boxedjoy

Well-known member
And The XX according to the Wikipedia page I just found. So maybe "Actual Talented" would be a stretch for me
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
where are all the acclaimed pre-1900 female and/or not white composers held in the same regard as Mozart et al?
There simply weren't that many of them, because the opportunities were few and far between.

Being a prematurely aged bastard, I listen to Radio 3, and they feature old-time black and female composers all the time - disproportionately often, in fact. They have whole programmes about them. Of course if you hate classical music and go out of your way not to hear it, you won't know about this.

You're correct to identify sexism and racism in the fact that nearly all famous composers are white blokes, but you're looking for it in the wrong place.
 

sus

Well-known member
It's a serious question. If they are out there I want to hear them. I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff becauseI I've invested all my energy learning about stuff I'm actually interested in aesthetically.
Ok I won't be a dick

The best lens IMO for this question is Linda Nochlin's "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" There's a Wiki entry if you're just looking for main points. This is usually taken as the standard stance/null hypothesis even among a deeply feminist vizarts scene, which was previously tempted to do revisionist "actually, this obscure/mediocre 18th C landscape painter has to be great because she's our only representative woman from the period" theorizing. It's a very simple argument, really, and intuitive; it's more or less what Luka has commented casually, but the TLDR is, "there are a lot of systematic obstacles that prevented historical women from seriously training/being seriously trained in the craft, and this inequality of exposure."

Almost every field/form's historical highlight real is male-dominated, from literature to science, but while I think it's fair to wonder if a lot of equally great artistic and scientific potential was squandered on silly primitive ideas about gender roles, that doesn't mean our historical Newtons and Beethovens are talentless hacks propped up by privilege. It's a false dichotomy—you can have the privilege and the talent; woman, unfortunately, could only have the latter.
 

sus

Well-known member
I will say—one of the major testimonies to the classical heritage is just how seriously black jazz musicians (i.e. a historically marginalized group with radical aesthetics) take it.
 

sus

Well-known member
Fair nuff if you don't like classical music now, I still barely understand jungle myself despite wanting to/trying, but I hope one day ten years from now when you're deciding what to pull off a used-CD shelf at a crumbling charity shop, you'll take a chance on a dead white male and let it change your life. It really is something, I can't even say how much it's meant to me
 

luka

Well-known member
Avant, if it has to be one or the other but very palatable and commercially successful avant
 
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sus

Well-known member
I play stuff from Glassworks on the keyboard sometimes too, lots of fun 3-over-2 business that keeps your brain split between hands
 

woops

is not like other people
i think i came to glass/reich at the wrong time cos i'd already listened to a tonne of post rock and electronica that did the same thing but more interestingly so when i came to listento ten mallets or whatever i wasn't bothered, my loss i'm sure but there's a reason his music ends up on mobile phone adverts and it's not cos he's a pioneering avant guardiste.
 

sus

Well-known member
i think i came to glass/reich at the wrong time cos i'd already listened to a tonne of post rock and electronica that did the same thing but more interestingly so when i came to listento ten mallets or whatever i wasn't bothered, my loss i'm sure but there's a reason his music ends up on mobile phone adverts and it's not cos he's a pioneering avant guardiste.
Fair, and Boxedjoy said the same thing about the Mozart & Sigur Ros, but also I think these things can only properly understood backwards—things get made palatable by time and exposure, and it's that platform that post-rock musicians perform on
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
mozart, and Classical era classical music in general, is an easy target. it’s ubiquitous yet unhip. by lambasting it you get to play the rebel without actually risking backlash—unless you’re talking to an orchestra violinist or an old person.

back in the day on /mu/ there was this contingent of young, obnoxious, highly knowledgeable classical fans who would ridicule anyone who found mozart et al boring and saccharine. by saying as much, you were instantly outing yourself as a dilettante, a “pleb” who lacked the discernment to read beyond the music’s pleasant, easy to swallow exterior to access its true depth and power. so instead of liking mozart being basic, it was not liking mozart (and being into edgier modern composers like penderecki and xenakis) that was disgustingly basic.

of course, everyone on dissensus is old enough and smart enough not fall for that rhetorical game. but as a method of trolling insecure teens who probably derived some fragile sense of self worth from the idea that they had good music taste, it was incredibly effective, and a pretty impressive feat of inverse-inverse-snobbery.

yet i think there is truth to that perspective, and it gets at what i meant earlier by saying i couldn’t get into mozart. there are works of his i find beautiful (probably like the one you posted, spendy, i’ll check later) but my engagement really is superficial. (learning the basic forms used certainly helped, but it’s still only an initial step.)
 

luka

Well-known member
I'm militantly opposed to learning anything at all specially music theory I want to stay in a state of nature. A savage.
 

catalog

Well-known member
but you know a thing or two about poetry don't you? or are you an outsider artist / dilettante when it comes to poetry?
 
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