Why don't they compose music like Bach any more?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach.
2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough.
I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172
I'm glad to be on the other side of this, I agree with you and can totally relate with you.
I like to view artists as mediums that can channel and manifest art, but that art stands on its own. Bach just happened to be the one in our lifetime to do that with what he discovered. — The strongest evidence to me for this is that art can outlast the artist every single time.
I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual.
The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible, and I love it, I am myself a musician and I rely on it a lot for this matter. — That said though, emotions are deep and complex and there is too much loss when attempting to convert them into a message. — _Maybe this is why there's a lot of copyright out there when artists channel similar sounds trying to express their feelings despite never hearing of those others who came first? Think the language being both extremely rich and poor in terms of what it can offer for this_
It may be that I am being too philosophical about it and like to look at it outside of the human realm. — Similar to the classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest_an...
> I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual.
I write about this very frequently. I have a strong interest in Art and aesthetics, and play guitar, and write poetry. I'm going to try to not post an essay, which is hard, but I could talk about this for days and am open to any others that want to talk about music and art.
I think I mostly agree with these quotes.
I specifically think that Art is so transcended from humanity it escapes it, it escapes the emotions, it escapes the day to day. One might be emotional about it, but emotional intent isn't a part of it since Art is beyond emotion, and thus also the communication of emotion.
If you want a good definition for what I think of as Art, read Zarathustra. My thoughts on overcoming are similar as to do with Art. Which is, is it something we can really achieve? Or is the intention enough to make it? And if so, how much intention is needed?
However I will leave you with something else about Art, something that I think is more closely to how we most of the time experience music.
John Dewey describes Art as the relationship between the artist, the medium, and the audience. All three are needed for it to be Art.
When you go see a live show, one with skilled musicians which are able to improv (playing with modal changes, and knowing how to build and release tension without thought), you get something new, an experience, that only exists in that moment. That experience cannot be captured, the audio can, even video of the audience and performers can, but that experience only exists during that improv, it will never happen again. And in my opinion that is the closest thing to Art, not only for music, but for other traditional art forms as well.
> The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible...
This conflicts with my first definition of Art (Platonic) but sits nicely with the second definition (John Dewey). There is something inescapable communicated listening to Pavarotti, but there's also something inescapable being communicated listening to Grant Green. Two completely different forms of music, communicating different things, but it's still very human and powerful.
So I don't see why you even need that recording, in the end there is no communication happening there in either case. When you go to a live concert sure, which is why people care so much about those and why they wont go away, since then you get the real communication, everything else is just fake, so why not generated communication instead of recorded?
Also the person singing is often just replaying a message written by other people, they aren't communicating anything of their own they are just relaying and repeating the same message someone showed them over and over and over. That isn't communicating any more than what computers do.
On commissions, when you are charging $500/minute of symphonic music (a mid-market rate), you just can't write a minute of a Bach cantata and have it make financial sense. It takes a long time to develop the material for a big work of counterpoint like that, and even Bach didn't write his cantatas off of nothing - he was a working church organist, so he had plenty of time to try his new material (improvising at the organ during services) that was paid for.
Music has always been a business and there's no money in neo-Bach.
I think you are using great differently here, I assume he meant "one per generation" great or similar, you wont have many such people.
Maybe Bach style music isn’t really a good as modern music.
Bach was writing pieces that were commissioned. Commissioned artwork always has a different character than artwork created for mass consumption.
The money has always been in commissioned music,* it's just about what is getting commissioned. Counterpoint rarely gets commissioned, let alone enough counterpoint to become Bach.
* Mozart's catalog is a great example: Salzburg Mozart wrote masses and organ fugues, while Vienna Mozart wrote operas and secular pieces. It's what he was paid to write.
They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time.
Do you go their concerts or listen to their records? If not, then it's not so much that they don't, as that people don't give them sales, success, and exposure, so you'd know about them. And apparently you didn't even bother to Google about such artists, so...
But it isn't that good, what people want is that level of quality not just that style.
I think to compose great music the entire culture need to support it, you wont get to the same heights when most of society don't care about what you do.
Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past? We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now.
Bach clearly was a geek of his time though, and I respect that.
Because we like it.
>We got different instruments and sound production methods at our disposal now.
So? Those are mere tools so we can make the music that we like and want to make.
Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us.
> Because we like it.
Nothing against that, but there seems to be a group of people who dismiss anything except classical music as if we lost the ability to make acceptable music today.
I also like some styles more than others, but I'm not going to make generalizing statements about humanity's abilities due to my personal preferences.
> Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us.
They most probably do affect the style, just like how 16-color pixel graphics produces a different visual style than playstation-style polygons. And that's a good thing, more styles = more variety, there isn't some particular style of some particular era that's somehow better than others
Forcing new composers to conform to what old people want from because tradition, damn it is a recipe for creative disaster.
Is it? That's how music and culture was preserved and slowly enriched over millenia, from Gamelan music to masterpieces like Bach.
I'd say forcing new music for the sake of it, especially to the degree and speed we do in the latter half of the 20th century onwards, leads to music following "fast fashion" like deappreciation, lack of understanding of its legacy, lack of leaving a legacy, spintering of audiences to individual echo bubbles, and ultimately commercial crap.
Also it's much cooler to switch back and forth between styles.
Synthwave is pretty cool, but it'd also be pretty cool to hear a Moog play a piece from an old composer instead of a simple drone.
It's a non-sensical question.
Is greatness about skill, or about getting lucky (right place at the right time)?
and that question is really:
Do I matter? Do my feelings (which feel so real to me) affect the outside world?
Never prevented us to have tons of artists doing music the style of other artists...
The premise is wrong anyway, people do make music in the style of Bach, both exactly in that style and borrowing from Bach, but also in general baroque/romantic/melodic classical styles.
The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.
When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that.
Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable.
Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be.
Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.
Just yesterday I found an album of Elizabethian remakes of Nick Drake's songs mixed with John Dowland's. The difference in composition is staggering. And Nick Drake was not a typical songwriter himself. Yet a 50 years old song is principally different from a 500 years old even when played by the same people on the same instruments.
There's a lot of music theory in pre-Baroque compositions, e.g. counterpoint theory or isorhythm.
I myself don't believe in before/after thing. It's not that one day all the composers in the world agreed to write music by the book. I think things shifted slowly but steadily along with the technological progress. Compared to Galilei's time, in Bach's era there were more books to learn from, more and better developed instruments, and with the rise of bourgeoisie, more listeners (and musicians).
Bach is just a convenient milestone.
Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Reich
The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time.
Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.
This might provide part of the answer.
Bach wasn't popular music when he was alive.
Rick Beato had an interesting video on this phenomenon. I'm not very musically literate but I found the general idea quite insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
I didn't really get into Bach until after 4 hours of listening BWV 988 (Goldberg Variations), then it just clicked and I could enjoy it deeper than anything before. Mozart does not work for me the same way. It's good, but somehow just clever bullshit at the same time. Music is subjective.
So we probably still have Bach-style compositions but most people neither know nor care.
Personally I can’t stand all but a few guitar solos. “Technically good”
With that framing, they never stopped composing like Bach
I strongly recommend you watch the excellent BBC documentary about him, by the maestro John Eliott Gardiner [1].
You'll discover a world where music wasn't yet associated with "fashion", where the "market" for music (i.e. concert halls, music publishing, etc) didn't actually exist and composers were paid employees of cities.
In that way, he truly is like any other artist (so engaged.) At the same time, rest assured we can celebrate and enjoy the extraordinary achievements made in that paradigm.
we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes.
It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.
And if even if someone did that - what's the point?
If you mean in terms of complexity etc - this is an era of shallower, more emotionally direct music. The complexity is all in the production, sound design, and mixing, and not so much in the writing and arrangement. A lot of skill goes into pulling a good mix together, but it's a different, much less obvious kind of skill.
If someone wants to experiment with equivalent levels of intellectual complexity - get a copy of Csound or something, pick a language for a front end to generate Csound events using composition rules, and see where you get to.
IMO that's the biggest unexplored area in computer music, with the potential to combine new sonic structures - designed with taste and aesthetic awareness, not just for the sake of tinkering - with new kinds of sound design.
Is there a market for it? Absolutely not. But so what?
On top of that, the taste of contemporary music buyers is often toward things that are downright weird rather than things that sound like old music.
I think it had to be said because, at the time of me writing this comment, none of the other 16 commenters had apparently bothered clicking on the link they were commenting on.
More seriously, if people imitated the music of the Baroque period, it's perhaps more as an exercise to improve rather than a personal opus magnum that will be published, because that time is just over. The same may be true for imitating some specifics of Bach's style (Johann Sebastian, there are many other Bachs that are likewise recommended, e.g. C. E. Bach also wrote excellent organ music IMHO).
However, there are also timeless patterns in Bach's music that invoke/exploit recursion, symmetry, variation, reference of others and self-reference that are perhaps mandatory if you want to write the best music ever - see Douglas Robert Hofstadter's seminal book on that topic (and many fascinating others), "Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Basic Books, New York, 1979).
Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels.
If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).
I would like to see some fusion, I like longer works, concept albums, I’d really like to see more of it in modern aesthetics. I keep meditating on the phrase synthwave symphony for my next project.
NY Pops is here too
I'm a super+++ fan of classical music from a little before Bach through Wagner and some since him.
E.g., the end of the Republican National Convention had a live performance of Nessum Dorma with none of the environment, e.g., the singer was not on the main stage.
I like classical music as art with the definition "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", and according to that definition to me that music has some astounding examples.
For Bach, okay, at one point I wanted to convert over from listening to the music to playing some of it, got a violin (easier to carry than a piano), some lessons (Indiana University, where I was a math grad student, with a terrific music school) and got through most of the famous E major Partita and, transposed up for violin, the famous cello piece. Both are very popular sometimes in surprising circumstances, e.g., the cello piece was used in an ad selling bathtubs!
Tough to put either piece into words, but a rough attempt is: They start with something simple, not very emotional, but suggesting someone beginning something challenging. Then the pieces move forward with some changes in different parts of the scale but with the rhythm slowly changing as if the person's experience was progressing, developing, but in a way that was close to clockwork, maybe driven, no big interruptions or distractions, even irresistible and inevitable. But in both cases the development leads to a climax of some success or, for the cello piece, some grand success. Well, from that a listener can conclude that they are not the only one progressing on some situation that has some irresistible challenge and ending with a victory.
The grand case of this, in words, roughly, moving ahead on a challenge, having a sweet, happy victory (2/3rds of the way through), having a catharsis after the victory, and then slowly reaching a deeply understood resolution is, of course, the Chaconne.
It was written for solo violin but is taken seriously in transcriptions for piano and full orchestra -- there is a good Stokowski performance; he seems to really understand the music and presents a good, expressive version.
So, I like the music for the effectiveness of the art.
Uh, in summary, to write music like, as good as, Bach's have to write not just in his style but with comparable effectiveness in his art. The tough part is the art, not just the style.
Don't know about peak, but sure sounds like a more cultured, intellectual, and refined human experience.