one of the reasons I like metal so much, because frequently the vocals are treated as just another instrument in metal, as Nort points out. (and this goes double when you're listening to metal in a language you don't understand! The actual words are pointless if you don't speak the language, so you can't rely on the meaning to carry the song for you)

It probably also helps that I love singing myself, so I'm drawn to interesting vocals. The vocals in a lot of pop music are just so... simple. They don't have to be. But they often are anyway.

[Vijay]

For whatever it's worth, I love listening to classical music, opera, etc. but listen to folk and traditional music much, much more often. I kind of grew up on old Indian movie songs, which were largely based on our folk traditions (though also heavily influenced by Indian classical music - some Indian movie songs are in fact just Indian classical music). I'm not much into other kinds of (western(ized)) music, although I think I've been slowly warming up to them over the past few years. Very few people understand my musical preferences. I've tried arguing in favor of them before to no avail.

One of the first Beijing opera songs I ever heard:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC6Ecc1LztY

Another much less typical Beijing opera clip with the same performer in the role of White Snake getting pissed off at her husband
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHPegoquV5I

One of my favorite songs (in Bahasa Indonesia):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kixk69P4NNI

Another one of my favorites (the traditional Banyumasan song Eling-Eling from (the Indonesian island of) Java):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqZfBAZGjTI

A nice introduction to Kathakali::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49lTzt1cZgI

Maybe it's just me, but Toda songs kind of remind me of heavy metal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sry7a4Bs01g

[Salmoneus]

Grove directed me to the eighth of Alkan's op 38 'recueil des chants'.

Alkan's music does not appear popular - his fans seem only to be into the big, relatively famous, finger-destroying virtuoso pieces, which frankly aren't that great in my opinion - Grove politely notes that his talent for melody is 'rarely comparable to that of Chopin' and 'sometimes critically weak'.

But his smaller works are I think much more interesting. He seems to have been a lot more progressive as a composer than I'd originally imagined. And this allegretto is a great example of that - what the hell? That sort of "harmony" shouldn't be happening at that point in time!

Unfortunately, that seems to be the most prominent youtube video of that piece, and when I found it it had exactly ZERO views...


I also recently encountered his La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer, which is less fundamentally radical, but still extremely ear-catching in mood and effect, and still feels like something written about a century later than it actually was.

[it's also a good example of what Grove notes as one of Alkan's peculiarities: his tendency to make use of the extremes of the keyboard, rather than the centre. It's a soundworld that unfortunately I think was far too little explored in his era.]

[gach]

Touching on the ever returning discussion on musical styles, I've always enjoyed music that doesn't try to keep within narrow predefined limits but is instead written or performed simply to be good music. That's vague, I know, but it catches the sentiment of approaching music as artistic expression instead of catering to an audience with strong expectations. As a result I've never found an interest in obsessing over the detailed differences between musical subgenres.

Here are a couple of examples I've found particularly enjoyable in the recent past:

Esko Järvelä Epic Male Band – Kabob Ostrobothnia
https://soundcloud.com/epicmaleband/kabob-ostrobothnia

Hohka – Luomalan Joonaksen polska
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfg3tM5zPoQ

Pekka Pohjola – Try to remember (ft. The Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v085JKKzNRE

Leszek Możdżer & Holland Baroque – DeDeDe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhzkCuOsuX0

Iiro Rantala & Leszek Możdżer – Suffering (comp. Lars Danielsson)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgdiyUbT2I

The first track has a nice description pulled out of a newspaper article: "A somewhat oriental sounding piece Kabob Ostrobotnia. It's exactly as oriental as what you'd get for ordering a kebab in Kaustinen. Oriental, but really not even close." Its B part, on the other hand, sounds like one of the most Ostrobothnian things I can think of along with Koskenkorva and knife fights.

[dhok]

RVW's Charterhouse Suite for Strings.

(I feel like RVW is heavily underrated...maybe that's just on the American side of the pond.)

[Salmoneus]

Well, all classical composers are heavily underrated these days. But yes, RVW particularly. He's known in this country for a couple of major crowd-pleasers - mostly The lark ascending and Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis; if you're lucky, maybe also English folk song suite and/or Fantasia on Greensleeves - but most of his work is relatively little known or played, relative to his brilliance.

I think he falls into a similar trap as Shostakovich. "The masses" don't know them well, because they're classical composers but scarily recent in time, not to be taken seriously compared to the great masters of the past. And they're also too serious to be loved by the public - yes, both composers wrote some eye-catching money-spinning pieces, but behind them there's this mass of very long symphonies and operas and whatnot. But the "elite" don't respect them either, because they're "populists" and, worst of all, "sentimentalists" - they wrote music with tunes, that provoke emotions - the two cardinal sins of music in the minds of Serious People. They're too obviously (multi-)talented to simply scrub from history like most sentimentalists of the 20th century, so they're paid lip-service, but I agree that they're not given sufficient attention.

Also, of course, it's easily to emulate the modernist composers, as that requires no actual talent, just study; it's much hard to try to emulate a RVW or a DSCH, so fewer people do.