Howard the Duck

it's also almost every song I write

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

GuitarBizarre

Well as far as the academy are concerned, anything that isn't avant-garde, jazz, or classical, is 'popular music'. Rock music and pop music being not that far apart, and metal being essentially rock music, its not surprising they all follow the same basic structures a lot.

What is perhaps surprising is that very little popular music is through composed, (Composed with few or no returns to an identifiable section) at least, not outside of those forms predisposed to building and repetition as a musical device, like downtempo or ambient.

Edit: Also, to further address the formula comment above, most of those works were composed using forms because they were for formal occasions where listeners had very strict expectations of the format. When modernism, Wagner, Cage, and even Chopin in the romantic period, come around, the idea of rigid obedience to an expected structure, or even to an audience, was considered outmoded. After all, romanticism was often concerned with the idea of god working through man, rather than critical acclaim or similar. Modernism largely concerned itself with abandoning structure entirely, hence the early works from Schoenberg's atonal period like Pierrot Lunaire, which was entirely atonal and observed no structure, rythmic, melodic, or otherwise.

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Howard the Duck

will check out that Schoenberg, i love atonal music

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

starrynight

LOL that's a very cheap point to make, as well as having nothing to do with the subject. Yeh I'm tired so I made a spelling error, so what?

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GuitarBizarre

Just that you seemed concerned with telling me I didn't know what I was talking about, so I figured that would be an important point for you if you were trying to imply that you do.

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starrynight

Why would it be surprising? And all music has an audience with limited time. 'God working through man'???? You are saying that earlier composers like JS Bach weren't religious? To say modernism or post-modernism or whatever mainly just abandons structure is a big exaggeration. I won't comment on whatever courses you do as I don't think that gives you any more authority than many other people here.

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GuitarBizarre

1 - Your assertion regarding Bach is backwards. God working through an artist is not what Bach claimed of his work, he was a man praising god through his OWN work. This is an entirely different kettle of fish and matches up more markedly with the thinking of the time, compared to romantic thinking which implied the artist was a vessel for the work of god, or modernism, which sought to reject the use of past forms or ideas in favour of 'making it new', which subsequently led to the rejection of traditional diatonic tonality in favour of atonalisty and serialism, (Serialism being concieved as a method by which to remove traditional harmony's influence over note choice by treating all 12 notes of the western musical form as equal, without leading notes or tonic notes, no resolutions of any kind). Many composers also removed the traditional forms of structure as an extension of this, such as Cage, whose works make a point of HAVING structure, to the point of 4'33 making the point of music only requiring the opening and closing of the piano 3 times, in mock of the fact that you can REMOVE any element of music, up to and including notes and/or silence, but it still needs to be structured to exist, but 4'33 makes no claims as to requiring specific structures, and indeterminate works such as Terry Reily's "In C" depend on having a loose structure which cannot be nailed down to a specific result!

Then we can mention freeform jazz or improvisational styles which depend on no explicit structure at all to define them, indeed, usually their defining feature is a lack of specific structure to create a more natural movement between sections or parts. They are not easily reproduced before being recorded as a performance, but their structure can only be determined, in most cases, in retrospect, its barely considered during the compositional process itself, if at all!

2 - I never mentioned postmodernism, I mentioned modernism and romanticism. Post-modernism is a very, very, VERY different movement, predominant in popular culture to this day, even in the referential sense, such as Lady Gaga, whose image is pretty much Dadaist/surrealist, both of which are postmodern, rather than modernist, styles.

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starrynight

I guess you are talking about the romantic hero worship of the individual artist, something that carries on to this day in a way. But why that has to be God working through an artist I don't know, particularly as there had already been philosophers and others questioning the existence of God anyway. And I suspect some earlier artists did think their skills had been given to them by God as they saw it. Romanticism is more about LOVE than God, and secular love at that. It's this that gets lifted up to some high ideal. And it got also mixed up with nationalism (due to the politics of the time)

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GuitarBizarre

No, thats not what romanticism was about at all. There are frequent tales of romantic period artists stuffing themselves to the gills with drugs in order to REMOVE their own influence from the work and allow god to guide them. THAT is what romanticism was about when it claimed to be god working through the artist.

This is getting tiring. Please, before you argue about romanticism, modernism, the intentions of an artist, or the nature of a work, I would implore you to educate yourself on the matters via a source more reputable and reliable source than assumption and hearsay. I am not stating what I am stating blind, I have been told this by university lecturers, read it in academic journals and researched it in books written by luminaries and professionals. I have spent a not inconsiderable portion of my life making sure I know what I'm talking about regarding these very topics, in and out of education proper. For all you claim that doesn't matter, my experience suggests that the opposite is in fact true.

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Howard the Duck

i sorta get the notion it's the wrong sort of "romantic" starrynight is talking about

GB is talking about the Romantic period of classical music, not general romanticism

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.