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Friday Miscellanea
 
Why the name?

That title, naturally, is probably not Beethoven’s.





Posted by Bryan Townsend at 6:15 AM Augustine said...

I think you should actually give D"Angelo's music a listen. The whole album's only about 30 mins or so long. It IS a remarkable synthesis of music on the order of Sergeant Pepper (if not more so).

BTW, you do love the Beatles a lot. I'm not sure if its nostalgia or otherwise, but I don't think you've ever done a good job of indicating why you think they're miles above anything else. Give this a chance! This one song is not wholly representative.

February 20, 2015 at 7:44 PM Bryan Townsend said...

This is probably good advice! If something doesn't grab me right away, I may not listen too long. So much music out there. Maybe I will listen some more.

I think I have written quite a bit about what I think is outstanding in the Beatles' music. Here are a couple of posts in particular:




February 20, 2015 at 9:49 PM 
I love the Beatles, too. Their songs are very well-crafted, which is all the more surprising coming from artists who were basically music illiterates. Which goes to show one can write excellent music with next to zero formal musical training.

Yet for all their genius, the music is essentially trivial. I can pick a random Beatles tune and it takes me a grand total of 5 minutes to master everything about it: the harmonies, the voices, the bass line, etc. I understand it's still on the sophisticated side of rock music, but rock music is essentially trivial music.

To master a Bach partita or a bebop tune takes me at least a whole day of hard work and usually longer. There's lots of meat there. I love the Beatles as much as anyone, but I find the music pleasant but essentially trivial. I understand its popularity but I find it strange that a professional musician would not be bored by it.

February 21, 2015 at 12:06 AM 
Hi Mr. Anonymous! Thanks for pumping up the debate. Yes, I do love the Beatles, but it's not just nostalgia as I think the first link I put up above, How I Re-discovered the Beatles, shows. I don't question your comment at all, but if you can master any Beatles tune in five minutes, then you are an enormously gifted musician. However, you strain my credulity a bit when you claim to be able to master a Bach partita in just a day. These are large, multi-movement works that gifted soloists take a very long time to master.

Also, you refer to the harmonies, voices, bass line as being what make up a Beatles tune and indeed they do. But as I think I have pointed out in quite a number of posts, from Rubber Soul on, what they were crafting went far beyond that and included a great deal of studio wizardry that was highly creative. Just one example would be the remarkable sounds and textures of Tomorrow Never Knows.

I'm not the only professional musician who does not find the Beatles boring. Let me cite two theorists, Walter Everett, who has written a massive two-volume tome for Oxford University Press analyzing all the recordings of the Beatles and William Caplin, authority on the structures of Classical era music, also published by Oxford, who is also very fond of and interested in the music of the Beatles.

But of course, you are quite right about the general triviality of pop music. It is just that the Beatles are the rare exception.

You are also right to point out that even someone with no formal musical training can create excellent music (though not write it down). The thing is that music does not have to be complex to be good. There is some great music that is fairly simple and some fiendishly complex music that is probably not very good. As B. B. King once said, sometimes you only have to play one note if it is the right note!

February 21, 2015 at 8:06 AM 

-- a commentator