In 1955...

>In 1955, music critic Henry Pleasants published the hotly debated book "The Agony of Modern Music" in which he put forth the argument that the European symphonic tradition and classical music over the course of the 20th century had ossified and become creatively bankrupt and unlistenable. He argued that jazz was the new classical music and spoke to the needs of modern listeners. "Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for 300 years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through its slag pile." He further developed this critique of contemporary music in Death of a Music?: The Decline of the European Tradition and the Rise of Jazz (1961) and Serious Music and All That Jazz (1969).

Thank God nobody's written a book since then claiming hip-hop is the new classical music.

Attached: henry pleasants.jpg (181x249, 12K)

Is this reverse psychology OP? What are you suggesting?

I mean, it's not wrong. Classical gradually forgot catchy melodies and became more and more experimental and atonal until nobody wanted to listen to it anymore.

^This and fuck Schoenberg.

I'm a classical pleb. Schoenberg's music has been copy and pasted into Star Wars and keeping that in mind is probably the last popular music in the classical vein. How did he kill classical? Legit question.

The music criticism equivalent of those boomer political cartoons making fun of smartphones and Pokemon Go.

He didn’t, the guy you responded to is an idiot. Classical is dead, just like jazz is dead. People don’t listen to it, but it’s not the fault of the composers and musicians. Schoenberg took the only logical step forward when he invented the 12-tone method and composed plenty of beautiful music using it. People like the guy you responded to pretend to sound smart by dismissing all “modern art” with a wave of their hand, without having ever really bothered to engage with it. It’s just another form of the le wrong generation meme.

Just like metal post-80s. Forget having catchy anthems like Breaking The Law, instead it devolved into unlistenable noise like grindcore.

Yeah because maybe the creative possibilities offered by catchy anthems were exhausted

Oh great, another OLD GOOD NEW BAD kinda guy. How original...

Modern classical being only harsh noise is just a meme people use to dismiss a whole genre. You sound like a boring grandpa

Jazz was no more the new classical than hip-hop is the new rock or whatever bullshit Facebook meme you heard. They don't serve the same purpose or have the same goals or compositional methods.

No shit?

Yeah but the goal of all art is transcendence/beauty. Different genres have different methods of achieving that goal, and the guy from OPs quote is just saying that jazz achieves it just as ably as classical, which is a valid point.

Yeah I didn't get the impression that was the argument being made.

seriously, fuck you

I mean, I would argue yeah that the two world wars changed Europe forever and so thoroughly that the classical music tradition as it had existed since the 17th century couldn't survive.

Or fuck Stravinsky.

Music was better when we banged sticks around in caves. Nowadays everything is unlistenable NOISE ruined by poseurs like Bach and Mozart.

Why is it always balding men with glasses that suck so much black cock?

I c wat u did thar.

How do you get pleb filtered by one of the most accessible 20th century composers. I understand not getting Schoenberg or Boulez but Stravinsky user?

Well actually the real irony is that jazz was pop music until the postwar years when it became art music for beatniks so kids couldn't get into it anymore and rock had to take its place.

yeah i guess so

I guess some of the Russian composers like Prokofiev were the last real fling of the melodic classical tradition.

lal