PhilGoetz comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong

68 Post author: PhilGoetz 22 October 2011 02:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (367)
Tags: status aesthetics art signalling psychology peer_pressure

Comments (367)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 21 October 2011 04:00:49PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, people disliked the Great Fugue more when it was performed than today. But this is also true of the 3rd symphony.

There's some relevant history to Wellington's Victory. In 1813, Beethoven was seen in Vienna as a has-been. He needed to get back into the public eye. He premiered WV together with his 7th symphony. WV was tremendously popular, and its success carried the 7th Symphony along with it, and brought Beethoven back into the public eye, so that he could write and sell more actually good music. This is a case where the contemporary taste was "wrong". But I don't know the most important fact, which is whether the musical snobs of the day identified WV as bad.

By contemporary accounts, Beethoven got a great kick out of conducting WV, what with firing cannons and making lots of noise, so I won't be cynical about it.

You can also see this pattern at work in the Beatles, who became popular by writing dance pop music like "Twist and Shout" (which is good, as pop, but is pop), and this enabled them to go on to record Sergeant Pepper's and the white album.

Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 21 October 2011 06:09:29PM 4 points [-]

OK I went and gave it a listen. The copy I have is in this 8 disk box.

  1. I like this piece very much.
  2. No idea if I like this more or less than any other Beethoven String Quartet. I like them all very much.
  3. I swear I heard at least ten distinct samples Rodgers & Hammerstein Sound of Music soundtrack.
  4. I was so convinced of this I was expecting to get real red meat when I googled on the following terms: (rodgers hammerstein sound music beethoven string quartet 13). Alas, all I got was a long list of orgs who had both of those items in their immense repertoires, but nothing like grouchy musicologist's friends writing back and forth pro and con at length on similarity and difference.
  5. A conjecture. My mom's favorite record was the Sound of Music soundtrack, and she had simple taste. I bet she would have liked the "grosse fugue" on one listen, from which I would argue that this piece is accessible.

(Also Rodgers and Hammerstein were going for a German folk music sound, so perhaps Beethoven and they were both independently derivative of the same sources. Or this connection could purely be a figment of my imagination.)

Comment author: komponisto 21 October 2011 06:03:02PM *  4 points [-]

But I don't know the most important fact, which is whether the musical snobs of the day identified [Wellington's Victory] as bad.

They did indeed. In fact, the snobbiest musician of that time was Beethoven himself, who responded to critics of the piece as follows:

"What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!"

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit