Real Music?
 

That professor has the same mentality of every music professor I have ever had.

La musique, c'est du bruit qui pense (Victor Hugo)
(roughly translates to Music is a thinking noise)

I think the whole point of Real Music / Fake Music is pretty ridiculous. The most trivial definition of music is "Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence expressed through time." (thanks wikipedia). The fact that there would be "fake music" implies that this music would not consist of sound and silence :confused: quite a nonsensical statement indeed.

I think people who listen to styles of music that could be considered as more "elaborated" (e.g. classical music, prog rock, etc) - because there are more layers, more solos, more technicity involved, etc - tend to overlook over styles, because, precisely, they seem less elaborated. But:
1) because they're "less elaborated" does not mean they're better or worse: it's all about emotion, feeling. You could shake people to tears with a 2 minutes track based on two chords, or a simple pad, or just a loop, etc, and you could bore people to death with a super constructed 30 minutes tracks involving multiple directionless ultra technical solos
2) even "elaborated" is a matter of opinion, actually: everything is subjective. A lot of people tend to think that technicity is a sign of elaboration; I don't: because one is able to recite a super technic pattern he's learnt in his 8th year in conservatoire does not mean he's doing anything elaborated. On the other hand, I remember showing some ultra layered noise track to some people two years ago, and they thought it was just an attempt at recreating the noise of a plane's reactor taking off - and definitely not music -, while I thought it was fantasticly constructed and gorgeous, a great composition. There's no right or wrong.

So, basically, everything is music, in a sense. There are records of pure silence, or fields recordings, or doors screeching, etc ; yet they're music. Music is what you want it to be. There's no such thing as "real" or "false" music

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edit: damn, it's been a while since i last posted something that long :D

My friend who is a professor of composition at a major Midwestern university thinks SY's Flower is some of the best shit ever recorded.

Funny, if I was a professor I would be saying how the beatles are the only real music.

Even though I don't fully mean that. Obviously I'm on a SY forum.

But bands that mix classical techniques and rock music, and don't sound like Muse, are where it's at.

Beatles did it alot and Beach Boys in terms of song structure and melody.

Sonic Youth actually does it, in the sense of their music can transform into something else so quickly, but still fit. Like intense classical in violent movies that has that industrial vibe, Sonic youth to me is best described by Lydia Lunch "Tornadoes, Volcanoes, Earthquakes".

What on earth would have the "professor" made of ethnic/folk music, both massive influences on jazz and classical? Good lawd!

Music is music if it moves you emotionally or viscerally, which covers all genres. Dumistrescu's music moves me in a different way to, say, John Coltrane or Throbbing Gristle or GZA, but it's the impact on me that counts. Of course the Beatles are "real" music, whether one likes them or not is something else.

I'd be interested to see what Glice thinks on this, in the whole "Classical = Real Music" sense.

obviously the "real music" thing is always stupid, it's all sounds rhythm and melodies at the end of the day and that's that

if there was only one sort of real music it would be improvised folklore, and not heavily rehearsed orchestral bizness as far as i see it

Strange, classical music could be considered less 'real', if you think like a twat, since pop/rock/blah blah is way more heard than that genre.

Your professor is just angry that he has no objective criteria to which he can classify good music. He's in denial.

music academics that i've met are some of the most willfully ignorant people around, they don't have a fucking clue what's going on in the world.

yes, & thusly he's probably worried about being exposed as a fraud or something

them ask I why I play music........

Music is the Most High!

The thing is, classical music is the only form that spends an awful lot of time deciding not what is 'good' and 'bad' but 'how do we describe this?'.

I wouldn't agree with what the Professor's saying, but I do think it's massively important to not conflate narratives (and, sometimes, it's massively important to conflate narratives).

Ultimately, people pontificating about music (hi) will generally spend more time doing so than actually making music, whether good or bad. I have a strong sense that I wouldn't be talking shite on the internet if I was Ligeti OR Joey Ramone.

Personally, I venerate classical for entirely different reasons to why I like Happy Hardcore or Ragga. I can entirely understand where the professor is coming from, and I think it's very important that people hold up that position, but it's not for me. However, it's very much a straw man for SYG, methinks.

I'm sure this professor must've provided some criteria as to what qualified as 'real' in music. I simply don't believe he or she simply stood there and made such a claim without basing it on something.

I can only imagine that the context is more than enough. I think if you're in a composition class it's more difficult to qualify the Beatles as 'real' music than it is to agree they're not 'real'.

I find it interesting that this professor considers jazz 'real' though. Because that position has long since struck me as an artificial construction upon the classical narrative.

It depends. V/VM regularly posts on his forum, the guy from Pink Reason does that too on another forum, and also Jay Reatard, plus William Bennett seems to be on facebook every time I log in, Alec Empire literally posted on the same site that he loved chatting about the recording of his latest album etc etc. I used to think something similar to that, then it started making no sense whatsoever, since chatting on forums/networking sites isn't going to take away any motivation that you might have to make records, if you really have any.

Pauline Oliveros is a serial poster too!

Heh, real music. Real music to me is something that moves you, that can change your mood completely and make you dance like a fucking crazy idiot or sob in a corner.

the professor seems to be an advocate of the music-appreciation racket.

the sort of thing that has kept me away from classical music.

And John Coltrane and various modern composers are easier to qualify as real music? What right does composition have to quality? It should be taken as indicative to the placement of the composition class if it isn't advanced enough to address complex music.

I suppose any 12 tone modernism is what, the opposite of real music? And Charles Ives composed anti music.

This. Examples: Andrew W.K., Current 93, and The Cure.

IT'S TIME TO PARTY LET'S PARTY
HANG OUT WITYOSELF AND HAVE A CRAZY PARTY

Oh god.

Next time i'm in Tower Records I'm gonna ask them where there 'Real' music section is so i can see what's in it. That should settle it.

I don't care about defining what makes music 'real'. It's something that isn't important to me. 'Real' in most musical conversations is understood as 'authentintically part of x'. Willie Nelson is not 'real' music in the context of a lecture on hip-hop.

Composition, as I either said or alluded to or intended to allude to, defines the parameters of description. It also tends to expand the vernacular of description. This is a null-statement.

The quality in the context of modern composition is not the same quality as in, say, Khoomei singing.

If I was teaching a class on music (and thank fuck I'm not), I would be very inclined to dismiss lots of sorts of music not because they're not good but because they're not conducive to the purposes of education. If, as a lecturer, I'd had 30+ years of people mentioning the Beatles, I'd probably dismiss them out of hands not on the grounds of their merits, but on the grounds that I'd be paid to explain fugues, not whether straberry fields forever is 'really' about acid.

I'm not intimating a sense of quality in any, I just reckon it just seems very self-explanatory that in a classical music class certain sorts of music are not really part of the deal. Obviously, you're right that Coltrane and the like potentially provide a challenge to that, and you could always put forward a Simon Williams-esque argument for Wonky, or whatever, ought to be included in the critical lexicon. But there is definitely a time and a place for that sort of criticism, and I imagine the hitherto mentioned professor was intimating this.

There's always exceptions, and it does very much depend on the individual. Obviously, people like Herr Park are serial forummers as much as serial musicians. I suppose I'm imputing my own ideal-case music made by people who hate music. That's half a joke, obviously.

Paul Leary is a gold-star forum-poster.

the "new" album by Carny is almost 2 years overdue (and likely never to hit shelves).

coincidence? you tell me.

his royalties may have plummeted but i'm sure his rep is triple platinum.

Butthole Surfers. Now there's a shit band.

Carny > Butthole Surfers

Whatever <> whatever.

This professor played trumpet which explains the Jazz obsession. Yes I do agree that in a classical learning atmosphere you will be taught the fuction, creation, and basic rules of writing and reading classical music. In the reality staying in that narrow minded world would limit the learning oppurtunities of what you can do to move classical music into modern times. The Beatle's music was not just about acid and hidden messages. They intigrated classical souds with Rock n Roll and did so very succesfully. There are many musical scores of the Beatle's that in my mind blow Mozart away.

It's music. Music isn't exclusively an art form. Music started out as folk music. Which is really what rock and roll is to us today. Many great classical composers had appreciation for this and did incorporate that into their music.

That last sentence is massively contentious to me, but it's good that someone thinks it, and I'm not sufficiently versed in classical criticism to negate it. The only question I'd ask is which Mozart?

I think the thing for me is that most musical worlds are narrow-minded, it's not exclusively classical musicians and composers who are myopic. One of the problems with a lot of rock music now is that it's a sufficiently expansive genre for people to not need to venture outside of it. I'd argue that rock, unlike jazz, doesn't become stolid when it's entirely self-referential (the Cramps vs Courtney Pine).

I mean, I think the basic division I'd make is that the classical era is definitely a limited corpus, and a lot of 'classical music' fans are obviously narrow-minded (this is true of fans of most things, in general) but I personally (and naively) believe in a sense of 'art music' which includes Bingen, Tallis, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Schoenberg, Messiaen, Cage, Feldman all the way through to, say, Sugimoto, Haco or at least Radelescu, Grisey, Parmegiani and Lachenmann.

ALL music is music.

however, there are only two kinds of music in the world:

good and bad.

That was a post so shiningly insipid it can only have been sarcastic.

you know me so well.

I think the whole argument can be resolved by the fact that if there is such thing as "Real music", then there is "False music". Then define it.
You should have answered your teacher "define false music"