We Should Teach Music History Backwards • Hacker News Board

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#161

Post by ljw1001 » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 10:43 AM UTC

badminton1 wrote: post #128

ljw1001 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.

So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war? The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war. It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic pro…

in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#162

Post by tim333 » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 12:18 PM UTC

limsup wrote: post #72

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.

It can kind of work for that. Looking at Wikipedia the LHC article links to "Composite particles" to "History of atomic theory" to

"Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms."

The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder.

And so on.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#163

Post by ForRealsies » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 12:33 PM UTC

javajosh wrote: post #157

mehwoot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate? Have you even read the book? It's mentioned and he gives possible reasons for it, even though it isn't the focus of the book.

I read the book, a very long time ago, but my understanding is that China was never interested in expansion, culturally. China itself was a vast, insular monarchy for thousands of years, protected by the Himalayas to the west, an ocean to the east and south, and vast steppes to the north. The Chinese, culturally, were convinced of their innate superiority (like most cultures!) and only wanted to perfect their kingdom…

Not a history major, but wasn't Northern China conquered by foreign invaders again and again? It was anything but pleasant.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#164

Post by tenaciousDaniel » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 1:03 PM UTC

History - directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Guy Pearce

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#165

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 1:06 PM UTC

olavk wrote: post #37

tsenkov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed. Same thing in programming - starting up with some…

I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.

[deleted]

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#166

Post by WhompingWindows » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 1:41 PM UTC

8bitsrule wrote: post #156

That's an interesting theory, but it ain't the way I learned music history. When the music store in my home town was closing out 78 records, my dad went in and bought a big stack, a couple of hundred 78s with mostly classical music on 'em. At closeout prices. As a little kid I was allowed to play those records any time I wanted to. And I listened a lot. Listening to that early music helped me, right away, to pick out…

How did you determine what is "good" and what is "bad" in pop music? Seems to me like there's a lot of personal preference in music and absolute morality has little to do with the question. You might find the writer Adorno interesting, he takes very very strong stances on Classical musicians and is not shy about calling their work bad or good or some much more eloquent phrasing.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#167

Post by christudor » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #82

christudor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. Ged Martin’s (critically acclaimed) ‘Past Futures’ is all about the importance of what might have happened when studying history. https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/471921

What are you disagreeing with? I don’t see what is not true, based on your response.

Sorry, thought I’d included a quote in my original post.

Disagreeing with this:

> History is about what happened, not what could have happened.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#168

Post by vinceguidry » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #115

c3534l wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Nati…

The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence. For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the…

China did dominate. Everybody that invaded China, became Chinese. It's a massive success story. If you're asking why it didn't colonize, that answer can also come down to geography. It's landmass was so good, it literally had no need for colonization. Once Europe chopped down its forests and got everything it could out of mines, it had a surplus of people that craved more things, this drove it to expand outwards.

China's just big and resourceful enough to provide. Once it collapsed into one big polity, something made necessary by lack of natural barriers like in Europe preventing individual nations from being able to protect themselves, everybody could work together to build China.

Europe's geography just wasn't as good. Good enough to get to colonization, but not good enough to avoid the need to.

You see this happening now in the US, which boasts the second best geography in the world after China. We had a few colonies, but really, our landmass provides us with everything we need. It just wasn't good enough without European horses.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#169

Post by nxie » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #147

nautilus12 wrote: post #84

I disagree whole heartedly. This will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative composers such as Bach are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinker…

Why is it _always_ Bach? Every single time I hear the entirety of recorded music's history being dissected, Bach is the first - often the only - example brought to attention. Have this many people subjectively decided for themselves that Bach deserves this credit? Or do schools of music have a habit of teaching that Bach is objectively the best, as if it's a fact grounded in science? Bach is to music as Shakespeare i…

> "Or do schools of music have a habit of teaching that Bach is objectively the best, as if it's a fact grounded in science?"

I don't think you're entirely accurate on why Bach is such a big name when it comes to classical music. It's not because he is viewed as some objective "best" as you seem to be so convinced of.

Western classical music as we know it today didn't really begin until Bach came around (the only exception that comes to mind immediately is Corelli who came a few decades prior). Music historians today recognize that Bach laid out the technical foundations on what Western music is itself. His development of the counterpoint is a major distinction between medieval music and the classical period that followed. As well, his Partitas for Solo Violin and Well Tempered Clavier for Piano have became and remain to this day, foundational parts of learning and improving violin/piano because they train and benchmark almost every technical ability of their instruments (at least in Western music) to such precision. To analogize to programming, it would be like a set of problems that ranged from basic recursion to debugging memory leaks and everything in between and beyond. There are of course other resources such as Kreutzer's etudes for violin but Bach is one of the first and one of the only to do so to such detail. There are numerous of other music elements such as figured bass and dance forms that Bach contributed heavily to, but I think you get my point.

So to summarize, no, I don't think most music historians "nod their head in agreement like a brainwashed zombie". It's not that they hail Bach as some "objective best", it's because they can recognize and respect the formative effects his work had Western Classical music. He is a father of his field much like Turing of Knuth are and that deserves his praise.

Re: We Should Teach Music History Backwards

#170

Post by pvaldes » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #19

Not just music history, but history in general. History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past. However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's n…

Traversing a tree backwards is easy only if you focuse in following only one of the branches. Otherwise you would be arriving to the same places and in need to repeat/refresh/redone the basal parts all the time.