Quote:
Originally Posted by josht23musiclover
This thread was extremely interesting to me: in fact it was the impetus for me signing up.
I'm a regular poster on a Classical music forum and that (massive umbrella of a) genre is by far my favourite, although I have been exploring other genres more and more lately.
It is guessable then why this thread was of such interest: what is considered 'old music' is, for someone like me, relatively very new in the context of just how far the history of great music goes back. Even a poster who is trying to defend 'old music' can say something like:
"Lol; people who can't appreciate music from before 1980 need a nice kick in the back of the head, as most of what you guys seem to like/appreciate is either diluted, derivative of, or simply influenced heavily from what was done back in the late 60's and 70's anyway (across ALL genres), so what's stopping you from spelunking some and seeing what you might have missed?
Personally, I'm also somewhere in the middle. I keep an eye what comes out regularly, but I don't make-believe that there isn't forty to fifty years of great music behind this generation either."
It's fascinating to me that this poster, defending old music, considers there to be only "forty to fifty years of great music behind this generaton." Classical has literally only been mentioned once in this entire thread: in a thread of 'old music', it is simply as if it does not even exist and that music started 50 years ago.
I don't mean for this post to seem bitter or antagonising (I'm generally very open-minded and accepting of what people listen to/the trends of listening), but rather am simply observing something that seems very unusual to someone who comes from a certain paradigm.
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Welcome to the forum. I get where you're coming from, but I think that there are some pretty straightforward social influences at play. Musical recording technology only goes back so far, which makes music that was created in the modern times easier to access. These recording advances led to the focus shifting from the composer to the performer, with extra attention being pointed at nuances. I think that The Beatles played a big role in connecting the performer and the composer and that has snowballed to the point where people equate the two. This introduces an extra step for modern listeners trying to become informed on classical music: they have to research the best composers, and then they have to find the best performers for that composer's works. That's a step that's often missed when they hear a high school band perform Ode to Joy. The internet age has made it very easy to circumvent this, but let's not pretend like people use the internet to its fullest advantage.