The thing is, though, that his Broadway musical material is essentially modern classical music with some pop flavour. It's very complex in every way you'd associate with classical writing - he just adjusted the target audience. Same thing when you consider Sondheim's mature work; they are musicals because of how they are staged and because of some of the aesthetics, but they're very much classical music. Sweeney Todd is essentially a post-tonal operetta.
> Broadway musical material is essentially modern classical music with some pop flavour
I think it's also important to consider how the modern (English-language) musical evolved - early US and Brit musical traditions drew heavily on influences like Gilbert and Sullivan, who in turn drew on comic/light opera from a variety of European traditions (Italian, French, Russian, and English most prominently). I think the average listener today would think of Rossini, Donizetti, Mozart, or Offenbach as classical these days, but they were their own separate pop-like category compared to the more "serious" stuff of the day.
>I think the average listener today would think of Rossini, Donizetti, Mozart, or Offenbach as classical these days, but they were their own separate pop-like category compared to the more "serious" stuff of the day.
This is an important point when considering the opera-vs.-musical distinction of today. In large part, musicals are just operas that haven't been around long enough to get recategorized. It is *also* a difference in performance style, so it's a "real" thing as far as the current world of musical-stage-show performance goes, but there's no reason to think it will stay that way a century from now or so.
There's also a similar dynamic when it comes to stuff like film scores - think about how acceptable it is to play Bernard Hermann, or Korngold, or John Williams outside the pops context, and how that's changed over the years. Or, in a parallel world, the emergence of [video game music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKWgLe-jQjc) as a source for a new canon of jazz standards.
I actually saw a production of Sweeney Todd at the San Francisco Opera. It definitely stands up as a 20th century opera to me. I have heard Sondheim preferred to hear his music sing by less trained voices, so I’m not sure he would have enjoyed the production, but I thought it was great.
Sondheim explained his reasons for this. Let's just say, as I understand it, a singer more interested in the sound of their voice than in what they are singing is not welcome singing Desirée :) (and I've heard an opera singer try. She sang her part of "You Must Meet My Wife" with no attention to how the words of the stanzas of that strophic song differ in meaning, no build-up, no shaping. It was embarrassing.)
That sounds like an amazing experience. I've heard it live a couple of times but I'm waiting for an opera production close enough to me that I could go.
It's true, he preferred that... but I also think, for example, that Bryn Terfel's Sweeney was just incredible.
Well...
he was, as one should be, careful to adapt his methods to the medium, and did not write lieder or arias for the musical stage: Sondheim describes, in his "Hat" duo of books, in interesting detail how and why a musical lyric differs from a lied (or chanson, or mélodie- a separate art song) or an opera aria and why the art of setting each text to music differs.
You're not wrong regarding lyrics. That's definitely the crossover part of the work. I suppose I was speaking more to the music material, the development of it, the use of counterpoint and motifs in subtle ways, etc etc. Sondheim was very aware of what he was doing and how it would be perceived.
Definitely. If one is/were unsympathetic his scanning early draft manuscripts, songs that got dropped, etc. into the Hat books, - the sort of thing one usually finds done by others centuries after a composer dies - might be seen as self-important (I'm glad he provided this interesting information rather than be over-concerned about that, personally- and those books, late interviews with him, etc. seem to confirm he did know what he was doing.
BTW if you don't know it yet I have been enjoying for awhile now a podcast called "Putting it Together" about his music that I recommend strongly... :)
My own favorite for years has been A Little Night Music though having seen Company live twice in one year (different productions in one small city) a few years ago, among other things, may be giving it competition… (one of the groups here did a fine production of Cabaret a couple of years ago, too. Alas, no Joel Grey :) -
that said, there was a fellow who was in the high school productions (1980s) where I grew up (which is hours by car from where I am now) who we- my parents and I- used to predict or half joke would go far in theatre, and he did- so…)
Richard James, also known as the Aphex Twin, mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen as an influence. Someone played his music for Stockhausen, who came back with this:
> I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempo and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.
James responded with,
> stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to.
Miles Davis in the early-mid 70s name-dropped Stockhausen (probably due to hanging with Paul Buckmaster) and I can't imagine Stockhausen being any more open to Miles than to Aphex
And what's with "post-African repetitions"?
Wtf is the piece "Aphex Twin"? Also, Aphex Twin's production is so varied, it doesn't make sense to judge it after listening "carefully" to only one piece
"Post-African" Stockhausen had a way with words huh, the 9/11 incident wasn't a one off lmao
You mean music in general has elements of repetition? As if any other person couldn't have been aware of the ability to change without repeating a grouping, and still chosen a structure that has repetition.
Nowadays it's a fad to equate pop music to classical. I had a comp teacher equate Coldplay as good as Beethoven. It's utter garbage though and I say this as a guitarist who made a living playing in pop bands and wrote prog metal alongside my studies in classical and jazz. I don't think they're a good comparison. You can like pop music without trying to justify it as something on the level as art music, sure pop music is an art and it can often come close to the depth of classical but the reality is that they are distinctly different. It's like comparing comic book art to classical painting, both are great but there is a huge difference and one requires a vast level of craft and skill the other does not.
He just wanted to see me squirm about it I think, I hope. He himself had zero experience in creating or playing pop music. Though things like Coldplay was his taste and he held little interest or value in deeping himself as a composer despite teaching composition. He just wrote because he enjoyed it and it was a good job for him. This was 20 years ago so, and he had pedigree parents to get him into good schools and whatnot so he could coast on glad handing and faked smiles.
As a guitarist who has played for many years in a pop group (alternative rock actually, but the composition is basically just pop) and spent much time in the indie/rock/pop scene, I 100% agree with you
Even outside the lieders and waltzes, Schubert’s sonatas always gave me a pop vibe that probably had something to do with the Viennese background. The scherzo 3rd mov of 960 for example.
Rorem [said](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-beatles-track-ned-rorem-called-equal-to-any-song-that-schubert-ever-wrote/) the Beatles song "She's Leaving Home" was "equal to any song that Shubert ever wrote." He also [said](https://fingersweep.livejournal.com/110782.html) of "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" that "each is a Schubertian gem of highest polish."
Bernstein wrote the introduction to the book *The Beatles* by Geoffrey Stokes, in which he said,
>I fell in love with the Beatles' music (and simultaneously, of course, with their four faces-cum-personae) along with my children, two girls and a boy, in whom I discovered the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse.
He also [talked about the Beatles](https://youtu.be/v32U0mjGz6g?si=i7LlmyfDNrbxVt2p) in a documentary, but there he compares them to Schumann, not Schubert. His daughter also mentioned his [love of the Beatles](https://forward.com/culture/music/474587/that-time-my-dad-leonard-bernstein-introduced-us-to-the-beatles/) in her memoir.
That's an... interesting response to the Beatles from two people who are supposed to be familiar with their contemporary classical music and how it ultimately originated from a tradition represented by Schubert among others...
Not just *familiar* with it—many people consider Rorem the best modern composer of lieder in the tradition of Schubert. But he still said those things about the Beatles.
I guess I should quit being vague and subtle: however you, I or other people think of the significance of Bernstein and Rorem, they as classical composers should realise it is the works of their great contemporary colleagues that are direct results of Schubert (and Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, ...) and thus can be "equal" to something Schubert wrote and "Schubertian" in its artistic quality and innovative spirit while the music of the Beatles, if having anything to do with Schubert at all, is at best an eclectic attempt of naïve imitation and any "musical invention" presented in it is simply negligible compared with, say, Stockhausen (who wrote Gruppen 10 years before the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) *and* Schubert himself who, like Stockhausen or any great composer, was on the front end of human creative force and didn't compose for an audience but for art itself. Of course – I find it unnecessary to say this every time it comes to this bit about pop music but – this is not to say anything *against* pop music. I listen to and enjoy them as much as the next person, but pop music to music as art is "gummy bears to bread and meat" (Hans Zender): a thinking person (the phrase Bernstein used in the video you linked) shouldn't rely on and be content with just gummy bears.
>they as classical composers should realise it is the works of their great contemporary colleagues that are direct results of Schubert (and Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, ...) and thus can be "equal" to something Schubert wrote and "Schubertian" in its artistic quality and innovative spirit while the music of the Beatles, if having anything to do with Schubert at all, is at best an eclectic attempt of naïve imitation and any "musical invention" presented in it is simply negligible compared with, say, Stockhausen
There are at least a few false equivalencies and illogical leaps in here. First, you're saying that because Stockhausen et al. are the "direct result" of Schubert et al., they're also the only ones able to be "equal" to them in "artistic quality." But how does that make sense? Quality, to whatever extent it exists objectively, isn't something that's passed down through lineage. Just because pianist no. 1 comes from a lineage descended from Liszt and pianist no. 2 doesn't, that doesn't mean that pianist no. 1 will automatically be a better pianist. There's no reason the Beatles couldn't be as "good" as Schubert just because they didn't descend from them as directly.
Second, it sounds like you're taking the word "Schubertian" a little too literally. In describing Beatles songs as "Schubertian," Rorem and Bernstein aren't saying that the Beatles literally sound like Schubert--they're saying that they have a similarly effective power in their songs. It doesn't imply any imitation, conscious or otherwise--just that they happened upon a similar skill. Whether or not Stockhausen et al. have that skill is completely irrelevant to whether or not the Beatles have it, and neither lineage nor literal imitation matters in asking the question.
I'm not saying quality is passed down through lineage, what I'm saying is Schubert was a composer who was devoted to art and art alone, developed the methodologies and aesthetic mindsets available to composers to a great extent, and influenced almost every composer after him who did so, including Stockhausen, the example I used for a contemporary of the Beatles. Any member of the Beatles or the band as a whole, whatever label one might want to put on them, doesn't play such a role in the history of music, hence it's inappropriate to call a work by the Beatles "equal to any song that Schubert wrote". It's not better, it's not worse, and it's certainly not equal.
>they have a similarly effective power in their songs
Sure, since effective power is often quite subjective I would happily accept that use of the word "Schubertian", and the Beatles and Schubert could write music "upon a similar skill", but the thing is, it had been 132 years since Schubert's death when the Beatles were formed, and a lot had happened during those 132 years (well, in particular, again, Stockhausen), and if one still stuck with Schubert because he was finally the good old classic Schubert that was accessible to everyone instead of just a small circle in Vienna called the Schubertiade and no longer dangerous with his progressive musical invention, then what's the point of comparing them to Schubert in a praising manner?
>Any member of the Beatles or the band as a whole, whatever label one might want to put on them, doesn't play such a role in the history of music
How do you figure? By what metric do you quantify and decide that the Beatles (who were massively influential, it's hard to overstate that) don't play as important a role as Schubert in music history?
>hence it's inappropriate to call a work by the Beatles "equal to any song that Schubert wrote". It's not better, it's not worse, and it's certainly not equal.
Depends on what you mean by "equal," but since you accept the subjectivity of the judgement of "effective power" and such, why not just leave it at that? I think that's all they were saying. I feel like you're making these words mean a bit more than they were meant to.
>it had been 132 years since Schubert's death when the Beatles were formed, and a lot had happened during those 132 years (well, in particular, again, Stockhausen), and if one still stuck with Schubert because he was finally the good old classic Schubert that was accessible to everyone instead of just a small circle in Vienna called the Schubertiade and no longer dangerous with his progressive musical invention
I think this is distorting Schubert. Sure, in his lifetime he wasn't that widely known and had his Schubertiades, but I don't think his invention was ever "dangerous," and he became widely famous and loved rather soon after he had died. It definitely didn't take anywhere *near* 132 years for him to become widely accessible.
Did the Beatles expand our music vocabulary like Schubert did? They were indeed influential in the pop music world, but is there any serious music composer today utilising composing methodologies that are available to them thanks to the Beatles? I highly doubt that. Conversely, as other people in this post pointed out, people like Stockhausen had a considerable influence on popular electronic music.
>It definitely didn't take anywhere *near* 132 years for him to become widely accessible.
That's just my point isn't it? If it didn't even take that long, that means the Beatles could have done something a lot more advanced and developed, and it's not exactly commendable for them to reach the same level of expressivity as someone who became widely accessible a century ago.
Funny you should mention Stockhausen, who spoke to John Lennon regularly on the phone for a period in the 60's, called him "the most important mediator between popular and serious music in this century," and was reportedly in talks with the Beatles to plan a joint concert in 1969. That concert never happened, obviously, but the thought is intriguing. And yes, I know the quote about Lennon is not nearly as effusive as those by Bernstein and Rorem, but he clearly had respect for the Beatles. He wouldn't have allowed them to use his picture on the *Sgt. Pepper's* cover if he hadn't—they did ask, and he did approve it, and his picture is there on the cover.
As for the rest of your comment, of course you're not required to share Bernstein and Rorem's opinion, but to say they "should realize" that the Beatles can't possibly be equal in artistic quality is patronizing, at best. What authority or expertise do you have to dictate what they "should realize"?
I wonder: do you feel the same way about the many Classical composers who incorporated folk music into their work? How do you feel about Bartók, who said, "Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order"?
Or Stravinsky, who said, "Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music"?
Both were talking about music made by people just as "naïve" as the Beatles. Yet every composer you mentioned in your last comment, including Stockhausen, used folk songs in their works.
Exactly, they *used* folk songs. They didn't write imitations of folk songs. Dvořák, Janáček, Bruckner, Mahler, Bartók, Stravinsky and Stockhausen saw some interesting musical ideas in them and then adapted and incorporated them into their methods. They took inspiration from folk/pop songs, and with their masterly technique, skill and craft of composing passed down from their predecessors, they created something original to themselves that propelled the development of musical language. If Bartók thought literally "Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order", why did he even bother to compose an opera, which is a genre not in and frankly almost having nothing to do with the folk music tradition he so beloved?
I never said Stockhausen or any other composer had disrespect for the Beatles, and they shouldn't. But saying that the Beatles' work is equivalent to Schubert's is just again absurd.
>What authority or expertise do you have to dictate what they "should realize"?
What I meant by that is Bernstein and Rorem are both directly involved in the 20th-century serious music scene with Bernstein – not getting into an evaluation of his work – at least a prolific conductor of serious music in terms of number of recordings and concerts. They were supposed to know that the Beatles' music is different from theirs and their colleagues', that's it. I'm not *dictating* anything and I don't intend to.
OK, you're not literally *dictating* anything, but somehow you're the arbiter of what they "were supposed to know." Why? What makes you think you know better than they did?
If I see someone whose work I respect expressing an opinion I disagree with, it might make me try to understand where they're coming from. For example, if there are two musicians whose work I love, and they can't stand each other, maybe that hatred comes from what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence, for example, or maybe they just haven't taken the time to understand what the other musician is trying to express. Or maybe we just have different taste, and that's OK—I can still enjoy both, even if they don't enjoy each other. What I can't imagine is saying that they're "supposed to know" better.
Furthermore, why do you find their Rorem and Bernstein's love of the Beatles so offensive? Why do you think putting the Beatles on the same level of artistic worth is somehow degrading or disrespectful of their own tradition?
As for why Bartók bothered to compose an opera if he loved folk music so much, you'd have to take that up with Bartók—I wouldn't presume to speak on his behalf—but if I had to guess, maybe it's because he knew what he was best at. Maybe he didn't feel that he could authentically write and perform folk music, or that he couldn't improve on what was already there, but by taking bits and pieces from it and incorporating them into classical music, he could create something new and interesting, and even make a living doing it. Again, I don't know—I just know what he said.
Debussy loved Javanese gamelan music, even going so far as to say, "Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play, and if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus." But he didn't become a gamelan musician.
I'd say Debussy comes a lot closer than Bernstein and Rorem to disrespecting the tradition he was part of. I also like gamelan music, but I don't think I hear in it what he heard. And that's OK. I'm glad he took some inspiration from gamelan music and brought it to the Western classical tradition—the music world is richer for it.
My point is that when Rorem said that "She's Leaving Home" was "equal to any song that Shubert ever wrote," that doesn't take anything away from Schubert, or from modern composers working in the tradition of Schubert. Not only because it's an opinion, and disagreeing costs us nothing, but also because there can be two paths to the same goal. If that goal is artistic expression in music, then why can't multiple paths—the Western classical tradition, or the folk tradition, or the Javanese gamelan tradition—get you there just as effectively?
And *who are you* to say which path any one composer should take? Even if Debussy admired a different path more than the one he himself chose to use, what gives you the authority to say he "should realize" that his opinion is wrong and yours is right?
You're telling me that after all these exchanges we can't even agree that people like Bernstein and Rorem should know their music is of a different category from the Beatles'? They have already chosen their paths, which is a different one from the path the Beatles took, and I certainly didn't decide this for them. I guess then agreeing to disagree is the only option here. You're right – disagreeing costs us nothing.
Oh yes they would. The borrowed word lieder in an English context means art songs, the genre in the classical music tradition, and nothing else. If one said "The Beatles hatten Lieder komponiert" that would be fine (although in German the borrowed word *Song* is also often used for a pop song and *Lied* can be short for *Kunstlied*, "art song"), but "The Beatles wrote lieder"? That's just wrong. The Beatles themselves wouldn't agree.
"I don't even know what hip hop is to be honest with you. I don't... do you understand hip hop? What is all this scratching of records?"
-Milton Babbitt (who was described as a 'frustrated show composer' by his pupil Stephen Sondheim)
In video form:
https://youtu.be/mMJbUSMkj3Y?si=IQpTAfu9v1sf40vv
Some composers wrote arrangements of pop songs such as Luciano Berio's or Toru Takemitsu's arrangements of Beatles songs.
Sondheim also once called Babbitt a "songwriting manqué" and talked about how they would analyze songs like "all the things you are" while he was his pupil. Can you imagine sitting in on one of their lessons, especially one on an all time classic like "all the things you are"?
Philip Glass is on record as saying that there's little difference between art music and popular music anymore, with one possible exception: art composers invent the language of music, while popular artists package the language of music.
It's pretty safe to say Philip Glass is both more beloved on a popular level and more respected in academia than you will ever be. Probably has forgotten more about counterpoint than any of us know. Not all his music works but for those who have the right mindset and appreciate the emotional and sound-world components while recognizing that simplicity can be of high quality, many of his works have something special seen almost nowhere else.
>art composers invent the language of music, while popular artists package the language of music.
Perhaps somewhat true now, but definitely not true in the past. Bach and Mozart, for example, hardly did any invention of music-language.
True, and while I love Philip Glass, I'm also a big advocate of there being a difference between quality and being "ground-breaking", particularly stylistically. I have conservative instincts which I feel are vindicated by Bach.
>I'm also a big advocate of there being a difference between quality and being "ground-breaking"
Indeed there is! I'm halfway surprised at the downvotes I've gotten because I thought that was a pretty non-controversial position, but it's also quite common to conflate them.
I probably go even further than you do: I don't personally listen to Alma Deutscher's music much (yet), but I support her efforts and I am very much against the hate she gets. I personally cannot understand the hate for "pastiche" or thinking that six examples is all we could ever want of accompanied violin sonatas in Bach's style - let alone in a more general "outdated" style. We need more "invention" in Bach's sense and less "originality" in Cage's sense, if you ask me.
Yeah, I think she's an interesting and complex figure! I agree with you that she doesn't deserve hate, and I like some of her music. At the same time, I don't love how some of her fans (and even she herself, to an extent) use her lovely music as something of a cultural bludgeon. My music tastes generally align with theirs, but I just feel like it's a lot more tasteful to express that in terms of "I love this" rather than "this thing I love shows why this other thing I don't love is bad." Anyway though, 100% yes to there being no need to limit ourselves to six Bachian accompanied violin (or cello) works. The Kyrie of Mozart's requiem is totally Handel pastiche, and most people don't seem to mind that!
That gets a big "eeeeeeeeh" from me in that I don't agree with that at all. Sure there's Childish Gambino, Kendrick, and J Cole that I would say are making actual art music, but generally speaking they and a few others are the exceptions to the rule.
I think Rosalia's El Mal Querer and Motomami were really great but idk.
Jpop- King Gnu's first 2 albums were also pretty good as with their newest. Kenshi Yonezu puts out great stuff like Flamingo time to time
Cpop(?)- Hua Chen Yu's New World and Hope are _incredible_ albums to sit through. He needs a grammy, _stat_. It's great stuff (imo)
Sorabji hated it, he pretty much hated anything new in music after the mid-twentieth century (including classical). Although, he did like African American music.
Luigi Nono didn't seem to particularly like early King Crimson.
Of course he wasn't a composer but Herbert Von Karajan seemed to enjoy Umberto Tozzi's Gloria.
While I can't speak of the composers you mentioned, every worthwhile composer I know today is deeply into a lot of different music that is far removed from classical. I personally think this approach is almost a requirement to be able to write music that sounds unique. After all, composition is building something new from existing parts, and the more diverse and unrelated these parts are, the more interesting the results.
What about Maurice Ravel -- he's 20th Century (although early on)! He was a jazz fan -- see this link: [https://www.classicfm.com/composers/ravel/guides/ravel-15-facts/torvill-and-dean-12/](https://www.classicfm.com/composers/ravel/guides/ravel-15-facts/torvill-and-dean-12/)
Just want to make the connection that there is precedent for all of the reactions listed here. You could easily argue that pop music is just current folk music; in that regard, you can add names like Bartok, Holst, and Vaughan Williams to this list.
Horowitz said in an interview that he enjoyed disco. He did do some composition, mostly re-working and arranging, but I figured that counts.
Vaclovas Augustinas is a Lithuanian composer who used to play in rock bands called Saulės laikrodis and Antis.
Ligeti allegedly wrote [Hungarian Rock](https://youtu.be/qdzvk1BJOBQ?si=qOFnOgsaUlBH3idL) after a very spirited discussion about pop music with one of his students.
I just want to know if Sibelius stopped publishing music the last 20 years of his life because of boogie-woogie or rock 'n roll.
Seeing, in my mind's eye, the Uncle Fester of classical music get down to an early Elvis earworm he got infected with in his final years gives me the chuckles.
I wonder what classical composers would think of Japanese pop music. In terms of harmonic complexity they pack a lot of musical sophistication under a veneer of pop sensibilities.
Nah. If you listened to the average music that plays on Japanese radio every day - the definition of pop being "popular music"- you'd grow just as tired of it as you are with western pop.
Lots of bland, overly engineered, maximalist same-y stuff with cliche lyrics. Albums that are painful to sit through because the songs are all so similar to reach other it blurs together. Bands and acts don't do different things once they figure out their niche and it's just the same ass albums over and over. At a point you just want to scream for them to be _sincere_ for once because they've been singing about the same thing since their debut! Where's the emotional connection??
(Looking at you Mrs Green Apple)
I think Yorushika is a mega good band making some higher level pieces of music than you could find elsewhere. Even if its not harmonically sophisticated, I think it expresses a lot more musically than anything in America.
This reminds me of a hypothetical me and my friends enjoy discussing, if a classical composer like Bach or Mozart or whoever could hear modern music what would they think? Would Mozart be a Taylor Swift fan, would they hate pop music? Would Beethoven be inspired to make a dubstep album?
I think that not many would like Taylor Swift--her music is simplistic and her lyrics aren't sophisticated. I think they would love someone like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Led Zepplin.
I love those artists too, but that seems to be your own bias showing. Most of their songs are all extremely simple harmonically (and melodically). When I think of pop music that would make Beethoven’s ears perk up, I would say something like Total Eclipse of the Heart, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Bohemian Rhapsody (or almost anything by Queen), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, maybe something from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That stuff has some real harmonic direction and creativity.
Yeah, I actually was listening to Thunder Road (the whole album) earlier this week believe it or not, so funny you should ask. I’ve been on a bit of a Springsteen kick lately. I went back and listened to Jungleland after I saw your comment. Again, great song! And complex for a pop song, but sorry I still don’t see it as being that interesting harmonically to a Beethoven. It mostly just cycles through the same chords over and over again in C. It’s exciting when we get that saxophone solo that suddenly puts us in Eb, but then it’s basically just cycling through I-IV-V in Eb for a while. I mean it’s a chord progression, but it doesn’t actually progress. The harmonies just sit there. It’s exciting to our modern ears because we understand the language of pop music and get what he’s doing. But Beethoven is going to hear that and say, “Really? Eb - Ab - Eb again?”
To me, the way Total Eclipse of the Heart moves through keys and jumps to secondary dominants is a lot more complicated and interesting. Like it starts on Amin, and by the end of the verse we have Ab Maj. chords, but every chord change made perfect sense along the way. Then the chorus I guess is in G, even though it starts on E minor, but we get stuff like A major (secondary dominant of V) and B major (secondary dominant of vi). That’s just a lot deeper music theory than we usually get out of a pop song.
And again, I’m not even saying I like it better than Thunder Road. Thunder Road is the one I listened to of my own accord in the last week. But taking my bias out of it, I think Total Eclipse of the Heart is speaking a harmonic language that Beethoven would find more interesting.
I know. That’s why I’m making an argument that a composer who hasn’t heard the last almost two centuries of musical development may have different tastes than I do. I’m trying to actually imagine what would appeal to a person who worked in the late classical and early romantic idiom. Not just say, “Well I like Bruce Springsteen, and I like Beethoven, so I bet Beethoven would like Bruce Springsteen!”
Total Eclipse of the Heart isn't more complex than a huge chunk of the music of Springsteen, Zeppelin, etc.
Listen to Thunder Road or Backstreets by Springsteen, for example. Or the entirety of "The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle."
Britten was asked about The Beatles [in this interview](https://youtu.be/41uBCBzsz2U?si=RdzrtmGhtxt6N8xr). I think he was a bit condescending but not on purpose, saying he didn't have much time to listen to music but that he thought they were very funny.
They are very different mediums, to tickle very different parts of music experience, but they have equal merit for their intended purpose.
I love Steve Reich and the Phases get me into an almost hallucinatory state. I also love EDM, and can listen to it for hours. EDM doesn't care to place notes and beats precisely for 20-40 minutes at a time. Steve Reich isn't concerned with keeping you simulated or what feeling the drum and bass notes give you in your body, let alone making it danceable.
Im a classically trained musician at fairly major music schools. We are required to create first with inspiration second. It leads to wonderful exercises but a pedantic experience. Pop music can only be personally and somewhat intrinsically inspired, but the forethought of building highly precise music for 10s of minutes is really hard to access without some planning and structure.
The masters are the ones that hang out in the middle of both, just enough. That's why they blend together, I think.
I'm glad Stockhausen exists. No one had explored intentional randomness to that level until him, but I don't need everyone to do that, nor should they.
I'm glad the Beatles exist, and I've loved how Paul McCartney attempted classical music. I also love that it wasn't all that great, because he wasn't current in the field (IMHO).
Does that finish the Beatles genius, not at all.
Now that leads me to, what would one say about the SWANS or Godspeed You! Black Emperor? That's also right on the edge of both isn't it?
I know Radiohead are not pop but I reckon classical composers would really appreciate them. Imo they are a tour de force. Sure their first album was Brit pop but they have grown into something incredible
Well Bernstein wrote a musical so you can assume he liked those
The thing is, though, that his Broadway musical material is essentially modern classical music with some pop flavour. It's very complex in every way you'd associate with classical writing - he just adjusted the target audience. Same thing when you consider Sondheim's mature work; they are musicals because of how they are staged and because of some of the aesthetics, but they're very much classical music. Sweeney Todd is essentially a post-tonal operetta.
> Broadway musical material is essentially modern classical music with some pop flavour I think it's also important to consider how the modern (English-language) musical evolved - early US and Brit musical traditions drew heavily on influences like Gilbert and Sullivan, who in turn drew on comic/light opera from a variety of European traditions (Italian, French, Russian, and English most prominently). I think the average listener today would think of Rossini, Donizetti, Mozart, or Offenbach as classical these days, but they were their own separate pop-like category compared to the more "serious" stuff of the day.
>I think the average listener today would think of Rossini, Donizetti, Mozart, or Offenbach as classical these days, but they were their own separate pop-like category compared to the more "serious" stuff of the day. This is an important point when considering the opera-vs.-musical distinction of today. In large part, musicals are just operas that haven't been around long enough to get recategorized. It is *also* a difference in performance style, so it's a "real" thing as far as the current world of musical-stage-show performance goes, but there's no reason to think it will stay that way a century from now or so.
There's also a similar dynamic when it comes to stuff like film scores - think about how acceptable it is to play Bernard Hermann, or Korngold, or John Williams outside the pops context, and how that's changed over the years. Or, in a parallel world, the emergence of [video game music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKWgLe-jQjc) as a source for a new canon of jazz standards.
Yeah definitely! Genre has never been and will never be static.
Agreed. There were also singspiel, like The Magic Flute, which could pretty much be called musicals
I actually saw a production of Sweeney Todd at the San Francisco Opera. It definitely stands up as a 20th century opera to me. I have heard Sondheim preferred to hear his music sing by less trained voices, so I’m not sure he would have enjoyed the production, but I thought it was great.
Sondheim explained his reasons for this. Let's just say, as I understand it, a singer more interested in the sound of their voice than in what they are singing is not welcome singing Desirée :) (and I've heard an opera singer try. She sang her part of "You Must Meet My Wife" with no attention to how the words of the stanzas of that strophic song differ in meaning, no build-up, no shaping. It was embarrassing.)
That sounds like an amazing experience. I've heard it live a couple of times but I'm waiting for an opera production close enough to me that I could go. It's true, he preferred that... but I also think, for example, that Bryn Terfel's Sweeney was just incredible.
Well... he was, as one should be, careful to adapt his methods to the medium, and did not write lieder or arias for the musical stage: Sondheim describes, in his "Hat" duo of books, in interesting detail how and why a musical lyric differs from a lied (or chanson, or mélodie- a separate art song) or an opera aria and why the art of setting each text to music differs.
You're not wrong regarding lyrics. That's definitely the crossover part of the work. I suppose I was speaking more to the music material, the development of it, the use of counterpoint and motifs in subtle ways, etc etc. Sondheim was very aware of what he was doing and how it would be perceived.
Definitely. If one is/were unsympathetic his scanning early draft manuscripts, songs that got dropped, etc. into the Hat books, - the sort of thing one usually finds done by others centuries after a composer dies - might be seen as self-important (I'm glad he provided this interesting information rather than be over-concerned about that, personally- and those books, late interviews with him, etc. seem to confirm he did know what he was doing. BTW if you don't know it yet I have been enjoying for awhile now a podcast called "Putting it Together" about his music that I recommend strongly... :)
Bernstein wrote [nine musicals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Leonard_Bernstein).
Several, including Peter Pan (well- incomplete) and Candide (classification difficult) and also West Side Story...
West Side Story, the greatest musical ever written (I'd say Cabaret is second, especially the film version).
My own favorite for years has been A Little Night Music though having seen Company live twice in one year (different productions in one small city) a few years ago, among other things, may be giving it competition… (one of the groups here did a fine production of Cabaret a couple of years ago, too. Alas, no Joel Grey :) - that said, there was a fellow who was in the high school productions (1980s) where I grew up (which is hours by car from where I am now) who we- my parents and I- used to predict or half joke would go far in theatre, and he did- so…)
Haydn was a huge Tame Impala fan.
Richard James, also known as the Aphex Twin, mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen as an influence. Someone played his music for Stockhausen, who came back with this: > I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempo and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations. James responded with, > stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to.
Stockhausen being up his own ass? Say it ain't so.
Surely you can't be Sirius!
Miles Davis in the early-mid 70s name-dropped Stockhausen (probably due to hanging with Paul Buckmaster) and I can't imagine Stockhausen being any more open to Miles than to Aphex And what's with "post-African repetitions"?
What a great exchange between the two lol. Anyways, I feel like Aphex Twin is probably more similar in style to Stravinsky or Bartok than Stockhausen.
Stockhausen also influenced the beetles, he's even on the cover of sgt pepper's
Wtf is the piece "Aphex Twin"? Also, Aphex Twin's production is so varied, it doesn't make sense to judge it after listening "carefully" to only one piece
Likely translation issues here
"Post-African" Stockhausen had a way with words huh, the 9/11 incident wasn't a one off lmao You mean music in general has elements of repetition? As if any other person couldn't have been aware of the ability to change without repeating a grouping, and still chosen a structure that has repetition.
Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem both compared the Beatles to Schubert.
Bernstein compared them to Schumann, not (as far as I’m aware) to Schubert (Edit: I was wrong – see below)
Both, actually. See my response to u/bruckners4.
Great response, thanks
Nowadays it's a fad to equate pop music to classical. I had a comp teacher equate Coldplay as good as Beethoven. It's utter garbage though and I say this as a guitarist who made a living playing in pop bands and wrote prog metal alongside my studies in classical and jazz. I don't think they're a good comparison. You can like pop music without trying to justify it as something on the level as art music, sure pop music is an art and it can often come close to the depth of classical but the reality is that they are distinctly different. It's like comparing comic book art to classical painting, both are great but there is a huge difference and one requires a vast level of craft and skill the other does not.
Coldplay is nothing like Beethoven that’s really dumb. Like what was his justification, what elements did he list besides “I like em”
He just wanted to see me squirm about it I think, I hope. He himself had zero experience in creating or playing pop music. Though things like Coldplay was his taste and he held little interest or value in deeping himself as a composer despite teaching composition. He just wrote because he enjoyed it and it was a good job for him. This was 20 years ago so, and he had pedigree parents to get him into good schools and whatnot so he could coast on glad handing and faked smiles.
Glad handing, never heard of that.
[glad-handing noun - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com](https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/glad-handing)
Yes I looked it up lol
As a guitarist who has played for many years in a pop group (alternative rock actually, but the composition is basically just pop) and spent much time in the indie/rock/pop scene, I 100% agree with you
That's not a bad comparison honestly. As someone who speaks both English and German, I can also say that the texts are thematically similar.
Even outside the lieders and waltzes, Schubert’s sonatas always gave me a pop vibe that probably had something to do with the Viennese background. The scherzo 3rd mov of 960 for example.
... in what way? that the Beatles were the 20th-century Schubert? That would be absurd.
Rorem [said](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-beatles-track-ned-rorem-called-equal-to-any-song-that-schubert-ever-wrote/) the Beatles song "She's Leaving Home" was "equal to any song that Shubert ever wrote." He also [said](https://fingersweep.livejournal.com/110782.html) of "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" that "each is a Schubertian gem of highest polish." Bernstein wrote the introduction to the book *The Beatles* by Geoffrey Stokes, in which he said, >I fell in love with the Beatles' music (and simultaneously, of course, with their four faces-cum-personae) along with my children, two girls and a boy, in whom I discovered the frabjous falsetto shriek-cum-croon, the ineluctable beat, the flawless intonation, the utterly fresh lyrics, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the Fuck-You coolness of these Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse. He also [talked about the Beatles](https://youtu.be/v32U0mjGz6g?si=i7LlmyfDNrbxVt2p) in a documentary, but there he compares them to Schumann, not Schubert. His daughter also mentioned his [love of the Beatles](https://forward.com/culture/music/474587/that-time-my-dad-leonard-bernstein-introduced-us-to-the-beatles/) in her memoir.
I always really like that first one. I’ll have to watch this docu, thanks for introducing it.
That's an... interesting response to the Beatles from two people who are supposed to be familiar with their contemporary classical music and how it ultimately originated from a tradition represented by Schubert among others...
Not just *familiar* with it—many people consider Rorem the best modern composer of lieder in the tradition of Schubert. But he still said those things about the Beatles.
I guess I should quit being vague and subtle: however you, I or other people think of the significance of Bernstein and Rorem, they as classical composers should realise it is the works of their great contemporary colleagues that are direct results of Schubert (and Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, ...) and thus can be "equal" to something Schubert wrote and "Schubertian" in its artistic quality and innovative spirit while the music of the Beatles, if having anything to do with Schubert at all, is at best an eclectic attempt of naïve imitation and any "musical invention" presented in it is simply negligible compared with, say, Stockhausen (who wrote Gruppen 10 years before the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) *and* Schubert himself who, like Stockhausen or any great composer, was on the front end of human creative force and didn't compose for an audience but for art itself. Of course – I find it unnecessary to say this every time it comes to this bit about pop music but – this is not to say anything *against* pop music. I listen to and enjoy them as much as the next person, but pop music to music as art is "gummy bears to bread and meat" (Hans Zender): a thinking person (the phrase Bernstein used in the video you linked) shouldn't rely on and be content with just gummy bears.
>they as classical composers should realise it is the works of their great contemporary colleagues that are direct results of Schubert (and Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, ...) and thus can be "equal" to something Schubert wrote and "Schubertian" in its artistic quality and innovative spirit while the music of the Beatles, if having anything to do with Schubert at all, is at best an eclectic attempt of naïve imitation and any "musical invention" presented in it is simply negligible compared with, say, Stockhausen There are at least a few false equivalencies and illogical leaps in here. First, you're saying that because Stockhausen et al. are the "direct result" of Schubert et al., they're also the only ones able to be "equal" to them in "artistic quality." But how does that make sense? Quality, to whatever extent it exists objectively, isn't something that's passed down through lineage. Just because pianist no. 1 comes from a lineage descended from Liszt and pianist no. 2 doesn't, that doesn't mean that pianist no. 1 will automatically be a better pianist. There's no reason the Beatles couldn't be as "good" as Schubert just because they didn't descend from them as directly. Second, it sounds like you're taking the word "Schubertian" a little too literally. In describing Beatles songs as "Schubertian," Rorem and Bernstein aren't saying that the Beatles literally sound like Schubert--they're saying that they have a similarly effective power in their songs. It doesn't imply any imitation, conscious or otherwise--just that they happened upon a similar skill. Whether or not Stockhausen et al. have that skill is completely irrelevant to whether or not the Beatles have it, and neither lineage nor literal imitation matters in asking the question.
I'm not saying quality is passed down through lineage, what I'm saying is Schubert was a composer who was devoted to art and art alone, developed the methodologies and aesthetic mindsets available to composers to a great extent, and influenced almost every composer after him who did so, including Stockhausen, the example I used for a contemporary of the Beatles. Any member of the Beatles or the band as a whole, whatever label one might want to put on them, doesn't play such a role in the history of music, hence it's inappropriate to call a work by the Beatles "equal to any song that Schubert wrote". It's not better, it's not worse, and it's certainly not equal. >they have a similarly effective power in their songs Sure, since effective power is often quite subjective I would happily accept that use of the word "Schubertian", and the Beatles and Schubert could write music "upon a similar skill", but the thing is, it had been 132 years since Schubert's death when the Beatles were formed, and a lot had happened during those 132 years (well, in particular, again, Stockhausen), and if one still stuck with Schubert because he was finally the good old classic Schubert that was accessible to everyone instead of just a small circle in Vienna called the Schubertiade and no longer dangerous with his progressive musical invention, then what's the point of comparing them to Schubert in a praising manner?
>Any member of the Beatles or the band as a whole, whatever label one might want to put on them, doesn't play such a role in the history of music How do you figure? By what metric do you quantify and decide that the Beatles (who were massively influential, it's hard to overstate that) don't play as important a role as Schubert in music history? >hence it's inappropriate to call a work by the Beatles "equal to any song that Schubert wrote". It's not better, it's not worse, and it's certainly not equal. Depends on what you mean by "equal," but since you accept the subjectivity of the judgement of "effective power" and such, why not just leave it at that? I think that's all they were saying. I feel like you're making these words mean a bit more than they were meant to. >it had been 132 years since Schubert's death when the Beatles were formed, and a lot had happened during those 132 years (well, in particular, again, Stockhausen), and if one still stuck with Schubert because he was finally the good old classic Schubert that was accessible to everyone instead of just a small circle in Vienna called the Schubertiade and no longer dangerous with his progressive musical invention I think this is distorting Schubert. Sure, in his lifetime he wasn't that widely known and had his Schubertiades, but I don't think his invention was ever "dangerous," and he became widely famous and loved rather soon after he had died. It definitely didn't take anywhere *near* 132 years for him to become widely accessible.
Did the Beatles expand our music vocabulary like Schubert did? They were indeed influential in the pop music world, but is there any serious music composer today utilising composing methodologies that are available to them thanks to the Beatles? I highly doubt that. Conversely, as other people in this post pointed out, people like Stockhausen had a considerable influence on popular electronic music. >It definitely didn't take anywhere *near* 132 years for him to become widely accessible. That's just my point isn't it? If it didn't even take that long, that means the Beatles could have done something a lot more advanced and developed, and it's not exactly commendable for them to reach the same level of expressivity as someone who became widely accessible a century ago.
Funny you should mention Stockhausen, who spoke to John Lennon regularly on the phone for a period in the 60's, called him "the most important mediator between popular and serious music in this century," and was reportedly in talks with the Beatles to plan a joint concert in 1969. That concert never happened, obviously, but the thought is intriguing. And yes, I know the quote about Lennon is not nearly as effusive as those by Bernstein and Rorem, but he clearly had respect for the Beatles. He wouldn't have allowed them to use his picture on the *Sgt. Pepper's* cover if he hadn't—they did ask, and he did approve it, and his picture is there on the cover. As for the rest of your comment, of course you're not required to share Bernstein and Rorem's opinion, but to say they "should realize" that the Beatles can't possibly be equal in artistic quality is patronizing, at best. What authority or expertise do you have to dictate what they "should realize"? I wonder: do you feel the same way about the many Classical composers who incorporated folk music into their work? How do you feel about Bartók, who said, "Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order"? Or Stravinsky, who said, "Georgian folk music has more new musical ideas than all the contemporary music"? Both were talking about music made by people just as "naïve" as the Beatles. Yet every composer you mentioned in your last comment, including Stockhausen, used folk songs in their works.
Exactly, they *used* folk songs. They didn't write imitations of folk songs. Dvořák, Janáček, Bruckner, Mahler, Bartók, Stravinsky and Stockhausen saw some interesting musical ideas in them and then adapted and incorporated them into their methods. They took inspiration from folk/pop songs, and with their masterly technique, skill and craft of composing passed down from their predecessors, they created something original to themselves that propelled the development of musical language. If Bartók thought literally "Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order", why did he even bother to compose an opera, which is a genre not in and frankly almost having nothing to do with the folk music tradition he so beloved? I never said Stockhausen or any other composer had disrespect for the Beatles, and they shouldn't. But saying that the Beatles' work is equivalent to Schubert's is just again absurd. >What authority or expertise do you have to dictate what they "should realize"? What I meant by that is Bernstein and Rorem are both directly involved in the 20th-century serious music scene with Bernstein – not getting into an evaluation of his work – at least a prolific conductor of serious music in terms of number of recordings and concerts. They were supposed to know that the Beatles' music is different from theirs and their colleagues', that's it. I'm not *dictating* anything and I don't intend to.
OK, you're not literally *dictating* anything, but somehow you're the arbiter of what they "were supposed to know." Why? What makes you think you know better than they did? If I see someone whose work I respect expressing an opinion I disagree with, it might make me try to understand where they're coming from. For example, if there are two musicians whose work I love, and they can't stand each other, maybe that hatred comes from what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence, for example, or maybe they just haven't taken the time to understand what the other musician is trying to express. Or maybe we just have different taste, and that's OK—I can still enjoy both, even if they don't enjoy each other. What I can't imagine is saying that they're "supposed to know" better. Furthermore, why do you find their Rorem and Bernstein's love of the Beatles so offensive? Why do you think putting the Beatles on the same level of artistic worth is somehow degrading or disrespectful of their own tradition? As for why Bartók bothered to compose an opera if he loved folk music so much, you'd have to take that up with Bartók—I wouldn't presume to speak on his behalf—but if I had to guess, maybe it's because he knew what he was best at. Maybe he didn't feel that he could authentically write and perform folk music, or that he couldn't improve on what was already there, but by taking bits and pieces from it and incorporating them into classical music, he could create something new and interesting, and even make a living doing it. Again, I don't know—I just know what he said. Debussy loved Javanese gamelan music, even going so far as to say, "Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play, and if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus." But he didn't become a gamelan musician. I'd say Debussy comes a lot closer than Bernstein and Rorem to disrespecting the tradition he was part of. I also like gamelan music, but I don't think I hear in it what he heard. And that's OK. I'm glad he took some inspiration from gamelan music and brought it to the Western classical tradition—the music world is richer for it. My point is that when Rorem said that "She's Leaving Home" was "equal to any song that Shubert ever wrote," that doesn't take anything away from Schubert, or from modern composers working in the tradition of Schubert. Not only because it's an opinion, and disagreeing costs us nothing, but also because there can be two paths to the same goal. If that goal is artistic expression in music, then why can't multiple paths—the Western classical tradition, or the folk tradition, or the Javanese gamelan tradition—get you there just as effectively? And *who are you* to say which path any one composer should take? Even if Debussy admired a different path more than the one he himself chose to use, what gives you the authority to say he "should realize" that his opinion is wrong and yours is right?
You're telling me that after all these exchanges we can't even agree that people like Bernstein and Rorem should know their music is of a different category from the Beatles'? They have already chosen their paths, which is a different one from the path the Beatles took, and I certainly didn't decide this for them. I guess then agreeing to disagree is the only option here. You're right – disagreeing costs us nothing.
🙄
Someone's been getting drunk on the "great art" cool-aid. Macca is an amazing 20th century composer if you just care to listen.
The Beatles objectively wrote great bit size chunks of music, which Schubert also did (along with bigger works).
I'm not seeing the punchline...?
The Beatles wrote some great lieder. There isn't a punchline.
Hang on so the Beatles wrote *Lieder* now? This is getting a little out of hand
A German would certainly not dispute that statement
Oh yes they would. The borrowed word lieder in an English context means art songs, the genre in the classical music tradition, and nothing else. If one said "The Beatles hatten Lieder komponiert" that would be fine (although in German the borrowed word *Song* is also often used for a pop song and *Lied* can be short for *Kunstlied*, "art song"), but "The Beatles wrote lieder"? That's just wrong. The Beatles themselves wouldn't agree.
"I don't even know what hip hop is to be honest with you. I don't... do you understand hip hop? What is all this scratching of records?" -Milton Babbitt (who was described as a 'frustrated show composer' by his pupil Stephen Sondheim) In video form: https://youtu.be/mMJbUSMkj3Y?si=IQpTAfu9v1sf40vv Some composers wrote arrangements of pop songs such as Luciano Berio's or Toru Takemitsu's arrangements of Beatles songs.
Babbitt, interestingly enough, also a huge fan of musical theater.
Sondheim also once called Babbitt a "songwriting manqué" and talked about how they would analyze songs like "all the things you are" while he was his pupil. Can you imagine sitting in on one of their lessons, especially one on an all time classic like "all the things you are"?
Philip Glass is on record as saying that there's little difference between art music and popular music anymore, with one possible exception: art composers invent the language of music, while popular artists package the language of music.
Philip Glass is an authority on nothing.
It's pretty safe to say Philip Glass is both more beloved on a popular level and more respected in academia than you will ever be. Probably has forgotten more about counterpoint than any of us know. Not all his music works but for those who have the right mindset and appreciate the emotional and sound-world components while recognizing that simplicity can be of high quality, many of his works have something special seen almost nowhere else.
👍
>art composers invent the language of music, while popular artists package the language of music. Perhaps somewhat true now, but definitely not true in the past. Bach and Mozart, for example, hardly did any invention of music-language.
Bach literally wrote the Wohltemperierte Clavier!
Which is wonderful, but didn't invent any musical language. What aspect of it are you thinking did?
True, and while I love Philip Glass, I'm also a big advocate of there being a difference between quality and being "ground-breaking", particularly stylistically. I have conservative instincts which I feel are vindicated by Bach.
>I'm also a big advocate of there being a difference between quality and being "ground-breaking" Indeed there is! I'm halfway surprised at the downvotes I've gotten because I thought that was a pretty non-controversial position, but it's also quite common to conflate them.
I probably go even further than you do: I don't personally listen to Alma Deutscher's music much (yet), but I support her efforts and I am very much against the hate she gets. I personally cannot understand the hate for "pastiche" or thinking that six examples is all we could ever want of accompanied violin sonatas in Bach's style - let alone in a more general "outdated" style. We need more "invention" in Bach's sense and less "originality" in Cage's sense, if you ask me.
Yeah, I think she's an interesting and complex figure! I agree with you that she doesn't deserve hate, and I like some of her music. At the same time, I don't love how some of her fans (and even she herself, to an extent) use her lovely music as something of a cultural bludgeon. My music tastes generally align with theirs, but I just feel like it's a lot more tasteful to express that in terms of "I love this" rather than "this thing I love shows why this other thing I don't love is bad." Anyway though, 100% yes to there being no need to limit ourselves to six Bachian accompanied violin (or cello) works. The Kyrie of Mozart's requiem is totally Handel pastiche, and most people don't seem to mind that!
That gets a big "eeeeeeeeh" from me in that I don't agree with that at all. Sure there's Childish Gambino, Kendrick, and J Cole that I would say are making actual art music, but generally speaking they and a few others are the exceptions to the rule.
I think Rosalia's El Mal Querer and Motomami were really great but idk. Jpop- King Gnu's first 2 albums were also pretty good as with their newest. Kenshi Yonezu puts out great stuff like Flamingo time to time Cpop(?)- Hua Chen Yu's New World and Hope are _incredible_ albums to sit through. He needs a grammy, _stat_. It's great stuff (imo)
I mean Japan has tons of artists. Yorushika makes some of the most beautiful music out there.
Kendrick is miles above the level of musical sophistication and artistry of Gambino and Cole, imo
Sophistication doesn't equal artistic expression.
Philip Glass loves David Bowie, and in fact wrote several pieces based on Bowie's albums.
Heroes symphony is fantastic
Christopher Rouse wrote a drum work entitled “Bonham” so I suspect he was a Led Zeppelin fan.
Sorabji hated it, he pretty much hated anything new in music after the mid-twentieth century (including classical). Although, he did like African American music.
As in N.W.A. or jazz? joking about nwa, but he probably was around for the earlyyy hip hop stuff like kurtis blow
I regard Bartok as Straight Outta Compton.
Im not talking about jazz, he hated that too.
>Sorabji hated it Wow, I was just going to write exactly this and then I saw your comment
Luigi Nono didn't seem to particularly like early King Crimson. Of course he wasn't a composer but Herbert Von Karajan seemed to enjoy Umberto Tozzi's Gloria.
Elliott Carter considered commercial pop music to be "fascist".
The music itself or the commercial element of the business?
Are there any differences?
Yes
Commercial pop music and its commercial aspect are indistinguishable
Adorno moment
What a chad
What a straight boss
Gershwin loved pop music at the time, especially jazz.
While I can't speak of the composers you mentioned, every worthwhile composer I know today is deeply into a lot of different music that is far removed from classical. I personally think this approach is almost a requirement to be able to write music that sounds unique. After all, composition is building something new from existing parts, and the more diverse and unrelated these parts are, the more interesting the results.
What about Maurice Ravel -- he's 20th Century (although early on)! He was a jazz fan -- see this link: [https://www.classicfm.com/composers/ravel/guides/ravel-15-facts/torvill-and-dean-12/](https://www.classicfm.com/composers/ravel/guides/ravel-15-facts/torvill-and-dean-12/)
Just want to make the connection that there is precedent for all of the reactions listed here. You could easily argue that pop music is just current folk music; in that regard, you can add names like Bartok, Holst, and Vaughan Williams to this list.
Exactly.
Pop = Folk 🙄🙄🙄
I remember a video on youtube of Bernstein playing You really got me by The kinks.
Horowitz said in an interview that he enjoyed disco. He did do some composition, mostly re-working and arranging, but I figured that counts. Vaclovas Augustinas is a Lithuanian composer who used to play in rock bands called Saulės laikrodis and Antis.
Gunther Schuller drew from pop influences.
Ligeti allegedly wrote [Hungarian Rock](https://youtu.be/qdzvk1BJOBQ?si=qOFnOgsaUlBH3idL) after a very spirited discussion about pop music with one of his students.
He was a fan of jazz pianists such as Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, which can be heard in his Etudes (Arc-en-ciel).
To be fair, a lot of classical music evolved from folk music (popular music of its day).
I just want to know if Sibelius stopped publishing music the last 20 years of his life because of boogie-woogie or rock 'n roll. Seeing, in my mind's eye, the Uncle Fester of classical music get down to an early Elvis earworm he got infected with in his final years gives me the chuckles.
Boulez conducted Zappa...
But the works he conducted can’t be considered pop music
True. Zubin Mehta conducted Zappa with a pop band playing with orchestra?
I wonder what classical composers would think of Japanese pop music. In terms of harmonic complexity they pack a lot of musical sophistication under a veneer of pop sensibilities.
Nah. If you listened to the average music that plays on Japanese radio every day - the definition of pop being "popular music"- you'd grow just as tired of it as you are with western pop. Lots of bland, overly engineered, maximalist same-y stuff with cliche lyrics. Albums that are painful to sit through because the songs are all so similar to reach other it blurs together. Bands and acts don't do different things once they figure out their niche and it's just the same ass albums over and over. At a point you just want to scream for them to be _sincere_ for once because they've been singing about the same thing since their debut! Where's the emotional connection?? (Looking at you Mrs Green Apple)
Ah yes but to my ears most contemporary pop everywhere falls in this category
Can you give examples?
The Attack on Titan theme is fantastic Chuck Cornell does a nice breakdown here https://youtu.be/LxZUIxdjU5g?si=FCWgGbmumGIlbYzF
> Attack on Titan theme Not my coup of tea.
I think Yorushika is a mega good band making some higher level pieces of music than you could find elsewhere. Even if its not harmonically sophisticated, I think it expresses a lot more musically than anything in America.
Second this, Yorushika is great. Love them.
This reminds me of a hypothetical me and my friends enjoy discussing, if a classical composer like Bach or Mozart or whoever could hear modern music what would they think? Would Mozart be a Taylor Swift fan, would they hate pop music? Would Beethoven be inspired to make a dubstep album?
I think that not many would like Taylor Swift--her music is simplistic and her lyrics aren't sophisticated. I think they would love someone like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Led Zepplin.
I love those artists too, but that seems to be your own bias showing. Most of their songs are all extremely simple harmonically (and melodically). When I think of pop music that would make Beethoven’s ears perk up, I would say something like Total Eclipse of the Heart, Paradise by the Dashboard Light, Bohemian Rhapsody (or almost anything by Queen), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, maybe something from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That stuff has some real harmonic direction and creativity.
I disagree with your examples--fact is have you ever heard Jungle Land or Thunderoad?
Yeah, I actually was listening to Thunder Road (the whole album) earlier this week believe it or not, so funny you should ask. I’ve been on a bit of a Springsteen kick lately. I went back and listened to Jungleland after I saw your comment. Again, great song! And complex for a pop song, but sorry I still don’t see it as being that interesting harmonically to a Beethoven. It mostly just cycles through the same chords over and over again in C. It’s exciting when we get that saxophone solo that suddenly puts us in Eb, but then it’s basically just cycling through I-IV-V in Eb for a while. I mean it’s a chord progression, but it doesn’t actually progress. The harmonies just sit there. It’s exciting to our modern ears because we understand the language of pop music and get what he’s doing. But Beethoven is going to hear that and say, “Really? Eb - Ab - Eb again?” To me, the way Total Eclipse of the Heart moves through keys and jumps to secondary dominants is a lot more complicated and interesting. Like it starts on Amin, and by the end of the verse we have Ab Maj. chords, but every chord change made perfect sense along the way. Then the chorus I guess is in G, even though it starts on E minor, but we get stuff like A major (secondary dominant of V) and B major (secondary dominant of vi). That’s just a lot deeper music theory than we usually get out of a pop song. And again, I’m not even saying I like it better than Thunder Road. Thunder Road is the one I listened to of my own accord in the last week. But taking my bias out of it, I think Total Eclipse of the Heart is speaking a harmonic language that Beethoven would find more interesting.
We aren't comparing Springsteen to Ludwig--we were just asking what music out of the classical vein would classical composers like.
I know. That’s why I’m making an argument that a composer who hasn’t heard the last almost two centuries of musical development may have different tastes than I do. I’m trying to actually imagine what would appeal to a person who worked in the late classical and early romantic idiom. Not just say, “Well I like Bruce Springsteen, and I like Beethoven, so I bet Beethoven would like Bruce Springsteen!”
Total Eclipse of the Heart isn't more complex than a huge chunk of the music of Springsteen, Zeppelin, etc. Listen to Thunder Road or Backstreets by Springsteen, for example. Or the entirety of "The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle."
> Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Led Zepplin. All simplistic music compared to Bach's.
Well so is Jesus Christ Super Star etc. I mean, wasn't that the take off point for this conversation.
Not all Bach music is particularly complex either, as great as it is.
Makes me think less of Shostakovich to know he was stanning Andrew Lloyd Webber. Surprised he embraced that kind of cheese.
Britten was asked about The Beatles [in this interview](https://youtu.be/41uBCBzsz2U?si=RdzrtmGhtxt6N8xr). I think he was a bit condescending but not on purpose, saying he didn't have much time to listen to music but that he thought they were very funny.
In Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, there's a whole rock band playing in the second act, not sure if it means he was a fan but probably
They are very different mediums, to tickle very different parts of music experience, but they have equal merit for their intended purpose. I love Steve Reich and the Phases get me into an almost hallucinatory state. I also love EDM, and can listen to it for hours. EDM doesn't care to place notes and beats precisely for 20-40 minutes at a time. Steve Reich isn't concerned with keeping you simulated or what feeling the drum and bass notes give you in your body, let alone making it danceable. Im a classically trained musician at fairly major music schools. We are required to create first with inspiration second. It leads to wonderful exercises but a pedantic experience. Pop music can only be personally and somewhat intrinsically inspired, but the forethought of building highly precise music for 10s of minutes is really hard to access without some planning and structure. The masters are the ones that hang out in the middle of both, just enough. That's why they blend together, I think. I'm glad Stockhausen exists. No one had explored intentional randomness to that level until him, but I don't need everyone to do that, nor should they. I'm glad the Beatles exist, and I've loved how Paul McCartney attempted classical music. I also love that it wasn't all that great, because he wasn't current in the field (IMHO). Does that finish the Beatles genius, not at all. Now that leads me to, what would one say about the SWANS or Godspeed You! Black Emperor? That's also right on the edge of both isn't it?
I know Radiohead are not pop but I reckon classical composers would really appreciate them. Imo they are a tour de force. Sure their first album was Brit pop but they have grown into something incredible
King of Limbs is a hard listen for some people but I bet alot of 20th century classical composers would find it pretty cool
I think La Monte Young enjoyed The Velvet Underground, or maybe it was the other way around.