Skip to main content

Why some music is great, and some is rubbish

The other day, as Radio 4 was being boring, I flipped through the other radio channels in the car. I usually only stay on Classic FM for a few seconds, as, by default, you tend to hit some tedious piece from the classical period, typically by someone like Mozart or Haydn. But this time I stayed, transfixed. They were playing a choral piece I would eventually find out was Cloudburst by Eric Whitacre, and it was stunning. I had to rapidly purchase the CD.

It made me try to analyze why my musical tastes differ from some people. It's interesting to compare what I hear in a piece and what my wife hears. We are both singers, but she has always been a soprano, while I (apart from a brief dalliance with alto) have been a bass since my voice broke, around 40 years ago. She primarily listens to tunes. I primarily listen to harmony. It's a weakly supported hypothesis, but our respective singing parts may help explain this. Basses rarely get the tune.

This seems quite a good explanation of why I prefer early polyphonic music, like Tudor and Elizabethan church music, or modern serious music, to music from the classical period. The classical stuff relies heavily on melody, with harmonies supporting the melody. In the early and modern stuff, it's the harmony that rules, and there often isn't a tune per se. Once harmony takes over, you can play around with dischords, which for me provide the most wonderful aspects of music done properly. (It's interesting that the Victorians bowdlerized Bach by taking out the dischords, assuming they were accidents, where actually they are the best bits.)

Please take a few seconds to listen to a prime example. This is just the 'amen' from the end of a piece called Jesu Salvator Saeculi by the sixteenth century English composer John Sheppard. The harmonies start off conventionally enough, but every now and then he does something so modern sounding that it's hard to believe this music is nearly 500 years old. Excuse the amateur recording, but click here to take a listen.

Of course it's entirely possible for music to have a great tune and funky harmonies (the best film music often does this, for instance) - but I do think I might have found out why I struggle so with the classical period composers. Their harmonies are usually boring.

So, to end where we began, here's that Eric Whitacre piece that got me so excited:

Comments

  1. Wonderful choral music. That first chord captivated me instantly. Totally took me away from the dark and grim world of job searching...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope