The younger generation...is there any hope (1 Viewer)

[David_Stein]

hey dudes, i listen to both hiphop and metal (of all sorts, including grind, well at least the grind bands that arent so fast that i cant make out anything), and both can be as much as anything else.

at one point i was going to make a long post to the guy who thought that drum machines and samples arent music. but really it comes down to one point:

is music playing the instruments? or is music being creative and putting the sounds together. because if you are like me and believe that the act of creation of something that is pleasing/challenging (or anything else an artist could be trying to attain) from (essentially) different vibrations of air is what music is then all you are doing is limiting yourself when you restrict music to just what can be made with instruments (and a lot of people are restricting themselves to just the white/european instruments as well) so you are the one losing out.

yeah, it takes no talent to do what sean combs does and steal the music from one song, the hook from another, and have some bullshit talentless rapping added in, but no one respects that anyways. it also doenst take any talent to play a limp bizkit song, but no one is trying to call them representatives of rock music.

if you think that hiphop isnt music because it doenst use "real" instruments, then you should listen to some noise bands, because they dont even attempt to work with a canvas of sounds that are pleasing ot the ear to begin with. its amazing what they are able to do with it though.

well i guess this ended up being long anyways.

 

[mark alan]

YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES!!!!!!

If you don't write the lyrics, the music or play the instruments, you are not a musician. You may qualify as an entertainer, or in the case of somebody like Eminem, a poet, but you are not a musician.

 

[Craig: Mclaren]

If I was black I'd be disgusted at the state of music coming from the streets. What the fuck ever happened to Soul, Funk, etc. The homeboys need to stop wearing over sized basketball tops while "sipping on coke and rum" and sort this shit out. We need another Marvin, Stevie, Issac etc. The 80's had talent such as Prince, Rick James and Michael Jackson. Please lets get the soul back into our music.

Love

A Soul lovin' whiteboy or "Honky" from Scotland.

 

[David_Stein]

i dont think we are talking of the same thing? rap music is only part lyrics (which by the way most rappers do write themselves), and the other part is the beat. not every lyricist is a producer as well, but someone made the music. in that case where someone made the music and someone wrote the lyrics its just like (for example) led zepplin or any other band that had a dedicated singer.

ps. to me music is writing/creating, not playing it. its being an artist as opposed to being a proficient musician. pure musicians are just technicians.

 

[chung_sotheby]

So you're telling me that an album like Paul's Boutique and people like The Dust Brothers, Basement Jaxx and Paul Oakenfold are not musicians? Or how about Butch Vig, who creates sonic soundscapes out of noise instead of instruments? Or on the other side of the coin, do you consider cover bands, who do none of their own songwriting but play all the instruments, to be musicians? Or is Joe Cocker not a musician, even though he only sings and hardly writes any of his music? What do you define as an instrument. Some may consider guitars, drums, sax, bass, piano, etc. to be the instruments, while others might call a beat machine or a turntable to be an instrument. Please illuminate.

 

[chung_sotheby]

Yeah, those guys are REALLY doing well now. Other than being made fun of on a weekly basis on The Chappelle Show, none of those once prolific talents has done anything of note lately, musically speaking.

 

[Mike Broadman]

Or Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday or the legions of blues and jazz singers who rarely wrote their own music. Or symphonies that are merely "covering" some dead guys' music?

The greatest thing the Beatles did was show everyone that a band can write their own music. The worst thing they ever did was make everyone think that is the only way to be a band.

 

[David_Stein]

a pure musician, using mark alan's definition, as in someone who only plays the instrument, in opposition to someone who is involved with the creative process of writing music. a technician is someone who just follows a procedue (in this case sheet music) without necessarily understanding why they are doing (besides making a living). an xray technician simply runs the xray machine because someone wants an xray, a (pure) musician simply plays the music because someone wants it played. a computer programmer generally does know why they are typing in what they are typing, so they are not technicians. someone who is programming a drum machine, assuming he/she is actually writing the music, is not a technician.

 

[Mike Broadman]

So, by that logic, a member of the London Symphony Orchestra is not a musician?

 

[David_Stein]

they are certainly musicians*. are they artists? not necessarily. something tells me that most people who are in the london symphony orchestra studied music theory and probably are artists, though perhaps within their duties as members of the london symphony. of course, im not 100% familar with how symphonies are run and maybe the members are given some leeway where they can interpret the pieces, which would transform them into artists within the restricted scope of the symphony.

* the point wasnt to define what musicians are. obviously its just someone who can play an instrument. my point was that we should not exclude the music of someone whose instrument (not only in the musical sort, but rather in the sense of some implement they use to acheive a goal) is a turntable or a drum machine or a sampler from being music at all. musicians play music, in a narrow sense the musician is a technician. an artist CREATES music, and just because instruments arent involved doesnt mean its not music.

 

[James_Welch]

I keep reading in is thread how kids are not exposed to “good” music (good seems to equal 60’s and 70’s rock). That is not the case in my area. There are at least 6 Classic Rock stations playing the same 107 songs over and over and over …………… and over again. Please can some one make this classic rock thing go away. The Eagles and Led Zeppelin send me running and screaming out of a room just as fast as Britney and Boy bands do. The sad part is, the albums that I really enjoy from that period have become cliché from too much airplay that I cannot even listen to them anymore. I have isolated my self from commercial radio for years and still cannot pull out Dark Side of the Moon or late 60’s Stones, Beatles, Hendrix or the Who and listen to it because of over airplay on classic rock stations.

 

[Rob P S]

Have you tried Keb' Mo' or Robert Bradley's Blackwater Surprise?

 

[Seth--L]

Each member of a major symphony orchestra is handpicked by the orchestra's music director/conductor and panel made up of fellow musicians. Players are not interchangeable technicians, but instead are picked for their unique qualities. The great orchestras of all-time where not the product of only the conductor, but also the orchestra members. For instance, Szell's legendary Cleveland Orchestra was filled with players who could have had extremely successful solo careers if they wanted to, such as Myron Bloom (horn), Rafael Druian (violin), and Robert Marcellus (clarinet). Each were brilliant interpreters of their instrument, and were often tapped to perform as soloists with the orchestra as well as record as soloists.

 

[Steve Crowley]

I would like to see some of these so called musicians transpose treble clef into bass clef, or take a Bb trumpet and play Eb trumpet score only transposing in his head while one plays. As a player,transcriber and composer I can say that is part of a classical music education. Of course this was back in the days of this curriculum.

Once I even took Black Sabbath's song "Sweet Leaf" and transcribed it for all of the marching band to play when our vaunted football offense was marching down the field. The tuba's, trombones and baritones mainly played the bass line. Now that was fun and the crowd loved it. Cheers.

 

[Seth--L]

I know what you mean. My cousin is in a band at night, so I've had to sit in bars and listen to lots of garage bands. A lot of the music would sound less unintentionally awkward if these people had taken music theory 101 and learned how to move from a tonic to dominant chord. It would also help if people understood the difference between projecting your voice and just singing loudly (but I guess that's why they all mic their voices).

 

[David_Stein]

well i did say i didnt know how they worked. however, when the symphony is playing a particular piece the musicians are just playing whats given to them, there isnt much room for improv is there? thats what i mean about being a technician. not that all of those musicians _couldnt_ create music, but that within the scope of playing in the symphony they arent utilizing their creative abilities.

steve: you are thinking about music in a restrictive caucasian/european sense. you need to think about it in a broad sense. besides, transposing is just learning a set of rules and applying them on the fly, which just takes practice. just like speaking (whcih almost everyone does), only on a much smaller scale.

 

[Seth--L]

You're making out creativity to be too narrow. While no one bursts into an improve solo, a wide range of flexibility is needed to be a concert musician. Just because there is a score and a conductor has told the orchestra how he wants the music played, the actual concert is not a preordained experience. If everyone just played the notes as marked and followed the conductor's tempi, a performance would be a mess. Musicians play in reaction to each other. All orchestral music, whether symphonic or chamber, is a conversation between musicians. Being able to engage in such a conversation requires talent beyond being a masterful technician. Even if a musicians has 50 bars of rests, throughout all 50 bars they need to be playing the music with the orchestra in their head. When they do this, then the music unfolds spontaneously as if the piece was one big improve. And that's the difference between a world-class orchestra and everyone else. Everyone else sounds like they are just playing notes on a page. There are also many occasions when the orchestra is collectively in-charge of the music making instead of the conductor (often in-spite of the conductor).

 

[David_Stein]

well then i stand corrected on symphonies. i certainly dont want to limit the scope of creativity.

 

[Mike Broadman]

I've had friends who've taken up violin, piano, and played classical music. A couple were very good- perfect pitch, near-flawless technique, strong graps of music theory, etc. (Even I played as a child) Sounded like shite in a concert setting.

And I've seen college orchestras or local chambers group perform with so much enthusiasm that it made up for their relative inexperience (when compared to the master orchestras). And I've been priveleged to see some of the greats, who combine all aspects of musicality.

Frankly, I think as soon as one tries to label and define, they are missing the point of music and art in general.
Even if you "just play the notes on the paper," whatever that means, that is artistry. You are making music. The only difference is the quality and how it effects the listener, and, more importantly, how the listener approaches the music.

 

[Holadem]

Exactly what i was going to say.



This is typical of where I am from. They play like this for hours, with nary a song at times. They have never heard of a key or treble, and probably never will. But it's not music I guess :rolleyes. This same emphasis on rythm is present in rap. In the end, I find this eurocentric view of what constitutes music insulting and sickening.

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H