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Comment by sweezyjeezy | Hacker News Reader

Aphex Twin.

I wish you had elaborated this comment into something substantial that readers could learn from.

Here is an interesting comment that a classical composer -- possibly the most influential one in the 20th century through his students -- on Aphex Twin and similar artists:

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stock...

Influential though he may be, Stockhausen still comes across as a self-aggrandizing asshole:

> I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.

Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.

And course the reply:

> "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to".

For what it's worth, any student of "classical" (highbrow, not limited to Classical period) music will have concepts such as ostinato, fugue, motif, theme/variation, Don't Rush, etc. drilled into them. Periodicity is what differentiates music from noise and a tension between periodicity and aperiodicity is one criterion that separates good music from bad.

   And course the reply:

I found Aphex Twin's reply disappointing.

Like a petulant child he essentially negated Stockhausen's points, without engaging with them. It seems to me that Stockhausen was trying to be helpful -- after all he had been a music teacher for nearly 1/2 century with academic offspring like Kraftwerk and Can. Aphex Twin seemingly was unable/unwilling to see that there are other approaches to music than the orthodoxy of 1990s dance music. Aphex Twin's main musical criterion seems to be dancablility:

    you can't dance to. Do you 
    reckon he can dance? You could 
    dance to   Song of the Youth, but 
    it hasn't got a groove in it, 
   there's no bassline."

I would argue to the contrary: dance music -- whatever its merits for dancing -- cannot be interesting as art music. Why? Because dancing, specially dancing well, is itself demanding: most brain capacity is used for moving the body along to the music in the right way, and that capacity is missing for listening to and analysind the fine points of the music.

   Reich, Glass et al. might disagree.

Of course the art music tradition of American mimimalism that you refer to, does change tempi and changing rhythms quite a great deal. It does so in novel ways that had not been explored in previous classical traditions. That's the main novelty that American mimimalism gave to the world.

   Periodicity is what ...

I agree with that, and add that modern pop-music errs on the side of too much periodicity, which renders it uninteresting as art-music, but useful as aural background and for dancing.

What is art?

IMHO:

Dance(able) music, like all music/noise, is about altered states of awareness.

There's sometimes something wonderful about reggae, house music, chanting, work songs that can change your frame of mind.

But then again all music (genres) do that for me.

What would be much more interesting is if instead of bickering, Stockhausen and Aphex Twin collaborated to create a new work together, like Beethoven and Goethe might have. What a wasted opportunity.

A few years ago, as a classical music fan, I set out on a mission to find some electronic music that I actually enjoyed listening to. Gradually, I learned that aside from the three usual pillars of composition — melody, harmony, and rhythm — there is a fourth that is underserved by practically every other genre of music: timbre. Electronic musicians are masters of sound sculpting as a musical atom. They can create new worlds from scratch.

Aphex Twin didn't really catch my ear, but Tipper sure did. Listening to his albums, I found myself completely enveloped in his immaculately sculpted aural biomes. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see the grumbling synth rivers, the shimmering vibrato branches, the chirping electric crickets. It was sublime in the classic sense of the word.

I would be disappointed if someone listened to Peripherals[1] or Gulch[2] and still came away thinking that electronic music was repetitive and boring!

(I bring this up because I think Aphex Twin is in a similar orbit of masterful sound design, though his style is too dissonant for my ear.)

[1]: https://soundcloud.com/tippermusic/2-peripherals

[2]: https://soundcloud.com/tippermusic/gulch-teaser

   melody, harmony, and rhythm [...] timbre

You are missing the fifth and most important: meaning!

To be fair meaning is extra-musical, and varies between listeners.

Other than that, you are absolutely correct: timber is the focus of modern electronic music. All previous genres simply lacked the instruments to do much of interest in the way of timber.

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