NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.
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Apollonius
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NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

I'm reporting from Victoria this evening.

This city is far enough south to be within range of NPR, always my favourite radio station when travelling through the States.



But, I find it almost comical that they are still playing exactly the same standards they've been offering the public for the last half century:


Entirely 19th century classics.

Entirely large symphonic works.





There is more than a thousand years of music out there. What's with their fixation on the big sound and music composed not earlier than Mozart? (Those familiar with my posts will remember that I've been quoted as saying music basically ended with Mozart).



Just sitting here shaking my head,





Update:

An advertisement informs us that on Sundays they have a special "two hour" baroque program.


Well, I'm just not all that impressed.
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Enki
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Enki »

Music did not end with Mozart. I hate it when people say crap like that. That's dead culture walking.
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Apollonius
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

I'm exaggerating, but only a little.


If you want hear dead culture, listen to electronic music.
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Enki
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Enki »

Apollonius wrote:I'm exaggerating, but only a little.


If you want hear dead culture, listen to electronic music.
Not at all dead culture. That's live people still producing new music. It's different from the mausoleum culture of people who revere only music that has been dead for 200 years.

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If you tell me this is dead culture, then I would say you are the sort of person who cannot broaden their awareness beyond their own tastes.

I think Kimchi smells like garbage, but I don't look down on the people who like it. Hell, I'll eat it if it's put in front of me.

At any given moment there are more live people dancing to electronic music than there are people sitting in a chair listen to live classical music. Live culture exists within the hearts of the people living and breathing and participating in it.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Typhoon »

Apollonius wrote: . . .

There is more than a thousand years of music out there. What's with their fixation on the big sound and music composed not earlier than Mozart? (Those familiar with my posts will remember that I've been quoted as saying music basically ended with Mozart).

. . .
Well, I'm sympathetic to your complaint regarding ignoring 1000 years of music: the links you've been posting in the music thread are both unfamiliar and wonderful.

However, is not the survival of classical music hanging by a string? Many orchestras are going bankrupt are they not?

What's the solution?

Also, I can't say that I agree that music ended with Mozart. I suggest that such views are part of the problem.

Beethoven and Puccini are two personal favourites.

There are other differing points of view:
The sound of a harpsichord - two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm.
~ Sir Thomas Beecham

Even in current pop music the profit driven descent into banality is depressing. With the odd notable exception.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Azrael »

J.S. Bach gets a fair amount of airtime on NPR. So does Vivaldi.
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Apollonius
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

enki wrote: Not at all dead culture. That's live people still producing new music. It's different from the mausoleum culture of people who revere only music that has been dead for 200 years.



If you tell me this is dead culture, then I would say you are the sort of person who cannot broaden their awareness beyond their own tastes.

I think Kimchi smells like garbage, but I don't look down on the people who like it. Hell, I'll eat it if it's put in front of me.

At any given moment there are more live people dancing to electronic music than there are people sitting in a chair listen to live classical music. Live culture exists within the hearts of the people living and breathing and participating in it.



It's not so much that I look down on modern music. I just don't have time for it.



You might be thinking I'm unfamiliar with pop music and electronic music, but that's not the case at all. I've done a lot of explorations into the popular music of the U.S. and elsewhere. Some of it is interesting, in an anthropological sense. Of course I've heard some electronic music that was composed with serious intent.



Again. I just don't have time for it. And since there is a thousand years of good music out there, brought live to us by truly outstanding contemporary musicians who play real music, real time, on real instruments, why would I want to accept anything but the very best?
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

Tinker,


I find most people's tastes in music to be remarkably monochrocentric, if I may coin a word. They listen to the music of the last ten or fifty years and suppose that includes pretty well everything they need to hear.



When I first posted a little music back on your old forum, I apologized ahead of time for introducing some dissonance into the discussion. I didn't and don't expect much interest. Most of us are at least vaguely familiar with the majority of what gets posted on the 'What music are you listening to?' thread, which might well be part of its appeal. I thought maybe I'd stop by now and then to link to a glimpse of the kind of thing musicians were up to two, three, four, and more hundred years ago. This is the music I know something about. This really is the music I listen to, and since I'm out of range of a good radio station, I rely on recordings*, unless I sit down to play myself. It remains true that the overwhelming majority (over 90%) of the pieces I look for are not on YouTube.


I'm one of those people who reads the liner notes. These days classical CDs are often boxed with what amounts to a little book on the composers, the performers, the instruments, and historical background for the pieces. I've always been a history buff, and you can learn as much and definitely get more of a feel for history by reading through the correspondences and biographical and technical details relating to past composers, performers, and musical instruments and styles, than from reading Toynbee, or Marx, or Braudel.






P.S. I really do hate electronic music. And I even tried to overcome this hatred by buying an old Korg M1, standard for rock bands for many years, but I hardly ever touch it-- maybe to find b-flat (A for baroque tuning), but a tuning fork is much better-- you actually get the strings on the harpsichord to vibrate with the fork. When you're used to accoustical instruments, electronic stuff just sounds plain awful. I like strings, reeds, and vocal chords that vibrate.




* So no, I'm not a purist. Recordings are made with microphones and listened to with loudspeakers. You can always just ignore me.
Last edited by Apollonius on Fri Nov 02, 2012 2:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

Typhoon wrote:Beethoven and Puccini are two personal favourites.


It's probably just a question of taste. I don't really like Puccini. I find most Beethoven to be pretty boring-- blame NPR. There are exceptions, for example, the Diabelli Variations, his Dances and Folk Songs. Chacun a son goût.


Orlofsky: Our motto here has always been 'Chacun à son goût'.


Eisenstein: A Russian expression, Your Highness?

Chacun à son goût (from Die Fledermaus) - Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) ; Doris Soffel, soprano ; Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden conducted by Placido Domingo
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Typhoon wrote: Well, I'm sympathetic to your complaint regarding ignoring 1000 years of music: the links you've been posting in the music thread are both unfamiliar and wonderful.

However, is not the survival of classical music hanging by a string? Many orchestras are going bankrupt are they not?

In other words, what I said about music dying isn't as much of an exaggeration as some might make out. I imagine making a go of it in the music industry, no matter what kind of music or in what capacity (composer, performer, director, record distributor, or record sales person) would be a daunting proposition these days.


You're speaking to an old hippie here. We were more interested in what *humans* could do than machines.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Apollonius wrote:
You're speaking to an old hippie here. We were more interested in what *humans* could do than machines.
What exactly is dying? Is it simply the electronics that bother you; or is it the standard tuning; is it the shrinking melodic pattern (and smaller chordal features) or is that people hear/think in chords now and have trouble hearing the old sense of polyphony....do you dislike rhythm?

I'm just trying to get a sense of what you believe we are losing; and I'm not sure if any of us are old enough to know what we lost. I've read plenty of people, much more adept and knowledgeable of music than me, who believe it to be the case that we cannot (in some sense) play any Western music from the 13-18th centuries in the way it was intended or heard back then.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by noddy »

to a certain extent the struggles of classical to make money from performances is as much to do with modern recording as anything else - this shows up in all music and theatre and the other artforms which can be recorded.

once you have an excellent recording of an excellent performance then the motivation to attend a lesser performance goes down - its reduced to the live experience and the social aspect ... which drink driving laws have punished .. buahahaha... yeh yeh i know we shouldnt *need* to be a bit drunk/stoned to enjoy such things but......woops, back to music.

one of my faves is Edgard Varèse, lovely colourful music yet its played rarely and then its even more rare its played well... I also love stravinsky, debussy and many of the russian composers.

i also find beethoven boring and guess who gets played the most at classical concerts.

in terms of dead or alive music - i enjoy the creators of most genres, the original people who get copied and create a new genre... after that its cliche city and gets boring fast.

less so with electronica i must admit, though i did enjoy some bits of it sometimes.. especially when i used to get stoned.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:What exactly is dying? Is it simply the electronics that bother you; or is it the standard tuning; is it the shrinking melodic pattern (and smaller chordal features) or is that people hear/think in chords now and have trouble hearing the old sense of polyphony....do you dislike rhythm?



Actually, if I really believed that music was completely dead I wouldn't be posting so many incredible performances from only the last few years. At the same time, you have to admit, most people don't know music. Hardly anyone actually plays a musical instrument anymore, even badly. Most people don't know one note from the next.*


Rhythm? I find the drum machine to be excrutiatingly boring. If you're talking jazz, well I can listen to jazz, at least until we hit Charlie Parker. One doesn't have time for everything, though, and I just can't listen to rock and roll. I find the standard pop approach to singing to almost always be insipid and unpleasant to the ear. Not sure what it is. Baby talk? The enunciation is definitely a problem. Out of tune? Screaming too much? I will not listen to an electric guitar. Sounds like static. To my ear, this stuff is mostly just very annoying noise.




I'm just trying to get a sense of what you believe we are losing; and I'm not sure if any of us are old enough to know what we lost. I've read plenty of people, much more adept and knowledgeable of music than me, who believe it to be the case that we cannot (in some sense) play any Western music from the 13-18th centuries in the way it was intended or heard back then.


I'm not sure if we can recreate music from the distant past in exact detail or need to. There have been lots of strides made in historically informed performance over the years, so we can certainly get closer than what you were hearing before the 1980s, much less during the first period of the early music revival of the 60s and 70s. We now have two and three generations of musicians who have been taught these rediscovered traditions and developed more complete and informed ideas about how the instruments were built and played, and of course we are finding new pieces all the time.

But that's not really to whole point. No, I never want to hear Bach on the piano, much less the Moog, but that doesn't mean you can't do something to freshen him up. That's being done by the people I sometimes call New Age Baroque or 21st Century Renaissance musicians. At times I've posted some works that go well beyond historical reconstruction and allow for unashamedly eclectic and sometimes downright modern elements, and I think we should welcome these efforts. Above all, this is about respect for the past, not by trying to present it as something embalmed in amber as a museum piece, but to make it come alive again today.





* As evidence for that I offer my own mistake, in a previous post, which I left uncorrected for a while to see if anyone noticed.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Apollonius wrote:Actually, if I really believed that music was completely dead I wouldn't be posting so many incredible performances from only the last few years. At the same time, you have to admit, most people don't know music. Hardly anyone actually plays a musical instrument anymore, even badly. Most people don't know one note from the next.*
I understood that you were using hyperbole. I was simply asking to foster discussion and try to see your point of view. I may agree with your conclusion, but I guess I am having trouble with your reasoning. I think more people are badly playing musical instruments than ever before. The breadth of instrumentation, and style of play may be what's tougher to come by. As for the note- from my understanding- perhaps the note you were looking for would be a modern G# for a Baroque A. But that is iffy when the nonstandard A of the time ranged from the 380s to the 480s in some cases. In the latter case, your Bb could be too flat!

You write about not keeping these forms as museum pieces, but most of them are because the peoples who created them are nowhere to be found. It's as if I sat at a piano and started to vamp out some sort of blues line. I may be able to get the piano to sound correct, but what in the hell do I know about the blues (in any of its variations?) Sometimes, these things just pass naturally.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

Nap,


In my not so very humble opinion in these matters, the *tunes* of today, as well as the *lyrics*, are feeble compared to what was being done two and three hundred years ago. It might relate to short attention spans. Perhaps also to the fact that nowadays people are more interested in *watching* music than listening to it.


I think music from the past only becomes a museum piece when there's no one left who has any interest in playing or hearing it. I'm here to foster more interest in both. I think people today are rather smug about art, as if great art were somehow restricted to societies that are computer literate. I can point to incredible cave paintings from 20,000 years ago.


Music is the same. The good stuff never dies and can be an inspiration across millennia.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Enki »

More people at this very moment are listening to classical music than at any time in Earth's history.

I don't think people think deeply about demographic trends. When Beethoven was alive there wasn't a symphonic hall in every city as there is today.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

Decided to put this here:


Why does classical music make you smarter? - Spengler (David P. Goldman), PJ Media, 22 April 2013
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/04/23/ ... epage=true
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by jerryberry »

I think people today are rather smug about art, as if great art were somehow restricted to societies that are computer literate.
Friends and family are almost uneasy when I bring up classical music. I can't tell if they think I'm being a snob or gay. I used to be anti country music to the point of irrationality even bigoted towards the country western lot. I really enjoy country music now.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Enki »

jerryberry wrote:
I think people today are rather smug about art, as if great art were somehow restricted to societies that are computer literate.
Friends and family are almost uneasy when I bring up classical music. I can't tell if they think I'm being a snob or gay. I used to be anti country music to the point of irrationality even bigoted towards the country western lot. I really enjoy country music now.
The hate of country music is the counter-culture mentality of thinking one needs to rebel against the mainstream.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by noddy »

i like the best of most genres - however in the genres i like i can listen to the average/derivative stuff and still enjoy it.

with country music i can only enjoy the very very best :)
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Re: NPR using its playlist from 40 years ago

Post by Apollonius »

Some comments about the matter of taste, which I will put here rather than in the What are you listening to? thread, since it is really about aesthetics:



The good, the bad and the ugly - Theodore Dalrymple, New English Review, April 2014
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpag ... _id/142369

The epidemiology, sociology and psychology of bad taste interest me because there is so much of it about. Bad taste is the shadow-side of self-expression, as it were; indeed, it often seems as if it is the only side of it. This is one of the reasons I so favour reticence as a trait, at least in the modern world. Take but reticence away, and hark what bad taste follows!

I happen lately to have been reading about a personage who strikes me more as a specimen of the worst possible taste than as a real person, namely the late Simon John Beverley, alias Sid Vicious. It is dangerous, though, to allow oneself ever to think of anybody as a mere specimen, however horrible whatever he might supposedly be a specimen of, for that way inhumanity lies. Even the most depraved person is precisely that, a person, and one must never permit oneself completely to forget it.

Normally, of course, I would not read about an uninteresting person such as Sid Vicious. I have a fairly simple attitude to rock music, of which Mr Vicious was some kind of exponent, the same in effect as President Coolidge’s to sin: I am against it. Ideally I would like to start a Society for the Suppression of Rock Music, but I suspect it would have approximately the same practical effect as the Society for the Suppression of Vice founded in the early Nineteenth Century, namely nil. Suffice it to say that whenever I hear that the youth of a country is employing rock music to rise up against dictatorship, I rally at once to the cause of the dictator. Civilisation can survive dictatorship, but it cannot survive rock music. ...
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