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How I listen to music

marginalrevolution.com

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: How I listen to music

#21

I came to Bach only recently, I bought a classical guitar a couple of years ago and just over the last eight months or so I've been really getting into baroque music. I don't know why I didn't appreciate it before, I guess I just never gave Bach a chance, but it's some of the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. The counterpoint that makes it feel like the music is spiralling around you is just otherworldly.

I'd be interested in resources you could share for baroque guitar playing. I play guitar and I love baroque music, but I didn't mix these two hobbys so far. I can read music, but I am a bit slow.

Re: How I listen to music

#22
post #21

I came to Bach only recently, I bought a classical guitar a couple of years ago and just over the last eight months or so I've been really getting into baroque music. I don't know why I didn't appreciate it before, I guess I just never gave Bach a chance, but it's some of the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. The counterpoint that makes it feel like the music is spiralling around you is just otherworldly.

I'd be interested in resources you could share for baroque guitar playing. I play guitar and I love baroque music, but I didn't mix these two hobbys so far. I can read music, but I am a bit slow.

I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment.

My main resources for baroque tabs would be:

- classtab.org - classclef.com

Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate.

For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_js_bwv0998_lute_suite_in_eb_1_...

Scroll down to the drop-D one, that's the one I play.

With baroque music I find legato is so incredibly important so really concentrate on fingerings that let the notes ring out. There may frequently be an easier fingering to grab but which means you have to stop the bass note too early, so it takes a bit of experimentation to figure it out.

It's very difficult but incredibly rewarding when you manage to produce the counterpoint yourself, I'm smiling to myself the whole time while playing.

Re: How I listen to music

#24

I was reading, distracted by the thought "is there anything more pretentious than naming your dog after a philosopher?", and the author immediately surpassed himself, throwing away his CDs because gifting them would be too cruel.

[dead]

Re: How I listen to music

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested in resources you could share for baroque guitar playing. I play guitar and I love baroque music, but I didn't mix these two hobbys so far. I can read music, but I am a bit slow.

I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment. My main resources for baroque tabs would be: - classtab.org - classclef.com Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate. For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_j…

Not to sound dogmatic but I would suggest learning notation also at some point so that you can read the original sheet music. It will open up an entire world of what the composer wanted to express apart from just the notes.

Re: How I listen to music

#26
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment. My main resources for baroque tabs would be: - classtab.org - classclef.com Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate. For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_j…

Not to sound dogmatic but I would suggest learning notation also at some point so that you can read the original sheet music. It will open up an entire world of what the composer wanted to express apart from just the notes.

Yeah I am learning standard notation and I do look at the standard notation for pieces to look at the instructions from the composer. I mean, I can read music but and I could figure out how to play baroque music from standard notation, I would just be glacially slow.

I'm still working my way through Sor etudes so I learn the fretboard.

Re: How I listen to music

#27

I like listening to albums the way they were produced: starting from the first song until the last one. This modern endless stream of curated playlists and singles is tiring, and loses the storytelling aspect of albums that makes them greater than the sum of its songs. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Modern music albums aren't really written with that in mind in my experience. They're optimised for people skipping through playlists in a streaming service, not going on a journey through an album.

Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If they bother with the album at all. I would definitely say bands that focus on holistic or even high-concept albums tend to do it often though, and obviously you see more of it in genres like progressive rock where it was kind of a defining mainstay, but it's a form that's alive and well in a lot of genres on a case-by-case basis. For example, I like a Russian pagan folk/black metal act called Arkona (which is pretty well-known by folk metal standards actually) and their latest album released last year is high-concept and cohesive, structured as a katabasis. I'll also warn that it's probably less for everyone than some of their other music as it's very musically gloomy and thematically dark, which makes sense given how things have been going in Russia and especially given the lead singer's family is from Ukraine... Point being, cohesive albums are far from a dying art form, they're just not the format most optimized for broad appeal and whatever monetization method is most favored by the largest distributors (these days probably Spotify and, what like, Apple?), which the most well-known pop music is by definition

It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds

Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect

Re: How I listen to music

#28

I like listening to albums the way they were produced: starting from the first song until the last one. This modern endless stream of curated playlists and singles is tiring, and loses the storytelling aspect of albums that makes them greater than the sum of its songs. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Modern music albums aren't really written with that in mind in my experience. They're optimised for people skipping through playlists in a streaming service, not going on a journey through an album.

Really depends on the genre you're listening to. Plenty of (prog) rock artists that still work in full album concepts.

Re: How I listen to music

#29
Bach is my absolute favorite, but not in listening time (playing he is, though). Since some time, I've been using YouTube to find lesser known composers, and there are really so many. Not that they deserve to be as well known as e.g. Bach, but some really deserve a wider audience.

In the mornings, I too look for more harmonic music, although e.g. Poulenc is still good.

Contemporary music is ok for later, but it's a more difficult find. Some of it is great, though. Don't be afraid of it. It doesn't have a good name, but there is quite a lot of variation in contemporary music, from harsh, microtonal pleep-ploop sounds to shimmering minimal music and reflective music with a bit of an edge, and anything between.

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