Light classical music, such as featured in the film “Amadeus” was well received by the general public. “Heavy” classical music certainly does turn off a lot of people.
I think this is an interesting topic. I don’t listen to classical music all that much, but as a flutist, I play it all the time, and am constantly asked why I don’t play another sort of music. Goddammit, it’s a flute! What other kind of music can I play with it?
I rarely choose to listen to classical, but if it’s on, I almost always enjoy it. I love playing classical music, especially baroque. I adore Bach. The classical I dislike is usually stuff that has lousy flute parts. I could do without Beethoven, for instance. So I submit that in this age, it (usually) takes a certain education to like classical music, if you don’t have it, you probably won’t like it. When I lived in Israel, my neighbor across the hall listened to Arabic music constantly, really loud. I HATED it. It sounded like a muezzin’s call, set to music, and less interesting. But I have no doubt that if I learned to speak Arabic and maybe took a course on Popular Arabic Music Appreciation, I’d enjoy it a lot more. Most kids today don’t know how classical music operates, what it means, etc.
~Kyla
“Anger is what makes America great.”
Did you know that Philadelphia, of all cities, now has no classical music station?! There were at least two when I grew up there, but now the only classical station has been bought out. It plays classical in the daytime and switches over to jazz at 6:00 P.M.
Now, my Mom loves classical and (sorry, Ike) hates jazz, so when she comes home from work she turns on the oldies station and listens to '50s and '60s rock instead.
Thank goodness you can still get classical on the radio in NY, though not as much as you could ten years ago . . . I know, it’s all financial; classical doesn’t bring in the ad dollars.
Wow, THIS thread sure picked up a lot of responses overnight. Back in August or September or so, there was a similar thread where we argued about terms, what constituted “Classical,” etc. Might be worth going back to look for, yosemitebabe.
Cartooniverse: Thanks. I picked those two because I consider most Vivaldi to be wallpaper music, totally inoffensive, backgorund music to carry on Court Intrigues by, and the Schoenberg Piano Sonata (1925) is considered the first completely atonal piece of 20th century instrumental music.
Kyla: I play the flute, too. I like it because I think it’s the instrument that most closely mimics the human voice. I play folk music on it (all manner of Folks worldwide!), jazz of all different varieties, Irish jigs and reels, the vocal line of anything from art songs to pop music to Broadway show tunes! The flute is astonishingly versatile, wonderfully portable, and sounds just great when you’re sitting on a porch-deck overlooking a still lake in Maine at summer twilight.
Classical (or Serious European Art Music) and jazz may irritate a lot of people BECAUSE they take some training and practice and understanding to enjoy. Those not in on it may feel they’re missing something.
When I was a kid/teenager in Cleveland, I remember that WCLV, the classical radio station, had a rule against playing anything by a soprano before ten AM. Now, THAT makes sense.
Uke
I submit the following theory:
Postulate A: Music is an art form that people feel passionately about. Opinions are generally expressed in a form similar to “Disco sucks!” or “Turn that noise down!”
Postulate B: A type of music attracts particular hatred when it is seen to be of radically “elevated” or “lowered” taste from the preferred music of the person in question.
Example 1: X likes popular music (Top 40 radio, mostly), and hates classical/jazz/opera. Why? “They’re always putting on airs.” Translation: X has internalized the implicit message “This music is too good for you; you’re too dumb to understand it” and has turned that back on the music.
Example 2: Y also likes popular music, of a similar strain to X. She also hates country music and rap. Country is, to her, “a bunch of rednecks yodelling about their dogs and trucks” and rap is “not even music! I mean, I could do that!” Translation: these forms of music are for people less important and special than me.
Similar arguments could be constructed for the rap lover (“all that white-boy shit is whack”) and the classical aficionado (“only sub-standard human beings listen to rock and roll”).
There’s also a strong undercurrent of class difference here, although there are several to deal with, not simply an upper/lower dichotomy.
Personally? I like quite a lot of classical (from Beethoven and Mozart through Mahler up to some moderns, such as Gorecki), but I can’t stand “plonky” piano music (Mendelshohn, among many others). All that “look how many notes I can bang out quickly” stuff leaves me cold. I love string instruments, especially violins, and if it sounds like you’re torturing a cat (cf. Gorecki’s First Violin Concerto), I probably love it.
I also like clumps of opera, especially Wagner. (I have a separate theory about opera: just about anyone can learn to like male opera singers without much trouble, but you have to be really interested to get to like female opera singers.)
I also also listen to a lot of “alternative” or post-punk music, or maybe just plain ol’ rock ‘n’ roll (Elvis Costello, Oingo Boingo, Tom Waits, etc.)
I think most people who’ve developed their own musical tastes have interests dispersed like mine: maybe you like bebop, Rossini and classic country; maybe it’s hardcore, gangsta rap and the minimalists. But if you’ve listened to a lot of music and really like music, you’ve probably got islands of taste that don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other.
On the other hand, people who listen to music as background, or who’ve never been terribly interested in music, probably have one fairly popular genre that they listen to, and don’t see the point in listening to lots of stuff they don’t like to find other things they might like.
This is a theory, and it is mine, and what it is too…
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
Uke, a few years ago I was staying at my mother’s in NYC, and borrowed a clock radio from her. It went off at 6AM (tuned to the local classical station, WQXR) and someone had decided that Flight of the Bumblebee was a good way to wake everyone up. There oughta be a rule about that!
Never attribute to malice anything that can be attributed to stupidity.
– Unknown
Ace: Well thought-out, and well-phrased theories. Thank you.
Let me add one more:
C) A person’s favorite music is the music s/he got laid the most to in college.
“C) A person’s favorite music is the music s/he got laid the most to in college.”
The Bee-Gees and Barry Manilow? Urgh—hardly. I don’t think I ever got laid to Gershwin or Irving Berlin, but they’re still my faves.
On my car’s radio, my presets are set to: (1) Alternative, (2) Classical, (3) Bluegrass, (4) REAL jazz (not that soul-less lite crap), (5) “Adult Black” (their label), and (6) Classical.
I listen primarily to (1) and (4). My take is that the different types of music are trying to accomplish different things. Classical is geared toward melodic complexity and generally not geared toward improvisation. Jazz is all about improvisation and harmonic complexity, but not melodic complexity. Rock and Bluegrass are trying to have a visceral impact, and any virtuousity is incidental to that goal. I’m listening to “Adult Black” to try to become conversant with that music. Incidentally, I’m a Protestant transplant into my Reform Synagogue’s choir, and I find that music extraordinarily beautiful.
What I appreciate about all of the music on my radio is that they’re all passionate about the music. What I hate is soul-less crap on Top 40, Lite Jazz, Easy Listening, and modern Country (I much prefer the old-time nasally whiny stuff - “lyin’ and cryin’ and dyin’”).
Boris:
Nah, Classical I like, as much as I really pay attention to music. But this is probably because I heard it before I met a snob.
MP3s help in this. I can download music I’d never have a chance to hear otherwise, and decide for myself if I like it.
Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone, I’ve actually watched bits of some G&S’s musicals and kind of like it… (I’m sure I liked the wrong parts though.)
The wine thing is harder. I can’t get free samples, and if I could, drinking enough for a comparrison would probably make me forget what they tasted like, so I’ll probably never develop a taste for it. No great loss imho, there are many other things to drink.
Uke
Now I have this image of going at it, overturning furniture and breaking windows, while Mars (from Holst’s The Planets) booms in the background. Maybe I should give the ex-girlfriend a call.
“BA-DA-DA-DUM DUM DUM-DUM-DUM BA-DA-DA-DUM DUM DUM-DUM-DUM…”
Even those who like classical music sometimes hate those who like classical music. At least, that’s what a recent local Bay Area radio station’s ad leads me to believe:
“Classical music picked out by REAL people, not professors!”
If I were a professor, I’d be righteously pissed off.
Music, like all art forms, reflect the social, economic, political climate surrounding the composer at the time it was created. What we now call Classical music were wildly popular at the time of Bach, Mozart, etc… They could also be controversial, such as Wagner, not necessarily due to the music but due sometimes to the music political establishment setting down rules that the composer wants to break. Guess what, so is Jazz, Rock, Disco, Rap. Each generation creates a new medium to reflect the tension of new versus old. Which is great, because as time goes on, new composers have more and more past experiences to use for melding even newer inventions. This creates a vast tapestry of sensations that we could experience. It is too bad that as the OP shows, there are people who would seek to prevent others to enjoy one of the few personal freedoms by ostracizing those in order to establish misguided social, economic, or political control. Or they are just plain mean.
“A person’s favorite music is the music s/he got laid the most to in college.”
I hope that isn’t true - it was Human League’s “Dare”.
The thing about classical I like is that they tell you the names, the artists and sometimes even the catologue numbers (if you’re still awake), and I’ve heard everything from Led Zeppelin (yep, on a folk program), Muddy Waters and Ravi Shankar on the classical station.
Never heard Bach on B96…
Pop music is force fed to young people from every source. This is a policy of US and UK governments in particular because it creates a huge market for illegal substances and alcohol. The collossal income from these sources is used to finance black space and defense projects which cannot be public. Not just the lyrics but the behaviour.
Classical music especially Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Beethoven, Liszt, Debussy, Ravel, Chopin etc. etc. gets in the way big time. If the proles get to like great music, no more income from that source.
This thread is twelve years old, and most of the posters who participated are no longer here. Artikulus, if you wish to make the argument you stated, please open a new thread in Great Debates. I’m going to close this one.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator