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Jack comments on Making History Available - Less Wrong
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That's a start. The next step is that you have a good bit in common with other people, but also substantial differences. They lived through history as themselves.
As for "America always having existed", I heard somewhat from a book about the geological history of the English Channel. It took a number of sentences to explain that there was a time before there was an England or a France and I was getting impatient, and then I realized that the amount of repetition probably was needed to bring the point home.
A bit of free association.... did you know there was a nation of Burgundy which has been all but forgotten? I found this out from Mary Gentle, whose Ash novels have some intellectual horror so awful that I stopped reading.
N uvfgbevna/nepunrbybtvfg svaqf fbzr irel fgenatr fghss, naq fur'f orggvat ure erchgngvba ba vg.... naq gura nyy gur rivqrapr qvfnccrnef. V unira'g svavfurq ernqvat gur frevrf, ohg vg qvqa'g frrz yvxr n pbairagvbany zlfgrel, jvgu fbzrbar fgrnyvat gur rivqrapr-- zber yvxr ernyvgl fbsgravat naq erivfvat vgfrys.
Actually, sometimes people do make accurate predictions, but they also make a lot of false predictions. The accurate predictions are much more apt to be remembered than the false predictions.
If you want to see a major effort to view past people as being themselves rather than modern people, see Ta-Nahisi-Coate's writings on the Civil War.
I think that this era is the best in general for a lot of people, but there are specific things which were done better in the past. People in the middle ages and the Renaissance were better at dressing up. It's possible that Eastern European Jews before the Nazis were better at producing mathematical geniuses than we are. Was there something about the educational system? Europe before WWI produced classical music so good that no one has been able to compete with it (for classical music, not music in general) since then.
I'm pretty sure the resident music experts disagree with this.
I should have been clearer that what I meant by good classical music is music which appeals to the general public.
Again, there are Neoclassical works that "the public" love just like "the public" love the old masters. Pulcinella Suite is a direct example that "competes," but really anything from that era of Stravinsky is a great example. Francis Poulenc's work is immensely popular (his clarinet duet and clarinet concerto are particularly good). In fact, directly after WWI is when all this stuff came out because europe couldn't afford large orchestras.
This idea that modern classical music can't be fun and entertaining is just plain strange! Serialism really gives modern music a bad name. People still compose tonal works, and tonal music is not considered "uninteresting."
I beg your pardon...!
There's nothing "bad" about serial music. (Individual works may of course vary in quality.) Not all music needs to be "accessible". You're right to point out that some modern music is, but it's okay if also some isn't. One just cannot expect everyone to be able to keep up indefinitely with increasing musical complexity.
Not even Beethoven is accessible to everybody, it seems.
But not all modern music is inaccessible. In fact a lot of is more accessible than the old masters (I mean come on, The Firebird isn't hard to understand at all). People seem to act as if once serialism came around all composers immediately threw out all ideas of tonality and harmony and that's not true. Many people openly rejected ideas of atonality.
I don't really have anything against serial music. Some of it is pretty cool. But that's not what "modern music" is.
I like to point out this line in particular, and then point to minimalist (and post-minimalist) composers.
Music doesn't have to get necessarily more complex. Composers, like any large group of people, don't agree on anything.
Well wait a minute: you were the one who pointed specifically to serialism as the culprit for the "inaccessible" reputation of "modern music". If you consider minimalists inaccessible also, why didn't you include them in the blame?
No, I don't think minimalists are inaccessible. You suggested that there is "increasing musical complexity," and I was merely pointing out there doesn't necessarily have to be "increasing musical complexity."
I cited increasing musical complexity as the reason why serial music is considered "inaccessible". I didn't say anything about non-"inaccessible" music.
Charles Murray, in Human Accomplishment, uses historiometry (toting up lists of who music experts consider worth mentioning and discussing) to try to rank various figures while accounting for the most obvious problems like recency bias.
In Western music there are 522 figures who make a certain cut (the bottom 5 of those 522: Thomas Simpson, John Hothby, Marbrianus Orto, Joannes Gallus, Mattheus le Maistre). The top figures in order: Beethoven & Mozart, Bach, Wager, Haydn, Handel, Stravinsky, Debussy, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Schoenberg, Brahms, Chopin, Monteverdi, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Weber, and Gluck.
I'm not a music person, but the only name I recall here as belonging to the 21st or 20th centuries would be Schoenberg.
(Murray, incidentally, tried to rank Chinese music, but found too little survived - little but the names of whom contemporaries considered great musicians, but not their actual compositions etc.)
Hm, could this be due to a difference in composition writing and publishing practices? That is, did older European compositions survive longer because they were copied more frequently, or (somewhat equivalently) were easier to copy for some reason?
I think much of it may just be relative age combined with poorly developed notation. The golden age of Chinese music was much further back than the golden age of European music - easier to survive 500 years than 2000.
(I don't think Murray draws the connection, but he discusses problems with ranking Greek music: the surviving music tends to simplistic melodies by a single instrument, distinctly unimpressive - yet writers like Plato describe music as one of the most powerful forces in society. Either Plato et al had very low musical standards or what has survived is extremely incomplete/unrepresentative.)
Here are the decades during which three or more top-20 composers lived. The number of hash marks shows how many top-20 composers were alive at some point in that decade.
Is there a relatively simple explanation for the predominance of Germans and Austrians in this period? Obviously you couldn't expect many great Norwegian or Mongolian composers, because of demographical or logistical reasons, but for example I see no Britons and few Frenchmen in the list. Which differences in musical education and culture could have brought relatively similar countries to have such vastly dissimilar results?
My guess is clustering caused by positive feedback, a.k.a, the Milanese Leonardo effect:
Edited to add: Maybe there were specific things about Germany and Austria that caused them to have clusters of heavy hitters, but maybe there are alternate timelines where Great Britain or France lucked into being home to such a cluster.
Right - my question was about what exactly those specific things were. For example, one reason Florence became a greater centre of art than Milan was that it was ruled by a family of socialite bankers (the Medici) whose power came from wealth and prestige, rather than upjumped warlords (the Sforza) who acquired it through skill at arms and dynastic marriages. Another is that Florence had much better access to the marble mines of Carrara, and so on.
Now Mozart, Bach and Beethoven all had two generations of musicians behind them, but consider, say, Haydn. He was the son of villagers who never played an instrument in their lives - yet they recognised his talent so early that at the age of six years they managed to have him apprenticed with the choirmaster. Had he been switched as an infant with a random Marseillais or Londoner boy, his chances of receiving such an early training would have probably dropped like a rock. Was that because France and England had fewer choirs and choirmasters, both to beget little Mozarts and spot little Haydns? Because violins and spinets were more expensive? Because music was considered more of a discipline for older boys, or for girls?
Yes. The period itself is essentially defined that way. That is, Germans and Austrians (and those influenced by them) wrote the history of music, and defined the "core period" as precisely that period when they happened to dominate the scene.
This is, of course, a fully general counter-argument: any time someone points to a cluster, you can say 'well those and those influenced by them wrote the history so of course we see a cluster'.
For those who don't accept this fully general counter-argument, Murray considered precisely this national/linguistic argument about bias and examined sources written in a foreign language - eg. what did the Japanese textbooks have to say about German music? He found that this corrective did change rankings and scores... for literature. pg 486:
To quote his longer discussion in chapter 5:
To be clear, my argument wasn't directed against Murray, but at his sources. I don't doubt that Murray more or less correctly measured what he was trying to measure (whether or not that measurement has whatever significance he attributes to it, I don't know; I haven't read his book).
My real interest is in "debunking" the notion of the "common-practice period"; I would instead prefer to call the period in question the "Germanic period" or something similar. It isn't really a question of quality: personally, I happen to agree that there is something special about Viennese classicism (i.e. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) but I wouldn't assign a similar specialness to Pachelbel and Reger while leaving out Gesualdo and Boulez.
ETA: Also, to be clear, my claim isn't that German-and-Austrian-influenced historians unfairly leave out or devalue other composers from the period 1600-1900; it's that they elevate that particular period itself to an unjustifiably high status relative to other periods (which in my view has hindered the development of music theory).
Well, why did non-German historians go along with it, then?
I would agree partially with komponisto.
Except that there were a lot French and Western Europe composers at this time. They were using a different model entirely however (Schenkerian Analysis only covers the German model). It didn't put as much emphasis on the bass as german music does. The German model just seems better (from my standpoint, it seems to actually focus on what the ear naturally focuses on), which made their music better, so they lasted the test of time. The German model then spread to the Western Europe and subsumed everything because their stuff was better.