= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CronoDAS comments on Helpless Individuals - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (235)
I do listen to contemporary music. Or is that not what you had in mind? :P
I apologize if that was too crude for you, but it seems to me an apt description (both of the situation and why outsiders feel the way they feel about it). For it to be sex it needs to include other people.
Of course I would never make a statement so sweeping. Masturbation is hardly valueless; it just serves a rather different function than sex, which seems to me to be a cruder restatement of your earlier point. But the implication of such a view is that the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles, and the cultural ancestor of little-known academic composers are the writers of 16th century theological texts- very sophisticated, but they're no Shakespeare. (I should clarify that by theological texts I mean commentaries, not foundational works like the King James Bible.) And so when we discuss "the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing" there are two things we could be talking about- making music for a particular set of instruments, or significantly contributing to the history of music.
If there is any gulf of misunderstanding between us, I think it hinges on that last bit.
Crudeness wasn't the problem; the connotation of disapproval was.
That absolutely does not follow. That is not an implication of "such a view" (i.e. my view) at all.
A meta-observation about your comment: it doesn't seem to reflect your having received new information from my previous comments at all. You've simply restated the position that I'm arguing against, without explaining why the things I've said fail to undermine that position.
For example, it should be clear by now that I don't agree that "the cultural descendant of Beethoven is The Beatles", and it should be equally clear why: in addition to the fact that the actual memetic lineage from Beethoven to the Beatles is much less direct than from Beethoven to contemporary art-composers (a point I didn't actually mention explicitly), Beethoven's intention -- his profession, his métier -- was to write the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music he could. (Beyond the blatant evidence of the music itself, as compared with his (more "popular"!) contemporaries, this is a matter of historical record, as revealed in his letters.) In this crucial respect, he resembles contemporary academic composers much more than the Beatles (who, as popular musicians, have few rivals, of course).
Now, I made it clear in my exchange with MichaelVassar and multifoliaterose that this was what I was talking about. Yet, in the parent comment, you continue to frame the discussion as though that had never occurred:
...as if my idea of "the-thing-that-Beethoven-was-doing" had mainly to do with instrumentation, and as if we all agreed that popularity among laymen was the criterion by which "contribution to the history of music" is to be judged -- in blatant disregard of my previous remarks in this thread.
I wonder if pre-WWII jazz musicians are closer in spirit to this, in terms of both "writing the most interesting/advanced/sophisticated music [they] could" and "advancing the field of music"?
Quite possibly. I don't even see any need to restrict to pre-WWII. My impression is that, among the various styles of popular music, jazz has tended to come closest to manifesting this ideal in general.