{"id":274676,"date":"2010-03-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/?p=3427"},"modified":"2022-04-14T18:49:45","modified_gmt":"2022-04-14T22:49:45","slug":"this-is-why-people-hate-modern-classical-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/this-is-why-people-hate-modern-classical-music\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Why People Hate Modern Classical Music"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>More than one new music aficionado brought to my attention <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/science\/science-news\/7279626\/Audiences-hate-modern-classical-music-because-their-brains-cannot-cope.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an article from the <i>Telegraph<\/i><\/a> regarding the cognitive difficulties presented by contemporary music. If you haven&#8217;t read it, please do.<\/p>\n<p>As far as I can tell, the work it describes is a credible piece of social science: David Huron and Ani Patel, two music cognition specialists whose opinions I respect, are called upon to corroborate Philip Ball&#8217;s book <i>The Music Instinct<\/i>, and they give it their respective stamps of approval. However, there are a couple of criticisms I&#8217;d like to level at the statements made in this article. For one thing, as Timothy Jones points out, cultural conditioning may account for some of Ball&#8217;s findings. Moreover, is Ball&#8217;s conclusion really so revolutionary? Of course music with readily perceptible patterns is easier to grok. Crossword puzzles consisting of thematically related clues are, I imagine, easier to complete than the other kind.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m perfectly willing to concede that tonal music, with its reliance on conventionalized expectation-forming patterns derived, in not very direct ways, from the harmonic series lends itself more naturally to human apprehension than post-common-practice music. But that&#8217;s beside the point of music&#8217;s importance as a human endeavor, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>Arguments that one type of music or another is the most &#8220;natural&#8221; don&#8217;t carry a whole lot of weight with me. As Schoenberg put it in a letter to Joseph Yasser, if you were to go out into the street and behave &#8220;naturally&#8221;\u2014tearing off your clothes and shoveling squirrels into your mouth with your hands\u2014people would think you were a lunatic. We do a lot of things that aren&#8217;t natural, often with good reason; it&#8217;s natural to allow weak children to die, for instance.<\/p>\n<p>I would submit that the natural and the humane are sometimes at odds in music as well: Respecting the intelligence of one&#8217;s audience, trying to furnish listening situations that prompt speculation and the consideration of new perspectives, may be unnatural\u2014but it&#8217;s exceedingly human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><I>By Colin Holter<\/I><BR>A few objections to the <I>Telegraph<\/I> article on Philip Ball&#8217;s book <I>The Music Instinct<\/I>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":591,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"nmb_categories":[6],"how_to_category":[],"nmb_tags":[],"internal_taxonomy":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - 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