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Old 02-04-2013, 11:00 PM   #2237
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by northern View Post
Well, people HAVE BEEN listening high speed shredding over 100 years. Here is one example (and I'm quite sure it is composed under inspiration, not with calculator):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-OwaHZ1cIg...
I can't believe I'm even responding to this, and what this thread has turned into, but here goes...

- To the point, and even discounting outright stupid or "bad" pop music, how many people are actually listening to that?

- Would that be a better piece of music if it were played twice as fast? four times as fast?

- Isn't there a point at which speed becomes a kind of novelty-act, like watching someone multiply big numbers in his head, or bend over to kiss his own belly-button from between his legs?

Please understand, I am not dismissing the value of virtuosity. But I submit that the piece you linked is artistically inferior to Beethoven's Ninth, Simon+Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", and The Temptations "Can't Get Next To You", all of which are easier to play.

Quote:
some of your advice gave me image that you are saying something like "only nerds will listen too complicated music, but if you want to make REAL music that sounds GOOD, then make really simple songs, because everything else sucks..." with little culminatively said :P
Yeah, you're totally reading that wrong. Moreover, if you think that Paganini's Caprice 1 is more musically, melodically, or harmonically "complicated" than a typical Simon+Garfunkel or Motown track, then you are sorely mistaken. The Paganini piece is fast and difficult to play, but there is nothing complicated about it, you just follow the dots, and most of them are in-key.

Meanwhile, a typical Motown bassline has as many "out" notes as root notes, and "I Can't Get Next to You" is musically all over the map, it's not only changing keys, it's changing scales within the key-changes predictively, to achieve a mostly simple and pentatonic-sounding melody, over multiple rhythmic and key changes.

I would re-phrase your criticism as: "guitar-nerds are the only people who will care about bad music purely because is difficult to play on guitar."

I think Beethoven's Hammerclav Sonata 106, which is almost unplayable, is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Not because of the fact that mistake-free recordings and performances are essentially nonexistent, nor because it is so physically difficult to play, but because it it just so perfectly-realized, that even the mistakes sound good. It makes the piano do things that pianos were never meant to do, it goes from formalized baroque chamber-music to explosions of sound that would make Jimi Hendrix shit his pants, to sparse, post-modern textures straight out of the avant-garde.
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