Has Materialism ruined Western music?

I think they're talking about the other meaning of materialism, the idea that observable reality is all that there is.

> in his musical practice, [Bach] was a radical materialist (in the modern formalized-mathematized sense)
Kek.

Kek.

I wasn't even half wrong.

Zizek is a pseud (in the modern formalized-mathematized sense).

>Around Bach’s time, a totally different paradigm started to emerge: that of a “well-tempered” scale, in which musical sounds are to be arranged following an order not grounded in any higher cosmic harmony, but which has an (ultimately arbitrary) rational structure.
No Shitzek, "Well tempered" simply means that the twelve notes per octave of the standard keyboard are tuned in such a way that it is possible to play music in most major or minor keys and it will not sound perceptibly out of tune. This doesn't exclude "higher cosmic harmony" whatsoever, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

This is why you aren't taken seriously by professional academia Shitzek, not because you're le "Joker". This is why you will be tossed into the trashcan of history with the rest of the pseuds.

I...think that's what he meant. Minus the assertion that it would not turn away from higher cosmic harmony. Note the quote marks.

>it's still beautiful music
>it's still beautiful music
>it's still beautiful music

no. what do you mean by the term? we will work together to better understanding

>in his musical practice, he was a radical materialist (in the modern formalized-mathematized sense), exploring the immanent possibilities of the new musical formalism.
Slavoj please consider suicide.

Not an argument

>materialism and bach's music
cringed hard

What the fuck am I reading

>trying to link something as dull and useless as philosophy to something as beautiful and beloved as music

Funny guy.

homie you're illiterate.

it's so weird how people prejudiced against difficult writing often can't read for shit.

screencap'd this colossal embarrassment bc i would be scrambling to delete it if we're you.

you're literally calling him out for arguing the exact opposite—the literal inversion which could only have been read into that bit of text precisely by not reading it or by being mentally challenged.

what an unbelievably oafish stooge you are. this is why i'm a stalinist: throwing sots like you into the reeducation camps would actually be good for them.

unreal. truly cosmic levels of stupidity. just read the sentence. that's all you had to do. but it was really too much for your peabrain. outstanding..

The connection between Materialism and Gnosticism is a very frightening one. Materialism in the context of Gnosticism would basically mean directly worshiping the Demiurge.

Western Classical Music tradition is literally a campaign against the Human soul.

PSEUD
S
E
U
D

12 posters, 23 replies. we know it's you:and since you've wrought this piece of utter baffoonery, we know who the real pseudo is. to the gulag with you

how is bachs work at all materialist? wasn't he most heavily influenced by pietism

>how is bachs work at all materialist?

Have you heard it?

holy shit that post. Somehow getting from the quoted text that a higher cosmic harmony is assumed to exist, somehow getting from it that the scale he talks about excludes it, and best of all, starting a sentence with "No..." and continuing to agree.

You're like half of a groundhog propelling itself in circles on the ground using its two remaining limbs.

Yes, have you?

youtube.com/watch?v=ZnIDTOR9EkM

contextually it may be pious, but his manipulation of tonality is informed by its internal logic, not by any transcendent ideology of faith or affect, the latter of which you get in folks like Wagner, and, as Zizek notes, Bach's own son.

Please define what makes a work transcendent.

youtube.com/watch?v=2-Bjp9jptbM

Not (him) but this is a nice one.

You gave an example, you didn't actually define anything m8

boohoo

Why do Veeky Forumsfags jerk themselves off over classical music? Everyone knows that the truly Veeky Forums music is jazz.

didn't say the work was transcendent. i said that it would have been informed by transcendent ideologies. in this case it means external or extrinsic to the "text" of 12-tone harmony, formulated beyond the bounds of its own permutational logics—music composed to evoke a certain affect, scene, or feeling, rather than composed to exhibit the beauty inherent to musical structure. the difference between an opera's or an action movie's score, and, well, Bach's inventions and fugues.

Transcendental things define themselves.

>needing to ask this

You're never going to make it

Ultimately it doesn't matter because everyone here is a pseud just jerking off for the (you)s

Still not putting forth an actual definion guys.

Bach did plenty of that though, just go read an essay about his use of rhetoric figures. To assume that Bach's music is only mathematically pleasing is a modern meme.

boohoohoooooo

>how is bachs work at all materialist?

The claim seems to be that ancient music theories revolved around pure math ratios, while Bach was around when the 'modern piano?' well tempered clavier, was invented, which grounded music theory into physical ratios based on taking into considerations the characteristics of the material, to create not mathematically pure ratios (pythagorean maybe), but physically pure ratios (length and tautness of string, maybe)

Maybe they are trying to relate this to the ancient music, (like can maybe be seen in indian style)(or like pan flute, ancient greek, or medieval peasants, or baroque) made music less directionless, more just floating eternally in space, harmonies playing with each other:

Whereas, the well tempered clavier, allowed maybe, a rationalist, always moving forward, building, constructing, allowed with the building blocks of the pitches relation, being slightly imperfect, compelling to be resolved:

Keep in mind I am completely, talking out myas, but this might be related. Personally I think this video is wrong, because I think the slight imperfection, allows a 'fuzzy quantum logic' which implies motions and motivation to be resolved, tensions and resolutions, which enhances the quantities and qualities of music potential:

youtube.com/watch?v=6NlI4No3s0M

i wasn't arguing that, either.

you seem to be doing a lot to avoid making an argument.

>definition

Think of it as a the polar opposite of Finnegans Wake I guess?

Pseuds obsess over orchestral music for some reason. It's wonderful, don't get me wrong, but those "I only listen to classical everyone else has shit taste but me" kids make me embarrassed to admit I have a large amount of classical on my playlists.

Jazz is a good aesthetic for roaring 20's and other early 20th century lit. Stuff like future bass, house, drum and bass, and other electronic music is the best background noise for writing.

Nice thread boys

(I say this with the utmost degree of contempt and sarcasm.)

The problem lies in that Bach was so mathematically dazzling people often forget he's also intuitively a joy to listen to.

They get hung up on the finger pointing to the moon and forget to move past the formal structure of what's before them. A mathematical (i.e. purely formal) analysis of Bach will never get you to actually listening to Bach.

He represents such a crucial step in the dialectic of music that people will forget to leave him behind.

just intonation is a meme, western music cannot exist with it because of the inherent flaws when tuning an instrument.
the tl;dr is either your thirds or in tune or your fifths are in tune or they're both a little bit out of tune as we tend to do nowadays.

Thankfully our ears correct a tone that is slightly out of tune so you barely even notice it. Think of it as hearing the difference between a G# and an Ab.

Calling someone who quotes Icke a mere "pseud" is too generous. The term you are looking for is "retard"

Interestingly, contempt and sarcasm are the only emotions G*rman composers defecated into their music.

As opposed to the facetiousness and irony of french composers?

his organ work seems to be affected greatly by the transcendental

There's nothing "mathematical" about interval music, nothing "transcendental" about music which makes a conscious effort to be unstructured, and nothing particularly "materialistic" about structure.

Reeeeeee, shitposter, you're undermining my agenda.

what makes you say that?

burden of proof

btfo'd eternally lmao

This is about the morbid obsession with structure and intervals.

I'm sorry, but Bach's music had fuck-all to do with materialism. Bach was desperately Christian and devout, and music was an instrument to him to further devotion to the church. I'm sure that you could analyze parallels between Bach and any damn thing you wanted from the eighteenth century onward, but it's kind of a waste unless you study Bach's material and his life and analyze from that perspective.

So this is about serialism?

OK, this is officially a shitpost. Interval music is ALL ABOUT MATHEMATICS. Intervals ARE ratios in Hertz. Octave = 2/1, perfect fifth = 3/2, perfect fourth = 4/3, etc.

Possibly relevant or not: Leonard Bernstein The Joy of Music" talks about your opinion in some detail, from the perspective of a performer attempting to interpret Bach and the choices that need to be made to do so.

What isn't a ratio?

Thank you user, sounds like an interesting read

OK, it's time to inject some actual psychoacoustics into this conversation.

The video glosses over too much in its effort to dumb down interval ratios for the general populace. It suggests that because the images are "imperfect" then the sounds underlying the images are equally "imperfect".

Now for some actual science. Humans have a pitch resolution of about 3.5 Hz or so. So if you're off by 2 Hz on a pure tone then a human will not be able to notice that error. Now the equal tempered scale differs from the just scale at most by 4.5 Hz or so. That's not perfect but it's pretty damn close to the point where humans cannot notice the difference directly. Humans can notice differences in sum and difference tones between equal and just scales. But there are good mathematical reasons why equal tempered scales work well where meantone scales do not. Go google "wolf fifth" for more information on this mathematical oddity.

tl:dr; anyone comparing the equal tempered scale to materialism or quantum physics or fuzzy logic is just jerking off and doesn't really understand the equal tempered scale.

>No Shitzek, "Well tempered" simply means that the twelve notes per octave of the standard keyboard are tuned in such a way that it is possible to play music in most major or minor keys and it will not sound perceptibly out of tune.
No it doesn't. With temperament the concept of "out of tune" goes out the window. This idea that harmoniousness is of vital importance is also what Bach argued against p much with the Well Tempered Clavier.

But I think the just intonation does not sound good, because it is too still, I think the slight imperfection of equal temperament, allows many positive characteristics of the tones expression, there is a restless and longing and implying for certain notes to others; that if every pitch was perfectly absolutely harmonic, there would lack that 'one note draws to another' instinct, and each note would seem sterily in a class of its own

Does wolf fifth, and other things, how much of these musical things have to do with the density and pressure and nature of air? If there were atmospheres on different planets, made of different gasses, with different gravity, and pressure, density, how different could sound, music, harmony be?

You will often come up against a natural extension of what he was doing, the use of tritones, and that they were considered unholy unharmonious monstrosities and so he never really explored them in many High School and above explorations of Bach.

>Humans have a pitch resolution of about 3.5 Hz or so. So if you're off by 2 Hz on a pure tone then a human will not be able to notice that error.
Beating is a real thing bro.

Even Bernstein himself struggled to find joy in Bach. Bach is opaque to a lot of listeners. Most of his chorales are bloodless and academic things. Personally, I don't think anyone would ever listen to the Goldberg variations if it weren't for Glenn Gould humming along like Rain Man through them. And those most famous showpieces, like Toccata and Fugue in D minor? Well there's some confusion as to whether Bach actually wrote them. My taste is questionable but I tend to fall asleep to the Mass in B minor. And Toccata and Fugue in D minor is totally dripping with parallel fifths (a huge no-no to Bach) and so some people think Bach didn't even write it. I am not saying Bach was not a great composer. He definitely was. But I am also OK with people not getting Bach. He is dry, he is hard to play, he is hard to make accessible. You have to listen to Bach on his own terms, not yours. Compare that to Mozart or Beethoven, who states a theme once and then you never forget it.

math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/tuning.html

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament

>the use of tritones
Oh god this meme again. People who spout this garbage realise the V-I cadence is based on a tritone resolving, right?
Aside from that Bach often got complaints from church-goers that his harmonic treatment was too complex and obfuscated. To suggest that he would avoid using a specific interval seems like madness.

Go back and read the part about "sum and difference tones," schoolboy.

>Most of his chorales are bloodless and academic things
Get. Out.

>hat if every pitch was perfectly absolutely harmonic, there would lack that 'one note draws to another' instinct, and each note would seem sterily in a class of its own
No the other guy (who desu I don't value the opinion of so much from that post), but this is part of what Bach did in his move to equal temperament with the fugue and so on. However, what you say isn't true, that draw still exists, but you can't travel around as easily with it over different modes and keys and so forth.

youtube.com/watch?v=RqrrhkCqIL0

You won't hear sum and difference tones over that small a range esp if it's meant to be imperceptible. You're being a wiki scholar bro.

I agree entirely, Bach is by no means writing catchy little melodies for the kids to sing along to and compared to him Mozart and Beethoven are pop musicians (from an intentional if not technical point of view)

However my post was speaking to the tendency to over-academize Bach. I wouldn't play Bach and expect my twelve year old cousin to be in raptures of ecstasy, but I can absolutely find pleasure in putting Bach on as background music or even as something to drift off to while travelling.

Math is a large part of Bach but Math is intuitively beautiful once understood.

>if not technical
Technique has constantly improved over time. Bach's sometimes hard to play but only because sometimes he literally demands the impossible.

I agree with user here. There's a lot of unsubstantiated bullshit about the tritone being from Satan. All that comes from an old medieval cliche "mi contra fa est diabolus in musica". That's just a rhyming mnemonic. It's like saying "i before e except after c." You're not going to hell if you write "niether," it's just a bit embarrassing.

OK, name your favorite brilliant and soulful and uplifting Bach chorale. Take your time. I've written counterpoint for only a few dozen; presumbly you know something I don't.

Sorry, that was poorly worded on my part

My point was that compared to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are much more palatable even if they can sometimes be just as technical.

I love all these Bachtists getting BTFO ITT

on the other hand, Zizek could have a serious talent in his music writing.

now this is poor bait

Not that I particularly care about your opinion, but yes, sum and difference tones (i.e. "beating") do make an audible difference when you move one of the upper tones by a few Hertz. This is one of the key principles that allow piano tuners to tune pianos.

At my best Prince Myshkin from The Idiot

Got me there senpai, I can't actually name one off the top of my head. We sang a chorale as part of the introduction week choir when I started studying at the conservatory, but I'd have to look up which one it was. I do remember nearly bursting into tears during performance though, it was that beautiful.

That's a valid viewpoint. And I know a lot of people like to put on Bach as wallpaper. But for me personally, if Bach is playing during dinner then all I hear is I AM MATHEMATICS FORGET YOUR MEAL PAY ATTENTION TO ME DAMMIT. Your mileage may vary.

youtube.com/watch?v=2mZvdGAGlOo

youtube.com/watch?v=EVqbl95Ezv4

Me thinks the problem is with you, not with Bach.

>the V-I cadence
Perfect.

Bach's project itself shouldn't lend itself at all to that kind of analysis (the harmonies are almost incidental to the progression of different melodies/themes), it's something he sort of lays over the top afterwards. And in that sense you should expect vii0's and such, but they don't appear all that much. The V7's are also often passing notes.

Mass in B, Matthews Passion, are absolute masterworks, that the writers of many soulful and uplifting chorales would likely prefer to have composed just one of those, rather than all of their works

Beating isn't "sum and difference tones", it's the apparent change in volume when two dissonant tones are played together. You get that WUBWUBWUBWUB noise. Sum and difference tones are other tones you hear from a harmony that aren't really there.

I can school you all day, but this is real basic shit and I assume if you didn't learn from google you're not going to learn from me. Just spend some time learning it instead of posturing.

Congratulations kohai, you have just learned that no one can name a favorite Bach chorale off the top of their head, because they are hard and academic little things. Now your choir may have found a way to put some blood into one and interpret it in a beautiful way. A talented musician can atone for a lot of compositional sins. Bach chorales are not inferior compositions. But they are pedagogical. They are not designed nor intended to speak to or from the heart. They are like completed sudoku or crossword puzzles: everything fits. If you can find beauty in them, more power to you. But the vast majority of people can't. Now this is a purely personal opinion: they are building blocks that you are supposed to take and to build into real music. They are "recipe ideas." Now you use that idea for all you can get from it.

They're considerably more technical.

>Bach's project itself shouldn't lend itself at all to that kind of analysis
While this is a position musicologists seem to take these days, I do not agree that you cannot make a harmonic analysis of Bach works. A lot of his writing is meant to be interpretated polyphonically, I agree on that, but sometimes he explicitly makes a harmonic gesture, for example when he out of nothing writes 3-4 more voices during the final cadence at the end of a fugue. That for me would be an obvious harmonic gesture, not a polyphonic one.

You think I'm defective because I am unable to ignore Bach? By the way, the word is "methinks."

>Now your choir may have found a way to put some blood into one and interpret it in a beautiful way.
Stopped reading after this.

Good lord

Classical Guitar is Violin tier when done right

No, because you cannot see the forest for the trees.