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Comments about music - contemporary and otherwise
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Thomas Whiteley
Posts: 786
Joined: Jul. 8 2003
From: San Francisco Bay Area
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 Comments about music - contemporary ...
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There are many definitions that relate to Jazz. A comment made by Quincy Jones a few years ago still makes me laugh! As a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie bands, Jones said, “We would never blow a note that sounded like a melody”!
Here is a 1984 comment, "People have called me a jazz musician, but that's ludicrous. I have yet to figure out what a jazz musician is."
Now here is a question for everyone regardless of your music background, preferences and thoughts. What does the term “contemporary” imply or mean in regards to a specific music? That term has always bewildered me. Can anyone “agree” on the meaning of that term?
Another question: Is a specific music no longer acceptable because it does not pass a test of today? Take Classical, Jazz and flamenco as examples. Miles Davis said of Louis Armstrong, “He never did nothin”! What he was saying was that Louis Armstrong contributed nothing to Jazz or music, and he was an incompetent musician. Others think that Armstrong is the reason that Jazz exists even today. People tend to not agree on many topics – even those people who are considered music masters!
Another thought comes to mind – this time about Chopin commenting on the playing and compositions of his friend Franz Liszt; “Many fingers – no brains”!
In Classical music we have four periods Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary. Contemporary has been going on for a long time relative to the other periods, I have noticed. It has the potential to go on forever. Will there be a “fifth Classical Period”? If you change the harmony, melody, chording structure, and a few other rules it is still Classical music. It just belongs to a specific period. Sometimes I think some of the Classical music I have heard (like one in 1969 using garbage can lids dropped from 12 foot high painters ladders used as the only instruments) should be called “Outer Space”.
Jazz also has periods and was influenced by Blues and Ragtime. We have different names for Jazz, like Dixieland, Chicago, and San Francisco plus many more. Is only the Jazz music of today “Jazz”? The structure changed so you be the person who makes the decision.
Flamenco also has a number of periods that are defined. Is only the flamenco music that follows the rules of today in fact the only flamenco music to be considered? Again you be the judge.
_____________________________
Tom
http://home.comcast.net/~flamencoguitar/flamenco.html
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Date Aug. 29 2003 17:25:58
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Billyboy
Posts: 389
Joined: Aug. 18 2003
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Thomas Whiteley)
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I think it was David Bowie who said the devil has all the best tunes, and by the nature of evolution, and the ever expanding human population, it is getting more difficult to find that seed of originality, take Rock music, which was at its most creative in the 60’s/70’s. There is noting that could be done now without people saying it is derivative, The reason people are confused about the term contempory, is because of the reasons just mentioned, there is very little anyone can come up with now, that people do not know the origin of. In the 60’s/ 70’s, people re worked songs by little known artistes, and called it their own, the general public not knowing where the original influence came from, now with mass media, you could not get away with it, we are living in a strange period in history where most things in music have all ready been done.
Bill
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Date Aug. 29 2003 18:24:15
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Miguel de Maria
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Thomas Whiteley)
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Didn't someone some guy in a patent office say that everything has already been invented, back in the 1800's? Everything has not been done, however, there is nothing new under the sun.
Out of red, blue, green, you get a lot of other colors, the Sistine Chapel, the Boating Party, and some other good stuff.
Out of a wooden box and six pieces of nylon, Paco de Lucia has done some good things.
Whether or not we start playing instruments made of graphite with extruded titanium strings or keep using Torres' basic design and materials, there are a lot of things to do that have never been done. Maybe we cannot invent another major scale, since the major scale has already been invented--or maybe we can. Tom laughs at people dropping trash can lids--it's funny!--but people probably laughed at the idea of using nylon strings, and they certainly laughed at the idea of an overdriven electric guitar. Come to think of it, electric guitar is pretty funny, still, but that's a matter of taste.
When we hear experimentation, the ideas and reworkings of the young generation, almost surely we will not like it. That is because we are OLD. Life goes on without us, if we don't choose to go with it. I like Paco, I like Vicente, the guys after them...maybe I won't like them. Doesn't mean they won't be just as good, just as inventive. The problem will be that my arteries will be so hardened I just won't get it! More to the point, I won't want to!
There is no golden age.... the Renaissance is simply a perspective. This time we are living in is at least as inventive as others, probably more so. We just don't realize it...
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Date Aug. 29 2003 19:42:26
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Guest
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Miguel de Maria)
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Well thats being optamistic, everything has been done, why is it most of the radio plays music from the 60's/70's, why is it no ground breaking guitarist has eclipsed PDL, I'll tell you why. Mathematically there are only so many computations of a scale, chords, rythem etc, and as time goes by to coin a phrase, less and less permutations are left.
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Date Aug. 29 2003 20:03:08
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Miguel de Maria
Posts: 3532
Joined: Oct. 20 2003
From: Phoenix, AZ
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Thomas Whiteley)
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Of course you are right about the permutations. There is only so much that can be done, with say, 12 bar blues. Maybe that's why jazz evolved, like those horribly complex chord progressions that are really just generations of substitutions of the base 3 chords. But if you look at the blues, and then see what monstrously complex things arose from that, and then project a little further, maybe you'll think that things aren't quite so limited after all. Nuno Bettencourt, a metal guitarist, once jokinly groused that Jimi Page, the Led Zepplin guitarist, had already written all the good licks! Well, we're talking about rock, a 4/4, 3 chord medium... and then they usually only use 5 notes of the scale, maybe he's right!
You say that the radios all play 60/70's music, that's because people who have money are in that demograhic--and they don't want to listen to new stuff, they like the Eagles. The "coveted" demograhic of the teenagers, the teenie boppers, is coveted Because they don't have set values, favorite brands, yet. You can ram Camels and various fashions down their throats just as easily as Britney Spears (who's Sooooo 2000, isn't she?). Baby boomers aren't going to change, they want their ELO.
Change in the popular music scene is nonexistent simply because of economics. With only one radio station running the whole land, based on the bottom line of the corporate annual report, exploring new sounds is not given a priority. There are just as many potential geniouses out there as always, Mozart and Bach are out there waiting to get the right training and be encouraged. If one of them emerges, it will be a miracle, because things aren't set up right now to cultivate them.
If you will grant me that radios play 60/70's music not necessarily because it's good (maybe it is!), but for commercial reasons, then you must agree that the lack of innovation is due to that fact. Paco was a genius, but there are others--Nunez is a genius too! Geniuses are made; they don't spring fully formed from their father's forehead. If basketball wasn't played in North Carolina, Michael Jordan may have gone into selling insurance. If the NBA wasn't so lucrative, he probably never would have reached the pinnacle of his abilities. Don't expect Michael Jordan to come from Siberia, and don't expect Bach to arise from the murky depths of Adult Contemporary.
And if it is true that all the harmonic and melodic possibilities of flamenco are exhausted, why, we'll have to expand flamenco to add to the possible numbers of permutations.
But...but then you might have to add...more chords...and flamenco wouldn't sound like Nino Ricardo anymore... and then we'd lose most of our baby boomer audience!
Guys, don't take me too seriously here!
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Date Aug. 29 2003 21:02:26
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Jim Opfer
Posts: 1876
Joined: Jul. 19 2003
From: Glasgow, Scotland.
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Ron.M)
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Ron,
I'm sure Paco Pena has formalize things. I guess that would have been a must for him, given Rotterdam and all he has achieved there. I understand that the course requires each guitarist to be fully conversant in musical theory and to write music.
When I went to Cordoba in 1990, I remember him shouting over to me when he noticed that I had my finger on the wrong fret, sometimes the din from all those guitars was deafening and you couldn't hear the sound from your own guitar, he shouted:
'It's A, on A'
I couldn't hear so I shouted back
'what the 4th?'
and he replied
'No A, the 5th?'
Like you Ron, I don't have any formal training and playing by ear, I tend to discover things on the guitar, and whilst I can't put a name to the chord, I do know however, that if I were really pushed to describe the notes in musical terminology, then I could work it out, but I don't need to.
Cheers
Jim.
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Date Aug. 30 2003 10:01:40
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bailoro2000
Posts: 93
Joined: Jul. 7 2003
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RE: Comments about music - contempor... (in reply to Thomas Whiteley)
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Tom.
Since you invited all comers, here's my two pennyworth (Brit for two cents (-;).
As a non musician, music to me is a sound, a rythmn. My difinition of contemporary is that it was the last in line of a progressive series of names used to describe music, but could well have been used at any period in musical history as it simply means "of that time" Also, as a non-musician, I can only learn rythmns by sound, the way I learned flamenco (what little I know of it)
I hear sounds in modern contemporary music that are the same as sounds you can hear in medieval music. Okay, done in a different way, but that's progressive, another term that could apply to any age as everything is progressive and yesterday's progressive is tomorrows history. Modern music only builds on the past just like anything else.
Someone says something can't be done, someone else takes known factors, shuffles them around and does the impossible: Brubeck's "Take Five" and "African Waltz" are
jazz examples. To stay within a specific frame work you use an existing base and play around with frills for it. 4 times tables can only be that if divisible by four; if it isn't, then it isn't four times tables. Staying with that base is, to me, the reason why flamenco is understandable and definable from other musical forms, waltz, (whatever Dave Brubeck might say, )tango, rumba mambo, jazz or classical.
Contemporary is just a term for today's version of the long established bases with a new set of frills. The word could still be in existence two hundred years from now, but it probably won't because, just like new words appear in dictionares that have no discernable difference from an existing one, someone will want to be "different". The fact that someone wants to add the mating call of a whale or the tinkling of a Tibetan prayer wheel to their music is not really of relevance if the music has no base. It may be called contemporary or new art but, without a definitve rythmn it is just sound.
All just IMO.
Jim.
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Date Aug. 31 2003 22:54:23
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