27 Oct
2015
27 Oct
'15
5:06 p.m.
On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:57 AM, David Santamauro <
david.santamauro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Nicely put ... but my comment was a
response to: "If you want to play
hobby music in the style of other artists some software tools make it easy
to do so, but you never will find your individual style."
I think the OP's point is that the constraints imposed by software tools
are sufficiently severe enough that it is difficult to break out of the
stylistic traps they set up. We could (usefully, perhaps) debate whether
this is true, and how those constraints compare to the compositional
strictures of the western canon, but it seems to me that the basic point is
at least debatable and might (just might) even be true.
Fair enough. but I think that our impression that the music from Haydn
through Brahms (even beyond) seems constrained and non-diverse (and to a
large degree I agree), has everything to do with the fact that we are
viewing it from an entirely different historical perspective. Macro views
hide micro changes. So even within the western classical tradition, the
diversity as observed by contemporaries is not something so easily
dismissed.
Not that I want to be accused of comparing Skrillex to Mozart, but I
thinking that the views of contemporaries can be quite easily dismissed
once you've lived through an era like the last couple of decades in which
various subdivisions of techno/EDM are all religious matters to their true
believers. I'm not sure that the western classical scene operated in the
same way, but it seems entirely likely to me. The fact that its
practitioners were massively more skilled at composition doesn't change
that.