"I do not believe...

And I realize that a lot of people are more interested or comfortable in just tossing a flippant dismissal off than actually delving into the deeper implications of something that seems archaic and obvious. But thinking never hurt anyone.

I did actually answer some of your questions.

Like I say: Fux was probably reacting to the excesses or laxness in the music of his day. Not sure how repeating an exposition has much to do with that. I think that, simply, our boredom threshold is now very small - due to all the constant multimedia bombardment that we all undergo. Of course hearing things twice helps stick things in the memory, but, as modern composers, we can find other ways of doing that without using verbatim repeats.
This is all guesswork, but it's answering a very vague question/statement anyway.

Originally Posted by SSC

For one, I have no idea what Fux meant with that, you don't give a historical context and I don't feel like researching it on my own. Speaking of which, it's a seemingly random statement and it has no depth because it can mean anything you want it to mean without any fixed context.

So all it really is, is an invitation to ramble on something which is as well uncertain and unclear. I'll pass, thx.

Seems to me you over-thought this and expected people to read your mind. You should've posted what you posted above in your first post, then maybe it would've been more interesting. Now it's not helping much, I have no idea what any of what you said has to do with Fux' quote at all.

I guess you've never had an English class in which the professor made a statement and told you to freewrite about what it meant? I once had the line "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." Do I need context to interpret that? No. I discuss what those words alone mean to me. In this instance, I took my immediate reaction, which was "A fish has no need for a bicycle, therefore women can survive without men" and looked for the exact opposite interpretation, which was "A fish does not need a bicycle because it is an underdeveloped creature, and lacks the proper refinements to be able to appreciate a bicycle. Likewise, women lack the proper adaptation and ability to appreciate men." I did it in jest, but had my instructor told me to interpret it in a feminist context I would not have said that.
I know personal anecdotes and analogies don't matter to you SSC, but for the rest of the world that doesn't need everything clear-cut and totally explained 100% of the time, I hope that helps as to why the original post is actually useful, if one just takes a moment to think of what it can mean. Perhaps it is one-dimensional; perhaps it can apply to many disciplines. Perhaps it can be a comment on human nature - how we always see things in rose colored glasses and that nothing we experience seems to be as good.
Who knows? That's why we discuss things. If you are against proper discussion and discovering things (maybe not things about Fux or his quote, but things about yourself) then I would advise you to shut up and stay out of the thread.


Many thanks,
Just a thought,
Hope that helped,
Jamie


*EDIT* the part about shutting up and staying out is only for those who insist on refusing to properly discuss the topic at hand.

Originally Posted by Christopher Dunn-Rankin

"I do not believe that I can call back composers from the present insanity of their work." ~J.J. Fux, from his Author's Forward to Gradus ad Parnassum.

Ignoring the problem of "insanity" in music, since the word choice lends itself to Fux being against the onset of Classicalism...

I feel he makes an interesting, if obvious, point that you can't close an intellectual door once its been opened. Which always makes me curious about stylistic composers...


and i always hated freewriting.

I don't see a reason to dismiss this thread and as I said, it is a nice thing to bring up. But I do see a reason to dismiss this statement of Fux right away, as it stands. I would dismiss any statement that says "the music of today is insane" without giving a more detailed reasoning and it doesn't not matter to me whether the person who said it is a well-known musicologist like Fux, or whether it's gianluca saying "pop music sucks".

If Fux did give a more detailed reasoning, discussing it would be another thing, but like that I'll just put it off as the ranting of a conservative old man who doesn't like things changing. Not because there may or may not have been good reasons for this statement, but because doing otherwise would do unjustice to all the well-argued points less well-known people have raised but aren't discussed.

Originally Posted by Jamie Whitmarsh

Who knows? That's why we discuss things. If you are against proper discussion and discovering things (maybe not things about Fux or his quote, but things about yourself) then I would advise you to shut up and stay out of the thread.

I don't really see any other discussion here besides this one, besides that there's just that quote that, like Gardener said, it's damn easy to dismiss and he even gave some really good arguments as to why it should as well be dismissed.

So, the discussion I'm putting forth is that I don't think the quote is worth looking at at all, it's easy to dismiss and it's completely irrelevant to any meaningful discourse about music as it's just "I haet sum musix" except said by someone of relative historical importance.

Why should anyone care? Why make a big deal out of it? Saint-Saens also spewed a lot of poison towards contemporaries of his, as did a lot of other composers. It's not particularly interesting, though maybe their reasons are we have none of that here either.

So, really, I still stand by what I said. He over-thought it, the quote is in itself pretty pointless and if he(or you) want to extrapolate it to other things you(or he) should as well say so and how that would work. That may be worth looking at or talking about.

But seeing as you're(and he is, I guess?) for the whole freewriting thingy, what do you expect? In fact, all of what I've said up to now is pretty much in line with your analogy, I took the quote and I'm questioning the validity of both this thread and the quote's relevance. It's as "in topic" as it'd ever get so if you don't want to acknowledge it as a serious argument or discussion that's not my problem anymore is it?

Trying to encourage discussion and at the same time telling people (me) to shut up is hilarious, I hope you realize that.

Ok, it's quite obvious to me why Mr. Dunn-Rankin even brought that up in the first place. There is too much of that sentiment in this forum and uneducated composers/musicians. They feel insecure with having to cope with new styles and new forms of expression, so they immediately label it as insanity. I'm sure that Schoenberg was labeled as insane throughout his life, but the point is that even Beethoven and Mozart were labeled as insane.

Just because you as a person cannot understand or come to terms with the new doesn't mean that the new is insane. I think that it was a brilliant idea to just dump the quote in the thread and see what sort of answers you would get. As soon as I saw that this thread was created, I pretty much knew that there was going to be an extremely negative and skeptical response.

But then again, that was the point of the quote: to expose the insecurity of people having to cope with new things.

Lesson/moral of the quote: DON'T DISMISS NEW THINGS SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE NEW OR YOU DON'T LIKE IT.

Schoenberg enjoyed a pretty good reputation as a theorist, composer and writer...

But anyways, I think it goes without saying that nonsense prejudice is nonsense. Right?

Originally Posted by SSC

But anyways, I think it goes without saying that nonsense prejudice is nonsense. Right?

Not always.

Originally Posted by Maelstrom

Ok, it's quite obvious to me why Mr. Dunn-Rankin even brought that up in the first place. There is too much of that sentiment in this forum and uneducated composers/musicians. They feel insecure with having to cope with new styles and new forms of expression, so they immediately label it as insanity. Just because you as a person cannot understand or come to terms with the new doesn't mean that the new is insane...

Woah, lets not assume that a conscious decision to use an existing style is any different from a conscious decision to independently combine styles. And most definitely lets not assume that avant-garde music is solely the realm of educated classes, or vice versa.

That's the problem with the avant garde or those "forging their own styles" -- even the most eclectic artists will be writing works resembling other things, and those things are fundamentally equal, so long as the musicianship is acceptable. There is no arbiter of music to say one style is any better or worse - it is personal preference.

Fux calling classicalism to be "insanity" is correct. According to accepted cultural norms of music, classicalism broke many rules - in the same way that free improv did for 1950s jazz - it was noise, to their ears. However, that it was noise cannot make it inherently "better" music, any more than classical was "better."

A negative attitude towards either stunts the true musical growth that should be sought in music.

Originally Posted by Ferkungamabooboo

Fux calling classicalism to be "insanity" is correct. According to accepted cultural norms of music, classicalism broke many rules - in the same way that free improv did for 1950s jazz - it was noise, to their ears. However, that it was noise cannot make it inherently "better" music, any more than classical was "better."

A negative attitude towards either stunts the true musical growth that should be sought in music.

????????

Source plz?

I don't know what you're calling classicism, but there's the Vienna Classic, before that there's the Mannheim school and the Berlin school, all at the same time you got the Galant Style with Händel and so on... I don't know WHEN he said it but Fux lived just until the late Baroque. He was probably talking about the galant style, considering that was the "new" thing at the time.

But, woah, it wasn't noise at all to the people back then. In fact the whole trend was to move AWAY from public-scaring crap like super complicated counterpoint towards a simpler style of harmony/theory. IF Fux said it when I think he did, he was just angry the polyphonic schools were sorta getting (or were rather) passé at the time nearing his death.

Some context here, yay.

PS: Händel was stupidly popular, as was CPE Bach, Haydn, etc. These are all people who wrote in the style Fux probably hated. So... if anything, people went crazy about it and it became a super-trend~