To be regarded as a great artist, one must do impressive things.
I’m not sure. There are many technically impressive artists who don’t become popular because they don’t bring anything new to the table.
My view is closer to Phil’s idea of “novelty”, but with a slight twist. I think art succeeds when it manages to enrich its audience in some new way. Repeating an existing idea usually doesn’t count as much, because you can’t enrich someone in the same way twice, but sometimes you can make an old art style cool again if people have sufficiently forgotten it. I suspect that looking for ideas that would feel “enriching” to today’s audiences (this is admittedly vague) might be more useful than focusing on technique for ten hours a day.
Yes, I think I agree that some degree of novelty is required. (Reductio ad absurdum: A robot that generates copies of Beethoven’s symphonies—by some fancy process that doesn’t explicitly involve copying them, but is none the less guaranteed never to generate anything Beethoven didn’t already write—is generating first-rate music but is also absolutely useless and would not be regarded as any kind of artist.)
But I suggest that the degree of novelty required is fairly small. How valuable would it be to the world if someone were able to write another nine symphonies just as good as Beethoven’s but that don’t enlarge our understanding of music any more than if, say, Beethoven had been able to work twice as fast and lived slightly longer, and had written them as his numbers 1.5, 2.5, …, 9.5? Pretty damn valuable, I think. If someone found the manuscripts of nine other symphonies Beethoven actually did write but for some reason never released to the world, it would be very exciting and I bet there’d be no shortage of performances and audiences. Or: Pick one of Haydn’s 104 symphonies. It probably doesn’t really enlarge the world of music much beyond the other 103, but the world would definitely be poorer for its absence.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called “The Quixote of Pierre Menard”, about a man who rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word. But because he writes it from a modern perspective, it has a different meaning, and is a different work of art. :)
It seems unreasonable to me to suppose that there aren’t already people writing Beethoven-style symphonies as well as Beethoven did. We probably have many times as many composers as talented and as well-trained as Beethoven was. Composers today have recorded music, easy access to scores, synthesizers, all sorts of advantages. And they’ve heard Beethoven. They should be better than Beethoven. My guess is nobody pays any attention to them.
(And if somebody wrote plays today in the style of Shakespeare, and they were as good as Shakespeare’s, I don’t think anyone would publish them. Publishers would laugh at the artificial, overly-stylized language, the monologues, the poetic form, the coincidences, the crude sexual puns. Everything people love about Shakespeare is considered bad writing today.)
Why does it seem unreasonable to suppose that? The space of possible music is not quite Hilbert-space huge, but it’s really, really huge.
So, to produce something like Beethoven, you have to be aiming rather specifically for that.
Very few composers frequently go into another composer’s space and produce great music there. John Williams comes to mind as a good candidate, but he’s not quite Beethoven-level. Why don’t they? Novelty-seeking is an excessive explanation. There is plenty of good stuff left in those veins, but by going there, you’re putting yourself directly up against Beethoven. There is somewhere you could go where you would stand out more. The obvious exception is when you’re trying to fit a particular space due to a program that you didn’t set (which handily explains Williams).
Once musicians have saturated music-space somewhat, you won’t need a specific reason to returning to these spaces. As noted above, that could be a while.
Yeah, Borges’ story is very clever, but part of why it’s funny and intriguing is that in fact no one would react as Borges-pretending-to-be-a-critic-writing-about-Menard does even though there’s an argument of sorts to be made that they should. And, actually, if someone were really able to make a robot that could regenerate Beethoven’s symphonies (but nothing else) from scratch without having the equivalent of the actual symphonies wired in, that would be really interesting. Anyway, we digress.
I don’t think the factors you list give sufficient reason to expect that there are people writing Beethoven-like symphonies as good as Beethoven’s. Countervailing factors:
Most of those people aren’t steeped in the same tradition as Beethoven was; they will (of course) have more exposure to music that came after Beethoven, and less to (most) music that came before, and their training will have been shaped by everything after Beethoven, etc., etc., etc. (They didn’t do as Menard did in the Borges story!) So the music they write will not naturally come out like Beethoven’s.
Most music-creators these days aren’t trying to write Beethoven-like symphonies. The great majority of music-creators these days aren’t even working in the classical tradition; most who are aren’t writing symphonies; most who are aren’t emulating Beethoven. (And I will hazard a guess that the most talented ones are particularly unlikely to be dedicating their talents to emulating Beethoven.)
Everything people love about Shakespeare is considered bad writing today.
Those things aren’t considered bad when Shakespeare does them, nor when other rough contemporaries of his do them (so it’s not just that there’s a special case for Famous Shakespeare). Pinter’s plays are pretty stylized and he won a Nobel prize. There’s a big (albeit ridiculous) monologue in “Waiting for Godot” and no one seems to object. T S Eliot got away with writing a couple of plays in verse and I’m not aware that it harmed his reputation.
It’s perfectly true that most plays these days aren’t written in Shakespeare’s style, but I don’t think it’s because that style is considered bad. It’s just not what people do nowadays.
Yeah, once you’ve been enriched by some art style, you want more of it to recapture the high. That’s what’s happening now with /r/hpmor and also with all the nostalgic game kickstarters. I guess that effect is responsible for most art consumption worldwide. Maybe an artist should decide whether they’re going for “enrich” or “recapture” (or some combination) and plan accordingly.
I think art succeeds when it manages to enrich its audience in some new way.
I think this is right. There is some novelty in the music of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Brahms, but it’s not the great originality that, say, Beethoven was known for. Mozart’s style wasn’t even about finding something old and making it cool again; much of his production was about engaging with the common styles and idioms of the day and adding just enough compelling subtleties to keep his audience interested. Much of modern music works pretty much the same way: top 40 tracks are often dismissed as rehashed and unoriginal, but they all have something interesting about them which helps explain their popularity.
Mozart lived in the middle of neoclassicism. Novelty wasn’t considered very important then. Beethoven’s music was one of the watermarks in the rise of the importance of novelty.
Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don’t miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too. Pop music, like popular literature, doesn’t have the same pressure for novelty. Mainstream pop music today has little stylistic novelty; that gets shunted into sub-genres. A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.
I’d thought the first video was going to be this one!
I’m sympathetic to the idea that pop music is decreasingly original & novel, but these videos are pretty slender evidence for it. The problem with invoking these videos is that they’re sampling on the dependent variable: they pick out small subsets of recent country songs or recent pop songs which go together attention-grabbingly well. But precisely because they go together attention-grabbingly well, they’re very likely unrepresentative of country/pop music as a whole.
(Also, even ignoring the unrepresentative sampling, these videos mainly just mean that particular chord progressions are popular. Comments on the Axis of Awesome video mention how the sketch plays on the fact that I-V-vi-IV is a popular chord progression, which it is. But that speaks only to harmony, not melody or arrangement.)
A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.
Those claims sound likely on first hearing, but I doubt them more as I think about them. It’s easy to have the wrong idea about what charting pop music sounded like in a certain year.
One can think of 1964 and imagine the charts were being revolutionized by a deluge of songs as memorable & novel as “You Really Got Me”, but looking at Billboard’s top 10 singles for 1964, I have a hard time picking out even half a dozen which stand out to me like that. (Admittedly, that’s more than I can pick out from the 1960 chart.)
As for 1990, I surprised myself twice over! After I started thinking to myself along the lines of, “new wave and hip hop were well established by then, and I guess it wasn’t long before grunge became a big deal, so maybe there was a lot from those genres?”, I checkity-checked myself by pulling upBillboard’s 1990 list. When I saw New Kids on the Block, Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, Tom Petty, Aerosmith, I thought, “oh, wow, yeah, right, guess I was wrong”.
But then I looked again and saw more. Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (Wikipedia: “incorporat[ing] dance-pop and industrial music, also using elements of hip-hop and funk rock”); Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend”; Madonna’s “Vogue” (Wikipedia: “a dance-pop and house song with notable disco influence” and “a spoken rap section”); Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” (Wikipedia: “in the style of new jack swing, a late-80s hybrid of R&B and hip hop”); Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart”; UB40′s reggae-fication of The Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do”; and Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple” (Wikipedia: “a unique sound, starting quietly with echoed keyboards and vocals before the main section of the song booms in with a pulsating synth bass, syncopated drum machines, Middle Eastern melodies and opera-like layered vocals”). That last one’s not on YouTube ’cause Prince and his record company are like super picky about people uploading his studio recordings.
It follows that my idea of the music crashing into the US charts in 1990 was patchy & incomplete. So who knows; maybe it is more different to today’s US pop than 1960′s was from 1964′s? The test that’d answer that question would be taking a representative sample of charting songs from 1960 onwards and analyzing them systematically for diversity.
We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991.
Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don’t miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too.
What these mashup videos show is that a lot of modern songs are essentially variations on a single ground bass. Whether this means that they “lack novelty” arguably depends on what exactly you mean by novelty (I certainly agree that Mozart was not original in the way Beethoven was), but even Beethoven wrote in this musical form (see e.g. his 32 Variations in C minor)
I just don’t think that it proves much, beyond what I wrote above. Given how consonance and dissonance work, it’s somewhat to be expected that playing many variations at once on the same ground can result in (consonant) music.
I’m not sure. There are many technically impressive artists who don’t become popular because they don’t bring anything new to the table.
My view is closer to Phil’s idea of “novelty”, but with a slight twist. I think art succeeds when it manages to enrich its audience in some new way. Repeating an existing idea usually doesn’t count as much, because you can’t enrich someone in the same way twice, but sometimes you can make an old art style cool again if people have sufficiently forgotten it. I suspect that looking for ideas that would feel “enriching” to today’s audiences (this is admittedly vague) might be more useful than focusing on technique for ten hours a day.
Yes, I think I agree that some degree of novelty is required. (Reductio ad absurdum: A robot that generates copies of Beethoven’s symphonies—by some fancy process that doesn’t explicitly involve copying them, but is none the less guaranteed never to generate anything Beethoven didn’t already write—is generating first-rate music but is also absolutely useless and would not be regarded as any kind of artist.)
But I suggest that the degree of novelty required is fairly small. How valuable would it be to the world if someone were able to write another nine symphonies just as good as Beethoven’s but that don’t enlarge our understanding of music any more than if, say, Beethoven had been able to work twice as fast and lived slightly longer, and had written them as his numbers 1.5, 2.5, …, 9.5? Pretty damn valuable, I think. If someone found the manuscripts of nine other symphonies Beethoven actually did write but for some reason never released to the world, it would be very exciting and I bet there’d be no shortage of performances and audiences. Or: Pick one of Haydn’s 104 symphonies. It probably doesn’t really enlarge the world of music much beyond the other 103, but the world would definitely be poorer for its absence.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story called “The Quixote of Pierre Menard”, about a man who rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word. But because he writes it from a modern perspective, it has a different meaning, and is a different work of art. :)
It seems unreasonable to me to suppose that there aren’t already people writing Beethoven-style symphonies as well as Beethoven did. We probably have many times as many composers as talented and as well-trained as Beethoven was. Composers today have recorded music, easy access to scores, synthesizers, all sorts of advantages. And they’ve heard Beethoven. They should be better than Beethoven. My guess is nobody pays any attention to them.
(And if somebody wrote plays today in the style of Shakespeare, and they were as good as Shakespeare’s, I don’t think anyone would publish them. Publishers would laugh at the artificial, overly-stylized language, the monologues, the poetic form, the coincidences, the crude sexual puns. Everything people love about Shakespeare is considered bad writing today.)
Why does it seem unreasonable to suppose that? The space of possible music is not quite Hilbert-space huge, but it’s really, really huge.
So, to produce something like Beethoven, you have to be aiming rather specifically for that.
Very few composers frequently go into another composer’s space and produce great music there. John Williams comes to mind as a good candidate, but he’s not quite Beethoven-level. Why don’t they? Novelty-seeking is an excessive explanation. There is plenty of good stuff left in those veins, but by going there, you’re putting yourself directly up against Beethoven. There is somewhere you could go where you would stand out more. The obvious exception is when you’re trying to fit a particular space due to a program that you didn’t set (which handily explains Williams).
Once musicians have saturated music-space somewhat, you won’t need a specific reason to returning to these spaces. As noted above, that could be a while.
Yeah, Borges’ story is very clever, but part of why it’s funny and intriguing is that in fact no one would react as Borges-pretending-to-be-a-critic-writing-about-Menard does even though there’s an argument of sorts to be made that they should. And, actually, if someone were really able to make a robot that could regenerate Beethoven’s symphonies (but nothing else) from scratch without having the equivalent of the actual symphonies wired in, that would be really interesting. Anyway, we digress.
I don’t think the factors you list give sufficient reason to expect that there are people writing Beethoven-like symphonies as good as Beethoven’s. Countervailing factors:
Most of those people aren’t steeped in the same tradition as Beethoven was; they will (of course) have more exposure to music that came after Beethoven, and less to (most) music that came before, and their training will have been shaped by everything after Beethoven, etc., etc., etc. (They didn’t do as Menard did in the Borges story!) So the music they write will not naturally come out like Beethoven’s.
Most music-creators these days aren’t trying to write Beethoven-like symphonies. The great majority of music-creators these days aren’t even working in the classical tradition; most who are aren’t writing symphonies; most who are aren’t emulating Beethoven. (And I will hazard a guess that the most talented ones are particularly unlikely to be dedicating their talents to emulating Beethoven.)
Those things aren’t considered bad when Shakespeare does them, nor when other rough contemporaries of his do them (so it’s not just that there’s a special case for Famous Shakespeare). Pinter’s plays are pretty stylized and he won a Nobel prize. There’s a big (albeit ridiculous) monologue in “Waiting for Godot” and no one seems to object. T S Eliot got away with writing a couple of plays in verse and I’m not aware that it harmed his reputation.
It’s perfectly true that most plays these days aren’t written in Shakespeare’s style, but I don’t think it’s because that style is considered bad. It’s just not what people do nowadays.
Yeah, once you’ve been enriched by some art style, you want more of it to recapture the high. That’s what’s happening now with /r/hpmor and also with all the nostalgic game kickstarters. I guess that effect is responsible for most art consumption worldwide. Maybe an artist should decide whether they’re going for “enrich” or “recapture” (or some combination) and plan accordingly.
It’s exploration vs. exploitation again.
I think this is right. There is some novelty in the music of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Brahms, but it’s not the great originality that, say, Beethoven was known for. Mozart’s style wasn’t even about finding something old and making it cool again; much of his production was about engaging with the common styles and idioms of the day and adding just enough compelling subtleties to keep his audience interested. Much of modern music works pretty much the same way: top 40 tracks are often dismissed as rehashed and unoriginal, but they all have something interesting about them which helps explain their popularity.
Mozart lived in the middle of neoclassicism. Novelty wasn’t considered very important then. Beethoven’s music was one of the watermarks in the rise of the importance of novelty.
Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don’t miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too. Pop music, like popular literature, doesn’t have the same pressure for novelty. Mainstream pop music today has little stylistic novelty; that gets shunted into sub-genres. A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.
I’d thought the first video was going to be this one!
I’m sympathetic to the idea that pop music is decreasingly original & novel, but these videos are pretty slender evidence for it. The problem with invoking these videos is that they’re sampling on the dependent variable: they pick out small subsets of recent country songs or recent pop songs which go together attention-grabbingly well. But precisely because they go together attention-grabbingly well, they’re very likely unrepresentative of country/pop music as a whole.
(Also, even ignoring the unrepresentative sampling, these videos mainly just mean that particular chord progressions are popular. Comments on the Axis of Awesome video mention how the sketch plays on the fact that I-V-vi-IV is a popular chord progression, which it is. But that speaks only to harmony, not melody or arrangement.)
Those claims sound likely on first hearing, but I doubt them more as I think about them. It’s easy to have the wrong idea about what charting pop music sounded like in a certain year.
One can think of 1964 and imagine the charts were being revolutionized by a deluge of songs as memorable & novel as “You Really Got Me”, but looking at Billboard’s top 10 singles for 1964, I have a hard time picking out even half a dozen which stand out to me like that. (Admittedly, that’s more than I can pick out from the 1960 chart.)
As for 1990, I surprised myself twice over! After I started thinking to myself along the lines of, “new wave and hip hop were well established by then, and I guess it wasn’t long before grunge became a big deal, so maybe there was a lot from those genres?”, I checkity-checked myself by pulling up Billboard’s 1990 list. When I saw New Kids on the Block, Michael Bolton, Rod Stewart, Tom Petty, Aerosmith, I thought, “oh, wow, yeah, right, guess I was wrong”.
But then I looked again and saw more. Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (Wikipedia: “incorporat[ing] dance-pop and industrial music, also using elements of hip-hop and funk rock”); Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend”; Madonna’s “Vogue” (Wikipedia: “a dance-pop and house song with notable disco influence” and “a spoken rap section”); Bell Biv DeVoe’s “Poison” (Wikipedia: “in the style of new jack swing, a late-80s hybrid of R&B and hip hop”); Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart”; UB40′s reggae-fication of The Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do”; and Prince’s “Thieves in the Temple” (Wikipedia: “a unique sound, starting quietly with echoed keyboards and vocals before the main section of the song booms in with a pulsating synth bass, syncopated drum machines, Middle Eastern melodies and opera-like layered vocals”). That last one’s not on YouTube ’cause Prince and his record company are like super picky about people uploading his studio recordings.
It follows that my idea of the music crashing into the US charts in 1990 was patchy & incomplete. So who knows; maybe it is more different to today’s US pop than 1960′s was from 1964′s? The test that’d answer that question would be taking a representative sample of charting songs from 1960 onwards and analyzing them systematically for diversity.
Come to think of it, I remember a paper — “The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010” — which has some relevance. The punchline?
1964 and 1991, ehh?
What these mashup videos show is that a lot of modern songs are essentially variations on a single ground bass. Whether this means that they “lack novelty” arguably depends on what exactly you mean by novelty (I certainly agree that Mozart was not original in the way Beethoven was), but even Beethoven wrote in this musical form (see e.g. his 32 Variations in C minor)
You missed the section starting at 2:39, didn’t you?
I just don’t think that it proves much, beyond what I wrote above. Given how consonance and dissonance work, it’s somewhat to be expected that playing many variations at once on the same ground can result in (consonant) music.