I dunno, classical music hasn't been the same since Mozart died.

I think classical music is great.

Interesting premise but unlikely. Anyone care to wager on that?

Yngwie Malmsteen perhaps presaged this with his "Concerto" album for orchestra and electric guitar - then again, those were just his classical music roots at work.

The only way orchestras are going to become rock'n'roll worthy is if they clear out that mosh pit in front of them.

The trouble with Yngwie Malmsteen's "Concerto" album is that it's complete and utter crap. And Deep Purple did the same thing (and produced a listenable result!) two decades earlier.

Classical music can have a real power in a live setting with a full orchestra, in any case I think it is like conmparing apples and oranges, and a love of one does not make appreciation of the other mutually exclusive.

Rock will never die, just as classical, folk, or jazz haven't died off despite being overshadowed by another more popular or modern form.

To see young people revolt against a stagnating entertainment scene by turning to an earlier musical genre would be bizarre and unprecedented. It seems more likely that rock is on the verge of another wave of innovation.

Just a few thoughts:

¥ most people are exposed to "classical" music through film -- which leads me to:

¥ The current crop of 'classical' masters who will be 'remembered' and played often in the future will come from film, which is 'the new church' when it comes to music patronage. (Star Wars, Titanic, et al are as ubiquitous as Beethoven and Mozart in the contemporary reportoire of most orchestras.)

¥ Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were crap. Still are, always will be. And no more than a silly footnote in the history of music. Future historians will say "What were they thinking!?"

¥ re: Malmsteen, et al -- the classically trained rock "composer" has a long history of producing mediocre to really bad shit. And I believe Keith Emerson did it before Deep Purple, but either way, Malmsteen was definitely in diapers at the time.



re: "...I haven't heard anything much in the past few years that could not have been released two decades earlier."

• We're living in a post-post modern world: maybe for the first time in history, one can truly say "It's all been done before." -- *because it has.



*And please don't dispute this, people: I can prove it with a pencil and paper.

Shark: The current crop of 'classical' masters who will be 'remembered' and played often in the future will come from film, which is 'the new church' when it comes to music patronage.

Very true; future generations will probably consider the likes of John Williams and Enno Morricone to be among the most significant late 20th century composers.

One point from the original article is that 'classical' music continually borrowed elements from popular genres (and there was probably similar borrowing going the other way) but in the last century this stopped happening. In recent years, 'High Art' and 'Popular' music seemed to inhabit separate universes that don't acknowledge the existance of the other; any cross-fertilisation of ideas tend to get frowned upon (look at the utter distain in which prog-rock is held in many rock circles, for example)

getting new music out there in the orchestral realm is really tough.

there's a reason why new pieces are programmed between old favorites, because if they played them last a boatload of people would walk out after the second part.

kinda sad.

excellent point about film music being popular and near-ubiquitous, but isn't it too programmatic to be compared with the abstract aesthetics of classical?

that's hard to say.

yes & no.

i mean, i the score for american beauty is just fantastic. i like it so much that in my mind there's no attachment at all to the film.

Opera music is programmatic, particularly Wagner.

good point, I suppose film scores, like operas, have favorite segments and melodies filter through and become popular of their own accord, apart from the film

I love some classical. It may once have been more popular than it is now, but it was never really a popular music in the sense that rock'n'roll is, or swing was. Classical has always depended financially on the elite.

Well, I love classical music.

"Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were crap." Whatever you may think of their chosen directions, they were all three extraordinarily skilled composers, unlike John Cage, say, or Phillip Glass. I happen to find Schoenberg's Moses and Aron quite beautiful. If your local library has a copy, I'd suggest that you, er, check it out.

BTW a really thought-provoking article about Cage and Babbitt, which I've bookmarked even though I dislike both composers, is at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR25.5/tymoczko.html

disregard the redundancy

And another thing, in case anybody's still following (not that the lack of an audience is something that I much concern myself with; dig my musical tastes): one reason I pseuso-linked to that Cage/Babbitt article is that it's relevant to Shark's comment; it discusses in a scholarly way not why serial music is "crap" so much as why serialism is, oh, let's say "gobbledygook" - that's how I remember Wendy Carlos characterizing it in one interview, wherein she noted that it was an attempt at a mathematical approach to musical composition, and that she was quite well-schooled in both math and music (indeed, she was [apparently - see the following sentence] quite skilled in serial composition, as she demonstrated in a thing (s)he wrote called "Pompous Circumstances" from the "Walter Carlos By Request" album. The salient (I'll just pretend that I actually know what that word means) point in the article was that, whereas trained musicians can tell by ear whether a composition follows the rules of counterpoint, but not the rules of serialism. The thing, though, is that Schoenberg himself was well aware that the rules he'd invented (in contrast to the rules of counterpoint, which had developed through the intuitive leaps of several generations of musicians, culminative of course with Bach) were pretty arbitrary; he considered it a "private system," and I seem to remember reading somewhere that he refused to teach it, although the evidence of Webern and Berg would seem to contradict my memory. Whatever. The thing is (forget what I said was the thing before; this here really is the thing) that, however arbitrary the rules may be, they can certainly be used to create good music, as long as the composer is skilled and, more important, inspired, as is proved, says me, by Moses un Aron.

Speaking of atonal stuff, I totally dig on
Lutoslawski. Everybody needs to hear my boy Witold. Suggest starting with the early tonal stuff, and working one's way forward and outward.

omit "whereas." Henceforth, I shall let my sloppiness stand, but not a moment before henceforth.

Oh, and another thought regarding the movie music question; this strikes me as the flipside of the various silly isms in other arts that appeared during the last century, wherein practically anything, ranging from the functional "art" of the worlds of advertising or comic books to vacuum cleaners or basketballs (which I remember from a 60 Minutes debunking) becoming high art simply by being displayed in a museum. I think both phenomena, for better or worse, are evidence of the end of an era, lasting just a few centuries out of human history, which saw the reverence for "great" as opposed to "good" art, characterized by singular masterworks ideally standing apart from any exterior function. Movies remind me of those medieval cathedrals we learned about in school, collective works of kindasorta practical art covered with little bits of all kinds of good stuff.

Can anyone remember the name of that 4 piece band of women. They played popular classical music on ultra modern styled classical instruments.

Bond

Bond were as manufactured and plastic as any boy band.

What does anyone think of Apocalyptica? Having seen them live, although their music is played on cellos, it's very rock'n'roll.