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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

Nahre Sol recently put out a video on contemporary classical music [1] that, while attempting to correct common misconceptions and generally promote it, basically reaffirmed my dislike of the genre. The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it.

And while I don’t begrudge the individual composers and performers who do make this sort of music - they are of course free to follow their own curiosity and passions - it does upset me a bit that this where “classical” music has ended up. It feels like the academics have hijacked the genre to the detriment of casual listeners.

[1] https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM

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There is definitely a lot wrong with the classical music scene in general (speaking as a classical pianist - in training). Most notably elitism/classism. I guess classical music also has lots of image problems and just has trouble finding its place in the world. Between the fact that in the last 200 years we've started to actually play and listen to older music (not to mention composing in older styles), the advent of sound recording and then the information age or whatever, it's understandable, really.

I myself just feel lucky that I can enjoy most of this "challenging" music without needing to care about the magnificently strict structure, or how the composer wanted to channel God or something. All I ask is that people not question my sanity on the grounds of my liking of this kind of music.

The classism/elitism problem is much more an image problem foisted/reinforced by pop culture than it is a real, inherent issue. When all you hear of classical music is on TV shows where it represents "the rich, elitist villain" or on ads for luxury goods, people reverse the association arrow.

How many people who perceive classical music as elitist actually have a personal experience of someone on the "inside" acting elitist and shunning them as "outsiders"?

Historically, literate music has always been confined to elite settings. The common people played folk tunes transmitted orally, and later "popular" songs and dances when mass publishing of sheet music became a possibility.

(There's actually no reason nowadays why this published "popular" music shouldn't become a part of the literate canon that's researched academically etc. But that only adds to a very long list of individual composers and entire musical traditions that end up being broadly neglected by standard academic POV's. It's also a general problem wrt. the study of human art and culture.)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-history-of-poor-peoples-ac...

Sacred classical music was accessible to poor people in big cities. Secular classical music was less accessible though.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the NYC classical/art music scene: I have many, many of those personal experiences.

I don't doubt it. However my point is that the scene is so small that direct interactions with the community hardly moves the needle when it comes to the broader cultural perception.

I'm a parent of two classical musicians in training, and I took cello lessons through high school. Today, I'm a jazz bassist, and a scientist by day.

I wonder if the cost and competitiveness of the training has something to do with the problem. The people who can win auditions are in fact elite musicians, and are almost exclusively from affluent families.

I enjoy the challenging music too, in the jazz genre. Given that I'm not trying to make a living at it, I'm grateful for the fact that I can play for a tiny but appreciative and loyal audience. I think there are a lot of niche genres that are sustained largely by amateurs and hobbyists.

If you consider Cage, Stockhausen and Glass part of the western classical music tradition, then I think we should consider composers like Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Richard Skelton and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith part of that continuum. There are people making interesting, innovative music that isn't academic or needlessly avant garde, that I think can appeal to everyone.

> needlessly avant garde

I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music.

Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena.

So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.

I find it really weird when people just run with this misconception that western literate music somehow started with Bach, as if what people were playing before was something different and not really music. One can clearly hear continuity between late Renaissance and early Baroque style (17th c.) and even how the secular music of the later Middle Ages (the sources of which are sadly a bit too obscure, hence why it's not often performed even as 'early' music) was carried over into the early Renaissance. Bach's style was highly individual, blending highly developed structures and forms of earlier Renaissance music with the fully developed tonality of the later Baroque and the earliest elements of 18th c. ("galant, classical") style.

It was just a shorthand. Of course everybody knows it didn't start with Bach, duh. He is a very central figure though, and any work you'll put into an artistic tradition will inevitably be compared to the greats of the tradition.

Most listeners are more interested in music conveying emotion, than novelty. If novelty is all WCM has to offer, it is not surprising that it has a dwindling audience.

>The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it.

One could say that for Mozart or Bach (or the Beatles or Miles Davis or Bieber) just as well, as the argument basically amounts to personal taste, doesn't it?

Lovers of modern classical music have been trying to sell it to the mainstream for a century and failed. 100 years after Bach, Mozart, Beerhoven, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and others wrote their seminal works, the audiences got them; in most cases they got them as soon as they came out or within a few years.

Schoenberg and his followers are dancing to a different tune, and that’s fine for them, but at this point it’s pretty clear that they will at best be remembered for their tangential effects on composers of actually beloved music.

Why does the mainstream get invoked in these types of arguments when no one called them? Who cares? There's hundreds upon hundreds of classical composers who didn't really survive into popularity who wrote standard good quality music for their time. Many people know of Haydn but who (who isn't a pianist) has ever heard of Kuhlau?

Not to mention Bach had to regain popularity through Mendelsshon.

> Why does the mainstream get invoked in these types of arguments when no one called them?

Oh, I must have gotten lost. I thought I was in a forum dedicated to hacking where a post had been submitted to justify the importance of a composer almost universally found difficult to listen to to a mainstream audience. Probably took a wrong turn somewhere.

> Who cares?

Whoever posted the story here clearly did one way or another. Everyone who commented, both of us included, as well. Affecting detachment while taking the time to clearly post how detached one is is not very convincing.

I think importance can be recognized without appealing to the average Bad Bunny listener.

I care about the music, people should be more open to hearing challenging music. That doesn't necessarily mean "the mainstream", that entails a whole cabal of mechanisms at play that go beyond what an individual chooses to listen and how.

Also many now revered composers were shunned by audiences of their time, such as Mahler.

Bach is now regarded as the greatest composer but he wasn't exactly popular during his life outside select circles.

> when no one called them?

This is debatable to say the least. Lovers of the avant-garde commonly trot out the argument that there's just no room for genuine, transformative innovation within the mainstream that can be grokked by average folk, that it is played out in some sense. And lovers of mainstream music (and arguably mainstream culture more generally) routinely prove them wrong, by managing to innovate within those boundaries in a way that's genuinely compelling to many. It happens again and again.

Many times what happens is that the "within" innovation is not so much innovation in itself, but the innovation is including aspects that were done by the avant-garde decades before, into a popular context.

avant-garde composers were playing with recording and editing techniques for a long time before the beatles came and used those ideas in a more catchy way, with a hairstyle to boot. The innovation is closer to the business side than to the music itself.

I think it's a valid point. Mozart and Beethoven's music was at the end of the day made to appeal to mass audiences. Although considered niche now, Mozart was quite the celebrity in his day and had a loyal base of (mostly female) followers. Whereas modern classical is meant to appeal to musicians, not a mass audiences.

We forget that although there are many surviving transcripts of their work, Mozart and Beethoven also improvised and performed on stage a lot. That whole genre of classical music is lost.

Mozart's music was considered too edgy and quirky in his day, actually. People who were knowledgeable about music tended to like it a lot because they could follow all the twists and turns, but Salieri was the more popular composer with the mass public. The story with Beethoven is not very different, ultimately some of the simplest pieces of his were the most popular and he wasn't very happy about that.

> The story with Beethoven is not very different, ultimately some of the simplest pieces of his were the most popular and he wasn't very happy about that.

I'm sure many artists fall into the trap of 'the public likes the work I like least'. That doesn't make the work not part of the authors creation. For example, Raffi makes extremely popular (and actually pretty good) music and I'm sure he absolutely hates having to play it over and over again. Still a better artist than Schoenberg.

If you read some reactions and reviews for music from Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, in their time, it is not much different than someone now hearing contemporary classical music.

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