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Originally Posted by Urban Hatemonger
I don't know why everyone feels the need to mention jazz or prog to justify any other type of modern music.
The main riff to 1969 by The Stooges or the bassline to Waiting For An Alibi by Thin Lizzy just to name two examples are just as much a thing of beauty as anything any classical composer has ever composed.
If you don't think it is then it's just snobbery in my opinion.
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Urban, I feel that saying one finds a particular song more beautiful than another is not pretentious or snobbery, but instead just shows a particular person’s tastes. For example, I don’t feel my musical tastes are pretentious...favorite songs of mine include the “Inchworm” song and Naked Eyes’ “Always Something There to Remind Me.” Yet after your post when I listened to Iggy & The Stooges “1969" main riff and Thin Lizzy’s “Waiting for an Alibi” baseline, I found I much prefer Bach’s Cello Suite No.1, i-Prelude because of the feeling I have when I listen to it. To me this Bach piece is beautiful while "1969" is not.
I am curious how it happens that people (almost all of whom I feel are fundamentally similar) develop such different musical tastes, because to be blunt I would actually prefer to listen to silence than to Iggy & The Stooge’s “1969" (except for the point several seconds after 3:40 when the lead singer makes a very funny gagging, strangled sound, which amused me...heh heh...I actually listened to that several times). My dislike for the song overall doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with liking the song
or with that style of music, but the song and the riff just don’t affect me like they must affect you, Urban. I actually had a hard time forcing myself to listen to the whole of "1969," but I can handle the Bach cello piece very easily, enjoying it time and again:
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Originally Posted by SuperFob
Is it? Or is there any modern music that can hold up? Can John Williams's work, for example, compare to that of any classical composer?
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SuperFob, I've been thinking more about your original question over the last several days while listening to Bach as well as other music, trying to come up with a clearer answer than the one I gave before. I feel that studying older classical music probably gives people a set of terminology and concepts with which to understand other types of music better, but older classical music doesn’t include all innovations in the musical world, obviously, and so can never be "better" than newer music...just different than more recent “classical” music compositions (such as those by Aaron Copland and John Williams) or other genres of music.
The reason an older form of classical music cannot really be a yardstick by which to measure the value of newer music was explained well by a classical musician, Stephen, who posts visual representations of classical music online (
Music Animation Machine). When one of his listeners recently wrote, “I do firmly believe that J.S.Bach's music is the yard-stick by which all other classical music must be measured,” Stephen (my newly discovered hero) replied as follows:
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Stephen: "Saying that music is a yardstick is a metaphor, and metaphors are necessarily imprecise, so it would be equally imprecise to say that you are wrong. Bach was a great composer, but many musical techniques and ideas were developed by composers that came later, and with respect to those musical elements, you can't say 'Bach did it better' because Bach didn't do them at all. For example, in the areas of orchestration and thematic development ...” http://www.youtube.com/comment_servl...%3DJTQsxs0mzc0
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One other little comment for SuperFob: my preference for lyrics is always to be able to understand them, too!