Curate yourself!

Around 1970 I became a listener to classical music rather than pop. After all, the Beatles had just broken up, so pop was obviously over (heh!). I also transitioned from being a rock/blues musician to being a classical guitarist. For about ten years I never paid any attention to pop music. But since the early 80s I have enjoyed checking in on the pop world from time to time. Lately that has meant watching some clips from Rick Beato. Here is one that went up two days ago and already has over 5,000 comments.

If we step back a bit and take a more historical view, we might want to ask how were previous musical eras characterized? It is fair to say that the "Classical" era which was centered on Vienna between, say, 1770 and 1830 was characterized by a certain kind of musical vocabulary that, influenced by Italian opera buffa, simplified the intricate counterpoint and chromatic harmony of the Baroque in favor of clarity, simplicity, rhythmic vivaciousness and dramatic harmonic contrasts. For the details, have a look at The Classical Style by Charles Rosen. By the end of this era and the music of Franz Schubert the vocabulary has become much richer and starts to show signs of the Romantic inwardness. Where did this style or genre come from? Pretty clearly from the explorations of people like Mozart and Haydn followed by the development and elaborations of Beethoven and Schubert. Was it influenced by publishers, marketers and record labels? Certainly not as none of these existed at the time (with the exception of publishers, but they had little influence on what composers actually wrote).

Throughout the 20th century the development of recording and broadcast technologies brought to the fore the influence of business people whose main interest was ensuring a profitable return on their investment. That is certainly fair enough, but the unintended consequence we see in the 21st century is that musical taste seems to be being shaped by algorithms more than anything else. Sure, the individual curating of micro genres is happening--the Music Salon is an example as I definitely tend to promote the music that I think is significant and ignore everything else. But honestly, there is a mainstream genre consisting of Taylor Swift and similar acts with much of the songs written by that committee of guys in Sweden. To me this feels rather like the tail is wagging the dog. I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.

How do we do this in the current environment? Now that's an interesting question!

Music to meditate with, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960 by Franz Schubert, first movement, played by Sviatoslav Richter.

When I Was Seventeen

Ann Althouse has a blog that rarely talks about music but a while back she said:

"It's the music you love when you are 17 that sticks with you all your life."

I know other people that say this too. But I wanted to leave this comment on that:

Not in my case. When I was 17 (I'm the same age as you) I loved Eric Burden and the Animals and found the Beatles confusing. I soon fell in love with Sgt Pepper's and the White Album and later on, Revolver and Rubber Soul. But I developed new loves in music every year since. When I was in my early 30s I fell in love with some stuff by David Bowie and the English Beat. Also true of classical music. First Dvorak and Debussy, then Bach and Beethoven. Lately I've been really fond of 12th century organum.

I think I know the reason why this is often true. A lot of your basic characteristics are formed when you are a teenager. Sometimes it is a case of settling into a way of seeing the world that, barring catastrophic events, will stick with you for your whole life. But sometimes you are struck by a kind of 'vision' that starts you on a journey and you don't know where it will take you. For me, I had a progressive, incremental revelation about music that has stuck with me. But this revelation is an open-ended one. The expressive power and magic of music just came home to me and I continue to explore it to this day.

I used the word 'magic' because there are things about music that have always seemed magical to me. Certain pieces or passages from pieces have a wonderful expressive effect but it seems impossible to pin down exactly why. I know musical theorists and analysts will be uncomfortable with this, but analyzing music is only useful up to a point. I remain fascinated with the magical effect a single note, played in the right way, can open the door, set the scene, whatever metaphor you like! I remember a conversation I had with a clarinetist once who had just heard a Jessye Norman recital and told me she sang one note that he would remember the rest of his life!

Some pieces start with, and keep returning to, a single, haunting note:

Some pieces have a harmonic aura that seems magical:

With a few pieces, the rhythm seems to create magical effects:

This magic is limited to no particular genre or style. There are pieces of non-classical music that have their own magic:

That's an old blues song. I always thought he was singing: "Woke up in the morning and all my hair was gone".

When I compose, I try to find a way to create just a bit of magic for the listener, an ineffable mood that is unique... To get back to the title of the post, you may indeed fixate on some specific music when you are seventeen that you will stick with, and I suppose most people do. But you might just discover music (or art, or literature or, who knows, video games) in a more general way, and be discovering and re-discovering it for the rest of your life.

Developed and Undeveloped Taste

Thanks to Alex Ross' blog, I read a fascinating article the other day on Anton Bruckner. Bruckner is the other composer of enormous late-19th century symphonies along with Gustav Mahler. Here is the Wikipedia article on Bruckner.

I have had little contact with Bruckner's music--I used to own a CD of one of the symphonies, perhaps the 7th. But I haven't studied his music or read about him to any extent. So the article in Stereophile was fascinating. It discusses the whole history of attempts to complete the last movement of Bruckner's last symphony and surveys the recordings of those completions. Again, fascinating stuff. I realize that there is a whole world out there of Bruckner lovers and scholars. Bruckner: he's not just for wacky Austrians!

I still don't know if I am going to like Bruckner. But I am sure I should investigate further. My taste regarding Bruckner needs to be developed. Here is the beginning of the 7th Symphony:

Bruckner's symphonies are so long that virtually every movement has to be split up into two or even three YouTube clips. So you should really listen to the music on CD. I remember a science fiction story I read a long time ago where the pilot puts on a Bruckner symphony as he launches out from Earth orbit. Traveling at a great speed, by the time he reaches the orbit of Saturn, Bruckner has only gotten to his second thematic group.

The point here is that there is such a thing as musical taste, of course, but there are different grades or levels. My taste regarding, say, J. S. Bach is well-developed. I have listened to and played the music of Bach for four decades. I have read a lot of books on Bach from Spitta's three volume study to the recent one by Christoph Wolff. I have analyzed many pieces by Bach and read studies of performance practice. So when I talk about Bach, I do know what I am talking about. But you shouldn't listen to my opinions about Bruckner because my taste regarding him is undeveloped. I haven't done the research.

Not all music needs to be looked into. There are some kinds, like grindcore for example, that seem to me not worth investigating, or too painful to investigate. Some kinds of music reveal themselves right away, as either possessing quality or not. With Bruckner, I am curious. I did have a Mahler phase, about thirty years ago and I listened to a lot of his music and did some reading. I don't think I studied any scores closely. At some point I started to find him cloying, like listening to someone plagued by neuroses. Now I tend to find Mahler unlistenable--his musical gestures seem like poses, not credible. I wonder how that happened? And if it is a reasonable reaction? As I've been writing this I have been listening to that Bruckner 7th. While lengthy, it sounds quite interesting. And not neurotic. Let's have a little listen to Mahler:

No, while that is really pretty at the beginning, I still find it neurotic and stopped the clip around 3:40 when the horns started bellowing. Isn't that odd? Is my taste regarding Mahler just askew?