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An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - pbrower2a - 08-01-2021
I just went to a thrift store, and out of curiosity (I no longer have an old-fashioned record-player) and saw LP records that had obviously been donated due to the death of their prior owners. Those discs are obviously from the 1950's or 1960's, so they were bought either by or for GI's or early-wave Silent.
The music was of the musical stars of the era, like Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Patti Page, etc. with some mildly-exotic music associated with Hawaii, Spain, or Latin America. It can remind us of a world no longer in existence, but one that most of us can recall. It now has no constituency.
I'm not saying that it was great music unless one was a GI or early-wave Silent: maybe a bit gimmicky, but otherwise unchallenging. It apparently sold well in the time, as the record labels often suggested that if one liked this record one might also like, with twenty-five other albums mentioned. A reminder: much of it was devotional music. Little was classical. I suppose that classical music was too much a reminder of the Evil Empire heavily associated with Wagnerian bombast.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - Eric the Green - 08-02-2021
(08-01-2021, 06:14 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I just went to a thrift store, and out of curiosity (I no longer have an old-fashioned record-player) and saw LP records that had obviously been donated due to the death of their prior owners. Those discs are obviously from the 1950's or 1960's, so they were bought either by or for GI's or early-wave Silent.
The music was of the musical stars of the era, like Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Patti Page, etc. with some mildly-exotic music associated with Hawaii, Spain, or Latin America. It can remind us of a world no longer in existence, but one that most of us can recall. It now has no constituency.
I'm not saying that it was great music unless one was a GI or early-wave Silent: maybe a bit gimmicky, but otherwise unchallenging. It apparently sold well in the time, as the record labels often suggested that if one liked this record one might also like, with twenty-five other albums mentioned. A reminder: much of it was devotional music. Little was classical. I suppose that classical music was too much a reminder of the Evil Empire heavily associated with Wagnerian bombast.
Actually though, classical music albums outsold pop in that era. Those albums were just in another bin, or maybe another store. I have a lot of them myself left over from my Dad's classical music radio station.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - pbrower2a - 08-02-2021
The demographics for classical music fans has always skewed old, highly-educated (one must be highly-educated to take a dare listening to something so generic in title as "String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K 428 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a work from the 1780's), and economically well-off (which usually goes with the education.
Maybe it is the pop stuff that people donate because it doesn't age well. Also, it may be the people who played music that I thought corny (and still do) that I miss. Nobody is perfect.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - David Horn - 08-02-2021
(08-02-2021, 04:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The demographics for classical music fans has always skewed old, highly-educated (one must be highly-educated to take a dare listening to something so generic in title as "String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K 428 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a work from the 1780's), and economically well-off (which usually goes with the education.
Maybe it is the pop stuff that people donate because it doesn't age well. Also, it may be the people who played music that I thought corny (and still do) that I miss. Nobody is perfect.
I grew up in a town full of immigtrants and their barely US-born offspring. Classical music was common in all age groupds except the youngest. Even there, the Italians still loved opera fromtjhe cradel on.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - pbrower2a - 08-02-2021
(08-02-2021, 05:05 AM)David Horn Wrote:(08-02-2021, 04:13 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The demographics for classical music fans has always skewed old, highly-educated (one must be highly-educated to take a dare listening to something so generic in title as "String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K 428 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a work from the 1780's), and economically well-off (which usually goes with the education.
Maybe it is the pop stuff that people donate because it doesn't age well. Also, it may be the people who played music that I thought corny (and still do) that I miss. Nobody is perfect.
I grew up in a town full of immigtrants and their barely US-born offspring. Classical music was common in all age groupds except the youngest. Even there, the Italians still loved opera from the cradel on.
Yes -- opera is very much a part of the life of the Italian diaspora. As for German-Americans... it is largely country now.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - nguyenivy - 08-04-2021
Something like 80% of my music collection will likely be thought of as worthless for even a single spin decades from now as it was viewed as corny when it debuted let alone now or decades from now. Some of it may sound cool & be pleasant to listen to but is of the type that is relevant only during the era. I guess such is life in a 3T/early 4T? Was most US or European popular music of the prior 3T & early 4T (1910s to early 1930s) similar in this aspect?
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - beechnut79 - 08-04-2021
(08-04-2021, 12:53 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Something like 80% of my music collection will likely be thought of as worthless for even a single spin decades from now as it was viewed as corny when it debuted let alone now or decades from now. Some of it may sound cool & be pleasant to listen to but is of the type that is relevant only during the era. I guess such is life in a 3T/early 4T? Was most US or European popular music of the prior 3T & early 4T (1910s to early 1930s) similar in this aspect?
But when Elvis Presley first appeared on the scene it was widely assumed that in a couple of years folks would be saying things such as “Elvis who? Who in the world is he? Yet his music stood the test of time as well as contemporaries such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Others such as Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich reinvented themselves as country singers. Same goes for icons of the 60s such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Still household names today.
RE: An essay: on visiting the recorded-music zone at a thrift store - pbrower2a - 08-04-2021
(08-04-2021, 12:53 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Something like 80% of my music collection will likely be thought of as worthless for even a single spin decades from now as it was viewed as corny when it debuted let alone now or decades from now. Some of it may sound cool & be pleasant to listen to but is of the type that is relevant only during the era. I guess such is life in a 3T/early 4T? Was most US or European popular music of the prior 3T & early 4T (1910s to early 1930s) similar in this aspect?
As a general rule, pop culture (like much else) from a 3T does not age well. But the music on LP's from the 1950's and 1960's that I noticed was mostly from GI and early-wave performers for people of like age. If 3T pop music gets criticized for being shallow and witless (Barney Google, with his goo-goo-goo-gely eyes"... or "Yes, we have no bananas") or even worse, un-musical (rap will get that treatment), the 1T music that I saw was either too anesthetic, insipid, or corny for current tastes. I doubt that it will be revived. I'm not talking about jazz artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, or John Coltrane. The witty and whimsical will be remembered, often in allusions to the time in cinematic treatments.
Contrast Big Band-era music, which works on multiple aesthetic levels at once, something like Haydn or Mozart.
Maybe GI tastes in pop culture relate to their experiences, especially if in World War II combat. Most had experienced enough strong sensation for multiple lifetimes, and they came to like the bland and "soothing". This was the generation that created Muzak ® and its format as "easy-listening" music which bowdlerized a show tune or recent pop hit into an orchestral arrangement with ethereal strings (the technique for that is to exclude violas whose absence one can hear but that one rarely hears directly in orchestral music) with gimmicky use of non-string instruments. Such music played on radio frequencies on the FM dial, often with the letters "EZ" in the call letters before the radio stations found that few people were listening.
A work such as J S Bach's Mass in B Minor isn't easy listening.