{"id":260,"date":"2006-05-23T11:26:44","date_gmt":"2006-05-23T11:26:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/23\/the-old-tunes-experiment\/"},"modified":"2006-05-23T11:26:44","modified_gmt":"2006-05-23T11:26:44","slug":"the-old-tunes-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/23\/the-old-tunes-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old Tunes Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, in <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/old_tune_pimpage.php\">our last installment<\/a>, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too&#8211; I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during the week. I did abandon it for the trip back up, but only because I found myself seated in the Squalling Infant Section of the plane, and needed the more even volume distribution provided by pop music to cover the noise.<\/p>\n<p>So, what were the results of the experiment? Look below the fold for details&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The preliminary verdict? About the same as previously, actually. I listened to the music, but very little of it really made an impression.<\/p>\n<p>The list of purchased tracks, in case you forgot:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Rhapsody in Blue&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Planets&#8221; by Holst.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The Rite of Spring&#8221; and &#8220;The Firebird&#8221; by Stravinsky. <\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Symphony 9 (the New World)&#8221; by Dvorak. <\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Symphony 1 (Classical)&#8221; by Prokofiev.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Appalachin Spring&#8221; by Copland.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;New York Counterpoint&#8221; by Steve Reich.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of these, I had heard &#8220;Rhapsody in Blue&#8221; and the &#8220;Rodeo&#8221; bit from &#8220;Appalachin Spring&#8221; (Beef: It&#8217;s what&#8217;s for dinner!) previously, so those I recognized right away. Other than those two, the only thing to really catch my attention has been a couple of movements of the Dvorak, specifically the &#8220;Allegro con fuoco,&#8221; which sounds like the thing that John Williams has been ripping off for all those movie soundtracks. (The &#8220;Carnival Overture,&#8221; which just finished playing, was also pretty good.)<\/p>\n<p>Weirdly, I have no recollection at all of the &#8220;New York Counterpoint&#8221; tracks. They must&#8217;ve played at some point, but I don&#8217;t recall them at all, and I had been worried that they would be actively annoying.<\/p>\n<p>An earlier round had also yielded:<\/p>\n<li> a few songs by Ned Rorem<\/li>\n<li> Copland&#8217;s &#8220;Old American Songs&#8221;<\/li>\n<li> Phil Kline&#8217;s Rumsfeld songs<\/li>\n<li> and Britten&#8217;s &#8220;Serenade for Tenor, Horns, and Strings.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My only solid opinion is that the conceit of the Rumsfeld songs (great press conference quotes from Donald Rumsfeld, sung to somewhat abstract classical music) is cute, but the execution left me a little cold. This is often the case with art that&#8217;s making an intellectual point of some sort, though, so I&#8217;m not surprised.<\/p>\n<p>Other than that, my lingering impression is just one of Opera Voice, which generally rendered the lyrics all but incomprehensible, removing the benefits of having lyrics in the first place. I wound up skipping over a lot of the Britten tracks at one point, just because I was sick of the singing.<\/p>\n<p>The Copland was an exception in terms of comprehensibility, but didn&#8217;t really gain by it, as I didn&#8217;t care for the way it re-cast traditional songs. The whole thing came off as sort of pompous&#8211; as I said in an earlier post, there&#8217;s something almost perverse about giving the Shaker hymn &#8220;Simple Gifts&#8221; the Three Tenors treatment.<\/p>\n<p>So, anyway, I wouldn&#8217;t call this a resounding success as a self-improvement project. With the exception of the tiresome Opera Voice, I like it all just fine while it&#8217;s playing, but very few of the pieces made me sit up and take notice.<\/p>\n<p>The obvious objection, pre-emptively raised by several people in earlier comment threads, is that I wasn&#8217;t approaching this the right way&#8211; that these pieces aren&#8217;t suited to use as background music for other activities, so listening to them while reading <cite>Rainbows End<\/cite> on a crowded airplane isn&#8217;t a fair test. To which I can only say that if the only way to appreciate classical music is to quietly and contemplatively listen to it while doing absolutely nothing else, then classical music is going to have to continue to get along without my appreciation for another eight hundred years or so.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not that I didn&#8217;t try, you understand&#8211; I did make a few attempts to just listen to the music, without reading something, or doing anything else. The result was the same as it usually is when I attempt this: nap time. I&#8217;m just not good at sitting still and listening to music with nothing else going on&#8211; I&#8217;m not a quietly contemplative sort of guy, and I either get really twitchy at the enforced inactivity, or I doze off, neither of which really enhances the experience of the music.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll make another attempt at it sometime this weekend, maybe, when I&#8217;m more well-rested, and not spending mornings running from one talk to the next. But if that&#8217;s the only basis on which the music can be appreciated, then it&#8217;s not going to do me a whole lot of good, because that&#8217;s just not the way I operate.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, it&#8217;s interesting to note that pop music functions just fine for me as both background noise and a primary experience. That is, I can put pop songs on in the background while I do something else, and I still notice particularly good tunes when they come up (I keep a list of songs that grab me when I have KEXP playing at work, so I can buy them later on iTunes). That&#8217;s something that doesn&#8217;t really happen with the classical pieces I&#8217;ve tried, and I&#8217;m not sure quite what the difference is.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;ll try to give these songs another listen in a more pleasant setting (i.e., neither an airplane nor an airport), and see if anything jumps out at me then, but for the moment, the experiment hasn&#8217;t really been a success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, in our last installment, I had purchased a bunch of classical music off iTunes, and pledged to listen to it while away at DAMOP last week. I was pretty good about it, too&#8211; I kept the classical playlist going on the iPod all the way through the flights down there, and for listening during&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/23\/the-old-tunes-experiment\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Old Tunes Experiment<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}