Ya know, I adore Led Zeppelin and I adore Bonham as a drummer, but the first part isn’t a really good explanation. The incredible thing about Good Times, Bad Times is that he plays that triplet on a single kick drum. Just about anyone would be able to throw that in with the sticks somewhere, but doing it on a single kick is harrrrd. I say this as a terrible drummer.
But yeah, I think you’re not likely to get that level of deconstruction of anything less than 20 years ago. Heck, Zeppelin is from when I was a little kid. You’re just now getting to where there’s some true serious musical analysis of them.
Pop music of the 60s and 70s was shorter and less complex than the classical music of the 19th century, therefore music died in the early 20th century.
I’m a fan of noise rock, some of my heroes don’t even tune their instruments. And then there’s Cage…
No, it is not doable. What you’re saying with your piano-whomping example is an illustration of subjectivity, not a refutation of it. That we often all agree on our subjectivity is to be expected, but it doesn’t indicate underlying objectivity.
Music has structure if nothing else. Your insistence that a non-repeatable performance of me whomping on piano keys is fundamentally the same as a piano concerto is just you going for internet points. Some kind of musical solipsism. You can safely sit back and claim that music doesn’t exist or that any noise is, at its root, music.
Your piano cacophony has structure. It is, after all, only confined to the black-and-white notes you’re whomping on.
Throw the same piano down the stairs, and I wouldn’t necessarily call the resulting noise music. Unless you did it intentionally to capture the sounds, that is…
None of that is a claim I’ve made.
Any noise is not music. Human intention is what makes noise music.
I notice you respond repeatedly to this side-thread about subjectivity/objectivity, but when a direct question of yours more directly relating to the topic of this thread is answered, you have no comment to make. Why is that?
Those are called tone clusters, and they occur in “real music” often enough that they had to invent various notation for them, not all of which I can see in a quick perusal of that Wikipedia link
Now, if you don’t know what you are doing, or even if you do, that does not mean you will automatically create an instant timeless classic by employing them on the piano, but exactly the same thing can be said for the note “G”.
So there are actually people nostalgic for the days of Christopher Cross? Eeesh.
To the OP and everyone else: the day the music died is recognized as February 3, 1959.*
A salute to the following:
My music collection (which began expanding markedly after the introduction of the iPod) draws from '40s R&B well into the 21st century. There’s lots of good to great stuff I missed the first time around.
*but not when you realize that given time, Buddy Holly would, in the manner of Charlie Rich and others, have morphed into a soft rock, pop or most likely country singer/songwriter and brought regrets and nausea to his fans. His untimely death resulted in an unblemished reputation.
Art is a means to communicate thought and emotion. If someone is intentionally banging a keyboard at random (well, it wouldn’t truly be random since you’re deciding where to bang) for that purpose, it is art and we would categorize it as music. It likely wouldn’t be especially popular music but I’m not going to tell someone that it’s objectively better than something else because there is no objective measurement.
Instead of grousing about “internet points” and trying to set “a trap” (your words) why not just lay out the objective measurements that make Tchaikovsky better than Jophiel’s Piano Slam No. 2. Since this will be an objective unit of determining the value of music, we can then apply it to see if Tchaikovsky is better or worse than Yankee Doodle Dandy, American Pie and Mambo #5.
