I Miss the Gold Ole Days...

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,

Ah, then it's just the test that isn't really good, since it's result doesn't really tell you anything as it entirely depends on the register you are comparing tones in. In the lowest register we can hear 1 Hz is about a semitone, in the highest register about 1/1000 of a semitone. A meaningful test would give a result in fractions of a semitone, or cents (one cent is 1/100 of a semitone).

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

The Boulez piece would be very different from the Bach piece!

Let's imagine we take someone who has no knowledge/appreciation of either fugue or serialism, maybe someone who comes from a non-Western musical culture.

Initially they would understand neither style/form. However once you explained what subjects, answers and episodes are, I bet they would be able to peg about 70-80% of the entrances in a typical Bach fugue, aurally, first time listening to the piece. They would probably miss several of the subjects in interior voices and the ones that were varied by augmentation or other techniques. But point is, they could immediately find something accessible in the piece.

Now give them one of Schoenberg's own texts on serialism and a world-class music teacher to explain the concept. Then have them listen to a Boulez piece and have them identify the pitch row, and if possible the duration row, tempo row, etc any other rows used in the piece. I couldn't do that and I've listened to serial music for a few years. Could anyone do that?

But do you really think one has to be able to "pick out" every aspect of the music to be able to appreciate it?

No, I'm just saying that "musical concepts" which are not aurally intelligible do not have any real musical meaning.

I could create a "form" in which the numerological values of the note-names (A=1, C=3, C#=3.5, etc) in each measure must always add up to 16. Except it wouldn't be a form.

So to me serialism is just atonal expressionism with arbitrary and usually detrimental constraints. Now, some atonal expressionist music, I like. Wozzeck is pretty awesome ;)

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

What is "difficult" though? ;) Is Wozzeck difficult? I think difficult is maybe just a euphemism for "inexpressive."

"Difficult" implies the listener needs to try harder to understand. I think maybe a composer of "difficult" pieces needs to try harder to communicate expressively and clearly! Just like language, if you want someone to understand something you're thinking/feeling it's your responsibility to say it using words and phrases someone can understand, or at least have the appropriate mental/emotional reaction to...

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.

Agreed, heartily!

Now within western musical culture, modes and even pitch intervals have developed emotional significances.

For example, it's not an accident that love-related motifs in Wagner and in countless movies start with a major (sometimes minor) rising 6th. Compare the "Tristan" theme & "Brunnhilde" theme to the "Princess Leia" & later "Han and the Princess" themes. Or compare the use of P4s and P5s to convey nobility/adventure/heroism (Main Title/Luke's theme, Siegfried's theme) vs augmented and diminished thirds to convey tension/plotting/evil (Ring theme and Death Star theme).

So in a western cultural context, does major mean happy? Heck yeah. :)

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.

And people FROM microtonal cultures can distinguish far smaller pitch intervals than we can... surely this is not biological :P

What is "difficult" though? ;) Is Wozzeck difficult? I think difficult is maybe just a euphemism for "inexpressive."

"Difficult" implies the listener needs to try harder to understand. I think maybe a composer of "difficult" pieces needs to try harder to communicate expressively and clearly! Just like language, if you want someone to understand something you're thinking/feeling it's your responsibility to say it using words and phrases someone can understand, or at least have the appropriate mental/emotional reaction to...

People can learn, and they do learn in all their lives to appreciate new things. Otherwise we would be animals!

There's a lot of music I have trouble with, but without it the music I enjoy possibly wouldn't have been written.

"Difficult" implies the listener needs to try harder to understand

For me, the music I enjoy the most has a kind of balance between consonance and dissonance. However, my idea of what this balance is, is purely subjective. I've heard people say that Beethoven achieved the perfect balance, but I've also heard people say that Webern achieved the perfect balance. Essentially, what isn't 'balanced', or 'difficult' in the eyes of one person may not be difficult in the eyes of another. I personally love the piece Verklarte Nacht, however my sister walked in when it was being played and said it was a complete mess. I don't think that, because one person, or even thousands of people find a piece to be 'crazy' or 'inexpressive', that it is any less valid.

If the meaning of music is purely cultural (imo debatable), then new forms of music and harmony will probably eventually develop the same kinds of meaning as a dominant 7th resolving to the tonic. Maybe some of this music already has meaning, and it has simply yet to be conveyed to the 'majority' of people.

And people FROM microtonal cultures can distinguish far smaller pitch intervals than we can... surely this is not biological

I'll have to investigate this...!

The Boulez piece would be very different from the Bach piece!

Let's imagine we take someone who has no knowledge/appreciation of either fugue or serialism, maybe someone who comes from a non-Western musical culture.

Initially they would understand neither style/form. However once you explained what subjects, answers and episodes are, I bet they would be able to peg about 70-80% of the entrances in a typical Bach fugue, aurally, first time listening to the piece. They would probably miss several of the subjects in interior voices and the ones that were varied by augmentation or other techniques. But point is, they could immediately find something accessible in the piece.

Now give them one of Schoenberg's own texts on serialism and a world-class music teacher to explain the concept. Then have them listen to a Boulez piece and have them identify the pitch row, and if possible the duration row, tempo row, etc any other rows used in the piece. I couldn't do that and I've listened to serial music for a few years. Could anyone do that?

You're comparing two entirely different things. Take Schumann-Chopin, etc harmony and explain it to someone who has no idea of music or isn't from the western culture. They'll have a very, VERY hard time picking up on the harmony changes since a lot of music from this specific period (late romantic) is SUPPOSED to be unclear! You're talking as if serialism or 12 tone (not the same thing) needs the same clarity as Bach fugues.

Obviously you can't intercept the tone row the same way as a fugue subject, because it's never presented as something fixed and nonchanging. If it was, what would be the problem? You can clearly hear and recognize the same intervals come up over and over after a little bit, even if they're spread over 12 tones or have non-traditional motive constructions. Really bad example there.

You can't intercept the rows in serialist music by ear any more than you can the symbolisms in Bach's music. Both things must be seen with score on hand and studied in depth to "see" them. They're not audio-related but intellectual aspects of both.

So, lol. Lurk moar.

I can give you an extreme example of the fact that this is not "biological".

A film maker came to me and wanted music for a short movie.

I sat at the piano and played some Mozart...

pause

then I played some Rachmaninov..

pause

then some QUITE contemporary..

pause

I asked him, which style he wanted?

he said, "I don't know, that was all just piano music"

The guy was not tone deaf, but he had absolutely NO musical upbringing. To him, classical was classical. It was all the same to him. So, no, not biological.

No, I'm just saying that "musical concepts" which are not aurally intelligible do not have any real musical meaning.

I could create a "form" in which the numerological values of the note-names (A=1, C=3, C#=3.5, etc) in each measure must always add up to 16. Except it wouldn't be a form.

So to me serialism is just atonal expressionism with arbitrary and usually detrimental constraints. Now, some atonal expressionist music, I like. Wozzeck is pretty awesome ;)

I perfectly understand where you're coming from and to some degree I even agree with you. Yes, ultimately musical structures are probably meaningless if they cannot be heard at all (unless you take a quite philosophical approach). But this isn't restricted to elements we can consciously extract from the music.

A person without any musical training may not hear how all motives in a Brahms symphony are subtly developed out of each other, but they may recognise a great sense of coherence through the whole piece. They may get the feeling that it's "well constructed music" without understanding what exactly gives them this impression. But even this is to some degree a matter of "training" and being used to similar forms of music and I'm not sure whether, say, a person from ancient Greece would even have got that feeling of "well constructed music".

I certainly don't hear out all the structural principles behind a Boulez piece. I don't even try to. But I can listen to "Le marteau sans ma

You can clearly hear and recognize the same intervals come up over and over after a little bit, even if they're spread over 12 tones or have non-traditional motive constructions.

But less clearly so if, e.g. they are used in chords, passed between voices, inverted, retrograded...

Serialism says a row and its retrograde inversion transposed by 4 semitones have a shared musical meaning. I think: if a listener can hear, or even subconsciously intuit that they are related without being told "this is the row," "this is the RI +4 row" then they are related*, if not, not.

Similarly, in sonata form, what makes a passage a development or recapitulation is that people recognize the passage AS a development or recap.

With the case of the newbie listening to the Brahms symphony, it would not be too hard to explain sonata form after which he/she would really be able to grasp a lot of the structural concepts of the symphony, with immediate aural accessibility.

*related for that listener, anyway. They may be unrelated for other listeners. It goes back to the good point made here:

I'd be very careful with accusing other composers of doing this, as in many cases they definitely may see musical sense in those forumlas, even if you as an outsider don't, consciously.

It may be a case of them using something only they and a few others understand, like that mathematician (forgot his name) who is the only one who understands his own work, after he dies nobody will be able to get it. However in that case I would have concerns about "How many people are you effectively communicating with?" If the composer doesn't think that's the point, then he's OK, otherwise he has some problems. IIRC Schoenberg said he could hear even the most difficult variations of rows, and Ives said he could hear MANY different planes of harmonies at once, but they may have been alone in that. To the average listener, for example, more than tri-tonality is just a sound mass...

To the average listener, for example, more than tri-tonality is just a sound mass...

Unfortunately, to the average listener, more than tonality is just a sound mass...

Don't forget that Ives grew up with his father accompanying him in one key and having Ives sing in another. My point is simply that childhood and the experiences we gain throughout our lives are important in determining how we listen to music, and if we grow up listening to repeating, hugely tonal (although way less sophisticated than classical music tonality) pop songs, that's what we will be able to listen. And if we grow up listening to Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven and Mozart symphonies and sonatas, then that's what we'll be able to hear (and if we listen to something that we cannot compare in these or similar terms and forms/harmonies/melodies/orchestrations, it just sounds so odd that we deny it and stick to the things we like). And if you grew up listening to Indian ragas and hearing people sing and play with microtones in tuning systems other than the equal temperament, then the equal temperament would sound a bit weird, and you'd also be able to very easily hear the differences between quarters of the tones (or less).

And since music education is not grounded enough to offer us the listening experiences that we ought to have in our childhood, then as soon as one realises that he lacks in such education, he/she should go out and look for these things to himself/herself, and be consciously open to many things and willing to change that state that was forced upon him/her.

But that's just my opinion.

The fact that everyone who hears a minor chord knows it is sad suggests that we are [/b']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.

Ok, the words I highlighted with bold are words that all indicate that what you're saying is the absolute truth, pure facts that cannot be questioned or be slightly wrong or inaccurate. I wonder if indeed that is the nature of your comment.

Furthermore, you talk about "being forced to listen to certain music". I wonder how much control you've had over the music you've been hearing until now. Tell me how much of the film music, radio music, commercial music, and music in stores (including bars, clubs, but also stores like malls, cd stores etc) you control. That music is also forced upon you, whether you like it or not. And tell me how much control over the music you heard you had until you first chose to consciously listen to a single piece of music (which I assume didn't happen until you were about 7-8, which if you're about 20 that's about a third of your life spent listening to music that you had no control of).

I hardly believe we are predetermined to like/dislike anything in terms of sounds, although one may argue that in evolutionary terms, we might be biologically predetermined to kind of be afraid of loud, sharp and quick sounds as opposed to soft, smooth and long sounds, because due to our primal experiences, loud, sharp and quick sounds most usually are coming from something dangerous to us (i.e. a tree falling, something breaking, an animal growling). However, humans are human beings with consciousness and an ability to reason, and thus these associations, if they ever existed, are either strengthened or weakened, depending on one's environment and experiences. It has been said that, for example, we find the pythagorean octave and fifth to be "perfect" intervals, because they are the first and second notes of the harmonic series (partials). And that can be partially supported by juxtaposing music from various cultures and periods of time, where it can be observed that the octave and fifth play an important role in many different kinds of music. But I think that's as far as one can go in saying that "tonal" music is "natural". For one thing, the tempered fifth is not equal to the pythagorean fifth (although it is very close, but still, it's not the same), and secondly, 18th and 19th century "tonality" is full of abstract rules and terms, saying things that "parallel fifths and octaves is forbidden because it doesn't sound nice" (needless to remind you that a few hundred years before that, all music consisted of movement in unison, octaves, parallel fifths and fourths), none of which can be quite attributed to "nature".

You also say that "Obviously a listener's tastes can change", which is kind of contradictory to what you said before, stating very confidently and boldly that we are predetermined to find major and minor keys to have emotional associations.

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.

Of course there are differences. There will be a difference in the relation of the frequencies of one scale compared to the other. But that doesn't mean that all cultures and all people have associated emotions with scales or triads or music. As a matter of fact, scales and modes are not used in other cultures in the way they are more or less used in 18th and 19th century western classical music.

but as far as emotion goes' date=' 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.[/quote']

Anyway, I will finish by quoting Adorno (from "Quasi Una Fantasia"). Despite his comments (and general attitude towards tonality and a few other things) and their aggressive, almost rude nature, you (plural) should be able to take something out of it:

"The positive element in kitsch lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.

All this applies to music with even greater force. Most people listen to music emotionally: everything is heard in terms of the categories of late Romanticism and of the commodities derived from it, which are already tailored to emotional listening. Their listening is the more abstract the more emotional it is: music really only enables them to have a good cry. This is why they love the expression or longing more than happiness itself. . . .

[...]

In a sense it is a kind of psychoanalysis for the masses, but one which makes them, if anything, even more dependent than before."

HE DELETED THE POST, so this is a reply to nothing!

That was unnecessarily long.

(And this will be too, sadly.)

Also, there SO. MANY. arguable points and just plain nonsenses (The twins thing? Plumbers?) And you're just saying the same things you've been saying the entire thread. No, it's not any better now, just longer, drawn out and hard to read.

Honestly, I couldn't care less if you change your mind or not, but just repeating the same things over and over without actually bothering to explain why they're supposed to hold true (the thing with the plumber is the exact same analogy I used of cars vs composers, and yet...) is tiring. It has been the case again and again that a lot of what you say is questionable at best.

I mean, fine, OK. Look. Nobody wants to argue about your opinion, since that's nobody's problem but your own. But don't you think just repeating what you've been saying over and over is really helpful?

You're just going on about stuff that is extremely theoretical (Genes and scraggy.) In practice, there's all sorts of exceptions and you can't just neatly sum it all up like you wish you could.

But what gets to me is just that I have NO IDEA what sort of argument you're trying to make. It seems you're just ranting. Do you have a problem with atonal music? With people who write atonal music? You say you would consider Schoenberg having no musical ability if you didn't listen to his tonal pieces for no real reason except it doesn't fit your definition of "musical ability." Too bad your definition doesn't hold up in practice since everyone's definition of this is different.

That's why there's no common ground on "the best composer" or "the worst composer". It's not like a car or a plumber. It's NOTHING like this. You're looking for OBJECTIVE FUNCTION in something which DOES NOT HAVE IT. Let me spell it out for you even further!

A car and a plumber are both named after the FUNCTIONS they carry out. They have OBJECTIVES, CONCRETE MATERIAL OBJECTIVES. A plumber and a car can be RATED, JUDGED and COMPARED to other plumbers with a good measure of success because there are FUNCTIONAL, OBJECTIVE parameters to compare.

A car needs to be able to transport people around, or it's not fitting the function designated to it and therefore it's a "scrafty car" or not a car at all. A plumber needs to do his job, otherwise he's failing at his objective and therefore he's a bad plumber or if the failing goes on and on he's no plumber at all.

A composer needs to do what? What sort of function? An ARTIST needs to do what? I hope it's clear to you the difference of subjective vs objective goals here. All the goals of an artist are subjective to opinion, because there's no underlying understanding/agreement of it's concrete purpose. A car can be "interpreted" to be good even if it doesn't function as a car, but that's subjectiveness on top of an agreed functional purpose (which is implied by the name "automobile" in this case.)

The problems with your arguments aren't anything more than fallacies of logic altogether or just wild assumptions of the unknown. So, it's not very impressive.

It actually starts to sound, throughout your ranting that you think of yourself as being musically talented. Specially when you're talking about the singing incident when you were 9 months old. It's as if you're just fighting off everything that disagrees with your own conception that you're talented in contrast to people who you think aren't (and yet become famous anyways!) The whole "I never met anyone that was like me!" part was very telling indeed.

I don't know what sort of pathology you may have and I don't really want to know either but just because your life has been so and so doesn't mean you hold all the answers. Far from it.

Then comes the obligatory paragraph where you throw scraggy at composers and things you don't understand at all. Let's start with Schoenberg. If you actually KNEW ANYTHING about the music he was writing (atonal, 12 tone music, and so on) it would be EVIDENT just from hearing that he was precisely going against traditional "anchors" in music such as the concept of consonance-dissonance (the principle of atonality is destroying the relationship between consonance and dissonance held traditionally, instead treating all intervals as equal.)

And to do all this, you have to know quite a bit of music history, old styles, and so on. I don't think you realize that even if something doesn't sound to you like X or Y, you've shown to simply not posses sufficient knowledge of the music you don't like to properly be able to even explain anything about it (or why you don't like it). I attribute this to your rather weird upbringing, it now makes sense.

Do you even think for one second Boulez is just some dude who "wrote for the sake of breaking rules"? That he has no grasp of history, styles, and so on? You seriously believe that his music contains no elements of the past?

I don't see why you concern yourself with "the public" so much, since the public is entirely irrelevant and arbitrary in their decisions (statistical majority again.) In fact, the only mention of them is when you're seeking validation that your points are "true", by checking if you have the majority on your side (specially when modern composers don't yet have a wide enough fanbase to compare to, say, Beethoven.)

There's an audience for Boulez and Schoenberg, however "small" in contrast to the statistical majority. Do you think that has anything to do with the music itself or simply the fact people aren't bashed over the head with it long enough and persistently enough that it starts to make a difference in the majority's opinion?

I guess since you've talked about your childhood and so on now it's a lot clearer why you hold such asphyxiating opinions. Like I said before, they're your problem, but since you're going on and on about stuff I'm just sayin' you should consider the possibility that you're brutally wrong about a lot of things, like it or not.

But that's what experience and living are for, not a rant on an internet forum.

Well I wouldn't call it a rather wierd upbringing as you put it. I merely used myself as an example to put forward a few ideas. Those experiences do not make up my entire life; I'm being brutally (if not too honest), but only about very specific moments of my life. If you really think somebody who vigorously hates a lot of music is odd, then I'm quite suprised! If you think somebodies own rediculously high self-belief is stupid, then I'm also quite suprised. I would worry for composers who didn't believe in themselves, how can you achieve anything without being slightly arrongant, if not deluded to some degree? Would you write any music at all if you didn't think you were capable? Our own self-belief, even if it is overly high is necassary to even begin the task of writing music.

The post was at a bit of a tangeant yes, possibly completely and utterly pointless, but I was at least making an attempt to show how the development of music may have less to do with the environment than some people think. Also it most certainly wasn't a rant, and I wasn't angry when I wrote it, and honestly I recognise that a lot of the things I wrote could be completely and utterly wrong, but quite frankly I don't particularly care! I certainly make mistakes, I'm human.

I concern myself with 'the public' because I actually care what people think. People matter to me, people's opinions matter to me, what people listen to matters to me. I know that you don't care what people like, and I suppose in some ways it's a healthy attitude, but it's not for me.

That one person cannot except certain musical idoms as not necassarily expressing musical ability is not exactly a crime. If I'm wrong I will learn I'm wrong, end of story. If somebody wanted to show me their musical ability, and sat down and played something atonal, quite honestly there would be a huge chance that they were making educated guesses, and were not actually 'pre-hearing' what they were about to play. Like I said, it could be that either a) they were supremely able as to produce something completely unclich

Well I wouldn't call it a rather wierd upbringing as you put it. I merely used myself as an example to put forward a few ideas. Those experiences do not make up my entire life; I'm being brutally (if not too honest), but only about very specific moments of my life. If you really think somebody who vigorously hates a lot of music is odd, then I'm quite suprised! If you think somebodies own rediculously high self-belief is stupid, then I'm also quite suprised. I would worry for composers who didn't believe in themselves, how can you achieve anything without being slightly arrongant, if not deluded to some degree? Would you write any music at all if you didn't think you were capable? Our own self-belief, even if it is overly high is necassary to even begin the task of writing music.

Well, arrogance and extreme self-belief as you call it blind people. It's not something necessarily new.

I don't think about being capable or not when I write; I don't dwell on that junk and instead I just proceed to write what I want to write. If it's the case that I'm thinking I'm not capable (for whatever reason), I'll make myself capable by studying and researching (if that solves it), not deluding myself that I am. Doing otherwise would be retarded, plain and simple. You need to be aware of what you're capable of and what you're not, otherwise you'll just run yourself into a corner of mediocrity by virtue of blindness and delusion!

Again, that's a rather wild claim (composers need to be arrogant and delusional?!), which can't hold up to any criticism, nevermind examples of the opposite. As for your rant previously, well, think scraggy through before you write it. I don't like replying to nothing and wasting time like this.

I also don't think people should hate any music at all. They may not like the stuff, but hate is just unnecessary. Did atonal music kill your family or what? Stole your wallet? Killed your dog with a pencil?

Ok well hate is a strong word. Extremely annoyed by would be better, and I'm not saying thay everything remotely atonal has this effect on me.

The method of serialism in particular is just a great shame. It's not particularly odd to dislike it, considering that in my opinion it ruined 2 composers capable of writing music that only a handful of people would ever come close to achieving. When I hear their music pre-serialism I enjoy it immensely, and so when I listen to their serial efforts I am inclined to feel like they've made a grave mistake. I'm sure there are people with exactly the opposite view, but from my own opinion I just think it's a terrible waste. Perhaps it's an incredible waste of time to even bother to say this, but I think people should be wary before they go down this particular path.

And of course everyone must have self-belief! If you didn't believe you could walk you wouldn't do it. If you didn't believe that by doing research you would better yourself at composition and achieve what you could not before, you wouldn't do that either. I made the point before in a slightly over-exaggarated way but I think at the very least it got the point across.

In regards to the genetics of music, there are plenty of scientists beavering away at this idea as we speak. It's not exactly far fetched to believe or at least consider that for some reason some people are born with an affinity for music; a natural understanding for something they could not possibly have gained without a genetic force.

Ok well hate is a strong word. Extremely annoyed by would be better, and I'm not saying thay everything remotely atonal has this effect on me.

There is a big big difference between not liking something (generally called "opinion") and hating something, or be extremely annoyed by it (called... hate). The one is passive the other is active.

I don't see any reason for anyone to hate anything, I see every reason for someone to have an opinion. I don't claim I enjoy everything, I certainly don't fancy baroque music in all honesty, but I don't go about hating it...

As I said big big difference...

Don't limit your self to Cage, or serialism, since they are but 2 chapters in contemporary music, and this book has dozens of chapters to think about. If you have enjoyed somewhat "Obscene Obsession", you might also consider giving a listen to some other works from me. QCCowboy has some EXCELLENT and quite enjoyable works as well, you might want to dig them up in the major works forum. What I mean is that start with people you know, and may have something more to say to you, on a personal level, since you know them, and move further. What I'm also saying is that there can be beautiful things in all honesty, you just have to search and find them.

__________________

And this concludes this months preaching about contemporary music. Audience, once more: Alex! :D:D:D:D

(see? I saved all 4 smileys for last!)

Objectively, I don't see a reason to hate music either, but still it is a feeling that I know. I experience it extremely rarely (maybe about three times so far, interestingly at least two of those by the same composer), but it can be frighteningly strong. There just are some very rare kinds of music that just make me want to strangle the composer and it only gets worse when the music is really long and I'm trapped in a concert and can't just leave... I don't like this, but I can't really help it. Sometimes music can actually bring out the worst in me...

Macarenna was one of these songs... Every time I would hear it I just had to run away or turn it off. There was also a Greek song. I also know what alex means, but I can't say it spreads for whole genre, or zillions of tracks, etc... ;)

Well there's a great deal of music I don't enjoy, and this is not some form of ridiculous elitist snobbery like some people would imagine. There's a lot of music I would describe as hating, but I don't mean that it literally makes me want to rip my hair out! Also I don't only like classical music, infact I've only got back into it over the last 3 years of my life.

However like Gardener said I have experienced complete and utter revulsion to a few pieces, all of which happen to be considered as avante-garde, or perhaps post-modern. It is a real, tangeable experience, not snobbery. Your heart-beat increases, your chest tightens, it's not particularly pleasant. Thankfully I don't have to take a class in post modern theatre practices anymore, a lot of that kind of thing literally does have this effect on me tbh.

There are also some people who actually experience real hatred of all forms of music, and cannot even stand to listen to more than a few tones. It's an actual disorder, nothing to do with stubborness, denial, or snobbery.

Like I said, it could be that either a) they were supremely able as to produce something completely unclich

Juji! "I know that you don't care what people like" was NOT aimed at you! Infact none of that post was! I think either something got deleted and my post appeared next to yours, or something like that.

Well I certainly am opposed to serialism, but I would respect somebodies wish for composing it. I would discourage them, but that's it.

Now I will take your advice, but my opinion of serialism will likely not change.

Well largely because the cognition of serialism itself is doubted. If it is used as an extension of pre-disposed musical ideas in the same way as a fugue, then it's not so big a deal. But really I don't see how writing a tone row and then inverting it for example, is the same as 'hearing' a melody a bass line, counter-point etc. I think there is a big difference.

Yes I expect Schoenberg, (and frankly I think he was a genius) and many, many other serialist composers could hear the original tone row, but the result of inverting it and allying it with consequent permutations for example would be largely unpredictable.

Well what I meant was, that the mental processes involved in the creation of a non serialist piece of music are very different from a serialist piece. If you think about it, Schoenberg was being very mathematical in his approach, whereas before, he was being musical. Some people may argue to the contrary, and I'd be intersted to hear from them, but really from my point of view I can't see otherwise right now.

Well if Bach inverts a melody it could be said he is using a mathematical process. However, in many circumstances a melodic inversion simply will not sound correct within the laws of Bachian harmony. With serialism however, there is no right or wrong, an inversion would not be a result of a composers calculations and his ear. It is a huge leap of faith to even begin to accept any of the resulting harmonies as being aurally intentional. With Bach, this is a very different story.

With Schoenbergs tonal pieces, you can hear that more or less every note was musically intentional, although of course there will be some exceptions with every composition, unless it is written solely by ear. If I took a tonal piece, and transposed the melody up a semi-tone we would know it to be wrong. If I did this with a serialist piece, would we really know? (assuming we hadn't heard it before)

If you're interested I currently can't sleep and am intentionally forcing myself to stay up all night, then all day just so I can get a bloody nights sleep. I should be in bed, but I am currently falling asleep at around 4-7ish and its not good enough! This is probably why I am wasting so much of my time at this particular moment...! If I sleep now, I'll just get up some time in the afternoon and I don't want that to happen!

Well what is the context in which something arose in comparison to the actual music itself? Who cares if I don't know what the words in Nessun Dorma mean? Who cares if it was written about Puccini's cat, or if it was written about revolting against slavery? Would I have to automatically appreciate something if it had a philosophical meaning? I don't think this way with music at all, because music, philosophy, politics are not the same thing. A great philosopher is not necassarily a great composer and vice versa!