Ridiculosity in Music

What do you all think of this music? Have you ever considering writing something like this?

This is why I hate modern music... these composers take themselves too seriously and start putting together anything at all just to "shock" and show people that they can be difference. One of my old teachers used to say that the reason he preferred Mozart to Beethoven was because Mozart's accomplished everything that he did while following the rules. Beethoven may have bent the rules, but even he had his limits and his limits always remained tonal. The idea of the statement, however, can be applied to this piece of masterful scraggy.

To make something original all while remaining tonal to me is an accomplishment, not writing down random junk like this and calling it music. I can't believe this is actually even called music....

I don't think there are "rules". It's rather arbitrary to define any style as the set, base style. Debussy completely broke these "rules" (other composers had been "bending" them for years), yet his music is still very tonal, and lot of people enjoy and understand it.

Actually, this is one of MY compositions. Yes, that Ricketson fellow is me. I threw it together in about an hour and a half tonight. Anyways, I find this kind of "music" hilarious. There's really no point in getting angry at music - even abstract weird music - because music can't understand your emotions, it exists in itself. Instead of getting bitter, I try and find the humor or the positive in something.... I've seen other pieces like this, and I find them very very funny. Of course, you're not really supposed to listen to it (mine can't even be played), but it's sort of like an inside joke between musicians.

Anyways, you should try writing the most absurd, random thing you can think of sometime. It's a completely exhilarating experience, and it's quite a bit harder than you think, and its a great way to "question yourself" (which is something all of us should do). Now, of course you don't have to like it, and you don't even have to show it to anyone, but its a nice little reality check.

My problem with this kind of music is that it's just there. Most of the time it's not meant to be played and the times it is meant to be played I find that it hurts my ears a lot to listen to it.

This piece, you wrote unnessary accidentals. For example, Double flat C =Bb and then you wrote C natural afterwards. You just could have wrote Bb then C natural. oh yes time sig 222/8? ok.... I could tell this is just some joke something to be laughed at, but I wouldn't call the music. My cousins can throw rocks at trashcan in even 4/4 time, but is it really music? No not really, but if you try harder enough you can start believing it is.

Actually, this is one of MY compositions.

Lol, I was just looking over it again...

"Set over to 400 degress" hahahahahaha! Funny stuff.

Hehe...quite 'Fairie's Aire and Death Waltz'-like.

I'm not sure I really consider it music, but I do appreciate it as musical humour.

Hell, I've actually had to perform stuff like this that was deadly serious. It ain't fun...and it ain't pretty.

This is funny, though.

But, um, is there any way to make the image smaller??

This is why I hate modern music...

:D That hurts! I write modern music. Please be more careful when tossing around giant labels and dismissals like that.

these composers take themselves too seriously and start putting together anything at all just to "shock" and show people that they can be difference.

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But this isn't different. It is a lot like, and perhaps aspiring to, Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz by "John Stump." And in that regard, Nightscape, I think you can pack in the wackiness a little more tightly than that! Though for this, notation programs are probably a hindrance.

One of my old teachers used to say that the reason he preferred Mozart to Beethoven was because Mozart's accomplished everything that he did while following the rules.

I prefer Beethoven to Mozart because Beethoven follows fewer rules. So, you like rules more than I do. So what?

Beethoven may have bent the rules, but even he had his limits and his limits always remained tonal. The idea of the statement, however, can be applied to this piece of masterful scraggy.

To make something original all while remaining tonal to me is an accomplishment, not writing down random junk like this and calling it music. I can't believe this is actually even called music....

So what your language is doing here is declaring one criterion (tonality) as the only one for you to allow something to be music, and putting it in direct opposition with "random junk" (when in fact one can very easily write tonal random junk). I don't want to argue with that unless that is in fact what you want to say. Is it?

So what your language is doing here is declaring one criterion (tonality) as the only one for you to allow something to be music, and putting it in direct opposition with "random junk" (when in fact one can very easily write tonal random junk). I don't want to argue with that unless that is in fact what you want to say. Is it?

I don't want to argue at all, so I won't go looking for it. I will say that I have heard many atonal pieces, and have never enjoyed one. So for me personally, to date, music has to be tonal to be enjoyable.

That hurts! I write modern music. Please be more careful when tossing around giant labels and dismissals like that.

Sorry about that... but I do still hold to the fact that I have never liked a modern atonal piece that I have heard. Perhaps I should have said atonal. This doesn't, however, mean that I don't respect you as a composer or respect your knowledge of music... I don't even know you, so I will never make that type of judgement!

PS: I like Beethoven as much, or maybe more, than Mozart as well.

Everything in music is a dance between structure and effect, otherwise known as unity and variety (though it's not an exact synonymical relationship). Whenever one of these goes too far and overwhelms the other, problems occur.

Too much variety, as seen here, and the music becomes ponderous and distracting. Music ought not to distract, but rather to evoke. When unity is favored, the evocation is fairly controlled, and when variety is favored, evocation comes more freely. We see this in Mozart and Debussy: the former followed much more stringent rules of structure (unity), therefore the evocation is much more controlled than in a work of the latter, whose 'bending' of the rules nonetheless remains true to the laws of unity and variety.

Great care is necessary to avoid becoming so ambitious as to become foolhardy and ignore either one component or the other. It is not so much a fence, however, and with practice, a balance can be struck consistently, just not when the composer is trying for double-sharped key signatures and the like. That is a conflagration of variety, and since it betrays music's basic tenets, it cannot be called music!

Successful will be the composer who, like Mozart and Debussy, finds new possibilities within established systems!

EDIT: That image took a while to load! Yes, it is very akin to the 'Faerie's Aire and Death Waltz' - a permanent fixture on my voice teacher's studio door! As I now see this is more a musical joke than an attempt at a serious, very 20th-century piece, I am forced to laugh at the seriousness of my post. You are welcome to as well, but I hope you do not miss the observations I made; I was responding to comments made above, not the 'piece' in question.

Successful will be the composer who, like Mozart and Debussy, finds new possibilities within established systems!

Amen! That's been my life's goal.

I like the way you think, Johann.

Why, thank you! The basic premises of my post, however, were taught me by my form and analysis professor.

Can we get a MIDI of this Prelude? Somehow?

That isn't music. It is a joke, and a very funny one at that. It should be on a comedy website! On the same token, John Cage should write a book on creative sound engineering. He is not a composer, and what he does is not music. Neither is that.

For anyone to insist that it IS music, and that people like John Cage are composers, is to simply change the definition of words. What's the point in that? (Except for humor, of course!)

John Cage actually did compose some pretty good music outside of his "experimental" stuff. I particularly like his asian-influenced pieces, and some of his prepared piano stuff like Bacchanale.

John Cage was a composer in the same sense that Marcel Duchamp was an artist. Cage made us think about what music really was. It's really history that ruined his name - anything John Cage did was original and interesting the first time it was done, and as he himself knew well, it could not be repeated.

This goes, in fact, for the whole idea of the prepared piano. Cage could use it, and make us think about what a piano is, but the prepared piano could never become a standard instrument. At some point, when other composers started using it, the prepared piano became an overused gimmick.

Great care is necessary to avoid becoming so ambitious as to become foolhardy and ignore either one component or the other.

That piece is hilarious! "Have friends help here." Lol!

Oh, and regarding "Ridiculosity in Music"... *cough* P.D.Q. Bach *cough*. :P

P.D.Q. Bach came up with the Tromboon! What we'd have done in the musical world without that instrument, I don't know. Wonderful sound! Hoffnung was also similarly genial.

OK someone has to explain this PDQ Bach stuff to me. Who is this guy, if he exists- Bach's long lost other son?

Anyhow, I was talking to an aquaintance who basically inferred that tonal music was inferior to atonal music and had some Miles Davis quote or some Jazz guy who said basically that classical music is equivalent to chicken sh*t.

Well I composed a piece, out of anger and his nagging and out of seeing waaaay to many absolutely terrible atonal pieces on the sibelius forums. So I made my own, completely in mockery of atonality, but I notice it sounds like it could fit right it. A tad short though. Anyhow, at least I had the decency to end it like it should be ended.

atonal.MUS

OK someone has to explain this PDQ Bach stuff to me. Who is this guy, if he exists- Bach's long lost other son?

PDQ Bach is a joke perpetrated for the last 30 years or so by composer and musicologist Peter Schickele, who is actually a very fine composer. He writes music in a pseudo-baroque style for strange combinations of instruments (or instruments that aren't really instruments, such as a wire music stand with an oboe reed), with almost incessant music gags judiciously (or not) laced throughout the music. Just some of the many titles include a cantata called "Ephegenia in Brooklyn," an oratorio "The Seasonings," an opera "The Stoned Guest," a set of short songs that sound like baroque advertising jingles "Divers Ayres on Sundry Notions," "Concerto for Horn and Hardart," etc. etc. etc.

What a jerk Miles Davis was, by the way. That isn't the only story like that I've heard about ol' Miles - not only about his attitude, but about his unconscionable behaviour toward other people. Why do so many great musicians have to be such utter failures as human beings? Geez. It's a lot easier to be kind than to be cruel - unless you're trying to hide something, like a deep-seated fear that you're not really everything you'd like to think you are.

Well I composed a piece, out of anger and his nagging and out of seeing waaaay to many absolutely terrible atonal pieces on the sibelius forums. So I made my own, completely in mockery of atonality, but I notice it sounds like it could fit right it. A tad short though. Anyhow, at least I had the decency to end it like it should be ended.

Heh...I've done the same thing a few times - the first time when I was 17, most recently just a couple of years ago. It always astonishes me how with just a little effort I can create something that sounds like it was written by the most die-hard serialist or avant garde maven. It takes a real talent to make that stuff really work, though.

Well I composed a piece, out of anger and his nagging and out of seeing waaaay to many absolutely terrible atonal pieces on the sibelius forums.

Sure, just delete the last two measures. After all, I have officially designated this piece as public domain.

lol. great piece of music.

just a stylistic note though, the glissandos got a little repetitive... :lol:

btw, i like the sound of this PDQ Bach, im going to search for him on google