I Miss the Gold Ole Days...

Nah, it's wholly possible that in 200 years Williams will be forgotten and Boulez will be held up as the underappreciated genius of our century.

Just don't think it's likely because, as much as human culture changes, human ears and brains stay the same...

Tsk:

http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/do-you-hear-noise-story-14147-4.html#post220901

I recommend looking at the entire thread, if you haven't seen it. Quite a heated discussion about what is music, etc etc.

guys, guys!

I have a GREAT idea.

Let's leave this thread alone and allow weca to discuss with giancula! It will be a loving great discussion! :D really!

guys, guys!

I have a GREAT idea.

Let's leave this thread alone and allow weca to discuss with giancula! It will be a loving great discussion! :D really!

Deal.

Sounds like fun. I'll get me some popcorn.

Just don't think it's likely because, as much as human culture changes, human ears and brains stay the same...

Hardly.

Music listeners change as much as music makers- otherwise we'd still have medival music, and you'd be hanged as a satanist for playing Tritones.

'Mainstream' music doesn't change to that extent. When augmented triads started being used heavily in music (I don't know exactly when, but I'm guessing around the time of Paul Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice) they didn't stop using all the ideas that came before. Historically, composers incorporate some ideas of the past with some new ideas, rather than simply disregarding the entire history of music.

So really what I'm saying is, 'mainstream' music is in constant evolution rather than revolution..

Hardly.

Music listeners change as much as music makers- otherwise we'd still have medival music, and you'd be hanged as a satanist for playing Tritones.

That's human culture changing... the ear has, technically, always been able to "understand" dominant sevenths, but culturally it was for many centuries off limits. If the ear can parse/comprehend two separate planes of harmony in different keys at the same time (e.g. Honegger or Ives)... tritones are no problem.

There are some things that the ear is incapable of, for instance, without the score and a pencil, picking out the tone row from the middle of a "hardcore" serial piece - much less any other serialized elements like duration - is a hopeless task. Serialism has been around for 90 years and it hasn't gotten easier to aurally parse... proving imo that it's not an expanding-musical-culture thing like the use of sevenths or aug 6s.

I vote Weca and Giancula duke it out.

*Cooks a three-course meal for the cat fight, throwing thirty dollars in the pot for Giancula*

weca: completely off!

Listeners can also be trained and enjoy more 'difficult' music, accordingly!

Also, even if something can't be "extracted" out of the music by our brains (our ears don't do that much) it can create structures that take part in forming our listening experience. You probably won't hear all the little number-plays and structural intricacies in a Bach fugue or a piece by Boulez and you won't actually hear all the micro-canons in Ligeti's Atmosph

If John Williams and Beethoven/Wagner/Strauss disappeared from the pages of history tomorrow, I promise you the London Symphony Orchestra would not stick around just to play concerts of Corigliano and Crumb.

I would just like to briefly join in here and warn Weca that you're getting into dangerous territory here. To criticise modern composers because their concert music isn't played as much as that of dead composers is very risky.

This phenomenon of the music of dead composers becoming more popular is one that started when Brahms was in his prime. History has taught us that much music that stands the test of time is not music that always catered to the masses.

The interesting thing about music is that it isn't wholly dictated by culture. For one thing, anybody listening to music in a major key immediately knows it represents a happy emotion, whereas a minor key sounds sad. When I first listened to classical music aged 4, I immediately knew how to react to minor chords, major chords and even tritones (The sorcerer's apprentice is obviously mysterious).

The fact that everyone who hears a minor chord knows it is sad suggests that we are pre-programmed to react to music in a certain way, rather than us adjusting to music over the course of a lifetime through being forced to listen to certain music. Obviously a listener's tastes can change, but as far as emotion goes, it's pretty much set in stone from a very young age. Nobody told me a major key was happy, how could I possibly have known this unless the music was somehow speaking for itself?

With this in mind, I think modern music that goes as far as not having a key is hard to interpret for a great deal of people, because it does not convey an obvious, immediate emotion.

Can you back up the statement that "everybody knows major is happy and minor is said" in any way, or are you just making stuff up randomly? The fact that you heard a minor chord when you were four and found it sad doesn't really mean anything.

Your statement reminds me a bit of a rather similar statement by a very clever person, namely Aristotle. He too thought that certain modes had certain characters which were fundamental and even scientifically provable:

"On the other hand, even in mere melodies there is an imitation of character, for the musical modes differ essentially from one another, and those who hear them are differently affected by each. Some of them make men sad and grave, like the so-called Mixolydian, others enfeeble the mind, like the relaxed modes, another, again, produces a moderate and settled temper, which appears to be the peculiar effect of the Dorian; the Phrygian inspires enthusiasm. The whole subject has been well treated by philosophical writers on this branch of education, and they confirm their arguments by facts." (Aristotle, Politics)

Now, the problem is that Dorian (and to a lesser degree Phrygian) is rather close to our minor and Mixolydian is rather close to our major, yet he associates sadness with Mixolydian and enthusiasm with Phrygian. Of course you can't just equate ancient modes with modern scales and the relationship is rather vague. I'm certainly not saying Aristotle would have found major sad and minor happy, I'm just saying that you should be extremely careful about assuming that your personal (cultural) experiences are something universal.

The point is just that people have often thought that their cultural standards were something more than just that and that very often this isn't confirmed if you actually compare different cultures.

If you really claim that certain modes, keys or chords per se evoke certain emotions, please back it up.

The fact that everyone who hears a minor chord knows it is sad suggests that we are pre-programmed to react to music in a certain way, rather than us adjusting to music over the course of a lifetime through being forced to listen to certain music. Obviously a listener's tastes can change, but as far as emotion goes, it's pretty much set in stone from a very young age. Nobody told me a major key was happy, how could I possibly have known this unless the music was somehow speaking for itself?

That was a fatal argument mistake, lol. Thank you for participating, you lose.

Star Wars: episode 4, track 4 "the desert / the robot auction" - direct lift from Rite of Spring... now, Williams does NOT do this sort of thing often, so I forgive him for that one.

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, sadly I hate this score so I can't tell you the exact track, but it's a direct lift from Battle on the Ice from Alexandre Nevski by Prokoviev

Willow: the main theme is a direct lift from a Schumann symphony. (Horner is a sticky fingered little bastard)

Half of anything Hans Zimmer does is lifted from The Planets.

I can't remember which film we were watching last week or the week before, but it had a direct lift from Daphnis and Chloe.

Now...

The thing is, considering the time constraints that composers of film music are under, as well as the idiocy of too many directors who want the EXACT same music as in their temp track, I can see why SOME composers of film music find themselves trapped into actually quoting from a classical source to satisfy the needs of the director.

James Horner, on the other hand, not only steals from others, he constantly borrows from his own soundtracks... he's the Arcangelo Corelli of the soundtrack world - if you've heard one of his scores, you've heard them all.

And I DARE anyone to say that I hate film music. I have a massive collection of filmscores to go along with my huge collection of films.

I'm just realistic about what to expect from a film composer given 2-3 weeks to write 60 minutes of music. I don't expect him to write anything earth-shattering. He's writing music for a contract. He's fulfilling someone ELSE'S expectations for the score.

I don't feel like sitting here and trying to explain the contradiction of why Howard Shore's score to LotR is a brilliant soundtrack, but actually not very good music. As a filmscore, it's wonderful. As "pure music" it's actually pretty bad. I happen to think that only on the very rare occassion do the two worlds coincide: a good filmscore stands as truly great music.

Oh, and enjoying a score isn't a guarantee that it is good. I love a lot of pretty "trashy" music. I hold no illusions about the ultimate quality of that music, however.

OK, you can all go ahead and flame and argue all you want. I've said my piece.

I agree with all this. Although I think a hell of a lot of film music is lifted from Holst's The Planets.

Far from being a cultural standard, I think minor and major is something that is natural, something that humans discovered rather than invented.

How could culture dictate that everybody simply instinctively knows that a minor key is sad? I wasn't told what a minor key was, I wasn't aware of their being keys; my percieved difference between the minor and major was simply instinctive. I do not think it was just luck that I just so happened to interpret music in this way. Of course, there are many other musical ideas that cause emotional responses in humans. The fact that certain musical ideas convey images is purely cultural, (eg arabic or egyptian, or military overtones) but emotion itself - happy and sad - is pretty much hardcoded into music.

I recognise that I am completely fallible, but from my point of view I find it hard to accept that a 500 year old musical notion (major = happy, minor = sad) could be instantly understood by somebody who hadn't been told of how to interpret it, who has never studied music, who has never even listened to classical music before. This is one example yes, but it is pretty much universal to people who have experienced western music, save for those without the ability to distinguish between a minor and major third.

The fact that if you double the frequency of any wave you produce an octave is hardly coincidental, so from my point of view the creation of an octave was a 'discovery', something that naturally existed but only made 'musical' sense to the ears and brains of humans.

edit: is the fact that I interpret minor and major 'correctly' a reflection of the fact I was for some unknown reason naturally affilliated with culture, or music? It cannot be coincidence, it must be one or the other. There are so many different emotions so many different musical ideas, that for me to automatically assign happy and sad to major and minor and even 'mysterious' to the augmented chord, implies that music exists in nature, that we really are predisposed to understand and react to it. Non-musicians and musicians have been shown to exhibit the same reaction (measured with brain scans) when listening to dissonance. Even people who listen to lots of dissonant music - who even compose dissonant music - have the same measured reactions. Regardless of whether somebody has been told that dissonant is unstable and consonant is stable, everybody except tone deaf people have been recorded to have had the same responses, with very small perceivable differences.

Well, there's only way to find out! Let's go to a remote country where western influence is cut-off, say, Iran or who knows, and play'em minor or minor pieces. Ask them if it represents "sad" or "happy" to them.

If you've been paying attention, they don't have a loving clue because it sounds like garbage to their ears since it has nothing to do with their culture and what they're used to hearing. Not that they can't appreciate it, but the cultural gap is so huge that it takes a long, long while to adjust the ear to it and "get" the cultural nuances which you so foolishly assume are somehow "natural." Come on now.

Like Gardener said, let's see you provide some evidence in contrary to what is widely known and accepted by sociology and cultural studies~

PS: To elaborate further: Symbolic interactionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It applies to music in this exact sense and context, precisely because of the inseparable nature of meaning and cultural application.

Different cultures will no doubt have different interpretations of consonance and dissonance, in the same way that 'mon ami' and 'my friend' appear completely different whilst having the same meaning. I would estimate however that unlike language, a minor chord and a major chord would most certainly have meaning to people from other cultures, as long as the people from that culture were able to distinguish between a major and minor third. Even if they percieved minor as happy and major as sad, it would still confirm that there was indeed a naturally existing difference between the two chords, and that each chord did have its own separate meaning, although the meaning could potentially differ between cultures. Anway gtg..!

Edit: I should read the whole wiki you posted, but don't have time right now.

"

1 "Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things."

2 "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society."

3 "These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters"

I can't see the point at which culture or society decided that minor was sad and major was happy for me. If I had to hazard a guess however, you could certainly say that nursery rhymes are usually in the major key. However, my musical experience did not consist of listening to solely nursery rhymes. In regards to the music (outside of nursery rhymes) I used to listen to before hearing classical music for the first time, I did not at any point listen to the lyrics. I could understand that if all songs about sad things happened to be minor, you could say culture had forced itself upon me, but this isn't true, and as I said I was not interested in lyrics, only the music itself. I see where you are coming from, and I'm not in anyway trying to say that I am right and everybody else is wrong. However, I am always skeptical of anything that implicity states that the way humans act is entirely based on their environment.

So long as they even have 3rd-built chords, and the same tuning system as us...

We do not use microtonal systems in our music, yet a lot of people can audibly hear a difference between two notes approximately 0.75kHz apart.

Uh, 0.75 kHz are 750 Hz. You'd be extremely unlucky to hear that badly. Besides, 750 Hz aren't an interval, as intervals are frequency ratios, not arithmetic frequency differences. It's something entirely different depending on how high the notes are. I believe you are thinking of a figure in cents?

EDIT: But even then I don't quite understand what you're trying to say.

I think I might have meant 0.75Hz. There's an adaptive pitch test Adaptive Pitch: Measure your pitch perception abilities and if I remember rightly the people at the top end could measure about 0.75Hz-1Hz difference,

We do not use microtonal systems in our music, yet a lot of people can audibly hear a difference between two notes approximately 0.75kHz apart.

Tell that to Alois H

The fact that everyone who hears a minor chord knows it is sad suggests that we are pre-programmed to react to music in a certain way, rather than us adjusting to music over the course of a lifetime through being forced to listen to certain music. Obviously a listener's tastes can change, but as far as emotion goes, it's pretty much set in stone from a very young age. Nobody told me a major key was happy, how could I possibly have known this unless the music was somehow speaking for itself?

With this in mind, I think modern music that goes as far as not having a key is hard to interpret for a great deal of people, because it does not convey an obvious, immediate emotion.

Just to chime in for a bit, I don't find minor chords sad. :whistling:

That just sort of destroyed your argument.

Just to chime in for a bit, I don't find minor chords sad. :whistling:

That just sort of destroyed your argument.

You uncivilized brute!

LOL

PS: Me neither actually.