chris_notts wrote: ↑Mon Mar 04, 2019 2:56 pm
Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:28 am
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.
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)