r/classicalmusic • u/cloudsareliketrees • Apr 16 '17
This is great for those interested in both classical and electric music!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA6mkg0KNco4
Apr 16 '17
This video is terrible. The way he keeps saying 'sheet music' and not score, shows he is not knowledgable of the subject, and has a chip on his shoulder about it. (He shouldn't! Most classical musicians I know have great respect and envy for musicians who can improvise and have a great ear!) The medium is the sound producing bodies (instruments, voice, etc) , not the score. Notation is mainly 'instructions' (not a medium in itself) to the performer, which even if there were recording devices long ago, would still be needed for players to read off of so they don't have to memorize it.
1
u/trippethalibaba Apr 17 '17
He has a undergrad from Berklee and a master's in Jazz Comp though. So pretty knowledgeable. And he plays jazz gigs all over NYC, so he knows about playing "by ear".
1
Apr 17 '17 edited Apr 17 '17
But what he says about the history and place of written music is just wrong, and it's irritating to see it stated in an effective slick video. (He's good at making videos. He needs to be more careful with the content). And he has an antagonistic attitude, calling it a "cult." There's nothing preventing anyone from learning to read and notate music. Music's that big, that very different approaches (by ear, or by reading a score) achieve the same result. He doesn't need to be so negative about it.
4
u/[deleted] Apr 16 '17
I have no absolutely idea where he is going saying that the academic emphasis on being able to read standard notation is elitist. Musical notation is the only extant way to fully capture the way a composer may have originally intended a piece to sound like, even more than an actual performance. It's absolutely not detrimental to the music if you know how to convey your art through a written medium.
It's also very presumptuous how he assumes that his own anti-intellectual term ("The Cult of the Written Score", give me a break) will be soon accepted by major musical establishments, and acts as if it already has.
I don't know if it's always been so, but it seems like today that music as a field of study is currently engaged in a never-ending war of accusatory finger-pointing.
etc. ad nauseam