Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Genteel Death
Glice - You make some good points, as usual. What I don't get is why you seem to apply academic theory to what is really just popular music, with a frankly very different way of evolving than the classical music you love. Personally I think Beefheart is indeed an important musician, but hardly one that didn't come out from a narrative of sort that the numerous experiments between rock, blues and jazz pointed at since the mid to late sixties. Also, good mention of The Soft Machine demonrail. I didn't say Drunkdriver are, or might care to be, an innovative band. Their work with Mattin, though, fuses two worlds that haven't met before, so that at least makes them different from any other hardcore band making music today.
|
I perhaps didn't make this clear - the thing with academic theory isn't that it belongs strictly to Western art music (which is a more useful term than 'classical music', albeit more cumbersome) but that it purports to offer a vernacular and language to describe all music. This maybe wasn't the case prior to the 20th-century and it's not quite a one-size-fits-all, but the general principle is that the vernacular you're calling 'academic theory' isn't loaded to solely describe 'classical' music, but that it's a way of describing music. You get a frission, as our musical horizons expand in the 20th-century, against other formalised systems - the main two I know about are the Maqams of Arabic states and the Indian 'raga' systems - but I don't believe it's somehow a reduction of the merit of anything to point out that some music has certain abiding forms. This is as true of, say, fugal counterpoint as it is of 3-chord-country.
I suppose the big difference for me is that popular music isn't somehow absolved of its formal structure. I don't think it's stretching the point to say that pop music didn't evolve in a vacuum, 'outside' of 'academic' music - it's only really with punk music that you get this idea of the auto-didactic musician, which is a good 50 years into pop's development. There are exceptions prior to then, but if you think of the early jazz bands (and even your Davises or Coltranes), most of them have some relationship with formal tuition, although not necessarily with the conservatoire-style tuition of your Oistrakhs and so on.
Even within the idea of the auto-didactic musician, there are plenty of people in 'classical' music who are entirely self-taught yet well considered - Takimitsu for instance.
So yeah. With all due respect, I don't think pop and classical music do have a different way of evolving. They still use the same language, the same instruments. I'm not saying that classical music is somehow better, or anything like that. I'd definitely say that one of the most important things that pop music has done is to introduce ideas surrounding tone production that go far beyond the timbral ideas of even Musique Concrete. This in two senses - first, the affect that amplification has on a tone, and second in the way that studio production offers a new palette for recordings. Loathe though I am to admit it, something like Sgt Peppers is a massively important record, if only in terms of studio craft.
I mean, it's worth bearing in mind that I've had no formal training and am entirely self-taught when it comes to matters musical. I'm happy to accept that you may think I'm talking out of my arse. I do think that popular music is capable of doing things that few have done before. My first thought was of Xenomania when I opened this thread, but I can't really be arsed to argue the case for them on this forum because I know most people here just have no time for that sort of thing.