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Originally Posted by Roivas
I like it when people belittle 1000 years of great music just to rationalize their myopic understanding of art. Great stuff, Syd.
Pentatonic scales, two guitar players, bass, a singer, and drums is not at all limiting. Brilliant.
This is pure ignorance. I'll give you one name: Bartok. Just listen to his music (string quartets are a great place to start).
Progressive rock will never catch up.
Earle Brown never experimented with time signatures? Elliot Carter? Alois Haba? Harry Partch? Paul Hindemith? Igor Stravinsky (one of the first composers to use compound time signatures)?
Dude! WTF?
Slonimsky could conduct two time signatures at the same freaking time!
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If I came off as putting down classical music then you got the wrong intent... My core basis was I prefer more modern developed music (that includes the use of modern studio craft) as opposed to the more organic nature of a symphony orchestra or opera... I actually find it very amusing that music elitists get so bent when someone tries to portray great rock music as art...
Also, my point about experimentation in modern music was to point out that often modern music has experimented more than those in classic jazz... Not all of jazz of course, but often when people talk about the greats in jazz (Armstrong, Bird, Coltrane, Miles) they do so as if those artists were always doing something "experimental"... Experimental, quality and variety are all very different things... We can say "Kind of Blue" is a masterpiece album even though it doesn't experiment with a very wide variety of instrumentation or time signatures... To attempt to be clear, Influence or experimentation are not the main criteria to greatness in a individual piece of music or an album... For me the "texture" of sound and often the variety of style with a combination of good melody and emotion are the key ingedients...
Roivas: as far as being short sighted, you have to get off your elitist view of music... An argument can be made that "Louie Louie" by the Kingsman is a masterpiece, just as one might say Beethoven's incidental music of Egmont overture is... And the emotional impact of each can be dissected as such...
And you can pick out several individual artists from any gerne who did experiment... But as a entire genre, rock has had far more experimental music than ANY previous form due mainly to developments in studio craft... Who knows what sounds Mahler may have made if he had a 128 track fully stocked modern studio to work with... What makes the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows" so ground breaking were the interesting mix between the common (drums) and the modern (studio experimentation)... Same goes for Strawberry Fields, or a number of Pink Floyd songs and so on... What make Forever Changes great is not just the choice of instrumentation, but the style and wide variety of emotions brought to the production...
Your short list of experimental artists is just that, short... I could name hundreds of artists post 1955 who have experimented far deeper into music than anything that happened prior... Probably 1% of the experiments had any quality to them, but the era of music experimentation exploded post 1955... Experimentation means little to quality, it's what your bring to the final product as to what counts, and the ingredients can come from a variety of sources...
Now, we can say that standardized melodies and achievment in song structure were more or less perfected before the modern era by classical, jazz and other artists in other genre, but great music has still been made in the last 50 years... Your knowledge of modern music (or your taste in music) seems limited if you think otherwise... That is not a put down... Just because I don't think Ascention by Coltrane is an important work or that some of the aggressive rhythms that domminates Baroks music doesn't move me, means nothing... I grant and understand that much of that I have been exposed to (my cousin has been a bassist in a noted symphony orchestra in years past and my brother studied music thoery for decades and exposed me to everything from the Beatles to Mozart) is considered masterpiece level work, and there are times I rather hear the final movement of Beethoven's 9th over Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love"... Both move me deeply, both are masterpieces to me...
So, if you want to debate music, fine... But don't try and tell me that that rock is a limited form of music... Because when done well, rock can (and has) moved many to the greatest depths of emotion and inspiration...
So, you can keep your elitist view of what art is, or you can open up your mind and experience all that music has to offer, from the Pergolosi influenced orchestral music of Stravinski (one of the few works of his I am well familar with) to the robust percussion-like keyboard throbbing of Cecil Taylor (on just about anything I have heard him do), to the subtle beauty of "Alone Again Or" by Love...
This is like the debates I get into with lovers of original blues music who think what Zeppelin did was blasphamy... I just say I prefer the loud electrified bastardization of Zeppelin's hard rocking blues to anything by Muddy Waters... Just my opinion...
By the way, after four decades as a working musician my brother prefers now to play in a classic rock cover band and is the leader of a Bix Beiderback jazz band in Bix' hometown of Davenport Iowa...
Bottom line, Orpheus's post was far more profund than anything I just wrote or anything Roivas was spewing out (although, for my taste, I'll insert the Sex Pistols to that of Green Day,
)...
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