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Posted
Is breathing necessary to live?

Some of the questions on this forum...actually sicken me. They actually - make me physically ill.

Get over yourself, bud. I could be grossly mistaken, but I dont think your attitude is impressing anyone. Ever consider becoming a teacher of any sort on any level?

Phantom: that depends. Within what context are you writing music? I assure you that Jazz did not come out of a tradition in which the founding musicians knew "where they were coming from," and thus, Jazz was defined.

However if you're going to be writing within a classical context, you're probably going to want to know where you're coming from. It's one thing to be immersed in a culture of music that renders history unimportant by comparison to your first hand experience, but classical music doesnt really have that to offer.

Take Mozart as an example. He learned everything he knew up to a certain point by being dragged around Europe by his father and studying with composers of the time. At one point they stopped by somewhere that had Bach manuscripts, and Mozart had never seen anything like it. So was it important for Mozart to be exposed to those manuscripts? Of course! But does that even begin to resemble what we know as "music history?" No, not really. He studied the music, not where Bach lived and how many children he had.

However, unless you have something in the here and now that you are ready to base everything off of musically, you're probably going to want to study the history of it all. It will allow you to understand where these traditions have come from, and why music is in its current state. It will also help you to place pieces of music within the context of other pieces of music, and get a sense of style and knowledge of the important details that a composer needs to know.

With all that said, music is music. If you only study the music (but you actually study it, not just play with it) without historical context, I dont think that it would have an indisputably bad effect on you as a composer. You will still be able to appreciate the music (a bit more unbiased, I suppose), and you will still be able to understand the music in an absolute sense. In some ways I think it would be healthy, since it wouldnt plant the bias of "atonality is the way forward!!!" in your head, and to be honest, I feel like it would result in a bit more originality and freedom in composition.

That being said, I love music history. I find almost everything about it riveting, and I love understanding the context from which the western tradition of music has come. I dont recommend that you skip over it, but I dont think that this specific lack of knowledge would render you unable to write music that applies to our time.

Posted
Yeah but he asserted that you can't HAVE music without music history. He didn't say you couldn't MAKE music without music history.

How do you expect to HAVE music if it hasn't been MADE?

Posted
That's like saying I can't take a sip of water if I don't know the molecular structure of H2O.

Yeah, but you don't need to understand water to drink it. You do, however, need to understand music to write it.

Posted

You make some valid points, Ravich. It's certainly true that people didn't have much knowledge of music history 200 years ago and they still managed to write "good music". But they did have the knowledge that was available to them, so I think it would be a quite different thing for a contemporary composer to be totally clueless about what happened hundred years before he was born, with all the knowledge that is so easily available to us today.

This doesn't mean that a composer who doesn't know this history necessarily writes "bad music". It may in fact not even have such a huge influence on her or his music at all, who knows. But as composers and contemporary humans we do live within a society, within a cultural context and personally I think it is our responsiblity (both as composers and as humans) to be aware of that and live according to it. And one part of such a cultural conscience is being aware of history.

In contrast to Mozart, a contemporary composer who is clueless about ancient music stands in contrast to the many other composers who do know a lot of it, have thought about it, have let it influence their work. And while a thousand years later the actual music may seem to be the most important thing, regardless of the circumstances the composer wrote it in, I don't think this always applies in the times the music is actually created. Here, the disposition, the composer's attitude towards music and the cultural context, and the location the composer chooses to place her- or himself at in the musical environment do matter (to me at least), and personally I think they probably always will influence how the music will sound, maybe even a thousand years later.

So I think the questions "why", "how", and "based on what" are significant questions every composer should ask her- or himself, if only to get a clear idea what you're doing there in the first place. And today, some level of historical awareness, is IMO part of those questions.

Posted
Is breathing necessary to live?

Some of the questions on this forum...actually sicken me. They actually - make me physically ill.

Really? I don't see how those two questions are analogous at all.

I think that, while the original question could have been expanded upon or worded better, the general topic is something worth discussing. Perhaps it's a no brainer that music history is important, and the real questions is "Why?" Perhaps someone here genuinely thinks that music history is not important, and even has a stable reason to think so. I don't know. I won't know if no one ever asks this question. I also won't know that I don't know until someone raises this issue.

Learning is a vitally important part of being a human being, and so should never be ridiculed or talked down upon.

Posted

(Does learning music history inhibit the actual original "creation" of music? That could be a sound reason for rebuking music history.) .... Anyway!

The question seems to be paradoxical. Do you need music history?

CAVEMAN: ugh. ......... ugh. ugh. .......... *beats primitive drum* .... howl. ugh.

^This caveman did not know anything about music history when he played the first instrument.

Music history is a tool. It is a road map. If one has a decent knowledge of music history, then he can do little more than tell you what period a piece was written in, who the composer was, and what they were going through at the time.

Music theory, however, is infinitely more important than music history, and it's not even supremely important. Look at Cage (Water Walk, 4'33'')! BUT! for the rest of us who want to make music, theory is the best way to learn.

I have never taken theory and it took me the better part of a year to get a sense of key, time, and rhythm. During this time, however, I could tell you everything about Classical Era composers short of what they had for breakfast on a given day. It didn't help me contribute to the musical community or even understand their music.

Fundamentally, the most important thing that one seeking to understand music should have is a sense of their own personal musical philosophy and the ability to accept, and, to a certain degree, understand the musical philosophy of others.

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