Why is classical not the most popular genre?
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because most people aren't senile
It doesn't appeal to most people
Because it's not the year 1678 or whatever
It is, considering it exists since Middle Age and is still around. Meanwhile, Blues, Jazz, Rock, Soul etc are all dead and forgotten.
Most people are utterly uninterested in music as a whole.
It can't be. It was the music of the elites back then. Popular music is music for the masses. Where do you think terms such as "pleb", "patrician" and "elitist" came from?
Americas still going through its white guilt phase
It was never the music of the elites, you fool. The composers themselves were most of the time poor during their whole career, also common citizens enjoyed it. Sure, you can say the elite listened to it, but it's no different today. Richfucks listen to (c)rap, for example.
it only appeals to rich white people and pseuds
>It was never the music of the elites, you fool.
Lol. Just pick a history book already.
Why listen to an over hour long classical clusterfuck when you can listen to a 3 minute catchy pop tune sung by a cute girl?
Because it fucks up your brain.
Why would a continent full of brown people feel white guilt
Because it's fundamentally more expensive to produce, make and market due to the great number of members and necessary components to work. The style prevalent in mass media marketing for entertainers also would prove incredibly expensive for every member of the orchestra, or alternatively, there must be a different paradigm designed and engineered for the group to function within society as you and I know it at the moment, and while the internet could provide this in some degree cheaper considering the ability to curate and curtail the viewer of the content, and the content in and of itself-- it still would provide a great struggle to any entertainment group who would own this 'classical' cadre's rights and production. The additional matter is that the music as well would be incredibly expensive on all resources, fiscal and logistic as you must ship the 15~144 members to studio or to venue, which in and of itself is a nightmare already under the current market that 'classical' operates under but would be a different matter all entirely if put onto the budget of a major recording studio. The recording could go smoothly, but I could easily imagine it being far more difficult if time constraints were as pressing as they are in modern commercial music.
The notion would be difficult. is a jackass, people only like what they like because they can actually access it in normal consumer conditions. Reasons for that being , which I couldn't put better myself.
To add, I think it could work in the east considering AKB48 and their other sister groups, but in the West we like a monolith with as few qualities, or if there are, very general qualities to fawn over.
Regarding the whole thing of people being totally uninterested in music, a lot of it has to do with cultural perceptions of music. It might be seen as an obligation for someone in a high school orchestra. It might be seen as a general sound-wash for most people. Very few have the interest in music to sit down and listen to the music and try to follow that soundworld.
>classical is only orchestral
Based retarded.
That's why I used 'classical' in that manner, I really didn't know what you homos were expecting, sorry senpai. I also don't work in a realm that expects me to know the nuances of pre-atomic age music beyond general facts and trivia I've picked up over the years, sorry.
The cultural perception was brought up in my point.
>The style prevalent in mass media marketing for entertainers also would prove incredibly expensive for every member of the orchestra, or alternatively, there must be a different paradigm designed and engineered for the group to function within society(...)
I tried my best m8
Less that, and more with the perception of music as a whole rather than the percepton of the performers. Nonetheless, a lot of people don't care enough about music, and classical music has been reduced to the music of the rich, the pretentious and the prodigies in the public eye. Child prodigies have become borderline maligned for it.
The perception of the music is the perception of the performer in modern pop-- it's a spectacle that entangles the brand, and it's why this kind of music could never be popular. I think you're putting cart before the horse here in why-- you're giving me outputs instead of the thing causing those outputs.
Most people think it's old fashioned, and its not aggressively marketed like popular music, so most people don't even know about it beyond their assumptions (like "its boring" or "its old"), or don't realize new works are always being written
How familiar are Americans with classical?
lol dat shit gay senpai
It's inaccessible
It depends. I've known enough people that know how to play a classical instrument that I could feasibly get a bunch of my friends and set up a small chamber orchestra, but as far as I am aware I'm the only one that goes to classical concerts.
its like anywhere else in the world: if you're in the classical world (a composer, performer, conductor, musicologist, or some kind of classical enthusiast), you're familiar with it. If you're not, you're not.
Could we get Internet-based classical groups? Like Brockhampton or Superorganism except for classical?
Same issue applies. The marketing budget is the largest hurdle. Would have to be in style of AKB48 most likely, all of them would need to be able to sustain their own careers, so to speak. That doesn't exist here in the west-- idol culture is cool as hell for entertainment industry but it doesn't work here.
The main issue would perhaps be the audio quality. You just might be able to do something as a fun project.
cause music got better nigger
Music in general is in a tough place right now. Everyone (besides the top touring acts) is trying to spend the least money for their product. This is across all genres. In classical music, the old great singers got to do studio recordings of operas - now they record a live performance. It saves money. So what if it's not perfect like a studio recording would be, record companies would say.
Classical music as a genre is having its own problems. After the late romantic era that produced some of the most famous classical music we know, there followed a period of desperate experimentation. You got things like atonal music, the prepared piano, the melding of classical music with the most academic/complicated aspects of jazz.
Part of it was the effects of WW1 and WW2. After WW1 classical music took on depressing, darker subjects and the music became less beautiful. Post WW2, experimentation went to a new level, playing with adding electronic elements like tape recordings, and trying to invent new sorts of soundscapes.
Unfortunately none of this produced music that the average person wanted to listen to. Classical music always required more skilled musicians than other genres, and more of them. They were never a money-making venture, historically they had the support of a patron, whether that was royalty, nobility, the rich, or the church. But in the 20th century, classical music became even more of a "scholar's artform," becoming less accessible. New compositions were always art first, entertainment was rarely a priority.
Today, classical composers have come to an uneasy truce with the past - you have the genres of "neo-classical" and "neo-romantic" to describe operas and works that don't sound completely horrible, but don't have any memorable melodies.
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Go listen to Pavarotti sing "La donna e mobile." Modern classical music has nothing that immediately catchy. Basically, in the 20th century there was the idea that classical music must always move forward, break new ground, lead the way for music as a whole. Find new soundscapes, new forms. They searched and searched, then realized they went too far. But they're too proud to go all the way back to the older classical music styles, so they take bits of romantic, classical, or baroque music and then ruin it with modern stylings instead. In the classical world, there is a stigma against being a "popular music" composer. Leonard Bernstein (composer of West Side Story, Candide) famously suffered under this stigma.
Also, most classical music survives partly off of donations and government funding/grants. Those are all being reduced or eliminated as the older generation dies off and people in government decide that culture doesn't need funding.
Oh, one last USA-centric bit. We don't have a true tradition of classical music here. Our tradition of classical music is a sort of emulation of the real European tradition. Look at the way the Metropolitan Opera (the largest opera company in the US) started - because an american nouveau riche lady wanted to have her own private box at the opera, but couldn't get one at the older New York opera because the old rich people kept her out. It wasn't about love of the opera, it was about being seen as high class. This is to say, our classical music tradition doesn't have a strong cultural foundation like Europe's does.
So basically, we've got problems.
It is a general fact that there's tons of classical music from every era of classical music that's on piano and nothing else
because of Schoenberg and his followers
the classical music of the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s is still popular
the issue is they reached a wall, they couldnt find a way to progress, to do something new, so the route they took was horrible atonal music that almost nobody enjoys, many people can't even recognize it as real music.
But the problem was real. Modern movie soundtracks are still romantic inspired music that could have been classical music of the early 1900s. Nothing new that is also enjoyable has been discovered.
As a genre, classical music, has been exhausted.
When people copy a handful of people from the past and refuse to enjoy anything new on principle, things start to stagnate.
I don't believe everything modern is bad, even atonal music, not in a pretentious conceptual way.
The economic factor definitely has some truth to it. It's why the rock genre was so big for so long because a handful of musicians with amplified guitar/bass/drums is far more economically and logistically easier to take care of than an entire orchestra. Now we have Digital Audio Workstations that are even cheaper than the rock band's equipment while offering even more variety in sounds so now rock genre is falling off while music made on DAWs is thriving.
But I also think that current examples of classical music over the centuries also really show that the music is extremely long winded for today's audience. Today's forms of entertainment is competing with tons of other, easily accessible things. This is often confused as the modern generation being more ADHD inherently when it's just the fact that if something doesn't immediately get someone's attention, they'll find something else that will.
By "popular" you mean, excluding a few portions of some movements, enjoyed in depth by a few percentage points of the population. Classical music requires too much investment with uncertain pay-off for most people, therefore they don't bother. Their reaction is similar to yours for Schoenberg and everything after WWI or whatever is your arbitrary cut-off.
Not until the mid to late 19th century was it common, and even then it was a strictly bourgeoisie phenomenon.
Not enough synths
by popular and early 1900s I mean stuff like Mahler or Rachmaninov or even Prokofiev.
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these obviously aren't popular, as in, well known, but I think most people who never heard them could and would enjoy them
objectively wrong
Long post guy here again, I never said anything about it being bad, but modern classical music has overemphasized "art" (and in opera, "making a statement") over the pleasure and entertainment of the listener.
Look at an older opera like Faust by Gounod. The characters go through terrible things and everyone loses. Yet there are moments of beauty, and music that is a pleasure to listen to. "Entertainment," that can be optional, but there's a reason that La Boheme is one of the most performed operas in the world - even if it's a tragic story, there are moments of levity, humanity, and beauty throughout. There is a loose formula here to create a work that people resonate with, and modern opera has lost it. I went to a modern opera not long ago where for one aria (a solo song) the composer wrote something that was almost memorable. As if the composer was saying to the audience, "look, I could make beautiful music if I wanted to." That's the sad state of things.
I don't need classical music to fully go back to the romantic style, but composers will eventually have to get their egos under control and compose something people want to hear. The respect of scholars and academics for one's music (see Schoenberg) isn't enough justification. There are still ways to innovate, ways to be clever and produce unexpected sounds or soundscapes. But the compromises made in the last 20 years that I mentioned before (neo-classical and neo-romantic) are not enough.
melodies with words are more memorable and actually people have been listening to music that resembles the song format (i.e. folk musics) for far longer than people have been listening to music that resembles european classical music
the song is the most natural and superior form of not just music but literature as well
*tips monochord*
IN FACT EUROPEAN ART MUSIC WAS DESTROYED BY AUTISTIC ANAL RETENTIVE G*RMANS LIKE BOG AND P*ATHOVEN AS WELL AS THE INTRODUCTION OF THE SATANIC EQ'AL TEMPERAMENT, NO DOUBT COOKED UP BY MASONS TO FURTHER ALIENATE THE EUROPEAN MAN FURTHER FROM THE NATURAL ARTS OF RHETORIC AND POETIC DECLAMATION. VOICE AND ACCOMPANIMENT, NOT HARMONY AND COUNTERPOINT OK, PRAISE PYTHAGORAS
Like I said, not all modern music is unpleasant to listen to. I don't think classical music is unpopular because of the content, but because non-classical music is much more accessible. For classical music to be "popular" again, I feel like it would have to become something that it isn't. There's already neo-classical-whatever music in movies/tv and video games that people enjoy.
I'm going to need some examples. Movie/TV music is in the worst state it's been in in practically the entire history of the medium. Directors are not interested in working with composers who have their own ideas, they want something they've already heard elsewhere, and it's always to be in the background, simply supporting the visuals in the most basic of ways. A sad scene, get the generic sad music ready. A horror scene, an action scene... directors by and large no longer care about incorporating the music into their film as an equal partner or editing to it. Plenty of movie composers have talked about this.
Video game music is also in the sorriest state it's ever been in. I used to be into video game music. I was the guy who would torrent and manually download from sites that were hosting bits of video game OSTs, Doujin versions, arrangements, etc. I would manually label each track so it'd display correctly in my iTunes (fuck iTunes) library. Video game music outside of the indie scene has also grown extremely stale, relegated to generic background mood music. I was never a huge fan of the Halo OST besides a few songs, but it had a recognizable soundscape and identity. That you can tell which game the soundtrack is from is now about the best that can be said for a non-indie video game. Maybe a game will have one boss fight track that stands out. There are few exceptions, but a major one is Nintendo games.
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Let me stop ranting though - modern classical music isn't always unpleasant to listen to. It's that it's not nearly as pleasant as it could be, evidenced by shared characteristics of the most popular operas in the world. I also don't think accessibility is as much a problem as you think. People are happy to consume long-form media (podcasts, movies, binge-watching TV shows), but they have to be interested. Many people aren't even aware of what they're missing, that's part of the problem. Then it's a matter of showing them the right classical repertoire.
classical is insanely popular, it's just that it now exists as the background music in an dramatic scene for a superhero movie.
A big part of Game Alf Thrones’ popularity comes from its score.
Zimmers’ work on Interstellar and Blade Runner where interesting approaches to granularity controlling drony electronic sounds is pretty cool.
The Hotline Miami games’ OSTs were huge in some of the trends even outside video games music.
The Nier games have their own very stylish approach of vocals driven neoclassical that’s been praised a lot.
cant find the words to describe my moderate admiration for your post, i've also read about this man's wacky theories of music
IMO these are exceptions. Zimmer is one of the composers I was thinking of when I said composers have complained about how it is in the business now. Game of Thrones has an alright theme song, yes. Indie game has indie OST. Nier is an oddity.
I don't mean to shoot you down here, there are certainly exceptions. But I do believe I'm generally correct.
>It was never the music of the elites
remind me where Haydn worked again
But te complaint makes no sense as temp tracks used in film have been a thing for a long as shit time now. I just think this is an extension of lewronggenerationism spouted by old fats and immature teenagers. If you want good shit you can find good shit.
My favorite composer is modern, Morton Feldman. Very calm, meditative, but interesting music (not the easiest to listen to, I admit, but not harsh on the ears).
Minimalist composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
If you want opera, Berg's Wozzeck may be my favorite opera of all time, and he's one of the dreaded Second Viennese School. Also his Violin Concerto is fairly well liked.
Some of my non-musical friends and family members have liked the music listed about, Hell, my mom loved a performance of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps we went to.
And I referred to movie music as an example of classical-gone-popular. It's not the same, but that's how it appeals to the masses. Most people know classical music as the little clips that accentuate movies and tv shows, they're not seeking out art music.
As for video game music, I do love Jeremy Soule's music (composer for The Elder Scrolls).
The temp track ends up dictating so much of the final composition that it ends up sounding like the temp. My understanding is that movie editors would use the temp track for a rough cut, then redo and change as needed for the final composition. Now the temp track edit is the edit, and the final composition has to fit into it perfectly.
If you haven't seen it, this is a good video on the subject. youtube.com
One can always find good shit, but there's less of it in the mainstream now, that's all.
From the first 3 names you give, it sounds like you like music with a more ambient style - with this preference, the current state of music in video games and movies likely appeals more to you than I.
Wozzeck is fine, but it's a novelty. One atonal opera was enough to get the point across.
If one goes in with an open mind, one can find something to like in modern classical music. But if I was taking a skeptical first timer to the opera, I wouldn't start with Wozzeck or Nixon in China. The thing with all music is it's the people who perform it that really grow to like it the most. I liken it to Stockholm Syndrome... you'll eventually find something to like in a piece if you practice it and immerse yourself in it enough. Out of necessity, at worst.
Unfortunately, the audience rarely hears it more than once, so that privilege only goes to the performers.
>because of Schoenberg and his followers
Overall terrible, uneducated and biased shitty opinion. Try again.
Because it isn't the 19th Century anymore and people enjoy dancing and singing along to far more rhythmic music.
>scans thread
Yikes, the autism is spreading around here.
Because most people don't have the time, passion, mental capacity, attention span and/or musical knowledge (prerequisite in many cases to "get" classical music) to listen to Beethoven doodling with motive development and creating thick ass structures for 45 minutes or to Scriabin's colourful equalising of harmony and melody (ultimately playing the same notes over and over) for 20 minutes, or God forbid, a religious vocal work with confusing multiple layered polyphonic lines.
Our current consumerist society doesn't have time for art; everything has to be fast and compact.
>Now we have Digital Audio Workstations that are even cheaper than the rock band's equipment while offering even more variety in sounds so now rock genre is falling off while music made on DAWs is thriving.
Fuck off bleepfag.
>dancing and singing along
Truly the pinnacle of human expression, eh?
>far more rhythmic music
More rhythmic how and in what way lmao? A pop song is literally the same rhythm/beat for 3 minutes and then you're done. And if you compare a thousand pop songs you'll see very little deviation between them. There is ZERO rhythmic expression or development in the majority of pop music whereas classical is full of it, especially after the late romantic era.
>because of Schoenberg and his followers
You absolute fucking mong
>Our current consumerist society doesn't have time for art; everything has to be fast and compact.
I feel that's where Christgau consistently got it wrong about metal and prog. Living in a fast-paced city environment, he never grasped why a bored teenager in Indiana would find listening to a 20 minute drum solo while smoking weed cool. There just wasn't a lot for rural and suburban people to do back then.
based partchposting
He probably thinks of music as a straight linear line (not a complex process, wtf are you smoking) where there was once beautiful music and then Schoenberg (one man alone) came along and said NO and now everything's suddenly ugly. If you limit your uneducated and illiterate worldview in such a way, it's easy to point at the baddies and imagine what they did wrong and at the same time seeming intelligent and thoughtful to the people who've never heard a note of music older than 50 years, whereas you're objectively a fucking dumbass with an agenda. Sad reality, really.
>Classical music always required more skilled musicians than other genres, and more of them. They were never a money-making venture, historically they had the support of a patron, whether that was royalty, nobility, the rich, or the church.
Mozart tried to go it alone without an aristocratic patron and suffered from it, which contributed to his death at 31.
You make a good point.
That's a very misleading thought about Mozart's health. He actually made it after going solo, he just had severe gambling and money problems and his health was bad his whole life. His death is a bit of a mystery.
Classical music is really more of a European thing anyway.
Wagner, now he spent money like crazy and always had huge debts, he just got lucky that the Bavarian king was an insane fanboy willing to spend 75% of the state budget on his music projects.
The vast majority of people don't care about being "patrician", and that's not what the OP was asking.
More rhythmic as in the rhythm is far more emphasized in the music.
Both of these points are common sense and really didn't need your retarded follow up questions.
Nobody ITT mentioned "patrician" yet here you are somehow making a comment on it.
>More rhythmic as in the rhythm is far more emphasized in the music.
Well that doesn't mean "more rhythmic". The latter would imply some sort of interesting rhythmic patterns, development and expression. It is emphasized but it's ultimately just so that people can dance to it because it's repetitive and simple. It's a carpet.
>common sense
Being on the left side of the Dunning-Kruger does not constitute common sense, buddy.
>Mozart tried to go it alone without an aristocratic patron and suffered from it, which contributed to his death at 31.
He died at 35.
Schubert died at 31.
Lowest common denominator.