Informed Dislike
When I was teaching Music Theory, we studied a lot of Bach. This was really a good deal for me, since I really enjoy his music, but many of my students thought differently. “Bach sucks!” from the back of the class. And if it wasn’t Bach, it was something else; country, rap, jazz. I’ve even heard rumors that some people don’t care for classical music.
Whenever I encountered a “Bach sucks” moment, I challenged the student to tell me why. Why does Bach suck? What is it about this music that causes the suck? Rarely did I get an answer, and that’s not surprising because it’s a truly hard question. Going that one or two steps beyond the initial reaction isn’t a place that most people want to go.*
It’s not that one doesn’t have a right to an opinion, but a better understanding of why one doesn’t like something goes a long way. I like to think of it as informed dislike.
February 18th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Bach sucks because he was not a true composer. A true composer hears the music before he writes it. Bach composed using a mathematical system of numbers which he tought his students. After his death one of his students published a book “How to write a menuet with little or no musical knowledge”. Frankly, the result of his work is not musical, the opening bars always sound musical because he copied someone else’s melody, broke it down into numbers and wrote counterpoint from it. Handel did not even like Bach, because Handel wrote music. Anyone who does like Bach does so because they are told to. For a comparison, listen to music by Frescobaldi, Rameau, or Couperin, then listen to Bach. The difference? Something that is musical throughout the entire piece, and something that is musical for 10 seconds and quickly loses interest.
February 18th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
That’s a much better answer than most of my students gave me. If you were my student, we’d then concentrate on what a composer does, and what being “musical” is.
It doesn’t seem to me that a composer has to “hear the music before he writes it.” I know that I often don’t; oftentimes I feel drawn toward a particular sound, and that I have to spent quite a bit of time before it feels right. Perhaps that doesn’t make me a true composer either, but I’d like to think that composers create differently. The best real definition I can give to a composer is as one who creates organized sound where there was none before. Bach falls under this definition, as does Handel, Mozart, and Cage. And me, I hope.
As a listener, I don’t feel what you do when listening to Bach. This is no surprise! – we come to things at different times with different experiences and different ears. I’ve been listening and playing his pieces for over a decade now, and there’s a great cohesiveness and depth to the work. Sometimes I marvel at its construction, sometimes I get teary eyed. What is considered “musical” is very subjective, though, as I find machine hums to be musical most of the time.
I also enjoy the works of Frescobaldi, Rameau and Couperin, and I’m not in the game of saying composer x is better than composer y, as I’m not really sure what purpose it has.
April 4th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
[...] Finally, after some rather long gestation, something snapped, and I’m ready to start composing notated music again. The process of hitting up musicians I know with the “can I write a piece for you?” has begun, and I can feel some old but trusty machinery in my brain creaking to life. While I’ve been informed that a true composer hears the music before he writes it, I’m not actually sure what I’m going to end up with, and I’m more eager than anyone else to hear the result. Posted at 8:17 pm [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Dan date is an idiot. Bach was a virtuoso that could improvise fugues. I want to hear that students music! Anyone can write a book saying how to do such and such. The greatest composers learned music from studying bach, not rameau. What have you got to say about that, fool? I mean Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelsohn, and Brahms.
No, I don’t feel compelled to behave in a polite fashion.
Bach was obviously the most substantial badass in the whole of western music. If you think he didn’t hear what he was writing you are really confused. If it so easy to do, how come not one person in history has mastered Bach’s compositional technique. Because he invented a style that is totally bitchin, and extremely difficult. You won’t figure it out studying rameau, or using math tricks I assure you. Good luck fool.