How I listen to music

Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If they bother with the album at all. I would definitely say bands that focus on holistic or even high-concept albums tend to do it often though, and obviously you see more of it in genres like progressive rock where it was kind of a defining mainstay, but it's a form that's alive and well in a lot of genres on a case-by-case basis. For example, I like a Russian pagan folk/black metal act called Arkona (which is pretty well-known by folk metal standards actually) and their latest album released last year is high-concept and cohesive, structured as a katabasis. I'll also warn that it's probably less for everyone than some of their other music as it's very musically gloomy and thematically dark, which makes sense given how things have been going in Russia and especially given the lead singer's family is from Ukraine... Point being, cohesive albums are far from a dying art form, they're just not the format most optimized for broad appeal and whatever monetization method is most favored by the largest distributors (these days probably Spotify and, what like, Apple?), which the most well-known pop music is by definition

It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds

Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect

Really depends on the genre you're listening to. Plenty of (prog) rock artists that still work in full album concepts.

You can listen to any Kendrick Lamar album either starting from track 1 or last track and still can understand the storyline overall. Very genius. Maybe you should widen your genre? Also I could say the same thing with metal, hardcore or punk in today’s modern music.

I think a lot of music (especially pop) has always been this way to an extent -- a bunch of songs are written with no sequencing in mind, and then the "structure" of an album is built up after the fact by sequencing those songs in a way that sounds good. Like, I don't think "Please Please Me" by The Beatles was written with an intent to tell a story though the arc of the album (it almost feels random, if anything, although maybe the most popular song was put at the end on purpose?)

In all honesty, I don't think the ratio of "a bunch of tracks thrown together" albums to "narrative arc" albums is overall all that different than it used to be.

That's been true basically since the invention of sound recordings and radio. If you look back, producers really focused on building the best single, optimizing for radio play.

While I personally mainly listen to full albums, unless it's explicitly a concept album or a classical suite I'm not sure it's possible to make a broad generalization that "it's how the music was intended to be heard".

Thanks

I love 998. The bass-line in the allegro especially is so punchy, especially coming after the fugue.

Always a pleasure to listen to David Russell.

My favourite of his is his arrangement of Handel's passacaglia from HWV 432: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3D0t1DiEg

If it's baroque don't fix it.

I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment.

My main resources for baroque tabs would be:

- classtab.org - classclef.com

Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate.

For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_js_bwv0998_lute_suite_in_eb_1_...

Scroll down to the drop-D one, that's the one I play.

With baroque music I find legato is so incredibly important so really concentrate on fingerings that let the notes ring out. There may frequently be an easier fingering to grab but which means you have to stop the bass note too early, so it takes a bit of experimentation to figure it out.

It's very difficult but incredibly rewarding when you manage to produce the counterpoint yourself, I'm smiling to myself the whole time while playing.

You could look into the actual baroque guitar too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_guitar

For modern guitar, there are many transcriptions of Bach and Silvius Leopold Weiss lute music.

I think it's like like saying the problem with rock music is all those thousands of rock bands out there. After a while, you know what you like or dislike and what pieces to listen to that you might subjectively enjoy.

Citation needed.