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Help me be a pretentious douche - [Classical Music]
Chanus
Harbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderator mod
Harbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User, Moderator mod
Okay, so I love Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (luuurv the dissonance) and Bach's Cello Suites . I'm a fan of Handel's Water Music... and now I'm starting to run out of stuff I know by name.
Need suggestions. I appreciate Opera as well, so suggestions are welcome, but I'm looking more for non-vocal stuff.
Also, it's been bugging me for a while, what's the Looney Tunes sunrise music? :P
Need suggestions. I appreciate Opera as well, so suggestions are welcome, but I'm looking more for non-vocal stuff.
Also, it's been bugging me for a while, what's the Looney Tunes sunrise music? :P
Allegedly a voice of reason.
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Mahler Symphony 1
Symphonie fantastique - Berlioz
Firebird Suite - Stravinsky
Just for starters. You can also pretty much check out any Tchaikovsky, Brahms, etc. Most of what I listen to is Brass intensive, and I am not so familiar anymore with operas, but this should get you started.
Barber - Adagio for Strings
Strauss - Also Sprach Zarathustra
Vivaldi - Four Seasons (all of them)
It's also possible the sunrise you're thinking of is part of William Tell.
Might be. The Greig suggested was different from what I'm remembering (though I remember Morning Mood as well).
I can't think of how to describe it in text, but it's a solo wind instrument (maybe a Clarinet?), very light and has a trilled bit.
The only part of William Tell I'm familiar with off-hand is the bit that was kind of the theme for You Can't Do That On Television.
Also, thanks for all the suggestions so far... definitely a good bit to sink my teeth into.
it is grieg. it's from peer gynt and the english translation is 'morning mood'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Mood
edit:
whups, sorry, reading comprehension ++++ It may be william tell.
Also, Shostakovich 5th symphony.
A little bit more off the beaten path, but Lincolnshire Posy by Granger is fantastic.
As for the sunrise music, I'm fairly certain its part of the William Tell:
http://www.kickassclassical.com/rossini_williamtell01.mp3
edit: And while I wouldn't say that Mozard sucks, I'm not personally a fan of true classical (Classical era) music. Ironically, I don't think anything suggested here is technically classical music.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
That's what I mean... I just listened to Morning Mood and that's not the one I'm thinking, though I remember that also being a "sunrise" song in cartoons.
Here goes nothing:
daa . . da DA da daa . . da DA da daa . da da da dadadada (trill bit) da-da-da DAA
Yeah... that :P
Well, in that style anyway... I have no idea what the technical/genre difference would be between say Stravinsky and Brahms.
When people refer to classical music, they typically refer to symphonic music. When a music nerd refers to classical music, they're referring to music from the classical period, mainly notable for the works of Mozart and the early works of Beethoven, distinguished by its greater focus on single melodic lines and simplified compositions.
While I'm on the subject, I forgot to add that Schubert's Symphony no. 8 (Unfinished) is also great.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Seconding the Planet Suites, also you may like Rhapsody On Paganini by Rachmaninov. Actually, I really like a lot of Russian classical composers.
I second the Shostakovich 5.
If the latter, it opens up a lot more options for you. If you stick with classical music exclusively, your snobbery will be confined to arguing over which is the definitive recording of Beethoven's 9th. Symphonic music encompasses a wide range of sounds, including experimental symphonic and some very highly technical pieces.
Copeland's American Symphony.
Yeah, this pretty much.
How pretentious do you want to be? Because I am the king of pretentious. We can go as far down the rabbit hole as you want.
Also, yeah, are you looking for Classical as in mid 18th-cent/early 19th-cent Classical, or Classical as in the common lexicon of "shit dem people in tuxes play"?
Well I mean, he does.
Well more appropriately, he wasn't a composer and his music is outdated by any modern standard. His stuff is an interesting historical study on improvisation in the 18th century. But thinking that his stuff is still relevant is like riding a horse to work.
Well... no. Unless you're stupid about it. Or you're referring to only the classical period, but no one really ever calls, for instance, Dufay "Symphonic", they normally just say "Classical". Or "Early"
Pretentious as fuck!
Nah, I just want to be able to know stuff by name, really... and know what I like.
Anything "dem dudes in tuxedos play" is pretty much what I'm looking for.
-I second Dvorak's New World Symphony. (and do make sure you include the accents on Dvorak's name, which I did not do) There is something about that symphony that makes me go all googly in the stummick.
-Rustles of Spring by Christian Sinding. It's much better if you find someone who doesn't suck at playing it; good luck!
-Try exploring Chopin. For extra douche points, you need to not only know how to properly pronounce "Chopin", but when someone else tries to talk about him and mispronounces the name, you can begin talking about it by emphasizing his name so the other person feels like a complete idiot. People will totally respect you for this. Ok but seriously, Chopin is amazing.
Note: I played the piano for a looong time. So a lot of my suggestions are based on that.
But based on the music you listed as your "likes", you ought to try listening to Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It's super common classical music that is incidentally also good, but you get bonus points for every time you see a movie that uses it so you can say, "Oh my, that's Vivaldi's Four Seasons... how excellent!" You'll also frequently hear it in pretentious restaurants.
Oh, and you might like Hadyn's Cello Concerto - it's also a very common and recognizable piece, so even more bonus points!
Well, the whole point I was trying to make was that if one was to really limit it to "only classical music" then it would be a bit more, er, limiting. Obviously he isn't going that route, but I know some (horribly pretentious) folks who aren't interested in hearing anything that isn't from that very specific time period. I was just curious if that was the way he intended to go, since "pretentious" is in the thread title, after all.
Dude.
[edit] youtube'd for your immediate auditory pleasure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZn_VBgkPNY&feature=related
Here is the condensed history of music with things to listen to along the way.
Part 1: Up to Classical
Then there was the whole dark ages thing and the ransacking hordes of barbarians, which is why we don't really have any examples of greek music. whoops.jpg.
The earliest western tradition music we have is Gregorian chant, of course named for Pope Gregory I, who according to a painting had some angel dude come down and give him music. But apparently the angel was a horrible musician, because he only gave Gregory a 7-note scale, no way of writing it down, and didn't tell him about the whole "you can have more notes than one at a time" thing. This stuff is lumped together with the later innovation of Organum(most of the time), which is a complicated affair, but basically is a way to have two notes at the same time. Amazing! The reason I haven't mentioned any composers yet is because we don't really know of any. We know of like, 5. Well really 1 that anyone has heard of. Most of these chants were written by "Anonymous" because they were doing it for god or something. Also I'm sure they were pretty embarrassed that they could write at max two notes. The person that most people have heard of though is Hildegard von Bingen, who was essentially Oprah of the 12th century. She did everything including write music. And since she was so famous and did so much, she got to write her name on things. Ordo Virtutum is probably her most famous work, so I'd listen to that. But get like, drunk and have TV to watch while doing so because it's really long. And it's one fucking person singing one fucking note. Also, since there weren't sharps or flats yet, everything was in C. Except it really wasn't, because to change the key, they'd keep the relationships between the notes the same, but move the starting note. So if the piece was focused on D, that would be "Dorian mode" That's why often modes are referred to as "The white note modes", because on a piano you can play all of them using only white notes.
Eventually(actually in the middle of that), this Guido D'Arezzo fellow came around and was like "Hey guys, why don't we invent some way to, you know, write stuff down?" He also led a choir of morons who couldn't remember that single note they had to sing. First he decided that cueing people by making an incredibly intricate system of parts of the hand to point to was great. Then they realized that was stupid and didn't really help as a memonic since there were more parts to the Guidian hand than there were notes, and decided that maybe they should write things down on paper. Fun bit of trivia, the modern system of notation is still based on his, and is technically "Guidian notation".
Of course, they still didn't have notes yet, so they used things called neumes, which is italian for "scribble on the paper". If you take certain early music history classes, you'll learn to read neumes. Then you will wonder why you are taking an early music history class.
Anyways, we're still in boring land over here, but we're almost out-ish. Also at this time sacred and secular music was like, completely separated. Of course, no one remembers secular music because only the great thinkers of the church could think up such things like writing things down. The secular music we do know about tended to be in "Strophic" form, which is defined as A-A-A-A-A etc. Just one section always repeating. It was also all about sex, which continues through the entirety of music history. Seriously, every fucking song from every fucking composer is about sex. Always. Even if it's about a pretty flower, it's really a metaphor for a vagina.
So eventually people were like "dudes. I had this person sing this pitch, and this other person sing this pitch, and it sounded cool!" and other people were like "HOLY SHIT WE DID NOT KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT!" and then the first group was burned as witches. But after enough of this eventually harmony came about. Of course this harmony was based on what they thought maybe the greeks did with the whole math thing, so the "consonant sounds" were perfect fifths, fourths, and octaves. Sixths and Thirds were of the devil, and 2nds and 7ths were unheard of. Now, no one yet used homophony, but they did start using polyphony. Famous examples of this stuff would be Leonin and Perotin. Basically what would happen though is that one person would sing, then another person would start singing the same thing but later. It was pretty much Row Row Row your boat, but about god. Magnus Liber is pretty much "Notre Dame School of music for dummies". Oh by the way, at the time, this style of Organum was referred to as the "Notre Dame School"
Then, De Vitry came along and was like "NO YOU ALL SUCK, I'M MAKING MY OWN MUSIC NOW" and started the ars nova style of music, and decided everything before him was now to be called ars antiqua, Because he had a big ego I guess. Anyways, they now could do awesome things like notate rhythm, so they started having independent lines. This stuff starts to sound really awesome, and this is where it starts getting interesting. Because note that we're still dealing with modal theory and all that shit, but with some crazy assed stuff happening in it. Machaut is probably a good place to start with this stuff.
At this point, shit got real. Isorhythm. Oh Isorhythm. If you listen to Machaut a lot, you'll notice that everyone is pretty much doing their own thing and they just happen to be in the same room when they're doing it. Isorhythm, and late Medieval music(14th cent stuff) basically subscribed to the voltron theory of harmony. Just keep adding shit to it and it'll get better. Basically they would just have like 8 completely independent parts doing their own thing in their own time with little hints of one another and no one with any idea what the fuck was going on 'till they got to what at the time passed for a cadence. This is the most messed up music you will hear until the 20th century. The shit was just weird. Seriously, when you study Isoryhthm it will pretty much just be talking about 14th century Ars Nova composers and then skip to 12-tone modernists like Webern.
During this time, there also started to be a creep of what was referred to as the "Sweet british sound", because some brits decided to sing in thirds. And it had a sweet sound. ergo sweet british sound.
Then people started going "Are you all fucking high? What is this shit?" and started the Renaissance(it took too many tries to spell that right). Renaissance music had people actually singing together for like the first time ever. This is also where we start getting shit-tons of names. And we start seeing the beginnings of classical theory being used. This stuff is actually a step back in terms of complexity, for a variety of reasons. First off, the isorhythmic motets are basically to music what an acid trip is to a person, and the renaissance people wanted things they could listen to without their heads exploding, and secondly because people were learning how to sing. Really early on people could sing like 2 notes total. And that's if they were lucky enough to be a good singer in addition to being a priest. So the music was super-condensed simply because people didn't have range. In the renaissance, there was so much more range you could make people sing in, so it gave composers so much more room to work. Anyways, you don't care about that, you want names to drop to sound smart.
Here are a few notables: Dufay, Ockeghem, Josqin, Taverner, Thomas "Motherfucking" Tallis, Pale"Fucking"strina, Gabrielli
Of that list, Josqin is one of my favorites. His name was "Josqin des Prez", however, no one called him that. He was like Cher, he only was known as Josqin. He was basically Elvis of the time, he was the biggest rock star ever to touch 16th century Europe. And it's plain to see why.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKJgwLPjmlw
Awwwwww Jeaaaaaaaaaaah
You know that god him laid.
There are a bunch of things here that you should note too, the whole Isorhythm thing? It kind of still was around, but made super-pretty. It's known as "Prima practica", or "first practice", as opposed to "secunda practica", which is basically early Baroque music. What they did is simplified Isorhythm a little and just had lines flowing over one another sung in huge churches where it would just echo around and sound awesome. It all fit together a lot more though. There were also these really cool line jumps and shit where things were everywhere. If you listen to Palestrina you'll probably hear some of it. It's awesome.
So, music kept focusing more on thirds and sixths now, and using things that could basically be described as "chords" This was "Secunda practica", and it seemed that Heterophony was the new Polyphony, thirds were the new fifths, and in general it starts to sound like what we think of traditional western music. Slowly but surely, we arrived at the Baroque period. The baroque period was basically when it all started to really get structuralized the way it is now. You have chords now, they move, you have cadences, you have people playing together at the same time in intervals, basically, what all music is from this point until Schoenburg came along and was like "YOU ALL SUCK MY STUFF IS BETTER" is. There is a bit of oddness here because most chord progressions were still somewhat influenced by Isorhythm, so would just repeat one bass line over and over and over and over again. Known as "Basso Continuo". For the most famous example of Basso Continuo, used in every history class since the dawn of time, check out Purcells "Dido and Aneas", specifically "When I am laid in earth". Here's also where you'll start recognizing some more names. Also, the theme of the Baroque period was "LOOK AT ME! LOOK HOW FAST I CAN PLAY! LOOK LOOK LOOK! I'M SO GOOD AT THIS! EVERYONE LOVE ME! I'M SPECIAL!" Shit is ornamented out the ass, and full of pretty much pure show-offy technique. Which is why so many people learn it and love it. You will always sound awesome playing Baroque music, and it's easy as fuck compared to later stuff because you hit the buttons under your fingers.
Notable Baroque composers to listen to:
Vivaldi
Handel(you may have heard of his Messiah. it's pretty big)
Monteverdi(Specifically from him listen to L'Orfeo... great opera
Purcell
and the cause of all first year theory student's nervous breakdowns:
Bach.
If you know these names, you can fit in with pretty much any musician who isn't an early music person, or at least have a frame of reference for what they're talking about.
Special note should be given to Bach here, because he "created" the rules of counterpoint, which influenced music forever and started the baroque period and changed the face of the earth! Except that Bach wasn't born 'till the baroque period was full in swing. And people were writing music that pretty much followed the "rules" of counterpoint before he wrote them. So what did Bach do? Simple. Statistics. Basically, he said "Hey, people don't write parallel fifths anymore." and "Hey, more than three parallel thirds is a little much for most pieces". And he wrote all that down and it's essentially easy-mode for sounding structurally tonal, and specifically sounding like a Baroque composer. That's why it was ok for him to "ignore" the laws of counterpoint.
It's also important to note here that music still wasn't "Composed" in the sense that we normally think of it at this point. Rather it was still pretty much an expression of math. They basically wrote according to formulae and just put it down on paper, then someone else played it.
So basically, Some people said "Hey. Show-offs. So decadent. We are the truly civilized people here, and we know how to be civilized, so we're going to call them Misshapen Pearls(What Baroque actually means) and make our own superior music. My my Reginald. It sure it hot today, shall we have the help fan us as we get out of our fancy horse-drawn carriage to go to the opera house?" These people then started the Classical era, also known as the "Giant stick up our bums" era. This was similar to Baroque music in that it was mostly formulaic, but the chords used began to take on a more common practice theory aspect to them, basically actually being used to support what was going on in an accompanimental sense, more than just repeating something over and over again, or being the whole piece(I'm looking at you Bach Preludes). Basically, think rock music but the De Gamba was the stand in for the Guitar. Also, this era was super-repressed. Don't get me wrong, everything was still about sex, but ornaments were seen as flashy and gauche, and not civilized, so basically it was melody, chords, and maybe some harmony if you're feeling especially creative that day. Again, rock music.
Notable composers here are:
Haydn
Scarlatti
Salieri
And of course
Mozart.
Oh and my favorite composer for no other reason than his name, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Actually he's the height of mediocrity in the classical period, his music's really fucking boring, but goddamn that is a name.
Anyways, people eventually learned to take the stick out of their bums, and the romantic period started. This is also the first period that called itself by its commonly accepted name. They were all "We're romantics" and then probably they played "Time of your life" on their acoustic guitar to try to get laid.
The romantic period tried to cover up the fact that everything they were doing was about sex by pretending that they had feelings and really were writing about love. That then led to sex.
this period was brought about by one raging vagina(I mean, he probably wasn't, but he pretty much started the entire era of music that was all about singing about your feelings instead of singing about sex) and one incredibly awesome madman.
Let me take a break here to tell you about Beethoven. Before Beethoven, there was no real composing going on the the world of music. It was either nerds spelling out "boobs" on their calculators and calling it art, or Mozart taking 5 minutes out of his busy lifestyle of drinking and bangin' ho's to sit down at a piano, play whatever the fuck he felt like, and write it down. No one ever had the idea to maybe edit their music or actually work on writing it, instead it was pretty much mechanical or "I'mma play this!" Beethoven though was like "FUCK YOU ALL! I CRAZY! I DO WHAT I WANT! THIS PART SUCKS. NOW THIS PART SUCKS. BUT I'M GOING BACK TO THIS PART AND MAKING IT BETTER. NOW YOU SUCK. NOW THIS PART'S DIFFERENT! BOOZE!" like this dude was crazy. If you ever get a chance to see original manuscripts, take a look at some Mozart scores, then take a look at some Beethoven scores. Mozart's shit might as well have been done by a computer, where Beethoven's doesn't even look like music, it just looks like the scrawlings on the walls of an insane asylum. However, because of this, it meant that his music was awesome, It was fantastic, because it was actually thought out and approached with hard work and all that jazz. Beethoven pretty much completely invented the field of composition.
Anyways, the romantic period started throwing out classical and baroque theory, and expanded the palette of tonality by like a billion. Chord progressions, bass lines, melody lines, they were everywhere in the romantic period. I-IV? Fuck you I'm going I-q. That's not a chord? I do what I want!
Well ok, they didn't get that bad for another 50 years or so.
Still, romantic music pretty much takes off. Also, it's got a lot of really recognizable names:
Wagner
Strauss
Berlioz
Liszt
Schumann
Brahms
Joe Green
Chopin
Important works to listen to: Symphonie Fantastique, All the Beethoven symphonies, Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, Chopin etudes, Chopin preludes, The Ring Cycle.
Then Stravinsky came along. Oh Stravinsky. This is common knowledge among musicians to the point that no one ever brings it up because yes we already know, but I'm not sure if everyone knows this, Stravinsky caused I riot with Rite of Spring. People went to hear music, they heard Rite of Spring, and they rioted. That is intense. It is my dream in life to cause a riot with my music. Stravinsky is still pretty much romantic, but he started to pave the way for the "Fucked up shit" period of music. He was all "FUCK YOUR NICE SOUNDING THINGS!". Anyways, stuff got wackier and wackier 'till Schoenburg came along.
Basically, he thought that tonal music had gone about as far as it could go, and in order for music to advance, it needed to get out of the stupid pointless restrictions. So he made up his own stupid pointless restrictions, and started 12-tone music. If you don't know, 12-tone music essentially is a style of music where you cannot repeat a note until you have played every other note. It exists to destroy tonality, because no note is more important than the others in 12-tone. Some composers took this and ran with it in the direction of "Ok you also can't repeat a DYNAMIC 'till you've used them all! And every note should be a different length! And every note should be played by a different instrument!" and Serialized the fuck out of everything. Others took it and said "Oh fuck. no tonality? I can do anything I want, and used 12-tone as a nice tool to help, but didn't really go super-strict with following it.
Some people say 12-tone is crappy and ugly. Some people say it removes the composer from their ability to communicate, because it's back to fucking math again. However, if you want 12-done done right, you need to look no further than Schoenberg's "A Survivor from Warsaw", in which the 12-tone creepy "What the christ" sound is put to good use.
Now, after modernism starts, it's hard to give a comprehensive view of concert music, so we'll stop with the history lesson for now. I could probably type a post three times the length of this one just going over the basics, but suffice to say that music exploded laterally. Some people are continuing to try to trudge music forwards, but it's also going out every which way with styles like minimalism, postmodernism, tintinabuli, micropolyphony, etc, etc, etc. I can give some important works and composers, but any sort of timeline or history just gets outrageous at this point.
So, important new stuff:
Arvo Part: Fur Alina
Elliot Carter: String Quartet #2
John Adams: On the Transmigration of Souls
John Adams: Dr. Atomic
John Adams: A short ride in a fast machine
Brian Ferneyhough: Bone Orchestra
Brian Ferneyhough: Terrain
Gyorgi Ligeti: Etudes
Gyorgi Ligeti: Le Grande Macabre
Ian Xenackis: XAS
Ian Xenackis: Ikhoor
John Cage: 4'33"
John Cage: Sonatas and Inteludes for prepared piano
Phillip Glass: Einstein on the Beach
Phillip Glass: Koyaanisqatsi
And for shits and giggles
Tamar Muskal: Harold and the Purple Crayon
Oliver Knussen: Where the Wild things are
Gyorgi Ligeti: Poeme symphonique pour 100 metronomes
fixed now.
Also I realized I forgot to mention that Isorhythm doesn't mean "Isolated rhythms" like it looks and sounds like it should, but rather "Same rhythms". Basically, it was like minimalism(Phillip Glass), where you would just repeat one rhythm over and over and over again, but everyone was doing it with different rhythms so it overlapped into a clusterfuck. That's also why Basso Continuo was like it, because it just repeated one thing over and over.
Also, it's a pattern often seen in african drumming, which is used in Ligeti's Etudes for piano.
But yeah just memorize that all 'till you can type it off the top of your head for a forum and you can go to any party and drink fancy wine and complain about the people wearing suits after 6:00PM and be a pretentious douche.
It's how I pick up girls.
What is this? Not a composer? There's being pretentious, and then there's being wrong.
Except I'm not wrong.
Mozart was an improviser. A great improviser. He had such an innate grasp of theory, style, and counterpoint that even at age 5 he could just sit down and go. And the music just flowed out of him onto the page, looking perfectly prim and proper, and bam, there's a piece of music.
But the modern idea of composing is a process. What Mozart did is what Jazz musicians do during a solo, if they then transcribe it. He was improvising, and then he transcribed the improvisation. That's not what composers do, which is think about, plan, and basically work out a piece of music. It wasn't until Beethoven that you actually see work being put into a work of music. Beethoven truly composed his music. He didn't just write down what he played after downing a bottle of Scotch.
Then... what part do you disagree with? That Mozart didn't edit his stuff? That's perfectly clear if you so much as glance at his original manuscript.
And if you recognize that composition is a process and not just playing something and writing it down then how is composition what Mozart did?
Though really, if you'll accept that there's a difference between just playing something and transcribing it and actually composing it then I don't see what the argument is. I've never heard anyone argue that pre-Beethoven musicians did what could be described today as composing. Like I'm pretty sure that's just historical fact.
I mean just look at this stuff