01-12-2022, 12:27 PM
Here's part of the problem:
I listen to some of the pop music and I think that I could write a better tune. OK, I have been binge-listening to Mozart piano concertos, so you can imagine what I would come up with. It would be tonal (I will be convinced of the merits of twelve-tone music when I hear a twelve-tone piece of folk music. I expect to see a real mermaid first.
The tune definitely bounces around the staff, so it would ill suit any one-note wonders. Tough! To be sure, repeated notes can bring powerful rhythm and allow some witty accompaniment in words... Antônio Jobim got away with that, but he was very clever at it, and ostinato accompaniment offers powerful rhythm for Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps .(1913 -- why am I treating a work from 109 years ago as "modern"?)
Oddly, in one of the aforesaid concertos I notice Mozart having stolen a tune... from a bird. Of course Mozart does some clever variation that pop songwriters rarely do. Think about it... a bird can come up with a better tune than some of our supposedly-successful songwriters.
I listen to some of the pop music and I think that I could write a better tune. OK, I have been binge-listening to Mozart piano concertos, so you can imagine what I would come up with. It would be tonal (I will be convinced of the merits of twelve-tone music when I hear a twelve-tone piece of folk music. I expect to see a real mermaid first.
The tune definitely bounces around the staff, so it would ill suit any one-note wonders. Tough! To be sure, repeated notes can bring powerful rhythm and allow some witty accompaniment in words... Antônio Jobim got away with that, but he was very clever at it, and ostinato accompaniment offers powerful rhythm for Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps .(1913 -- why am I treating a work from 109 years ago as "modern"?)
Oddly, in one of the aforesaid concertos I notice Mozart having stolen a tune... from a bird. Of course Mozart does some clever variation that pop songwriters rarely do. Think about it... a bird can come up with a better tune than some of our supposedly-successful songwriters.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.