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Old 02-03-2013, 03:53 AM   #2232
yep
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by northern View Post
...I'm sure that there are lot of people who haven't study any music theory, but they still love complex pieces of classical music. And if you go to gig of progressive metal band, audience is jumping around and headbangin to those 7/8 riffs. Even those songs will probably not be played in parties...
There are two components to making good music: the ghost and the machine.

The ghost in the machine cannot make better music than the machine is capable of. A three-chord genius will be forever limited. Mozart's Requiem or Beethoven's Ninth or Coltrane's "Love Supreme" or Bach's Crab Canon could not have been made by a person whose only musical knowledge was barre-chords and box-scales on guitar. The ghost can only express what the machine can produce, and the machine must be capable enough to produce it.

The machine itself is of little value, except to express what the ghost has to offer. Player-pianos have existed for over a hundred years, and MIDI has been around for 30. If listening to fast scale-runs and technically complicated music were intrinsically enjoyable for its own sake, people would have been listening to high-speed player-piano rolls for the past 100 years.

It is, I think, worse than a false dichotomy to draw a distinction between "technically good" music and "artistically good" music. I submit that there is no such thing as "technically good" music, unless it is also artistically good.

Music is good if it is artistically good. Whether it is technically difficult or complex is irrelevant. Technical proficiency or complexity for its own sake is, at best, a sort of parlor trick, like saying limericks backwards or adding big numbers in your head.

I hope you do not think I am disagreeing with anything you have said. I don't, I'd say the same to anyone to anyone who said that "all you need is inspiration, it's all just sounds..."

The machine puts a cap on what can be expressed. It's up to the ghost, to give the machine something worth expressing.
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