Comments on: Mahler? I Barely Know ‘Er!

By: Brian Doherty

Brian Doherty — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:24:37 +0000

Oh, you were asking only composer, not piece? I glossed over that part. OK, that I could probably have done pretty well on. Certainly in combination with any verbal clue.

By: Julian Sanchez

Julian Sanchez — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:46:27 +0000

Well, I’m not saying I could necessarily peg exactly where (say) a particular snippet of Glass came from unless I’d listened to it recently, but it would be pretty unmistakably Glass, which was all they needed. (There was a bonus for naming 3/5 of the titles.) And I dunno, you don’t think you’d recognize “Fanfare” or “Rite of Spring”?

By: Brian Doherty

Brian Doherty — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:36:41 +0000

Very interesting. I’m NOT surprised at how hard most people found it–if they’d get it at all, it would that sort of Jeopardy level knowledge based on the clues, not recognizing the music itself. For my own part, after decades of obsessive pop music listening before delving into both jazz and 20th century classical-art musics—and despite hundreds of hours listening to hundreds of records of the stuff, my ability to recognize and remember specific pieces in those fields is HORRENDOUSLY bad, even things I’ve listened to a dozen times or more I might not recognize purely sonically out of context—whereas with pop/rock, almost every bit of it I heard (prior to age 30 at least) I can still name artist track probably year of release…my abiilty to retain this sort of musical info just is disappearing.

When I was a young hipster in the late 80s-early 90s, pop/rock record collector obsessives were apt to know Glass, Reich, Cage, maybe if they were deep Xenakis and Varese, but that was about as far as it went…

By: Christopher M

Christopher M — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:30:12 +0000

Interesting point about the easier transition from the current style to classical & art music. What do you think are the key elements that make this transition easier? On a first take, I'd offer two: the decline of the domination of the guitar, and the decline of the verse/chorus/bridge song structure.

I was listening to some 8-bit electronic stuff just yesterday (crazy kids making music with the noises producible from the sound chipsets in old-school, 8-bit videogame hardware) and thinking how similar a lot of it was, in its general aims, to Bach's 2- and 3-part inventions: discrete tones, intellectual, centrally concerned with creating sort of harmonic geometries in musical space (by which I mean, for example, the way an ascending line and a descending line played at the same time have an almost spatial feel of divergent geometrical line segments, and how two similar melodies played in different keys or on slightly off-center rhythms can have the feel not unlike two geometrical shapes aligned on the page in the same slightly off-kilter way). And it doesn't hurt that the Bach's harpsichords sound like they could have been produced on an 8-bit system.