Dennis Prager has stated many times the best new Classical music today are movie soundtracks. You still can hear music composed for movies as if Schoenberg never lived with melody, harmony, and embracing the full spectrum of human emotions. As long as current composers outside the movies still are composing atonal and 12 tone pieces the public will not give a damn.
Exactly correct. I played in the orchestra in college but I left after hearing our star violinist practice on her own. She was on scholarship from Mexico City and she was wonderful.
After hearing her own creations I could no longer stomach watching them cram her into a cage and force her to perform nothing but 500 year old compositions. It wasn’t music, it was cruelty.
Most of it sounds like Romantic era to me, focused on single emotional themes rather than complex tunes.
Some here of a certain age may recall the 1967 movie "Elvira Madigan," a somewhat pretentious Swedish art film that became a huge, and unexpected hit here in the US. The entire score was of Mozart's music..I think one of his piano concertos, and the album also became a bit hit..people who had no idea who/what Mozart was loved the score..
I think the cassette, later the CD, marked the beginning of the end for classical music. In the 60's you could go into an record store, and they'd have hundreds, if not thousands of classical vinyl. At one time I had nearly 200 of the DGG albums. The math of the music industry today makes that impossible.
Across the country, lots of symphony orchestras are struggling, if not already died off. If they could find a way to lower prices, and attract a younger crowd..you might revive interest.
It was movie soundtracks that got me into classical music. I collected many soundtrack LPs, and got used to the sound of an orchestra. Some soundtracks actually included classical pieces. From that, it was a small jump to listening to and collecting classical music recordings.
Totally agree with Prager, thanks for posting.
Live365 - Cinemix streams high quality soundtracks 24/7 with few to no interruptions. I listen mostly in bed, helps me sleep.
Totally agree with Prager, thanks for posting.
Live365 - Cinemix streams high quality soundtracks 24/7 with few to no interruptions. I listen mostly in bed, helps me sleep.
With respect to Dennis Prager (whom I read with appreciation), I figured out that film scores (inherently programmatic) were the modern equivalent of classical music - in the broad versus period sense - as a child of ten; this was long before I developed a significant appreciation for any music, especially classical: Like it or not, film scores generally made sense to me, as did true classical music; atonal “classical” music was literally nonsensical in that it was purely arbitrary, without any anchor to attach it to the human mind or soul.
After I was laid off and returned to school (c. 2000), I studied music at first a college and then a university. I knew what to expect philosophically/politically, but it was even worse than my expectation.
I knowingly made the mistake of opining this very thing (i.e., that film scores are the modern classical music) to the ranking music history professor; he, a confirmed leftist with an apparent homoerotic agenda, categorically dismissed my assertion without discussion.
The Babylonians had a seven-tone “major” scale; it is natural to the human being. This is just one more way in which leftists virulently hate and aggressively attack inherently human dispositions.
Schoenberg was philosophically akin to Marx and Nietsche: A nihilist who hated truth and beauty, and wanted to subvert both.
Before Stravinsky, the public wanted to hear the latest/newest classical music, for it had the fundamental elements of music: melody, harmony, rhythm, in ever-renewed combinations, producing a specific ‘affect’ (emotional effect); in other words, it was music with purpose and meaning. (Tchaikovsky, a melodic genius, was beloved in America more than in Russia!).
After Stravinsky and his successors, the public suddenly wanted to hear “old” classical music. The resurgence of Bach, Telemann, et cetera, is largely a 20th Century phenomenon, due to the ascendancy of atonal/serial music, and not just due to the development of recording technology.
I recommend the book, Dionysus Rising, by E. Michael Jones:
I think an excellent example of this is the first Hunger Games soundtrack: I consider this the best combination of film score [James Newton Howard] and pop music [The Civil Wars, et al] I have ever heard, and I won both albums. The music all seamlessly blends with the cinematic material, and enhances its emotional effect.
I've read a number of statements from supposedly classical composers who've expressed their irritation at what they called "accessible" music. I guess accessible music is music the public likes. You know like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky all those cruddy composers who wrote music the public liked.
So these musical morons were admitting they only composed "music" they liked...which was frequently atonal and full of dissidence.