Music and the Art of Form - Page 2

People always talk about breaking the "rules" of music... this is a great example of how the rules can be broken without turning your song into an atonal pile of garbage, and actually propelling it forward and making it stand out. The chromatic chord appears on the word "everybody", temporarily hinting at a transient key change, then quickly changes back to normal tonality immediately afterwards, preventing the songs harmony from sounding formless and atonal by obscuring the original key, which is a mistake made almost always in modern second rate writing.

There is a secret to making popular music. All you have to do is make the listener feel good about themselves. Anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves and living in fantasyland. If you make the listener feel confident and strong, and that they are part of something bigger and better than themselves, you will give them a strong positive emotional reaction which they will then associate with your song or band. Just like religion, human beings attach themselves to things that are larger and more powerful because it is an instinctual survival tool. But you will not hear many people say this about music and "taste" in general, because it diminishes the human desire to see ourselves as magical mystical unique souls whos opinions and tastes originate purely from the most sincere origins. But sadly, we are biologically programmed, and there is no magic. People will choose their favorite of a million different shades of art, but, in the end and under even semi-adept scrutiny, all of those varieties of taste still have underlying fundamental similarities. Genetics hold culture on a very short leash.

As far as musical skill goes, beatmaking and electronica are so easy to make its literally sickening. Yeah, maybe joe blow cant just sit down at a computer and make great electronica or beats, but any midlevel skilled musician can. The hardest skill in music is songwriting. It is the least in supply, and the most difficult skill to obtain. Many many musicians try their entire lives and still never gain even moderate skill in songwriting. Go read any songwriting forum on the internet and youll see. Most people are completely clueless as how to write well or improve, and instead spend most of their time obsessing over instrumental performance (guitar solos etc) or recording/equipment/producing. Thats because those are skills that are easily obtained through blind repetition, or mastery of electronic equipment. Songwriting is by far the most difficult of all, thats why there are so few strong writers, and so many strong performers and producers. Go down to guitar center on any friday and tell me what you see... dozens of great drummers and great guitar players and djs. And yet? Not any great strong songwriters.

There are alot of people in this thread making claims about music that are merely publicly adopted notions that dont really mean anything, and arent necessarily true. The general public has no idea how little they truly understand music. They simply know what they like, and what they like is based on their ego and their emotional/identity/lifestyle desires. So, thats about it.

On December 19 2010 07:15 c.Deadly wrote:

I also agree with this - however even in a Euro-centric view of music you are wrong. Music has certainly evolved throughout history, in every sense of the word. Look no further than The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach's attempt to change the music world's paradigm on proper tuning.
Beyond that, conventions of proper dissonance have changed throughout history - while your view of controlled dissonance was acceptable during the Renaissance, composers like Claudio Monteverdi started a musical transition as he popularized "text painting" and uncontrolled dissonance. His works were extremely popular despite breaking the rules you've outlined.
And to touch on your ideas on "proper" chord transitions - it is not a natural thing for people to desire a correct conclusion to a progression... modern music and your own musical training has made you think that way. In medieval music, composers always concluded their works on a perfect chord because it was considered the most beautiful at the time (thanks to Pythagoras) - modern music would consider it a hollow and lifeless chord.

I would suggest reading further into music history - how composers write music and likewise how listeners perceive music has constantly changed over the course of time. I gave you a few examples that I hope will make you rethink your narrow viewpoint. Also please don't restrict yourself to western music, it is worthwhile to study eastern music, or computer music - broaden your perspectives.

On December 19 2010 13:46 phosphorylation wrote:
Someone shoudl really start a classical music thread.

Yeah, a song can be a massive hit and suck.

On December 19 2010 14:17 phosphorylation wrote:
Maybe the rules shoudl be to disallow posting youtube videos without having a substantial amount of text to accompany it.
The thread can be sustained by posting any articles regarding classical music and consistent posting up analysis of anything relevant (performance, composition, theory) to jump start discussion. Could be very interseting.

On December 19 2010 14:51 koreasilver wrote:
The thing is, his arguments against postmodernism comes entirely from his own absurdly reductionist beliefs that he doesn't really accomplish anything but reveal that he's just another one of those people that have no idea what they're talking about but still think they have everything figured out.

On December 19 2010 15:07 Chef wrote:
I think I've tried to respond to the modernist comment like six times now and deleted it every time. There really isn't a good way to argue about art. All I can say is that modernism/post-modernism is one of the most important movements in art to ever take place. It's been incredibly liberating and allowed creators to invoke feelings which in the past would have been considered out of the realm of art. Imagine not being able to describe the gritty details of war, imagine where we'd be if war poets had never done that. That was art before modernism. Romantic poems about failed love and clouds and personal regrets. And before the romanticists, political poems that always tried to teach a lesson and never talked about the poet's feelings. Shifts in music have been similar.

One of the things modernism has really done for art is being able to express psychological disorders like PTSD and schizophrenia... If everything were nice and pleasing and obeyed the rules, it'd be really difficult to express that kind of stuff. But by being allowed to make jumps and sharp, unpleasant sounds, you can get a sense of stuff like that so much better.