Re: [dev] [OT] Music?

On Thu, Sep 09, 2010 at 07:33:04PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
>
> On 8 Sep 2010, at 11:27 pm, David Tweed wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:35 PM, Joel Davila <6336737_AT_gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On 8 September 2010 15:12, Nikhilesh S <s.nikhilesh_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What kind of music do you listen to? Your favourite artists, genres,
>>>> etc.?
>>>
>>> Interesting.
>>>
>>> Suckless music may be classics as Beethoven, Brahms,Chopin, Ravel,
>>> Tchaikovsky...
>>
>> I thought the only music that would count as suckless is John Cage's
>> 4′33″. It's the only piece where there's just no bloat. Even that
>> Nokia "classic" ringtone has 13 notes that are unnecessarily inflates
>> the NOM (notes of music) metric.
>>
>> [I'm sorry, this is cruel caricaturing but I couldn't resist].
>
> I very much enjoy the rich sounds of classical music but I can't see how
> it could be suckless at all. Some jazz pieces pack an immense amount of
> feeling into a very sparse melody only using a few instruments. I would
> listen to jazz a lot, but the good stuff is rather overshadowed by the
> sheer volume of pointless crap which somehow manages to get the same
> genre label.

I quite agree with you about Jass, but I don't think you're
being fair to Classical. Depending on how you define Classical,
you're being quite unfair. Consider Satie, who was post-Romantic
and thus not technically Classical, for instance. His solo piano
music is utterly simplistic and yet completely, stunningly
beautiful at times. And then there's Bach (Baroque-era, and thus
pre-Classical), who's known for his fantastic counterpoint, and
yet manged to write solo music, such as his Chaconne from
Partita No. 2, which is based on a simple developed theme from
one instrument, and yet is absolutely masterful.

And even when you go beyond that, well, I don't like to use the
term suckless at all, but I wouldn't shudder to apply it to most
classical. Composers may sometimes work with a huge orchestra,
but what the music boils down to in the end is incredibly
simple. And unlike a lot of pop musicians, composers have spent
a lot of time and thought on their music, often striving to get
it exactly right, pare off anything unnecessary, hone any rough
edges. And unlike so many musicians and software developers,
most of them tend not to rehash the same tired crap for years or
decades on end.

> Anyway, in classical my tastes have changed recently. I used to like
> Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, anything dramatic and/or wild, I forget who
> wrote the Hungarian Dances, but I loved those too. I won't say what I
> think of Tchaikovsky now. ;-}

Brahms. And, please don't say what you think of Tchakovsky. We
may come to blowe.

> Now, listening to last.fm I find I like anything from the renaissance to
> baroque transition and a smattering of composers from all eras since,
> including Schönberg. I know nothing of 12-tone and post-modernism, maybe
> what I like is transitional music; music from artists who are just
> discovering new forms. I like most musical forms in their early stages.
> Once they're well-defined and people start getting taught the form rather
> than feeling their way you start to get pointless crap promoted as
> 'really good'.
>
> I don't listen to last.fm very much, I find it takes a bit of managing to
> keep it on track with what I want to listen to, and there are several
> different themes I'd like to train it to. Perhaps I need several accounts
> to use it properly, and I really couldn't be bothered. I prefer to
> download from Jamendo. Still with the classical, Jamendo has a couple of
> albums by Arnaud Conde which I absolutely love, but I haven't generally
> gone looking for classical there.

I've given up on Last.fm. Have a go at Pandora. In my
experience, they're much better at giving you music that's
actually good. And orders of magnitude better at finding related
music. Last.fm had an annoying habit of playing Roy Orbisson in
the classical channels, for instance (it was so bad that I had
to write my own client to automatically stop and ban certain
artists).

-- 
Kris Maglione
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will
reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so
that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
	--Friedrich Nietzsche