Why don't most people love our beloved music?

  The answer is sooo simple. They don't like it because it's geeky and nerdy. It's dificult, as Tarkovsky and Bela tar are in cinema. People are tired, they like easy sounds so their brain do less work.  

Edited by oracus - May 17 2011 at 12:57

Thanks Vibrationbaby. You seem to love those speed demons as well huh? ;)

How about Jane Siberry?

Vibrationbaby wrote: Yoy mean Issa? I can deal with Jane. She's harmless. Sort of like Kate Bush meets Sara McLachlan.Thing about Diana is that I realy liked herwhen she started out but she doesn't really do any original material. I think she's on a one woman show tour right now. Just her on piano. No band. Don't know what she sees in Elvis Costello. Escapes me. You would expect her to be with someone like Jon Bon Jovi. That wouldn't siuprise me. I can't see what La Toya sees in Bob either. I mean if I was a woman I don't think I'd be flirting with Bob. Can you imagine being a woman and having to adopt to his rigidity. .

I don't have any of her albums but just a couple of guest appearances on other peoples albums.

I totally reject the notion that you can't dance to prog.  The Catherine Wheel,  Fred Frith's various dance albums.  You just have to be creative.  Hell, square dancing can be interesting even if you don't care for the music.

 

rogerthat wrote: Alitare wrote: I never said music didn't exist. I said the inherent 'goodness' or 'badness' of music does not exist. But you had earlier asked the question that how can a toddler wailing on a toy piano be called objectively bad music? My point is it would not even be music if he was just banging keys randomly, so the question of whether it is good or bad music does not arise.  Within the realm of whatever IS music, we cannot prove what is inherently bad or good music, I agree. You will, on the other hand, get most people to agree that the same toddler playing some 'musical' crap with horrible tones is terrible music. That is not proof but it is highly persuasive and most music discourse goes around on persuasion, not proof.

I would call a toddler playing an instrument poorly music. It's not music that I want to listen to, but that doesn't mean nobody finds value in it. Who am I to say that they're wrong? If we say playing an instrument poorly is not music, what is the exact cut off point of skill that makes it noise versus music? If you can't define that then I think the term is useless.

To be honest, I'm not sure that music exists at all, and I know that sounds silly but there it is. 

Well I do believe in free will. ;-) I would make a distinction between the organization of sound by cosmic forces and the organization of sound by the human brain. If you think that cosmic forces count as organized sound, then yes, everything is music, but I think it's a bit simpler and smarter to say sound intentionally organized by human beings and presented as music.

But if someone wants to call those things music, I don't actually care.

I say we throw some pearls at the swine who don't like our beloved music. 

I think this example should make my view clearer.  Which of the below two lines of text is a sentence written in English?  Just English, not necessarily correct English.


I has to go to the park

h s k a o g t p r

I have used the same alphabets in both lines.  In the first, the letters have been used to communicate something intelligible. Should it not turn out to be intelligible, at least the communicator intends to be intelligible.  The second is just the alphabets not arranged to make any sense at all. This is the difference between music and sound.  Sounds are simply the alphabets. If you do not arrange them, you don't speak in a language anybody, including even yourself, can understand.  What liberties you take with your use of language and what mistakes you make come much later into the picture, but the sounds necessarily have to be arranged into the code we call music.  Two sounds placed next to each other in a musical way relate and make sense and that is why it arouses a different reaction from the ears than just any two sounds put together randomly which bear no relation to each other.  You can put two, three notes together which make no sense at all but ultimately the notes must fall into some pattern, whether immediately evident or obtuse, to be music and I don't believe every combination of sounds will give you that result.  By arranging sounds, you do eliminate those which you do not see the need for in the given context. 

I think Douglas Adams hit the nail on the head in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency :

Every single aspect of music can be represented by numbers. From the organisation of movements in awhole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics and the way they change over time. in short, all the elements of a noise thatdistinquish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping on a drum - all of these things can be expressed in hierarchies of numbers.

I think it goes without saying that there has to be some semblance of order in anything or else you just have KAOS ( whoops I spelled it the Get Smart way ) Either you you use your heart or brain to appreciate music or both. I would think especially in jazz it's both. Very mathematical even if the players are not aware of it. I'm no Nuerologist but I find that hard core fans of prog I find are a bit more on the brainy side. Quebec jazz legend Nuy Nadon told me once that he plays from his heart and that counting was for bank managers. I wonder if Céline counts.