Bo - cool, thanks for the breakdown. “Sounds ordered in time” - okay, I appreciate Zappa’s definition and how it fits for you. And, to a certain extent, I like that definition, too - and some harsher sounds that are ordered in time in an interesting way can be really cool. I enjoy experiencing metal, composers like Penderecki, etc. - although not necessarily as part of a Sunday morning
For my definition of music, I tend to add the concept of “sounds that trigger our evolutionary need for pattern recognition” - or something like that. I have always assumed that music is a cool byproduct of our senses evolving for survival - and hearing melodic and harmonic and rhythmic patterns emerged out of that need.
Kind of like we evolved a taste for sugar and fat way back when that stuff was scarce (still the case in vast areas of the world today). Candy, or fat-laden foods are an over-the-top triggering of that need. Music, is an aural equivalent…again, as I noodle it.
Now, as for AC/DC - well, the vocals are screechy, no question. I get how that could put folks off. But the guitars? The tone of their guitars on their first albums leading up to Back in Black are just wonderful - guitar geeks study their rigs in the hopes to get a tone as good. Big and crunchy, but easy on the ears - no ice-pickiness or harsh wolf-tones…
Excellent point. (And thanks, Bo, for that thoughtful and eloquent post).
The first few times I heard Bartok’s six string quartets, I knew they were brilliant on an intellectual level, but I couldn’t enjoy them. Now, they are beautiful to me. I notice Hungarian folk dance styles in parts, so that’s more approachable, but even the angular, dissonant, harsh passages are beginning to speak to me.
Listen to a Bartok string quartet and a late Beethoven string quartet on the same day, and you’ll be struck by how the century between them – the entire Romantic period, essentially – evolved such that things came full circle, yet ended up in a different place.
Beethoven can be surprisingly ugly/beautiful, too.
Inspired by this thread, I put on Bartok’s exquisite Sonata for Solo Violin. My wife walked in and said, “Perfect music to walk to a bridge and commit suicide by jumping off!”
To each his/her own – though there could be even a kind of beauty in jumping off a bridge (though I don’t recommend it).
Well, yeah, I don’t always want to listen to everything. Sometimes a mood is already set and the music fits it, sometimes the music is setting the mood, for example. And as I said, just because I recognize something as music doesn’t mean I like it.
From my point of view, what you just described isn’t a different definition of music, it’s just a description of a preference.
Just to add to my horrible awful noise music street cred (like that’s something that’s gonna help me out or impress anyone :rolleyes:), I wanted to mention that today I received the February and March 2014 issues of a UK magazine called The Wire. I had to special order these from the publisher as I missed their publication earlier this year. I think it cost me like $28 for both of them. And why did I have to have these months-old magazines from a foreign country thousands of miles away?
They contain the first face-to-face public interview ever with Jandek. They even did a photo session around Minneapolis!
They even did a photo session around Minneapolis!