GuitarBizarre

Correct, although the romantic movement in art, like most movements, including modernism and postmodernism, coincided across most forms, including painting and sculpture, after the movement became a commonly held idealogy across philosophy.

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Howard the Duck

since when did a thread about pop become classical?

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Malaise is THE dominant human predilection.

starrynight

There has to be some structure to operas, it's based on a libretto which tends to have a dramatic structure. And opera was quite important in the romantic period of course, Wagner, Verdi etc.

A religious inspiration to the extent suggested would certainly imply a lack of secular subjects. Romanticism was about the glorification of the feelings of the individual raised up to an ideal and worshiped level almost. At the same time, paradoxically, it was influenced by political nationalism because of the political circumstances of the time. I don't really know how anyone can ignore these secular aspects and just focus on religion in this time. Some composers may have been religious obviously, but that wasn't as defining as it was in Bach's cantatas.

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GuitarBizarre

What are you even arguing about? Everything has a structure if you analyse the crap out of it, but your previous argument was that structure is a means to an end, your current argument is that everything has a structure even if it was composed with no specific one in mind. You're at cross purposes with yourself.

Not to mention the secular or religious content of works from a given period is irrelevant when we're discussing the mindset that created those. We aren't discussing the rationale behind the presence or absence of religious feeling in a periods music as a whole, we're discussing the mindsets of periods of artistic endeavour and their relevance to the reduction in importance of explicit structure moving on from germanic traditions into the more broad base of western harmony in art music, including the rise of atonality, serialism, through-composition, the introduction of jazz (And a subsequent expansion of musical ideas to encompass microtonal harmony, already briefly explored by classical composers during the romantic vogue for east european and world music as applied to classical harmony) as a part of the western classical canon, forming a bridge between popular music and classical theory (Which in itself exposed a great number of problems with critical theory at the time, for example the inapplicability of schenkerian analysis to blues or black cultural music, it subsequently being replaced with the newer theory of "signifyin'" [Apostrophe included, really!] which became a crux for much of modern musical theory regarding the intermingling of black and white musical styles and traditions)

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starrynight

I never said something was composed for nobody, everything has an audience and I'm sure I've said that already. And for someone who makes a huge thing of a small grammatical mistake you just wrote a sentence which is far too long to even communicate its message very well. And my argument hasn't changed anyway whereas you seem to be bringing in all kinds of other issues to take it away from the original subjects.

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GuitarBizarre

I never said anything that I believe can even be misread as meaning this, what in blue blazes are you even talking about?

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gsrox

Some of the best songs I've heard are pretty simple arrangements.

Guybrush

I think sometimes, it's simple and sometimes it could be hard.

Let's say you have a great composer and their task is to make a hit pop song. In other words, the task is to make a song which should be popular with a lot of people, most of which know little about music or are not really serious music consumers. Obviously, the song should be in traditional time, or else these people will get confused. It needs a few hooks - some simple melody that gets stuck in your head. It needs to be familiar so as to not throw people off - probably the standard verse, bridge, chorus setup. But, a really good pop song also has a slight edge - something new, like a new sound, something that will pique people's interest and make it stand out (but again not enough to confuse them).

All of these things could come together relatively easy because the composer just happens to get a great idea. Or it could not. But even though it could be hard to make these things come together, it's pretty clear that there are some constraints you need to keep in mind when making pop music. It has to be catchy, it currently has to be in traditional time and you basically can't stretch the formula too much. So, pop music is not necessarily simple to make, but the musical toolbox that you can use to make it is certainly smaller.

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Something Completely Different

Spectralmusic

I agree, pop music is so constrained that once you go out of those parameters it becomes something else almost entirely. These parameters despite being very derivative, are what people have come to expect from this style of music.

This makes pop music very fascinating to me, when it comes to innovating. The area to work is so constricted that I sort of admire anyone that is able to innovate and be effective (and marketable) with those restrictions.

In a way, it's a similar conceptual idea (on the surface) to Webern or jingles (yes).


This all said, I'm not a fan of "pop music" (in the genre/style sense), I talk from a background in contemporary/modernist classical and the avant garde (metal, rock and jazz)

Guybrush

I feel like pop music on the whole has become more sophisticated than it was when I was a teenager in the 90s. Pop is a big umbrella so all comparisons under it are not fair, but a lot of the sort of music you might hear at a "We Love the 90s" festival is thankfully a thing of the past. Other than that, there was such an incredible amount of boring R&B back then.

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