I like to try to match interesting videos with particular musical favorites, for example the record setting French TGV speed record 574,8 km/h run with Stratosfear by Tangerine Dream. I start two youtube tabs and turn the train sound down:
You might want to try Michael Nymans
"Musique à Grande Vitesse" then, which was explicitly composed for the inauguration of the northern track of theTGV:
I like listening to albums the way they were produced: starting from the first song until the last one.
This modern endless stream of curated playlists and singles is tiring, and loses the storytelling aspect of albums that makes them greater than the sum of its songs.
Modern music albums aren't really written with that in mind in my experience. They're optimised for people skipping through playlists in a streaming service, not going on a journey through an album.
Heavily depends on the genre and the artist. A lot of top 40 pop albums are vehicles for singles or designed to get chopped up across some playlists, sure. If they bother with the album at all. I would definitely say bands that focus on holistic or even high-concept albums tend to do it often though, and obviously you see more of it in genres like progressive rock where it was kind of a defining mainstay, but it's a form that's alive and well in a lot of genres on a case-by-case basis. For example, I like a Russian pagan folk/black metal act called Arkona (which is pretty well-known by folk metal standards actually) and their latest album released last year is high-concept and cohesive, structured as a katabasis. I'll also warn that it's probably less for everyone than some of their other music as it's very musically gloomy and thematically dark, which makes sense given how things have been going in Russia and especially given the lead singer's family is from Ukraine... Point being, cohesive albums are far from a dying art form, they're just not the format most optimized for broad appeal and whatever monetization method is most favored by the largest distributors (these days probably Spotify and, what like, Apple?), which the most well-known pop music is by definition
It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds
Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect
Fortunately that's my preferred genre (prog). You'll have to pry Devin Townsend and Haken albums out of my cold dead hands (or just log me out of my Spotify account).
You can listen to any Kendrick Lamar album either starting from track 1 or last track and still can understand the storyline overall. Very genius. Maybe you should widen your genre? Also I could say the same thing with metal, hardcore or punk in today’s modern music.
I think a lot of music (especially pop) has always been this way to an extent -- a bunch of songs are written with no sequencing in mind, and then the "structure" of an album is built up after the fact by sequencing those songs in a way that sounds good. Like, I don't think "Please Please Me" by The Beatles was written with an intent to tell a story though the arc of the album (it almost feels random, if anything, although maybe the most popular song was put at the end on purpose?)
In all honesty, I don't think the ratio of "a bunch of tracks thrown together" albums to "narrative arc" albums is overall all that different than it used to be.
That's been true basically since the invention of sound recordings and radio. If you look back, producers really focused on building the best single, optimizing for radio play.
While I personally mainly listen to full albums, unless it's explicitly a concept album or a classical suite I'm not sure it's possible to make a broad generalization that "it's how the music was intended to be heard".
I'm a trained classical music composer and it's shameful how little of music I ever listen. I usually have couple of songs that are in a power play but I very seldom listen any other music. On a contrary I have melodies and song ideas playing in my head all the time. But I'd sure like to find more time to listen through the classics from time to time.
I came to Bach only recently, I bought a classical guitar a couple of years ago and just over the last eight months or so I've been really getting into baroque music.
I don't know why I didn't appreciate it before, I guess I just never gave Bach a chance, but it's some of the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. The counterpoint that makes it feel like the music is spiralling around you is just otherworldly.
I'd be interested in resources you could share for baroque guitar playing. I play guitar and I love baroque music, but I didn't mix these two hobbys so far. I can read music, but I am a bit slow.
I'm completely self-taught, so while I am teaching myself to read music I'm learning baroque music through tab. It's just too frustrating for me to try reading complicated standard notation at the moment.
My main resources for baroque tabs would be:
- classtab.org
- classclef.com
Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate.
Scroll down to the drop-D one, that's the one I play.
With baroque music I find legato is so incredibly important so really concentrate on fingerings that let the notes ring out. There may frequently be an easier fingering to grab but which means you have to stop the bass note too early, so it takes a bit of experimentation to figure it out.
It's very difficult but incredibly rewarding when you manage to produce the counterpoint yourself, I'm smiling to myself the whole time while playing.
Not to sound dogmatic but I would suggest learning notation also at some point so that you can read the original sheet music. It will open up an entire world of what the composer wanted to express apart from just the notes.
Yeah I am learning standard notation and I do look at the standard notation for pieces to look at the instructions from the composer. I mean, I can read music but and I could figure out how to play baroque music from standard notation, I would just be glacially slow.
I'm still working my way through Sor etudes so I learn the fretboard.
I think it's like like saying the problem with rock music is all those thousands of rock bands out there. After a while, you know what you like or dislike and what pieces to listen to that you might subjectively enjoy.
I was reading, distracted by the thought "is there anything more pretentious than naming your dog after a philosopher?", and the author immediately surpassed himself, throwing away his CDs because gifting them would be too cruel.
Dub Element's Dub Techno YT playlist can always pull me back to a relaxed but also alert state for working with text (e.g. litrev or writing). For higher BPM his Deep Progressive Techno playlist is ace. https://www.youtube.com/@DubElementMusic/playlists
Bach is my absolute favorite, but not in listening time (playing he is, though). Since some time, I've been using YouTube to find lesser known composers, and there are really so many. Not that they deserve to be as well known as e.g. Bach, but some really deserve a wider audience.
In the mornings, I too look for more harmonic music, although e.g. Poulenc is still good.
Contemporary music is ok for later, but it's a more difficult find. Some of it is great, though. Don't be afraid of it. It doesn't have a good name, but there is quite a lot of variation in contemporary music, from harsh, microtonal pleep-ploop sounds to shimmering minimal music and reflective music with a bit of an edge, and anything between.
It mostly depends on how you feel in the moment, and how you would like to feel some moments later, e.g., if you are feeling blue, listening melancholic music will amplify your blueness, happy music on the other hand (whatever it is for you) will possibly get you out of it. Another factor is your age (your music listening experience). Many times you'll find yourself listening to the same albums/songs and feeling differently than you felt while listening to the same tunes years ago.
Music is just a game of pattern recognition to spur up emotions which may trigger thoughts/ideas or may just provide resolve. Rules like no rock music in the morning, or jazz only in the evenings, though may help, don't make sense. Maybe you hate rock music this morning but next week maybe you'll enjoy. Keeping an open mind about the consumption of music and avoiding self imposed rules like that will only add to your experience.
Wrote something on similar lines[1]. To understand a song completely I needed to dig deep in the artist's life & philosophy, the same with lyrics. I stopped trying to relate and match my existing life experience with the artist and explicitly tried understanding what the artist was trying to convey, dissolving my own understanding of what I thought it should sound like. Never went back to listening music the old way.
48 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadTGV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOdATLzRGHc
Stratosfear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w8VsvJ40sM
https://youtu.be/huEtJw7pfLk
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGV_(composition)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G4vARda08X8
To some degree, one could say that rock / metal is a degeneration of Bach's music (and that's what makes it great).
> And to be clear, I am not suggesting that these methods are optimal for anyone else.
This modern endless stream of curated playlists and singles is tiring, and loses the storytelling aspect of albums that makes them greater than the sum of its songs.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
It's worth considering that writing a cohesive composition that's roughly an hour long (even if broken up into a few different songs) probably takes more effort and vision than accumulating individual songs and eventually releasing them together, so you'd expect the latter to happen more often even in the absence of systematic pressures of other kinds
Also, obviously this permits a lot of degrees and can be kind of subjective. Like you can have a whole continuum from "This is one large cohesive opera or play broken up into songs for convenience or structure" to "These songs share some musical motifs or thematic ideas, possibly just explained by all being composed around the same time by the same artist" and the latter of which one listener might view as having a coherent thematic thread through it while another might view it as a bunch of barely-related singles. Often even just the year an album was released can make it a snapshot of the zeitgeist in a big way that sometimes only even seems that way in retrospect
In all honesty, I don't think the ratio of "a bunch of tracks thrown together" albums to "narrative arc" albums is overall all that different than it used to be.
While I personally mainly listen to full albums, unless it's explicitly a concept album or a classical suite I'm not sure it's possible to make a broad generalization that "it's how the music was intended to be heard".
I don't know why I didn't appreciate it before, I guess I just never gave Bach a chance, but it's some of the most amazing stuff I've ever heard. The counterpoint that makes it feel like the music is spiralling around you is just otherworldly.
Always a pleasure to listen to David Russell.
My favourite of his is his arrangement of Handel's passacaglia from HWV 432: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b3D0t1DiEg
If it's baroque don't fix it.
My main resources for baroque tabs would be:
- classtab.org - classclef.com
Of the two I would say classtab is the more accurate.
For example, here's the tab for the prelude from 998: https://www.classtab.org/bach_js_bwv0998_lute_suite_in_eb_1_...
Scroll down to the drop-D one, that's the one I play.
With baroque music I find legato is so incredibly important so really concentrate on fingerings that let the notes ring out. There may frequently be an easier fingering to grab but which means you have to stop the bass note too early, so it takes a bit of experimentation to figure it out.
It's very difficult but incredibly rewarding when you manage to produce the counterpoint yourself, I'm smiling to myself the whole time while playing.
I'm still working my way through Sor etudes so I learn the fretboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque_guitar
For modern guitar, there are many transcriptions of Bach and Silvius Leopold Weiss lute music.
For me, it is his lute music that really shows his genius.
Part of the problem with the classical masters is we speak as if we love all their work the same.
I love Pink Floyd too but that doesn't mean I think all Pink Floyd albums are equal.
In the mornings, I too look for more harmonic music, although e.g. Poulenc is still good.
Contemporary music is ok for later, but it's a more difficult find. Some of it is great, though. Don't be afraid of it. It doesn't have a good name, but there is quite a lot of variation in contemporary music, from harsh, microtonal pleep-ploop sounds to shimmering minimal music and reflective music with a bit of an edge, and anything between.
Music is just a game of pattern recognition to spur up emotions which may trigger thoughts/ideas or may just provide resolve. Rules like no rock music in the morning, or jazz only in the evenings, though may help, don't make sense. Maybe you hate rock music this morning but next week maybe you'll enjoy. Keeping an open mind about the consumption of music and avoiding self imposed rules like that will only add to your experience.
[1] - https://harpratap.com/2023/05/31/on-how-to-listen-Nusrat-fat...