This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.” There are a million metrics by which we might try to measure it, but well… that’s just not how art works. Thinking this way indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of what art is.
Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.” And pretty much any arbitrary “1000 best” list is not going to take that into account.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)
You don't need to rank strictly and linearly. An objective ordering need not exist. It's enough to see that on shortlists of "great" works, common themes emerge. Is The Great Gatsby better than The Catcher in the Rye? It doesn't matter. They both come with universal acclaim, and that's stiff competition for anything new. Besides, are great works not promoted as being timelessly relevant to the state of the world?
And I loved Catcher in the Rye, but not so much The Great Gatsby. I've found this "shortlist" of classics that have universal acclaim has always been hit or miss for me. The classics I was assigned to read in high school would seem to lurch from riveting to a slog to get thorough. I don't blame the books, it's just what captures my particular interest. Given that, I have never really used "the classics" as a guarantee that I will find the reading fulfilling over other, more obscure, recommendations that I may receive, whether they be old books or new.
I've felt this before. A librarian taught me a trick: chug the book. You were probably trained to really analyze what you're reading, look for symbolism, etc, but you can enjoy a book as almost an emotional-sensory experience instead.
I read both twice, once in high school and again a few years after I graduated (this was over 15 years ago). I loved The Great Gatsby even more (that opening first page is magnificent), and couldn't help but feel like The Catcher in the Rye as being so incredibly naive and juvenile. The latter experience is similar to reading (or watching) Fight Club and thinking Tyler Durden is a hero of sorts and something to aspire to, which is not the ultimate lesson.
Stan Lee made a comic about how he and his co-workers made comics, and in one frame he says something like "How dare it he say it is hackneyed? I stole it from the best classic I could find!" That is, if superhero movies sell today, stories about Hercules and Theseus sold 2500 years ago.
Parent's point is not some abstract personal value problem.
Think about public libraries. They have limited space and budget, and already abundantly hold loved classics. They'll still take in some amount of new books, but when a 8 yo kid goes in to decide what to read, the vast majority will be older books.
I visit libraries wherever I go and that's not true anymore, outside of university libraries. The average municipal/county library is almost entirely books published in the past 15 years. Most classics have to be procured through ILL, if they're even available then.
> That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way.
As someone who grew up on Looney Tunes and the like, I absolutely start humming and making up words to classical music far more often than anything from this century.
I would love to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play the classical music in "What's Opera, Doc?" and other Looney Tunes classics. Saw them do that with The Godfather and a couple other full-length films which was great.
>This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
Not at all. The only assumption the OP needs is that old media can still appeal to modern people, at which point quantity and accessibility may give it a certain advantage.
> This is all built on an assumption that arts/media can all be strictly ranked “best” to “worst.”
No it isn't. It's just based on the objectively true assumption that contemporary fiction is competing with all fiction ever written.
It absolutely doesn't have to be the case that people buy more classics because the classics are objectively better. (Although that is, in fact, he case).
Art has no objective measure. I cannot stand classical music because it has very little rhythm and emotion compared to the other, more modern music I listen to. Does that make classical music worse? No.
Just because something may have been popular in the past and is now seen as "smart" e.g. the opera, books, classical music, painting, does not make it better than what's popular now, e.g. television, video games, and rhythmic music.
If anything I'd argue art has gotten significantly better and more advanced over the years. I don't play many video games but the combination of visual, auditory, interactivity, and storytelling still blows me away.
Art is indeed subjective, but saying classical music has no emotion is a pretty controversial opinion. I've wept from plenty of classical symphonies and don't know much about the genre. A lot of movies just aren't the same without some Hans Zimmerman or John Williams.
Unless you're listening to extremely niche heavy metal, electronica, or the kind of jazz that they don't play on the radio you aren't listen to anything with the skill and complexity of classical. And the people who do also show up to new music.
I don't think there is any video game that comes close in depth to the Ring Cycle.
I’d add to that that classical music was made at a time recording and listening whatever you want, whenever and wherever, wasn’t a thing.
Many pieces were intended as a whole, and optimised for specific settings.
I’ve long thought I wasn’t an opera person. I listened to pieces of some on my iPod, or on the tv in music class in school. Then, years later, some friend told me he had extra tickets for the opera.
It hit very, very differently. It is likely the experiences I had gone through since school helped the opera’s theme and songs resonate with me. But I’m pretty sure listening and witnessing it, from beginning to end, in a room carefully crafted for this specific purpose and left little room for distractions contributed immensely.
I thought you were going to link to the incessant ominous col legno (hitting the strings with the stick of the bow) at the start of Holst's Mars for rhythm, so please allow me to add that one to the list.
All of this is immensely subjective. The pieces presented were utterly bland to me, bordering on the unlistenable. This is obviously not due to a lack of quality for they have plenty, but they register as little more than noise to my brain; to which i prefer silence...
That would be emotion to _you_, not to me. You've also missed this point:
> compared to the other, more modern music I listen to.
Additionally, complexity is not an accurate measure of how "good" art is. But if you want to argue about complexity - and this would mean total complexity, not just sheer storytelling complexity, an easy refute to your point is GTA V, which is arguably one of the most complex pieces of art ever made.
I guess anything is arguable, but I think it would be pretty difficult to make a very good argument that GTA V is one of the most complex pieces of art ever made. I mean, first we’d have to define a piece of art, then we’d have to define what it “complexity” means in that context…
Eh, he’s right though. You could get sidetracked quibbling about the edges of the definitions, or you could just use their centers and see that there obviously are some modern works of art that are immense team efforts and substantially justify the label of “one of the most complex pieces of art ever”.
Depends what we mean by better. If you prefer rock music to Bach then great. Enjoy! I love popular music and classical for different reasons
But if we're talking skill, intellectual depth, craft, then there are objective criteria. Take Bach, his music is like a masterpiece of engineering with its unparalleled compositional complexity and craftsmanship. His mastery of counterpoint being but one example. His work represents a pinnacle of musical architecture, establishing foundational principles that profoundly influenced centuries of Western music.
That just doesn't compare to most pop music does it?
Counterpoint is cool, but a lot of the time is carries the emotional weight of listening to someone solve sudoku.
Objectively, Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling you get when you drink too much and get kicked out of the party (a foundational principal of Country Western music)
> Bach lacks the skill and emotional depth to write a song about that lonely feeling
For a wide range of such feelings, some can regard as "lonely", as they develop, achieve a triumph, a catharsis, and finally a recapitulation and a comforting, secure resolution -- communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion, i.e., art.
Sure you don't have an objective best to worst, but I'm sure that most serious listeners will venture to music from all kind of eras and cultures.
I find that it's much harder ( than visual art ) to say "I don't like this" and more "This sounds really fun but I can't budget time to listen to this kind music".
She's a good pop musician. No need to be snarky just because she might not be your thing. Comments on HM tend to put down popular music / art / whatever for the sole reason of having some kind of pop sensibility
So, with the definition of art as the
"communication, interpretation of human
experience, emotion" what I saw in those
two pieces was that they were intended for
some teen girls and young women -- single,
lonely, generally afraid of their
circumstances, don't understand what they
see of reality, eager for sex but afraid
of it, lost, i.e., missing any good
cultural, social, or intellectual
foundation for understanding reality or
facing life, ....
So in the music, the costumes and stage
shows are rapidly changing, outrageous,
meaningless, fantasy, scary, i.e., are
communication, interpretation of those
women's experience, emotions, rapidly
changing, outrageous ....
In simple terms, those women have
circumstances that yield strong emotions
that the music communicates.
"Communicates"? Why? As common, to the
audience comfortingly confirms that they
are not alone and instead like many
others.
How could this be? In the past the women
lived in a culture based on strong social,
practical, economic, religious, parenting
forces. Now (1) for millions of those
women the culture is weak or gone and (2)
the Internet permits getting confirming,
reinforcing communication, interpretation
of their scary circumstances from the loss
of the culture.
In short, the music really is
communication, interpretation of the
experience and emotions of those women.
To me it seems that Taylor Swift did much
the same, i.e., similar audience, but
Chappell Roan is stronger, louder, more
outrageous for an audience with stronger
emotions.
As a young man, the teen girls I knew,
right, had the anxieties from their
circumstances but much more constrained
and less scary than now.
The music, for me, a man: Get rid of the
sets, costumes, dancing, and words and
take just the background music (a lot of
drum beating) and the singing. In places,
the singing is pretty good, i.e.,
expressive, but really the singing, as
art, is all nearly the same, that is, the
same vocal content for the same
communication, interpretation of
experience and emotion.
I expect that even the current devoted
audience will soon, a year or so, give up
on the current Chappell Roan -- for a
cruel joke, "A one trick pony.".
From Vivaldi and Bach through Beethoven
and Brahms ... Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ...,
Barber there is a lot of effective
communication, interpretation of a wide
range of experiences, emotions, that is,
really good art.
For level 101, a major key is glad and a
minor key, sad. Then changing keys,
selected chords within keys, pitch,
volume, variety of sounds from the variety
of instruments, combinations, ..., give a
lot more tools for expression than used by
Chappell Roan and, thus, permit a lot more
music, art.
Next, the tools were just means, and Bach,
Wagner, Tchaikowsky, ..., were really good
in the artistic content, that is, again,
communication, interpretation of human
experience emotion.
Yeah this is ridiculous. One of the songs you posted has a key change so if you're saying a key change is fundamental for expression you're clearly not listening hard enough. You also didn't do a great job trying to explain the appeal of it, likely because you don't like it, as you will never be able to capture the fire like someone who does, so it just comes across as condescending. As well, likening her to "Taylor Swift but Louder" further shows your lack of knowledge about pop theory and history.
The rapidly moving pace of the music and performances in those two performances (2 of her hits, of course they're intense) is because she believes those were the more interesting/economical choices at the time. any inferences you make about the women who listen to it are purely based on your personal idea of what you decide women are thinking about on a given day.
Taylor Swift did well understanding the emotions of teen girls, so well that lots of teen girls, not just in the US, begged their fathers and got ~$1000 for a ticket to a Swift concert, and Swift ended up worth ~$1 billion.
It also helped that with good makeup and a good photographer, she had one of the prettiest faces of any human female. She also had a near perfect figure. So, her audience could identify with those. Likely even more important, were her stories of love gained/lost.
I'm a man and so don't much like Swift's art, but the ~$1 billion got me to try to explain her success.
For any men here slow to figure this out and take it seriously, a lot of teen girls and young women have some strong emotions, and art that communicates and interprets those emotions to those teens/women can be very welcome, so welcome to generate ~$1 billion.
I did spend enough time with teen girls and young women to understand a little about their strong emotions.
On key changes in music, the Bach piece in the URL I gave starts in D minor, has central section on D major, and has the final third a lot like the first section and also in D minor.
When I was playing it on violin, I liked the D major section the best. There are some triplets, and I played them insistently, maybe not the best interpretation -- the URL doesn't do that. Maybe I tried the interpretation from a Heifetz performance.
The piece is also sometimes played on guitar. Waiting for a concert to start, a guitarist sat next to composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and said "The Bach Chaconne sure is difficult to play." The composer, a man of few words, said nothing until the end of the concert and then replied "The Bach Chaconne is the greatest piece of music ever written."
Oh, the URL I gave is a full orchestra arrangement of the Chaconne.
If pop music is that good, I'll be glad to listen to it!
> Probably one of the most important metrics is “relevance to, and effect on, the state of the world as it is right now.”
Actually, no! It's more of “relevance to the state of the world as it was right then, and as it is right now, and that teaches you that we are not living in bizarre times, but then we just don't know enough about ourselves as a society and we keep committing the same errors.”
The fact that you can belt out Chappel Roan drunk is pretty much an objective assessment of its "worse'ness." Beethoven takes many years of dedicated practice to be able to achieve and you would have to be very skilled to perform it drunk.
Man, you should go to an open air classical concert in Europe sometime.
Sure we are just quietly getting shitfaced for most of it but if they play Ode to Joy you can be certain that the 10000 drunks in Waldbühne will belt it.
Also not Beethoven but I'm pretty sure some violins will get broken if they don't play Berliner Luft here in town.
Like how it's probably law in the UK that any classical concert with a large crowd in attendance must end with Jerusalem for a good ol singalong, or else they tar and feather the conductor.
I can belt out (and am known to occasionally do so when walking home from the pub solo) Ein Schwan by Grieg (in the German, didn't learn the Norwegian version) and Ave Verum Corpus by Byrd while drunk, so you're saying these two pieces suck?
(I also like to throw the occasional Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis to mix it up. As you can tell, I'm a reformed choir boy. Oh, and Jerusalem by Parry/Blake is custom designed for drunken singalongs.)
I beg you to listen to the first two pieces and perhaps reconsider your chosen metric.
A friend of the family gave my son a guitar a while back and more recently tried to get him to play Sugar Mountain by Neil Young. He worked at it pretty hard and struggled with it because even though it is simple it has to be played with great precision to sound good. Then he discovered grunge and bar chords and had a breakthrough with The Day I Tried to Live by Soundgarden and Rooster by Alice in Chains.
Now he's looking for good songs he can play and that's gotten him into David Bowie songs from The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For a long time I thought of David Bowie as one of those classically trained musicians like Frank Zappa who played rock because it had commercial potential, but he found many songs on that album to be great songs that were within his reach. Now when we have houseguests who say they like Rush he will be able to play the chorus of a few songs in 24 hours and he's building instruments like a Guitar-harp-ukulele (fretless guitar with two bridges, one of which has a harp section) and he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
There is no two octaves below a regular bass guitar. On a 5 string bass, the lowest string is B0 in standard tuning, coming in at 30hz. You can get a long scale length bass and put really chonky strings on it and drop that down as low as E0, which is 20hz, but past that point most people just can't hear the notes anymore.
> he's asking me about the physics to build a bass guitar tuned an octave or two below a regular bass guitar.
I barely know anything about music, and probably less about guitars, but if he can do barre chords, then you can try to build a simple capo with him, since he might readily grasp the utility of having a clamp that essentially gives you another hand on that side of the guitar.
He's been experimenting with clamps, he has one for the fretless guitar section of the guitar-ukulele.
As for the electric quadro- or octo-bass the variables you can tweak are:
* length
* mass/length
* tension
There's some limit to how long you make the strings or you can't play it or otherwise you need something to extend your reach like the levers on the octobass. The other two are inside a square root which is not in your favor. Probably the easy thing to do is find some really heavy strings for a normal bass and see how low you can get the tension.
But really he's the one to build things. Back when I was in physics they kept trying to get me to do experiment rather than theory, if I have any regret it is that if I had studied experiment I'd be able to build all the things that my son wanted to build but, hey, he can build those things now.
Life is the ultimate test. We see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others. There may be nothing more humbling than being confronted with our own ignorance, except when we have an audience.
I guess once the strings are too loose, then they can’t vibrate consistently enough for long enough to be tunable/playable? I am wondering if a kind of lap guitar or a guitar laid flat might allow for pedals to be used that could bisect the strings to do octave changes upward in pitch. Going downward in pitch from an open position is going to be hard unless you have some excess tunable string beyond the last point of contact with the strings, and that contact could be released to increase the string length?.
You might be able to find an 8 string bass, and have two different string gauges. The top four could be heavier gauge and tuned at a lower octave. Or you could alternate gauges and silence the strings? I don’t know much about playing technique, but it sounds like it might be hard to build in such a way so idiomatic playing technique and style is preserved, but many alternate tuning methods and tools do affect how the guitar is played, so that may not be such a big deal if he’s the only one playing it, but if he wants the mechanics to translate to playing other guitars, those concerns might be more relevant.
It might also be possible to teach him how to build simple guitar pedals, which can easily pitch bend in post-processing once you know how the parts fit conceptually together.
Your guitar projects sound interesting and would be a good post for HN if you can find the time.
Get him a multiscale/fanned fret 5 string bass and just size up the gauges. A 37" scale bass trying to hit E0 will need about 0.18ga on the low string to be playable, which will definitely require a nut modification, but is doable.
There was once a company making a bass ukulele with inch-thick polymer strings. Playing them was kind of hilarious, and would be fun to see it scaled up to the size of an actual bass guitar... Probably someone has done it...
I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
It had to be removed from the fair early because it was drawing dangerously large crowds. [1] If art moves people, Comedian was an undeniably literal success.
Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant.
Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
> If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that
I didn't.
> what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus
If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning?
Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
To be clear: I have spent the years to memorize and be able to perform a few Beethoven sonatas (not to mention the years required to even get to that point). I can also play them drunk (though not as cleanly, and wouldn't do that in any paid/professional performance situation). I literally did this sort of thing for a living before deciding to use my CS/Math degree to be able to better provide for my family (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonlatane/).
And none of that makes Beethoven "better" than Chappell Roan. Because there is no objective assessment of "better/worse"ness in art. That's not how art works, or what art is.
On the other had, your inability to correctly spell the name of an influential contemporary artist, with 40+M listeners per month, replying to a comment that did correctly spell her name, is a pretty objective reason to not trust anything you have to say about art (or, perhaps, much else, at least until you address whatever underlying issues/pathologies have you thinking this way).
Perhaps this will offer you some perspective: back when I did music for a living, I often did think this way. I thought most contemporary music was trash if it didn't offer the harmonic or contrapuntal complexity of classical, or even jazz. Really, being a young man from a poor background, I believe it was more a survival instinct (trying to gaslight myself and others into measuring me as "good enough" for gigs). It nearly ruined music for me, though. It required me being dishonest with myself about what I really enjoyed. Letting all that go has been a multi-decade process, and it's made me a much more well-adjusted individual. It also applies in many ways to the software world (as long as you stay out of Google-/Meta-/Oracle-type bigtech misery-inducing rat races).
Precisely the opposite. Rent-seekers eagerly invite comparison for purposes of valuation, and push the lens of art towards technical and political measurements. When a work is incomparable in the way in which it achieves verisimilitude it is escaping this system.
You are basically talking about the part where the system is so broken or rent captured that the only way out is through the bottom. Sure, but that doesn't make it good automatically.
There's art that moves you, or does not move you. That's the measure that matters most in your unique and finite life. You get to choose for yourself what to spend your time on, objectivity be damned.
Is there an article (so you don't have to write an essay) that explains what you mean here? I don't think I'm familiar with the short hand point you're making here. I understand the terms rent seeking and familiar with the argument made in the quote fwiw.
Are you honestly tell me that you would let someone correct you on a matter of taste? That an authority could tell you, "no, you're wrong for enjoying this piece of art. It's bad and you ought to dislike it," and you would obey?
If so, you're a dupe. Trust your own taste. That's the first step to connoisseurship.
That’s why people listen to Chappell Roan, and near-instinctively belt her songs out out after a few drinks, instead of Beethoven symphonies or Mozart operas, even if the latter may be “superior” in nearly every measurable way. Part of art is how it speaks to the listener. In fact… I might argue that that’s all of art, with metrics about it being an entirely different, not-art thing.
(I say all this as a classical musician and senior software engineer with a math background, myself.)