Modern Classical Music Is Dead

Modern classical music is like modern art.  One big garbled mess.  There is no discernible structure, and, lacking any sort of rhythm or melody, one piece is indistinguishable from the next.

This past weekend my ears were forced to endure the 40 minute premiere of a symphony penned by a millennial hipster, prior to the Beethoven concert I planned to hear.  It was like every other modern classical piece I have heard: an aural assault of dissonant noises, repetitive sounds, and unnatural rhythms.  As I suffered through this piece, longing for the end, I reflected on the similarities between modern classical music and modern culture.

Disposable Pop Culture

When one mentions Beethoven, you likely hear the melody of Beethoven’s 5th, or perhaps Moonlight Sonata playing in your head.  Mozart evokes the tones of the Marriage of Figaro.  Tchaikovsky will surely recall some melodies from the Nutcracker.  Richard Wagner will likely trigger some Flight of the Valkyries.

I’ve never heard a modern dissonant classical piece that I could remember anything from the next day, nor compare to any other.  They are completely forgettable, lacking any melody or chorus.  This is why it is difficult to find recordings of any of these pieces even 10 years after they are released.  Indeed it was difficult to even find many examples on youtube, as no one bothers to even record the performances (and trust me, the examples here are relative masterpieces compared to the modern pieces I’ve suffered through).

Ugliness is Venerated

fatbeauty

Modern culture tells us that short skrillex haircuts, defiling the body with metal shrapnel and inked graffiti, and massive, revolting body fat is “beautiful.” This message is so successful, that today, in the west, it is extremely difficult to find a female below the age of 25 who has not purposefully destroyed her physical beauty in multiple ways.

As this worship of ugliness has marginalized natural beauty, likewise, modern classical music teaches us that dissonant chords, out-of-key incongruous sounds, and loud, harsh noises are pleasant and desirable.  Gone are the naturally pleasing chords and intonations which music theory teaches are good.  Listening to a modern classical piece is truly like watching the Emperor parade around in his new clothes.

Repetition Trumps Creativity

animatedgif

Much as feminists do little more than repeat meaningless phrases like “Rapists cause rape” and “Still not asking for it” or having Trigglypuff breakdowns at public forums instead of having a thoughtful discussion, modern classical music replaces creativity and musical complexity with repetition.

In the piece I heard this weekend, much as in the piece below, the same chord was repeated at least 50 times before another instrument joined in.  One may assume this is because it’s so daring and shocking to keep the audience guessing when he’s going to change and play something else. Surely he won’t continue the same chord for another 10 seconds.  But then he does!  How rebellious and avant garde!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww

Rules Are Broken Simply Because They Exist

circle-of-fifths

The Circle of Fifths – outdated once we invented the third gender

The western system of music divides sounds into 12 tones, with a subset of 7 of these tones being related in a specific way known as a “key” (eight counting the octave, which is double the frequency of the first note).  The notes are mathematically derived, based on the number of vibrations per second of a tone, and applying a ratio to obtain other tones that are both arithmetically related and aurally pleasing.

frequencies

Mathematical derivation of the 8 tones in a key

Typically, before beginning to play, the orchestra musicians will all tune their instruments to a middle “A4” note of 440 cycles per second.  Avant garde modern music does away with all of this, allowing all 12 tones to be used at any time, essentially doing away with the idea of a musical piece having a key.  Notes which are 1/5 away (for example from C to G) have a naturally pleasant sound, and mathematically there is a relationship of 3/2 the frequency of the original note to its fifth.

Fractions perfectly describe the relationship of each of the notes in a key to each other, and this system of music developed in most cultures throughout the world, whether they understood the mathematic principles behind it or not.  There are physiological reasons that certain frequencies are harmonious to the human ear.  When notes are played which are not strongly mathematically related, they have a harsh, dissonant sound.  In fact, music theory describes these as being “unresolved” or “anticipatory” sounds, and can be used to help build up to a grand climax of harmonies.  The problem with modern musical pieces is that the entire symphony is one 40 minute assault of dissonant sounds.  It’s like listening to a 40 minute standup routine with no punchlines.

1450285458631

Why are we wearing this? Just ‘Cause.

Of course, we see the cultural counterpart to this all the time.  While there is a biological basis for some natural level of homosexuality, the large numbers of deviant lifestyles today, including bisexual, pansexual, or any of the other  49 flavors of crazy are nothing more than emotional outbursts of troubled minds who know of no better way to express their frustration than to shun the norms and mores of their culture.

Being a tranny shouldn’t be a lifestyle choice.  It should be something done privately in the extremely rare case of severe sexual birth defect or gross medical error, and perhaps for the sake of comedy, at Halloween, or as in Monty Python skits, or Chris Farley working at the Gap.  No one can truly want a livestock ring placed in their snout.  This is clearly a case of rebelling for the sake of rebellion. And yet I see both trannies and livestock implements in millennials on a weekly basis.

Conveys a Message of Unhappiness and Discord

b8pytbn

Beautiful classical music can be inspiring, emotional, thoughtful, and powerful.  The message behind many modern classical pieces is one of unhappiness, chaos, conflict and discord.  And the main problem is that these are not themes that the music touches briefly upon; instead the composer assaults the audience with nothing but harsh, aggressive, chaotic tones for the duration of the piece.  It’s the musical equivalent of watching a horror movie full of nothing but the scary scenes, with all dialogue and plot devices removed.

With SJWs and feminists, we can see that they are clearly unhappy and emotionally unstable.  They could take a few easy steps towards being more attractive, desirable and happy, but instead choose to live out miserable lives mutilating their bodies and defiling their spirit.

Artistic License

A model displays a Spring/Summer design by Luis Manteiga Ancochea during the Pasarela Castilla Leon fashion show, in Burgos, Spain, on, Thursday, March, 11, 2010.(AP Photo/I.Lopez)

Now, some will say there are no rules to creativity, and that is partially true.  An artist should be free to try whatever he wants; however, Stephen King knows that putting random words down on a sheet of paper, just because it breaks the rules of grammar and the precedent of all of literature, will not make for good storytelling.  Indeed, one of my favorite pieces, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, is modern, breaks many traditional musical rules, and incorporates dissonance, but is also full of beautiful melodies and harmonies.

Artists should be free to experiment.  But just as no one is going to be wearing the above jacket any time soon, humans the world over have shown a distaste towards discordant sounds, lack of melodies, and harsh noises which defy the laws of basic music theory and mathematic tonality.  Experimenting with different techniques is great, but writing an entire symphony that sounds like unsupervised children banging pots and pans for 40 minutes straight is not creative, is not beautiful, and is not artistic.

Why Do We Have Music?

The purpose of music is to relax, to express our emotions and our humanity.  Perhaps the authors of these pieces are so broken and distorted inside that they have nothing to say but the musical equivalent of feminist screaming, but the musical establishment should not be supporting and condoning these works.  Music is a record of our culture and our civilization, and while perhaps modern composers are being honest by musically describing the world as a disarray of ugly and disturbing tones, we should strive for something higher.  Modern classical music is yet another piece of the mass ugliness that our culture presents in art, architecture, literature, culture, fashion, and design.

Read More: How Your Life Changes When You Start Listening to Classical Music

234 thoughts on “Modern Classical Music Is Dead”

  1. Just think how degenerate the distant future will be when Sir-Mix-A-Lot becomes “classical music”. Just like the ‘Futurama’ parody.

    1. I’m not sure if that’s better than the future described by “Chinese Star Trek” (2016’s Star Trek Beyond) where the Beastie Boys will be seen as classical music in the future.

  2. Brother, don’t overlook Hans Zimmer. This man’s catalog contains 30+ years of classical styled gems you’ve undoubtedly heard.

    1. I used to love him until I put together a playlist with just his stuff.
      Turns out, it’s a lot of repetition. 🙂
      I’m not saying he’s horrid, but he doesn’t have the talent of other composers.

      1. He has his style and that’s cool, but as you say, it gets repetitive over time. I am bored to death by the fact that most movies these days have these constant Zimmeresque musical beds underneath. No originality at all.

      2. Learning music theory can definitely have a spoiling effect once you realize how similar song progressions can be.
        What are some other composers you recommend? I’m looking for new music to listen to.

        1. I’m afraid I don’t have any suggestions. Aside from the old guys that is. I’ve been hitting a lot of Vivaldi lately. Seems to me he’s a lot happier than Bach. (Not saying Bach is in any way inferior though! :-D)

  3. Uhh what? There are plenty great classical players Hans? Einadu? Those guys are still alive and making great music. They are out there, you just have to find them

  4. All of this was co-opted by the elite long ago. The goal was to dumb people down…movies, plays, literature, art, music. Mission accomplished on all fronts.

    1. A lot of chicken and egg stuff here Bob. I think the birth am son subsequent advancements in television had a lot to do with the destruction of attention span which lead to a lot of paradigm changes in those other mediums.
      Sometimes I wonder if these changes were really moved from the elite as you say or if they weren’t fostered and driven from the bottom.
      By the time credit became a thing and attention span was totally denigrated the lower classes were able to drive the market with their lack of education and ability to make people rich.
      I am sure it is a little of both.

      1. One may also wonder, though, whether low production costs led to a diminishing in value of art that requires and rewards a long attention span.
        Or another possibility: Maybe the fact that production became cheap opened the doors to many inexperienced people who were incapable of creating anything worth dedicating long attention to.
        Now I tend to have a short attention span. But when I see a really worthy movie or read a fine book, I hardly notice that.

        1. Absolutely. Same goes with books. Imagine all the stuff self printed in the amazing digital book store. I mean 80% of it is about as worthwhile as digital toilet paper but it’s easy to put out there.
          Out of the box most, if not all, laptops come pre packaged with stuff that my band paid to have access to and paid an engineer to use in high school and it’s all fairly easy to use.
          There are any number of factors going into it. I think people get oneitis for the idea that the elites are craming things down our throats like so many german sausages because it is nice to point a finger at old evil looking billionaires and say “they did it” what is more uncomfortable is to look in the mirror and say “I too was involved”

        2. Heh. I’m guilty of using that ‘the elite’ phrase myself. I am not even sure what I mean with it. Some hidden (?) people in power, I suppose. Never dug into it too deeply. Well, and obviously, leftists and that kind of obvious shit. But you also gotta wonder: What motivated THEM?
          I had this idea for a music video once: Nerdy guy. Big horn glasses. Has a shitty little bicycle. And on this bicycle, he carries a ton of hardware, 90s style. A big ass cathode monitor, a black and white printer that weighs a ton, computer, a highly complicated digital camera with a lot of cables etc etc. And he basically goes around and does what people do with smartphones these days, but with that old hardware.
          So this nerd on his nerdy bike drives up to some cutie and shows off his hardware and she’s intrigued. Then he pulls out that shitty 90s digital camera, takes a photo of her and himself, slowly transfers it to his computer, there he prints it out. Result is a low-fi 50×50 pixels black and white selfie. And she’s like totally into him and screams ‘Amazing! Whoa! You are my hero!’

        3. Your idea for a video is prettt much what is currently happening in Brooklyn

        4. No way. Maybe you misunderstood. I mean that he’s carrying around literally like 500kg of hardware on a bike. As if it was the most normal thing on earth.

        5. Oh I understood just fine. and while I was being slightly hyperbolic, the hipsters in Brooklyn are walking around with flip phones and 110 film cameras and doing dot matrix art and making mix tapes

        6. Nah, just kids trying to be different….like, ya know, every fucking generation of kids in the world ever

        7. I have no doubt believing that the CIA used popular movements in ways they thought could be subversive but the truth of the matter is that Jackson Pollack was a ground breaking genius who did things on canvas which had never before been achieved. He quite simply broke through the old platonic idea that art is merely a mimetic representation of nature and actually accessed the random chaos and fractal shit going on in nature itself.

        8. Yeah, I think people point to Pollack because he was sort of a turning point from traditional “paint this face to look beautiful and realistic” to “Jesus Christ Pissjar” art, but I do enjoy his work and find it stimulating.

        9. I can sit in the moma in front of “One” for hours and just lose myself.

        10. Sam Hyde went to Williamsburg awhile ago and interviewed hipsters on the street, asking them who paid their rent and stuff…pretty funny.

        11. One: Number 31 Jackson Pollack it is 8 foot by 17 foot (plus a little) I can get lost in it for hours. It is in the MOMA

      2. Whatever the case, the mediocre has been elevated to excellence, and the abjectly horrid has been elevated to mediocrity, in the eyes of the general public…and what am I still doing up, Jaysus it’s 2:12 a.m. in Arid-zona. Time to catch some zzzzzzzzzzz’s…catch ya on the flip side Kneeman.

        1. I do think some of it is unintentional. I mean the elites either had a hand in the creation of the internet, or allowed it to be created, and look what a tool for subversion it has become.
          It is a tool both of good and bad, of course. One of my biggest problems with it is it encourages this “any anonymous person is just as good as a trained expert in a field” phenomenon.
          People will say “oh the internet removes gatekeepers, that’s great.” Well… sometimes I like the idea of gatekeepers, people trained and professionally educated and focused on a certain field who are arbiters of good ideas or bad ideas.
          Walter Kronkite would never have done a story on the Kardashians.
          Most of these feminists would never be given a voice, because, they really have nothing to say.
          The videos of the SJWs would not go mainstream, because they wouldn’t view videos of other SJWs acting like fools to encourage them in the first place.
          I have to wonder if some of the acceptance of this modern classical stuff didn’t come about because some traditional paths to symphony writing were broken down, allowing someone to skip several steps and submit some pain inducing cacophony of sounds as a symphony.

      3. I have to agree with you. I think it’s both. The elite saw the potential effects and with a bit “help” maximized the effects of the new technology…

        1. agreed. It is always both. It is impossible to ever point a finger and say “they did it all” we are all a little bit guilty here.

      4. I just saw where Ken Bone, the Office-space-looking character from the last presidential debate, was offered $100,000 to do a porn shoot. I don’t understand how anyone pays for porn. But even if it wasn’t free and ubiquitous, I can’t fathom the economics that it’s profitable to offer an unattractive man that kind of money just to ridicule him.
        This kind of thing is ONLY possible when the lower classes have incredible market power. I mean someone has done the math, and somehow they will extract more than $100,000 from the rubes in order to make this work. And that blows my mind.
        http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/161010004816-ken-bone-debate-exlarge-169.jpg

        1. ha! that is perfect.
          The dialogue writes itself:
          What do you want to do when you come over
          We can have some pizza and then we can
          what?
          Ken Bone

  5. How do you separate structure from repetition? Isn’t repetition a form of structure? If so then isn’t it contradictory to criticize repetition?

  6. Good article. I think many of the things you’ve said on classical music can be applied to popular music as well.
    However, while I’m sure cultural decline plays a part in the degradation of classical music, I don’t think it’s THE reason. The fact is that everything in music (and art in general) has been done. There are no new chord progressions to be written, no new forms to create, no new modes to discover. It’s all been done. “Avant-garde” was bound to happen eventually. Will it stay that way? That remains to be seen.

    1. I read an article recently about the first symphony composed by AI. The AI was fed a bunch of classical pieces so it could study them and analyze what made them “good” music. The output of this AI sounded much like a typical classical music piece if you tuned in to your public radio station right now. NOT like these avart garde pieces. So I think it’s quite possible to write traditional sounding “good” music.
      Hell, they are still writing new blues and it’s basically the same 3 chords over and over since the beginning of time.
      I’m musically inclined and trained (at a low level) and if there were reward enough or I had enough free time I would try writing a decent modern piece just to prove it doesn’t have to sound like crap. But it is a LOT of work.

  7. Most ‘modern classical’ music (and all art forms, really) is garbage nowadays due to modernism, and now, postmodernism. Art used to be about acknowledging and reflecting the true, innate beauty of nature and creation. Then, the modernists came and there was a questioning and/or rejection of the traditional norms of what constituted art. And now, postmodernism
    has rejected that there are any norms at all. Postmodern art must have esoteric ‘meaning’, and if you don’t understand it, it means you’re uncouth. Well – I don’t think anyone can understand postmodern art: it cannot
    be understood, because its meaning is entirely subjective and it has no meaning.

  8. Mussorgsky once said that art is a means of communicating with people. What exactly are the assholes who compose this tripe are trying to communicate? That they are incompetent? Lazy? Hate their audience? That’s not a good message to communicate. Fuck them. Listen to this instead:


    1. I love some of Mussorgsky’s stuff. But I wouldn’t call it modern or dysharmonic by a far stretch. Do you call this dysharmonic:

      ?
      Edit: Misread your comment. Nevermind.

    2. Fully agree. Berg and Schuenberg started the avante garde music and Wagner was competing against them. I introduce immigrants to pre modern opera in my events, everyone loves it. Being half Russian I agree ” art is a means of communicating with people.” And the best music is our utmost for our highest, our tribute to the divine, or derived from that

  9. The joke is on the modern composers. They attempt to reject conventions, but can only do that by referencing the very same conventions.
    One can either write music that adheres to the path cut by Bach, or music that purposely veers off that path. Either way, Bach looms large.

  10. Oh come on. Joos are producing great music. Rap is off the hook.
    P I M P by 50 cent is the most important song in the last 50 years

  11. What the author is writing about isn’t actually classical music. Nor is Tchaikovsky nor Wagner. Classical Music is music from approximately 1750 to approximately 1820.

    1. Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, ,his orchestral Night on the Bare Mountain, 1867 at age 16.

      1. Pretty cool. First musical concert I ever attended this song was played. Still not classical music though.

      2. I always enjoyed Great Gate of Kiev which is part of Pictures at an Exhibition. Great stuff.

    2. The real term for the music we generally refer to as “classical music” is “serious music.”

      1. I typically call it Traditional Western or “music of the western tradition”. Doesn’t really fit under one genre though, its just music…

        1. Dude you trip me out sometimes. I think you take this relativism thing to an extreme. I mean ultimately your are correct but we gotta draw the line. That’s how we have a cohesive culture, through naming shit.

        2. Hm. Alright, you have a point. But in that case, I will simply change my argument and ask: Why is ‘serious’ music in any universal way preferrable to other music?
          If you say you like to listen to serious music because it often harmonizes with your mood and does something very nice to you: Cool. I actually share this feeling. But to then go and say: ‘Serious music above everything else’, that I think is misguided and, frankly, a bit naive.
          And I hold on to my statement that it is something that is propagated by a self-proclaimed elite. Just like movie critics. It’s all just voices in the wind.
          You say that ultimately I am correct, but if you follow my (correct) statement to the ultimate conclusion, we would have no culture. Logically, that means that in order to have ‘culture’, we need to construct a lie. To which I say: Why? And do we really need ‘culture’?
          A guy I once met had this idea that the world ‘culture’ comes from ‘cultivation’. That is, we take something particular and cultivate it. Like in agriculture. Monoculture. Shit like that.
          And on one hand, you may say ‘it makes sure that society has standards’. But then, who defines those standards?
          Look where it leads. This leads to fashion. Mainstream. This leads to 99% of all people practically only being mouthpieces of one of a handful of flavors of opinions. In politics, it’s more extreme. You basically reduce people to ‘leftist’ or ‘republican’. What a short-sighted view!
          And you may look back at, say, the 50s and watch some black and white movies and see how they all have a coherent and kinda unified style. And then you say: THIS IS AWESOME! THIS IS CULTURE!
          But don’t you think that if you were exposed daily to exactly this same style and had no variety whatsoever, you would quickly grow tired of it and wish for something else? I know I would. I like to watch some oldie movie every now and then. But I couldn’t watch that shit all the time. In fact, I can hardly ever tolerate being exposed to the constantly same stimuli all the time. I think that’s either because I’m weird or because we as humans simply don’t have consistent moods. Sometimes we are hungry, sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes we need candy, sometimes we need a steak. And sometimes we just need that fucked up bag of disgusting fatty potatoe chips. Why should it be different with music and art?
          Now as I in my other comment, I love classical music. Every now and then. Right now for example, I don’t feel at all like listening to classical music. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it. Just means that it’s not what I need right now.

        3. I really don’t disagree here and I wasn’t specifically referencing you serious music comment. I just think that if we don’t have some universal standards then we get what we have today, a cluster fuck where nobody is sure what is up or what is down.
          Small things like music, I agree but I also think that if music wasn’t in the hands of degenerate capitalists who only care about profit we wouldn’t have half of the bullshit we hear today that is passed on us.
          In the 60s they rebelled against every form of normality and I’m not sure I can find a positive this brought us.
          Other small pleasures I agree with you and I think they are inconsequential and possibly even positive but…
          Family, sex, marriage, law, codes of conduct, man above woman, religion, the role of government, taxes, the words and language we choose….all these when defined and accepted help contribute to a cohesive culture yet all these things are no longer universal in the west and look where we are at…we’re all tucked up.

        4. Hm. But isn’t life always like that. Do we ever truly know what’s up and down?
          Our culture does not necessarily hurt from a lack of direction, but from conscious misdirection. I like the Anarchistic idea more and more. Why should I have to care what some guy 1000 miles away from me is doing, who he is fucking, what values he holds, what music he likes … it makes no sense. That person has nothing to do with me, but somehow we are supposed to be connected through the “nation”.
          Now, there are benefits to standards. Like language. We can communicate pretty universally through controlled language. But it’s also a weakness, as we can observe through language manipulation. And I wonder if it would be that much of a big deal either way if we didn’t have standards.
          I suppose there is no right way to go about it, anyway. There’s just an infinite amount of variations of compromises. My preference is to reduce the, say, “area of interest” of an individual to his close surroundings, for example the city he lives in and his close and personal friends. Instead of always looking out there into the “big world” and towards the nebulous “glorious nation” with all its culture. Smaller communes are perfectly capable of governing themselves and have the standards that a now much smaller and more immediately afffected group of people agrees upon.

        5. I disagree with you here. I believe in the Roman ideal. The universal empire and cohesion of the nation.
          I do see the reasoning behind what you say but after weighing the pros and cons in my head I’ve found the Imperium to much more beneficial to me, my future children, and mankind.
          There’s less freedom in abandoning all programming then there is in being detached and accepting of positive and righteous programming, both for your self and the nation.

        6. “Our culture does not necessarily hurt from a lack of direction, but from conscious misdirection”
          I really like this quote of yours. It is very true, in a way. Majority of people on this planet have proved over and over throughout history that they are incapable of conscious self direction, that’s why we need outside direction. There will always be men like us who question everything and have their own sense of inner powers and direction but I beg you to consider the positives outer direction has for mankind because most don’t share this power.

    3. From Merriam Webster,
      Classical:
      a : of or relating to music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries characterized by an emphasis on balance, clarity, and moderation
      b : of, relating to, or being music in the educated European tradition that includes such forms as art song, chamber music, opera, and symphony as distinguished from folk or popular music or jazz
      Of course, classical refers to the music from the times of Haydn and Mozart, which fits the (a) definition. But that doesnt mean that it’s the only definition the term has.

        1. Yeap. Languages are derived from common usage. In my country there’s an organization that organizes the rules of the language (it has been doing that for several centuries), and their purpose is to integrate in the official language what has become a common usage (for longer enough to be more than a trendy stuff). Languages are a common contract.

        2. It’s a weird interplay. I am not sure it makes a terrible amount of sense to put up ‘rules’, because rules are shaped by common usage. But then, common usage is shaped by rules. So I guess … oh wel, I don’t have an answer. 🙂

        3. It’s a matter of tradition. England was into non-written rules, while continental Europe (Germany, France) was more into putting everything on paper. US is a middle point since it was influenced by both England and continental Europe.
          Well, “was”, of course. Funny thing is that England, which hold for centuries against continental Europe influence, now has finally given up to some foreign influence… now it has Shariah laws.

        4. To an extant. The UK and the other Commonwealth nations as well as the U.S. pass laws through Parlaiment/Congress and these are written and interpreted by Judges in court who also make laws based on what they hear in proceedings that are termed ‘common law’. Continental Europe on the otherhand uses a civil law code.

      1. I see what you mean, however I prefer to call that Western Traditional Music or Music of the Western Tradition because it is really to broad to be considered one genre.

      1. I was always aware of Zappa’s political stances, but never took time to listen to his music. He’s a got a groovy edge.

  12. From the New World Encyclopedia entry for Giovanni Gabrieli, the great Venetian composer of that special time between the Renaissance and Baroque eras of music:

    He used his extensive knowledge of counterpoint in composing toccatas, canzonas, fugues, sonatas, and instrumental music to rouse personal and spiritual qualities in his listeners, aiding them in achieving their individual transformations.

    Indeed. The very concept of art as a vehicle for individual transformation is long, long, gone. A shame, really.

    1. A bit boring and formal to my ears. I also don’t particularly like the fact that most music from those eras is full of Christian crap. Hallelujah Hallelujah.

      1. May the Lord bless you. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Just for you

  13. That “music” in the videos almost reminds me of some of that atonal crap. I say almost because the atonal stuff they forced on us briefly at the university was so bad it was like nails on a chalkboard.
    This stuff is just like one nail on a chalkboard.
    🙂
    Also, I don’t mean to complain (yes I do), but with all the hideously ugly pics, can we get at least -one- that’s attractive? Doesn’t need to be a woman, just SOMETHING. A pleasant meadow. An ocean sunset. ANYTHING! 😀

  14. Another thing…. repetition is generally bad, I agree. However…. it’s been done effectively.

    😉

  15. Gotta say I kinda liked the two pieces you posted. First one became a little boring after a while. Might make for good film music tho. Second one I didn’t care to watch longer, but I kinda liked the tune.
    “Fractions perfectly describe the relationship of each of the notes in a key to each other, and this system of music developed in most cultures throughout the world, whether they understood the mathematic principles behind it or not.”
    Ehm. Have you listened to indigenous music from time to time, or music from various cultures? To say they all follow the same rules is far from true to my ears. Take Arabic singing. Or Indian stuff. And I don’t mean the Westernized stuff that obviously just put a few ‘outlandish’ elements into a generally Western mix.
    And what about blues music? And I don’t mean the occasional blue note in rocknroll, although that is also a solid example. The original blue note is nowhere to be found on our Western 12-tone-scale. It’s in between there somewhere.
    “The purpose of music is to relax, to express our emotions and our humanity. Perhaps the authors of these pieces are so broken and distorted inside that they have nothing to say but the musical equivalent of feminist screaming, but the musical establishment should not be supporting and condoning these works. Music is a record of our culture and our civilization, and while perhaps modern composers are being honest by musically describing the world as a disarray of ugly and disturbing tones, we should strive for something higher.”
    That’s just your opinion. There is no universal ‘purpose of music’. Music is just a collection of sounds. These can be harmonious, heroic and uplifting or depressing and chaotic. I don’t see anything wrong with either. And you actually bring it finely to the point. People are broken. So they express that. Instead of criticizing the expression, we should be questioning where that brokenness comes from.
    It actually makes a lot of sense for me that modern music and art is exactly that. An expression of the distorted and abhorrent psychic condition many of us find themselves in these days. Think of industrial revolution paintings. Dark, depressing.
    And you may say it lacks rhythm and structure and a ‘line’. Yeah. So do many lives these days.
    Hey, think back of Shostakovich and his 4th Symphony:

    I love this shit.
    That shit got him denounced by the Soviet regime. Here’s a wikipedia excerpt:
    “In 1936, Shostakovich fell from official favour. The year began with a series of attacks on him in Pravda, in particular an article entitled, “Muddle Instead of Music””
    Do you know what ‘Pravda’ means? It means ‘truth’. So much for attachment to words. ‘Muddle instead of music’. That sounds like something your article could be called, no? Would you deny Shostakovich a place among the great classical composers?
    And here’s one of my absolute favorite classical pieces ever, although you may argue it is not exorbitantly dissonant:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bqka478hLI
    Written by Strauss. Who would say he is not one of the “great ones”?
    I had an album of modern music from something like 1960 that I also liked, but I can’t remember the name.
    No offense, but I think you just want some kind of vanilla world of heroic Hans Zimmer scores. I find that boring as well. Sure, I love the Moonshine Sonata. But it’s just one facet of human existence.
    The Nazis actually shunned and punished what they called ‘Degenerate art’ back then. I thought it was cool for a while, because I was also on a ‘heroic uplifting shit’ trip, but I am coming to realize that life is more than that. Those people were in pain. This was their expression. Just as Blues was the expression of a life in slavery.
    Now, I bet my ass most of those modern artists do not understand why they do this. And some may only be in it for the money, that’s for sure. But while the rational mind can trick us, our feelings and intuitions tell a lot about us. I think it’s worth listening to. Think of it … a man in conflict with his masculinity … if that is not stuff that makes for a dissonant chaotic piece, I don’t know.
    And by the way, those pieces you posted are total vanilla (almost traditional) in comparison to something I experienced a while ago in a university in Munich. Now THAT was avantgarde shit. The artist not only discarded the quint circle, he flat out took a piano and started hammering on the strings creating all kinds of weird sounds. The singing that came with it consisted of broken-apart syllables with all kinds of disharmonious and arhytmic bullshit. Now that was a little too much for me, but even that one had a few real cool moments.
    Anyhow, just my 2 cents.

        1. C’mon, it’s Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. Moustaches were kind of usual some decades ago.

        2. That reminds me of the video of Lindybeige. He was wearing a cloak for a while, and found out that they are incredibly comfortable and useful, rainy days included. But he can’t use them because everybody looks at you as you were some kind of snobby guy.

        3. Niiiice work.
          I am watching ‘Look whos back’ right now. That picture reminded me I still had it on my hard drive.
          It features a terribly, almost comically beta main character at the side of Hitler. Luckily, Hitler points this out.

        4. I am not sure how it ends though. And meanwhile, he gets the girl with ‘total wuss game’. So yeah … may want to reconsider. Remember it’s a satire that’s supposed to make Hitler look bad. That said, I love his character.

        5. This is literally my good deed of the day. I will not stop.
          Of course considering you, you have likely banned me already to keep your safe space.
          People like you are simply too sheltered. That seems to be necessary for degeneracy.

      1. I don’t get it. Haven’t you realized that you are wrong here?
        You won’t even stand for a discussion that would critizise your ideology.
        Nor do you showcase that you have any idea what return of kings stands for.
        You completely lack any understanding of the ancient values and wisdoms that we uphold and want to revive.
        You are incapable of reflecting on yourself critically. You are a effeminate coward. This degeneracy led all ancient civilizations to ruin.

    1. Israel Eldad wrote in memoir that it would take generations before any Israeli composer would be able to make music to reflect the nature of the liberation struggle. He said it’s because all the composers of that time (and still today) are all in Tel Aviv, and because Tel Aviv is a flat plain, the composers are not psychologically equipped to understand the pain and suffering, the ups and downs that come with a liberation.
      Whereas it would take a composer raised in Jerusalem herself to grasp the up and down nature of the struggle.

      1. Reminds me of some Hollywood productions that depict ‘badass’ guys. You basically immediately notice the director had no idea about what a ‘tough guy’ really is and you basically get wimpy kids making some dramatic gestures and acting ‘manly’, but it doesn’t FEEL real. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s like when you see a dead body … something has just left, I think you can feel it. The spirit / swinging is wrong. So you could compose a piece about some form of pain … and it would superficially work. Like … yeah it’s pain, so well use a minor scale etc. blah blah. But it will never truly transport the spirit as if it was written by someone who understands.

  16. A good example of perfectly harmonious and following-the-rules music that personally bores me to death is Bach. I can’t think of but 1 or 2 pieces by him I actually enjoyed or liked relistening.

    1. Bach never wrote counterpoint by the book. He can also be quite dissonant. Sure, he wrote in the Baroque style of the time. But a rule follower? Not in the slightest.

  17. Let’s also not forget that most of the stuff that prevailed from back then that we value today was likely just a fraction of all that was produced. My dad uses to say: We only think that stuff in the past was better because only the best of it stayed with us.

    1. That is a nice way of saying “you eventually stop producing natural dopamine and so everything new seems strange and unsettling to you and everything familiar seems so much better”

    2. He was right. I’ve many times said the same regarding antiques (I used to deal in them for a while). “Things were made to last back then” “Um, not really, no, what you see here is stuff that sat protected in an attic for 100+ years. Most of the stuff that they made, like 99.99% of it, is broken and gone”.

  18. Is “modern classical music” an oxymoron? It reminds me of those “Antique Tables Made Daily” signs at touristy furniture stores.

  19. Speaking of music, does anyone know of any metal bands that have Gregorian chants or symphonic elements?

        1. Glad you liked. DSO are fantastic and Batushka knocked me on my ass. Check out Spectral Lore and Midnight Odyssey for something a little different in a similar vein. I could also suggest Mgła and VI who put out some really intense stuff.

        2. Definitely going to check those out. I honestly just found sabaton a few months back through a reactionary blog I read. Never really gave metal a shot but I now feel like a fool. What I just heard was beauty to my hears and is way more intense than sabaton, though I like the war and battle lyrics. Thank you again.

        3. No problem. The beauty of metal is that it can take on so many forms and incorporate so many different influences and styles that it has something for everyone. For me it is king of all music given how it is always evolving and incorporating so many things. You can go from one extreme which is neoclassicl to another which is Lo-fi and primitive-there is so much out there you will find something that resonates with you that I can guarantee.

        4. I have gratefully been enlightened and just when I thought music as an art form was dead.

        5. I’m pleased to have made a positive contribution. Metal is where it is at as far as art is concerned. I’ve been listening to such for 2 decades or more and there is always something that surprises and delights me.

  20. Interesting take but I feel that music is too subjective to pigeonhole too precisely. I listen to stuff from many different eras, but only really like a very small percentage. Modern / dissonant works can be ugly or just not well composed just like works of any other era. Repetition can be ugly, but it also has a hypnotic effect … and there really isn’t any such thing as perfect repetition because one moment is always different from another and there may be other subtle differences not readily detectable.
    The equal temperament system you laud in the article is itself a compromise and an imperfect one; it deals with the problem of dividing up the octave equally at the expense of skewing some intervals (5ths/3rds, iirc) out of exact intonation. We’ve just become used to it because it became the standard in Western music centuries ago. (Related: The A = 440 Hz standard wasn’t fully standardized until the 1930s; prior to that, different regions would use slightly different frequencies.) Non-western systems like the Arabic maqam and Indian 22 tone system sound weird to us, but if you familiarize yourself with them they start to sound normal to your ears.
    Interesting discussion of equal temperament and alternatives:
    http://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/focus/the-tuning-wars-%E2%80%98equal-temperament-destroys-everything%E2%80%99

    1. “Petite Fleur” originally written by Sidney Bechet. The 1959 Chris Barber Jazz Band’s rendition is one of the most sublime melodies I’ve ever heard.

    1. Lovely. Atmospheric black metal has been my choice of music of late-Spectral Lore for example are a great band and their III and Gnosis records are tremendous.

        1. I’m looking forward to it. There’s so much I need to pick up-a lot of atmospheric black metal as I indicated. I neglected to add Acherontas; check out their Ma-Ion (Formulas of Reptilian Unification) which is absolutely astonishing. Very dense as far as trying to understand the concept underpinning it and the lyrics but when you listen to it it has passages where you feel like you’re being carried away into the cosmos so to speak.

        2. Got it right as it was released. Very talented esoteric act. Also Nightbringer (whose split with Acherontas was incredible) and anybody on the Daemon Worship label. Heard Batushka yet?

        3. Batushka I have heard-I enjoyed it immensely. Check out Mgła from Poland; their ‘Exercises in Futility’ record is astonishingly good; great production but so energetic and oppressive that it hurts in a good way.

        4. Seen Mgla live. It was stunning! There is speculation that Batushka is members of Mgla and Nokturnal Mortum.

        5. Lucky you. You know, I would rather not know who they are; I like the idea of not having the magic revealed much as an illusionist does not give away their secrets.

        6. Bandcamp is the best thing to happen to independent music ever. With mainstream media becoming more and more insufferable due to tokenism, PC bullshit and SJW taint it’s so nice to have more and more underground options these days where their split-hooves cannot reach and demolish!

        7. I could not agree more. It’s joyous and you can find whatever you desire without all the horseshit you spoke of; bunch of fucking killjoys that they are. I despise them all.

        8. Man I can’t get excited for more than one, possibly two, film trailers a year anymore because this shit has gotten so far out of hand. They are goddamn FICTIONAL narratives, who gives a fuck about your quota hires or your equal representation or your feelings? Let people tell the fucking stories they want to tell unhindered!
          When I can’t even get stoked for a new Star Wars film’s trailer is when you know I’ve checked out completely!

        9. Indeed. I have not watched a movie in the cinema since 2012 and refuse to ever do so again. I will not be dictated to by anybody and will not give those SJW propaganda-peddling wastes of flesh a cent. If they want to make their own movies, fine, but when they try to butcher others purely for to make up quotas and assuage their pathetic feelings of inadequacy then I take umbrage; the thought of a black James Bond for example makes me want to vomit from rage-what next, an Indian playing Bruce Lee in a remake of Enter the Dragon, a white Shaft, an Inuit Rambo? The insanity has to end and it does when people do not give them money-they will shrivel up and die like a vampire doused in holy water when you do that.

        10. I do highly recommend watching the recent film The Neon Demon, however. The filmmaker is a maverick and doesn’t give a fuck about feelings and it shows women’s true nature toward any others that are younger, prettier and thinner than them. Shocked it even got greenlit these days!

        11. There is perhaps hope yet. Otherwise I am perfectly happy watching Spaghetti Westerns and the like-they harken to a time when men were men and not pansies.

        12. MAN! Amazon Prime Video is a goldmine of Spaghetti Westerns! Even the ones Fulci directed are on there!

        13. My dad is also one-being that he raised me on those. We quote The Good, The Bad & The Ugly near verbatim.

        14. Same! He loves Leone’s body of work very much.
          Apparently Hell Or High Water is supposed to be an amazing neo-Western like No Country For Old Men. The men in it are extremely masculine and justifiably belligerent toward those deserving and also loyal to their families, I have heard. I plan on seeing it stat!
          There’s a shred of hope for films today, you simply need to be a director bigot. First thing you should do is beeline it straight for the “DIRECTED BY…” credit before even contemplating wasting time/money/energy on a film. Make sure that the film is by somebody who can write good characters you can relate to and tell a compelling story rather than having gotten the job by virute of only having a Yehudi last name (the bane of Hollywood and all Western media!). And avoid anything directed by a woman not named Katheryn Bigelow or Penny Marshall!

        15. Interesting.
          As far as modern movies go I will tend to take a pass. In saying that though, I do enjoy ‘foreign movies’ as more often than not they are exponentially better written than English-langauge ones and have deeper and better characterisation. I don’t waste my time with women-produced anything to be brutally honest-it may sound extreme but if a band even has a female member in it I am very, very reticent to listen to them as often they are cynically used as eye-candy to appeal to all the nerdy jock-sniffing metal geeks.

        16. Well yeah, if you mean garbage like Huntress, then yes, she was used as a gimmick to try and make up for otherwise crap music. But acts like Demonic Christ, Sentinel Beast, Holy Moses, Acid and Znöwhite are awesome despite being female-fronted. And indeed, they didn’t showcase the woman front and center as a selling point, everybody was (GASP!) equally represented and they let the music speak for itself. THAT’S how it should be done!

        17. Yes. I will give you that. Heaven forbid everyone be presented as an equally important and viable member irrespective of sex (not ‘gender’; I despise that artificial word).

        18. Actual good bands rely on their music, not image, to sell themselves. What they look like or even any band photos are completely irrelevant.

  21. Makes you want to throw up. That said, I do appreciate some Basil Poledouris; there’s a certain taut and muscular feel to it and I like the Byzantine inspired sections.

  22. Geirr Tveitt One of the last Romantics:

    He was from Norway and was a nationalist, his music is based upon the traditional folk music of his country.
    What reigns today in “Classical” music is what is called expressionism, the artist writes notes without following any system, so that he can better express the chaos of his emotions.
    If I comment further I will be insulting your intelligence.

  23. A lot of “everything before was better than everything now so get off my lawn” old manism here. Every generation thinks the current generation sucks and they are always wrong. Plenty of visionary stuff out there

      1. I think one of the worst things to happen to the world in my life span was the birth of the snobbery of the mediocre. The comments section on this article in large part is displaying this sad trait and it is disparaging. To say that today’s art and music is just degenerate and ugly nonsense and to praise as holy the art and music of other generations (which has been praised to fucking death already — talk about brain washing) is mental laziness and just stinks of hoi polloi snobbery.
        modern music and art has always been too complicated and seemed frightening to the current generation of average minds…this is why the greats are remembered as path blazing geniuses.

        1. I am not a big fan of modern music, but I can see it’s appeal. A bit like blues. I don’t really ‘like’ it, but I can see why you would.
          Hey, as coincidence has it, I just yesterday bought all the electronical parts needed to solder myself a small phantom power circuit for my Panasonic WM-61A electret microphone capsule.
          This particular one is extremely cheap and is infamous for it’s very high frequency response. That is, while a normal microphone does not capture anything above, say, 20kHz, this baby, from hearsay, goes up to 60 or more.
          So I put it into my interface and did a shuddy recording of one of my songs. Then slowed it down by 300%. Result is a slow motion recording which, thanks to the genius microphone, still has a lot of high frequency components and sounds natural.
          It is arguable whether it still sounds like music, but I love the sound:

          Currently looking for ideas on what to record with this shit. If anything enters your mind, let hear. Some apparently used it to record bat screams. Unfortunately, I have no bats nearby, heh.

        2. I don’t particularly like it either. I like old blues. But yet another generation of people making the mistake of confusing “I like it” and “it is good” is yawnola.
          The people who rioted in Paris after the release of the rite of spring didn’t get it. they didn’t like the atonal stuff, the 12 tone rows. They called it ugly and degenerate. The truth was, they were just average people with middling intelligence who didn’t see that something special was happening right in front of them. People complained about Bethoven too. This is why artists require some measure of freedom. If the average person drove the artistic market then we would still be listening to people banging rocks together.
          People don’t like change or innovation i get that. But to complain about how ugly today’s art is is just foolishness and stinks of an arrogance that can only come from the average

        3. Btw interesting project.
          Maybe old video game theme songs like Mario or Tetris

        4. I don’t think it’s that they didn’t “recognize” the worth. I think that in their hearts, they did. But they were so caught up in ideology about what they can allow themselves to ‘find good’ that they could not acknowledge this notion in themselves. I admit I have this a lot in myself. It’s really weird. I get an extreme cognitive dissonance in my mind when I watch Hollywood movies sometimes. A part of me really enjoys those blasting visual effects. Another part of me keeps saying ‘Meh, empty showmanship’. And in a way, both perspectives are valid. But then, when you add social pressure on top of this, people typically default to what is ‘generally considered good’.

        5. That wouldn’t work, because those songs do not have any high frequency components. They were recorded – and more importantly, distrubuted – in normal formats.
          Basically, we are talking about real-world sound sources. Like … imagine some sound of something ordinary. And then wonder if there may be some inaudible, but intriguing overtones in there.

        6. What you say is right about movies. The difference is that this music was the same thing but in mirror. The explosions make the emptiness of meaning easier to swallow whereas the atonal music has the meaning, being a reflection of a different world, making the image harder to swallow.
          empty showmanship, btw, is as indicative of our times as the precision of Mozart was of his. The fact that our current emptiness is scary is why people clammed for Mozart. They don’t long for that music, they long for a world in which that music makes sense, a world with order where meaning is assigned rather than our current meaningless world where we have to be brave and assign the meaning itself.
          Relativity scares the fuck out of people and the onion has had its layers peeled back and we simply don’t have the order imposed on us any longer to allow us to reasonably believe that the world is meaningful outside the meaning we give it. The result of this is hostility and a veneration of things that were a product of a lost past.
          This is why people hated Stravinsky to the point of rioting. He was holding a mirror up to them and saying “your life is empty and has no meaning or intrinsic values and everything you know is bullshit”
          This really pissed some people off. However, other, better people saw it as an opportunity. In the end he forced people to see something they didn’t want to see and they rioted. Nothing new under the sun here

        7. Well said. Although
          “The result of this is hostility and a veneration of things that were a product of a lost past.”
          That’s as if people had never been hostile and mean before today. Lol.

        8. Would loud and crowded restaurant noise work? 60 conversations, plates banging, tables being bussed, blah blah blah

        9. They always have been. And they have always pointed at the modern and said it is no good compared to before. That is pretty much the definition of average.

        10. Why take it as an insult? It’s average. The people who have the gift to see past these boundaries are geniuses. It is only in our modern age of narcissism that everyone in the world thinks they are a genius.
          6 billion people who are all in the top 1%. A world with 6 billion centers of the unniverse and we wonder why music has become what it is.
          The emperor’s new clothes gone global.

        11. If there is a better example of how classical modes versus modern ones and the denigration of one and veneration of the other by people who simply don’t understand the language I don’t know what it is

        12. One of those is made for the ages. (Out of stone)
          The appeal is also that one of those will never regain consciousness and continue to annoy people.

        13. Same here. But isn’t the fact that most people have something that is anything but average just another expression of the average? The vast majority of people simply aren’t special regardless of what their grandamas told them. The ones that are special are almost, to a man, fucking miserable

        14. I am sure St Theresa, if you had to talk to her for 5 minutes, would be totally fucking annoying.
          The truth is, one of those was made in a time when the prevailing wisdom on the civilized word was that a just god had a plan for us and that our actions mattered and that permenance was a real part of the world and things mattered and had meaning. The other was made in a world defined by a lack of grounding, where impermenance was the theme and where meaninging given from on high and eternally conferred had been totally obliterated. Other than the translation it’s pretty much the same thing

        15. Ha! Btw I was slow on the uptake of the regain consciousness line. Well done

        16. Social media especially FB really feed into this. Totally detached from reality it makes everyone seem “special” then steals your personal details to sell you shit with popups…

        17. Good idea. Needs to be something I can use at home tho. I have a mixer, a ventilator, a juicer. But maybe I could borrow some other stuff. Any particular idea?

        18. I would agree with you…but the snobbery is from the “top” nowadays. The average person is indifferent to art and “modern art” and modern music (most of it crap under any standard) are mainstream. Sorry but this is not the Renaissance when a bunch of midwits and some con-men looked at Rome and Greece for models and started disparaging the Middle Ages achievements and art.

        19. the snobbery is absolutely on both ends. The absolute snobbery that comes from the “average” person is both the most absurd and distasteful thing I can think of. It is right there with women who are clambering to be treated as equals in my eyes. It isn’t that they are indifferent to art and modern art which, to me, would be perfectly fine. Tbh I am fairly indifferent to it a lot of the time too. But they seem, to my lights, to be outright hostile to it and that hostility is just snobbery against anything that makes them seem less special.
          It is the “you are a special snowflake” syndrome that I see in every other group that aggravates me only with an even haughtier derision. The fact that there is stuff out there that they simply can’t understand isn’t good enough in a world arrogant enough that every single person thinks they are a genius.

        20. Absolutely. But so too did a generation of depression era people spoiling their children in ways that they couldn’t have and their children creating the most privileged group of cunty kids ever….all while television and movies were basically destroying peoples attention span and critical thinking and cultural Marxism was turning schools into, for lack of a better term, drunken orgies. There are a bajillion interconnected reasons.

        21. I wish I could go back in time and experience that performance of Rite of Spring, in hopes of understanding a little more what made the crowd so upset. Was there tension in the air from social or political change? Did someone say something before or during the performance that got them riled up? Was it a particularly bad performance?
          Rite of Spring is a good piece of music. Were the listeners so thoughtful and educated that they could immediately understand Stravinski’s message and it enraged them? Was the piece simply so different, and the first time they heard something so different, that it enraged them? I mean maybe if I had never heard of avant garde music and we didn’t have the internet to warn us that such things exist, and had been going to classical music concerts my whole life and then one day I go to something bizarre and jarring, it would piss me off.
          But on the other hand, I think there’s something to be said for how the French reacted with rioting and violence, and today someone can perform utter shit and the audience will give them a standing ovation. I think it’s a combination of the repressed emotional state of man today (did Germans in Cologne even react to the mass raping there, which should disturb them far more than a new type of music being performed?), and the PC culture that says we must respect everything and maybe this isn’t my cup of tea but oh maybe this composer is coming from a different cultural background and I am obligated to honor him with fake applause nonetheless.

        22. The message is important though. I mean perhaps those people needed to be told their lives were empty and meaningless. People today certainly need to be told messages that they are not. Instead, they are told things like “Go Feminism! Your culture is the best in the entire planet and throughout human history.”
          My problem with this modern music is the message. What are they trying to say? That the world is full of chaos and ugliness?

        23. Point taken. Some of it is saying just that. A lot of it is saying that in the chaos and ugliness there is a separate order that is imposed by the listener rather than the musician. There is a piece, I can’t recall it off hand but it will come to me, that is so incredibly and fractured that it has absolutely no coherent or cohesive theme but for some reason (that very smart engineers or someone can explain) the human mind will synthesize it to make sense. The thing winds up having different melodies and harmonies build out of the ooze to not only different people but to the same people over multiple listens. Some people who were poled swore they were listening to different songs because of the way they processed the sound. It was just fantastic. Now, are you going to blast this while you are taking a cross country road trip or put it in your headphones at the gym? Of course not. But that isn’t what it is for. It is a direct reminder that the world is in fact chaotic and that it is the individual which imposes the order not the world or, in this case, the composer.

        24. In the times we are in, with economic recession, ugly fat women everywhere, cultural change, increasing costs of living, stagnation of wages, and all, is it too much to ask for some art and music to venerate the beautiful?
          Throughout much of history the focus of art was on either the religious / spiritual which one could say is about veneration of beauty or holiness, or actual beauty / youth / nature itself. And sure, that can get boring.
          But art also adapts to the times and themes. If you look at many of the movie themes over the past 10 years, they are much more positive and simple than the decade prior (how else do you explain the rash of musicals that Hollywood released). And that’s in large part because the world became comparatively ugly and depressing: the most serious economic depression in 100 years, endless wars, terrorism, cultural change, etc. and people wanted to laugh, smile, and be happy.
          Kneeman, you are in an extremely rare and fortunate place. I have visited NY many times, and have friends and family there, and I think you acknowledge how it is nothing like the rest of the country. You have access to far more beautiful people there, and indeed the mere cost of housing and speed of life up there weeds out a good bit of the SJW nonsense. But even for a guy like me who has his shit together, will probably be able to retire by 50, has a good career and health and good genes, shit is depressing and sucky, and I must look outside national borders to find women who are worth a 3rd date.
          My point is enjoying the decline means something far different for me than it does you. All I’m asking for is a brief respite when I indulge in art or music. And the classical music of today is exactly the opposite.

        25. I get what you are saying, but it is a it much to ask that the art of a particular epoch doesn’t reflect that epoch. If you want fairy tales they are there. If you want to listen to music and look at art from a time you see as more simple and beautiful it is there. However, for better or for worse, these are the times we are living in and our music and art and literature, for better or for worse, ought to reflect that.
          Religious and spiritual art comes from religious and spiritual times. Is there interplay? Sure. It wouldn’t make sense to paint the last supper today…….the last supper is, in so many way, indicative of its times. It would be out of place.
          I also refuse to use “enjoying the decline” because I don’t see change as necessarily decline. The world has changed. Period

        26. I aspire to be as nihilistic and carefree to one day view all this as simply “change.”

        27. join us spicy! we are awesome. Step one: start measuring time in clips of 100k years.

        28. I was thinking more mechanical / industrial machines because they have so many different moving part thus lots of deiffrent frequencies of sounds..
          At home let me think..have to get up early..

        29. “Do ghosts and spirits use ultrasound to try and communicate with us during an investigation?”
          http://www.cctopsghosthunters.com/ultrasound.html
          The question is posed but not answered. Gives interesting sources for ultrasound: just rubbing fingers together, crickets and other insects. Has a sample of crickets. I read elsewhere cymbals have lots of high frequency.
          If you hooked up to a little Raspberry Pi or similar device you could be portable. Some FFT software could display presence of sound in all frequencies.

        30. The problem is that in order to record at a very high sample rate (I use 192 kHz, which is able to record sounds up to the half, 96 khZ), you either need a semi-professional portable recorder or a very performant PC and a good interface. I have the latter. I can’t (or don’t want to) carry around 20kg of Hardware.
          Those are good ideas though. Will try that finger rubbing definitely.

        31. Hm, interesting. Didn’t think such a little toy could handle that. Alas, this is only a playback card, not a recording card. I seriously doubt the little toy can handle 192 kHz recording, but who knows, maybe through some weird magic…

        32. Doh! That’s embarrassing, for some reason I thought it was both ways. Yeah, probably not. The ADCs I found upon a cursory search are really slow, not even good for regular audio.

    1. There is plenty of good stuff out there, yes, I mentioned as much above. That being said, it’s pretty clear that contemporary commercial music really does blow chunks these days. Not because “git offa mah lawn” but because it is so obvious that it’s coming from some kind of music and lyric generating algorithm.
      Heard modern country music? It’s fucking pop music in the key of A. I remember Rock going through the same thing and now it’s gone (it was fucking pop music in the key of D though) for all intents and purposes. Dead lyrics that don’t speak any actual truths or even have interesting themes, it’s all “Hey, lookit, I got a hat and a pick’em up truck” and for women “Hey, I really hate men, like experimenting with women sexually, and will likely kill the man in my life because Grrrl Pwrrr”. It’s revolting.
      The real music today is by artists whose names nobody knows, being put out semi-underground on music sites and/or creating home made videos on YouTube. Some awesome shit there. But you’ll never hear it on the radio, because the music industry gatekeepers simply will not allow it.
      End of the day though I think people like to complain instead of act and investigate. I got tired of modern music and searched out new alternatives, which exist aplenty. A lot of people bitching would be better off using that energy to make a positive change in their lives. The music industry doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them, and they need to come to understand that and find alternatives. Bitching without taking action is futile.

      1. pop music is pop music and some people like it and some people don’t. I was specifically talking about avante gardeand experimental music. Music that would be considered high art rather than pop. There are people out there doing atonal chamber music that is, frankly, fucking brilliant. It is exhausting to listen to but if you work at wrapping your head around it it is like being taken on a fantastic journey.
        The modern algorithm pop music is just McDonalds music. Some people like it some people don’t.

        1. My point with pop music wasn’t to actually disparage pop music, it was to note that many other styles of music have been turned into pop in their respective keys. Because it’s “easy on the ears, requires no real contemplation and is inoffensive” as I’ve heard said. Real country, traditional anyway, you had some dude making some pretty pithy observations, or telling a story or whatnot (Johnny Cash, the holy saint of outlaw country, wouldn’t get a single recording contract in this day and age, guaranteed). Now it’s basically the themes I noted, in a happy cheery “boot scootin” key of A. Pop as pop is fine, converting every other popular style to corporate pop though, that’s just freaking annoying, bland, and boring.
          I’ve never been fond of “avant garde” music to be honest, even when I was younger and not “git offa mah lawn” inclined. I did like alternative and experimental stuff like Jean Luc Ponty, or Tangerine Dream, or Bauhaus. But the atonal/weird/chaotic stuff never made my socks roll up and down.

        2. agreed about the move to pop as well as the beatification of Cash. As for avant garde, not being fond of it is the point. We are part and parcel of the world we grew up in and this stuff is looking forward to a world we can’t imagine. There is something very good in the best of the avant garde stuff (and there is a lot of crap to) but it wasn’t written to be easy on the ears of this generation. If you were fond of it, if you truly understood it, you would be a musical genius ahead of your time…..you are many things friend…but that ain’t one of ’em. These people make what is actually important music and are too often denigrated by people who think it is just decadent bullshit. Sure, some if it is but painting the whole with that broad brush stroke essentially says you don’t give a fuck about the small percentage of them that are truly visionaries. The simple way to deal with it is to not listen to it….I don’t listen very often. I do have an old friend who is a fantastically brilliant musician and I will occasionally listen to his music. It is physically painful. I imagine it is a lot like what average readers felt like when Faulkner released sound and the fury or when Joyce first released Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. If you really want to put the effort in the brilliance will eventually show itself. Me? I would rather listen to elmore james and bob Dylan because I feel there is a lot of soul or stuff like Whitney and Huey Lewis or Katrina and the Waves or the Sex Pistols and all the stuff I grew up with because it tickles my nostalgia bone. What bugs me…what really gets under my skin….are the people who mix up “i don’t like this” with “this is bad” because it leads back to the snobbery of the foolish.

        3. I just know what I like and don’t like. I’ve no problem with Avant Garde stuff existing and others finding value in it, it’s simply not for me. In fact, I really haven’t commented on avant garde at all until now, I’m simply revolted by turning all music into pop. Takes away the soul of a lot of genres, imho.

        4. there you go being all rational and logical again. Are you saying that if you don’t like something you shouldn’t make talking about it the center of your entire fucking life?
          As for the modern pop…again, yes, it is McMusic

        5. Despite living in the south, I despise most country made after 1980. But for some reason I really enjoy the Hootie and the Blowfish guy who turned country–Darius Rucker. Oddly enough, though, his songs do sound rather poppy.

        6. It’s a general attitude I have towards life. It’s how I became a libertarian actually (we’ve discussed something similar on another thread). There is right and wrong of course (murder comes to mind here), but when it comes to general preference stuff that harms nobody in a real sense, I could give a fuck what people do or say, and would never lobby to have laws passed to stop them from being what I consider weird or stupid. It just ain’t my problem.
          Unfortunately, most people aren’t wired like this and have no problem pressing their idiocy on me, at gunpoint if required.

        7. I like some of the Willie Nelson stuff from that era.

        8. I can’t remember where I heard the quote, but someone said “there is an absolute wrong and an absolute right and nearly every time there is a body count involved. Everything else is an opinon”

        9. Yeah, I suppose 1990. I was a kid then so I don’t really have a concept of when those songs came out. Willie is precisely who I was thinking of–Willie and old Hank.

  24. Modern classical music, art, cinema, literature, theatre, cars, architecture, cuisine, politics, the whole modern society. They’re all indistinguishable from one another. One big piece of advertisement, narrative, vulgarity and anti–creativity.
    Anything aesthetically beautiful and technically superior that I can imagine had already been done in the past.
    And there’s nothing bad in this fact for me after all. We have so many gems of the past behind us! The whole life is too short to touch them all.

  25. “Rules Are Broken Simply Because They Exist”
    It’s worth asking the question: why are they broken simply because they exist?
    The answer to that question is a curious one, and requires engaging with the modern history of revolutionary politics

    1. It is a byproduct of liberalism – breaking any constraints on your freedom regardless of anything, even if there’s no need to.

      1. well it is that, but there’s the still the question as to why liberalism took that particular character, and the name itself doesn’t begin to explain it. There is a history of anti-nomianism than goes back to the idea that ‘anything is permitted’ (or indeed required) if God is dead, something which is inherent to the revolutionary impulse.

  26. Supply and demand………
    If more wanted to listen to classical, composers would get paid more and more would get into the field.
    As far as rock, I would agree to an extent. With the advent of the internet, there is plenty of music out there already. The only ones who are looking for new music are the idiots who follow the latest trends, and are easily influenced by the media.

  27. Gonna disagree on that Steve Reich piece. In fact Reich is one of the few modern composers anybody at all actually enjoys, and it’s because he’s relatively accessible. You can follow it, you can find the downbeat. It’s not a dissonant chaotic mess. No memorable hooks though, from what I’ve heard.
    The other piece with the cello soloist throwing her hair around, yeah, that’s a chaotic mess. Not my thing at all.
    John Williams is still around, by the way. He’s written a lot of orchestral music that people actually enjoy. With memorable hooks, even. But he has to do it in Hollywood.

  28. I would say that all music in this modern world is dead. Save few examples mostly in the metal scene, modern music is some kind of nauseating mix of reggaeton/dancehall/rap and pop.
    I’m not a musical expert, but a musical enthusiast; and I think that the decadence of modern music started with atonality who -what a coincidence!- was created by (((Arnold Schoenberg))).
    There are a few contemporary compositors I find good, like Britten (shame he was a fag) and Stravinsky.

    1. There is plenty of good music, but none of it is getting past the gatekeepers in the industry. Still, you can find all kinds of independent artists doing great work on many different music sharing platforms, you just won’t know who they are and will never hear their music on the radio. But it’s out there.

      1. Yep. If you like instrumental music, as I do, there are a lot of good, IMHO, composers/groups out there.
        Two Steps From Hell; Audiomachine, Brand X Music, Twisted Jukebox, John Dreamer, Zack Hemsey, Immediate Music….

      1. I know the works of Evola, as well as Guenon. They have a few interesting texts and ideas but one have to be careful about it. My main problem with Traditionalism (Evola/Guenon line) is that is a dead end in real life. If you stay in your library full of books of Evola and Guenon, thinking great thoughts about trascendence and being a man among the ruins the enemy is going to win…..and I really, really don’t want that.
        That doesn’t mean that I’m opposed to Traditionalism or the intellectual/metapolitical side of the battle in general;. they are fellow travelers and we need them, but right now our situation is desperate and we need action in the real world.
        I read everyday Counter Currents (http://www.counter-currents.com/) and even wrote an article for them (http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/02/nicolas-gomez-davila-unknown-reactionary/), but I’m an action type of guy.
        Check this articles:
        http://www.returnofkings.com/70971/8-tactics-of-the-occult-war the best mainstream article about the traditionalist concept of the Occult War…… and was published here.
        http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/12/metapolitics-and-occult-warfare-part-1/ about the same concept, but more “technical”.
        http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/10/the-jewish-question-for-normies/ the best intro to the jewish question for normies I have ever read. All the people here at ROK shoud be reading this.

        1. I also read counter currents quite frequently. We both agree that action is needed and reading Guenon or Evola is no where near enough. ( I would like to discuss this further with you, maybe on a different channel, if your up for it of course) They are however crucial to the outcome and type of society that is to return, though they offer little as far as changing our situation, they provide great templates to the proper society and we need to incorporate some of their ideas into our end goal.
          I did not know you wrote for counter counts, and being a huge fan of Don Colacho I am honestly excited an am going to give it a read as soon as I finish typing these words. I will also check out the other links you provided. Thank you.

    2. No exception for metal music here since it obviously celebrates the ugly stuff. so it is dead music too as are all other popular, current, contemporary styles of music.
      The decadence of music, this decay did not start with atonal music. The music is only a symptom of hat is wrong with a society. Go figure.

      1. Yes, most metal celebrates death, ugliness, bizarre behaviour, etc.
        However, there are exceptions with bands who lyrically exalt beauty and technically/musically are really good:


  29. I don’t care about contemporary art.
    All I need is this:

    At 02:02, a man becomes a god, like Icarus, drunk with Sun, light and strength.
    Or this:

    For reflexions of love, and long walks in Paris.
    Or even, in my dark, revengeful days,

  30. Okay, this was quite amusing to read. But just because a bunch of edgy hipsters and uninventive fuckwads are getting mainstream attention, doesn’t mean modern classical music is dead. Listen to Time I by Wintersun. Give it a try, my friend,

    1. Time by Wintersun is the furthest thing from classical music, though I won’t judge if it’s good or bad. ‘Classical music’ means using natural instruments like piano, violin, and vocals.

  31. I guess the music didn’t “Struck a chord” with you.
    This article reminds me a of a scene from ” Once Upon A Time in Mexico”, where William Dafoe ‘s character Drug Lord Barillo is learning how to play the piano. The piano teacher say that music comes from the soul, and Barillo still can’t play. Later in the movie, Barillo orders the teacher fingers to be removed for the comment.
    The scene I describe is good description of what many of us are seeing in the works of “Modern” classical music or art. As the author witness at the concert, the beginning act is expression of ego of composer. You do not a get feel of emotion from the music, a spark of memory, nor tingle down your spine. Just hallow notes played for a man’s ego and his hipster friends.

  32. Good stuff.
    Too many phonies want to tear down the old masters and yet have nothing of value to offer in their stead.

  33. Thanks for the quick overview of classic music basics. I’m a fan of Mozart as well as Vivaldi, but because I really don’t attend classic music concerts and I had no idea what is happening by today’s conductors.
    It would seem that all the contemporary arts across the board are suffering.

  34. Compare this:

    to this

    In my humble opinion there are fundamental differences with new compositions:
    no dynamics, signals instead of instruments, pseudo rythm changes.
    However composition rules are maintained.

    1. Yeah film music is the only beautiful modern classical music, and it can be amazing. But look beyond the world of film music and you struggle to find anything of value.

  35. “Listening to a modern classical piece is truly like watching the Emperor parade around in his new clothes.”
    Yes, John Cage’s 4’33 of silence: I always wonder if some kid in the audience
    turns to his mother while everyone is clapping and says, “but mommy, he
    didn’t play anything”

  36. I too wonder what people like Olivier Messiaen, Stockhausen and the likes want to tell us. Their music is either too encrypted and shrouded in mysteries beyond comprehension or it is so simple it has no message.
    Wasn’t it Stan Getz who said that we should enjoy and express the beauty of things and reflect this beauty throughout the music, to make the music beautiful and be inspired to go for the beautiful things in life? And right he was.
    Today we see these teen cultures and it is filled with ugliness, distortion and simply noise and lots of repetitive music.
    We have these debates. In those people debate over metal music and other popular genres and how metal is superior or whatever. Yet most of these genres of today are just ugly, noisy and trend oriented sound collages.
    Steve Reich is not too bad, just repetitive. You can use his music to lead lovers of likewise repetitive techno music to new grounds.
    But with artists such as Arvo Pärt, I really lose my patience.
    I love some Philip Glass though. His music is not too bad and he has build a little collection of works so far, including symphonies – a bit like the old composers did.
    Another one who really kills me is Cage or Stockhausen.
    It really gets weird when sound experiments get sold as full fledged musical creations.
    But even worse when modern young people, mostly into metal music pull out their guitar, plug them in and shred down some pieces from J.S.Bach or Beethoven and believe they doing us a good service. They may boast their metal music ego, but otherwise do good disservice to the realm of music.
    Another thing that bugs me is when I realize that a lot of modern music lacks cultural background and connection.
    Take on Bach. His collection of works does connect to what moved the society around him and what was important to the people.
    At that time and the area he lived, sacred ideals were imminent. It shows in his music, especially his sacred cantatas.
    Or Brahms, who’s music was also influenced by Hungarian folk and dance music.
    But please. Stop calling today’s music classical music. This regards only to music from the era of classicism. This is important to keep in mind.
    The modern and somehow distorted societies we live in are full enough of confusion.
    I simply call it modern music.
    And in this regard I think there is lots of good music. Many movie scores bear good music. I prefer Danny Elfman’s works so far who seems to be highly inspired through the works of Aram Khachaturian. And also some of Goldenthal’s scores are inspired by older music and many more.
    That would be my next concern about today’s music. The gap between musical ideas.
    When one follows the constant development of music from the Renaissance until today, there is a clearly audible development. Yet some just try to jump this development and pop up ideas out of nowhere. That, in my record adds up to this disconnectedness from cultural background as I already mentioned. There is no flow in it. It just exists. Like you said, for the purpose of pure rebellion. But than what else? Rebellion forever?
    Let’s take a look at rock and metal fans who are in their forties. Do they look rebellious or as if they are about to make the next big change to our society?
    So weird. I think we live through the era of chaos. May we live long enough to see things return to the evaluation of beauty again.

  37. What is this, an article for ants? Wonderful critique of contemporary classical music you got here — how did you manage to fit it into 20 paragraphs. So concise.
    But really, before you go on to making dull statements like “The purpose of music is to relax, to express our emotions and our humanity.” do manage to do some actual research.
    Perhaps you should also try listening to Dufay or Palestrina and try and find remember anything about their pieces the next day, or compare to any other. The fact that you are unable to comprehend a certain musical language says something about your shortcomings, not the music’s.
    Also, the two examples you’ve posted are examples of what? Beauty or ugliness? Both are quite expressive, beautiful and even cinematic, and there are lots of pieces way way uglier than these two.
    Weak.

    1. Sorry to interrupt your inner peace.
      But why should I or the author of this piece not define subjectively what is beautiful or ugly?
      And why should there something be wrong if one does not appreciate what is ugly?
      Why is there something wrong with a person not appreciating repetition?
      I may agree that the piece played by Sol Gabetta (that cello piece) was beautiful. I would love to hear it been played by someone else to really compare it.
      And maybe I can stomach Steve Reich’s music since I also had techno music for one of my favorite genres for many years. So I can handle repetition as it also comes with my life. The author does not like that and finds it not to be beautiful. to some people repetitive music is just ugly in the truest sense.
      Not everyone can handle this. And there is indeed worse.
      I can not say something is wrong when someone dislikes a certain style. Nobody can love all music universally. Impossible. We all have preferences and biases. That makes us human.
      Some people just love ugly music when ugly determines their lives and beauty appears all cheese and cliche.
      But at one point we have to agree on what is beautiful.
      So what is?
      How far do we go until we disagree?
      Is metal music beautiful or outright ugly, noisy music (yes it actually is music)?

  38. This is true – I’m trying to pick a piece of contemporary music for the List E of my ARCT in Piano Performance. You describe the style perfectly; Canadian composers like Walter Buczynski, Stephen Chatman, and similiar ones sound exactly like what you described.
    Don’t think so? Play Mountain Spirit by Stephen Chatman off Spotify for example, and I’ve even heard a lot worse than that.
    Beauty in contemporary classical music does seem to survive in film music as its last holdout.

  39. To further torture your ears, I suggest you listen to this:

    and this:

    oh and why not this (this is what happens when Quebec’s governement pays women to make music):

    Also, I’m so sorry for this. Please have some Bach to cure your eardrums, if you haven’t punctured them already:

    1. For those who are still alive, here is the very best piece of modern music brought to you by your man John Cage:

      Maybe you might prefer the orchestral version (don’t forget to clap at the end like these mindless fucks in the audience):

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