KStoertebeker

As far as my experience with this forum(as a user as well as someone who read silently before) goes, this has been a one-in-a-time occurrence. Things got heated quickly, there were some misunderstandings and slapfights about semantics, but besides some minor taunts(which I took to be in the tone of the discussion and understood as such by the addressee), not much happened. Nobody involved poo pooed up other threads or seems to hold a grudge. Then again, it might as well have been closed before the first page break to prevent such slapfights.

Just jump to 1:16, 6:48 and 12:32. I distinctly remember these sections because back then, when I could not stand this piece at all and would only listen to Bach and Telemann, I was still mesmerized by their beauty. Vivaldi's piece on the other hand would have bored me to death even back then, at least compare it to the Brandenburg Concerti or Telemann's quartets. Nevertheless, I was not talking about the whole work. Comparing a thirty-minute story to a short baroque concerto is not very fair. Yeah, I will not. It has been a quite a while since I tried to and all I could produce and finalize was a boring concerto in the Baroque style(I was 15 back then and inexperienced) and some awful fugues and minor exercises. Actually, I registered to get me back in the mood, but that has not happened yet. Ask me in a month maybe. You are taking this thread way too serious. We are three pages in and you are still trying to get a cheap gotcha out of somebody because Marx or modernism or whatever. Nobody is going to give you that, calm down.

Have you ever listened to Schönberg's "Verklärte Nacht"? Its thematic and harmonic ingenuity easily knock Vivaldi's entire work out of the water(no offense to the Red Monk) and it still has many memorable, yet accessible moments. Maybe they will flinch at some point, but at least they are not bored to death by endless Ritornelli sections for two Violins. Why compare the two? Arch Enemy produces bottom-of-the-barrel melodeath(emphasis on the first two syllables) which is basically glorified rock music. Take a simple song structure, slap some blast beats on top and congrats, you have got yourself an AE song. Cannibal Corpse at least put some effort into their batshit insane lyrics and hilariously frantic riffs. They would prefer the former(if at all) because it is easy rock.

No. 1: Nice short theme, I can almost smell the ridiculously oversized wig on the performer's head. The stretta in MM. 64 ff. is also nicely prepared. I really like how you insert free-flowing toccata sections. No. 2: What a strange introduction, reminds me of Mozart's "Dissonanzenquartett". The slower tempo has an air of Bach's pastorale for organ. No. 3: Starts rather conventional as well, but quickly takes a turn to something different. Great cadence into the Ebmaj7 in M. 18 and the picardy third on the tonic minor in M. 20 gets the sweet plagal minor cadence sound from the fa-mi and lo-so. MM. 25 ff. on the other hand have an infectious rhythm. The Cm sixte-ajoutèe and the fdim7 leading into a surprising Amaj7 are a nice touch(Haydn did something similiar once in a quartet). No. 4: Right of the bat, this sounds like the funky lovechild of Buxtehude and Stevie Wonder(in a good way). Those sweet jazzy chords and progressions: dimmaj7(M. 30), Maj7(M. 4)...MM. 9-12 are just pure voice leading, held together by the C# over a 9b2(as the third), 7#4(as the augmented fourth), m7b5(as the fourth) and a lush lydian augmented chord. M. 29 really tricked me into thinking you would give us a minor plagal cadence. By comparison, the fugue is rather tame. Nice how you let the introductory sections reappear in MM. 106 ff. and MM. 153 ff. respectively. Seldom can I brace myself for such a large-scale work, but I actually listened to your entire opus and read along. This is such a smooth marriage of fugue and toccata, truly a marvellous work, combined with anachronistically different pre-/interludes. Have you met with the organist yet?

@SSC To me, it is more the presentation than anything. I have read master theses in under sixty-two minutes. He could easily have done it in less than half of the time and it reeks of self-importance. Granted, he is important to many a thousand people all around the world but still. At least give the viewer an idea of what is to come, you are not livestreaming the discovery of the world formula. @AngelCityOutlaw > implying that listening to Mozart makes you smarter

@AngelCityOutlaw Tantacrul, just like Neely, is a lazy blowhard who sprinkles his rambling liberally with (leftist) buzzwords. This instantly reminded me of mouthbreathers like Contrapoints getting high on obscure trivia with their five-dollar words. One hour of video, five minutes worth of ideas, that was my main gripe. As pointed out by @SSC, music still is very much common practice period. Your studies at a university will be many semesters of counterpoint and classical form. You will not study melody because there is not much (academic) study to melody. Go, look it up, I just did it for our universities. Mostly, it is grifters/journalists from outside who push for change and seldom succeed. And who does even know Mahler? Mahler did advance the classical tradition to its pinnacle, yet people know Mozart, Chopin and Beethoven, not him. People like accessible, popular things and much classical music requires stiff attention to get pleasure out of it or you will miss the most of it. Tchaikovsky, Bach and Mozart have billions of views on YouTube, Stockhausen does not. You absolutely have to be a total sperg to think people have even heard of Schoenberg.

Yeah, I have to stop you right there. Most people get into classical music through music education and I have never met a single person there, even among professionals, who is into serialism, even throughout the Boulez craze. Most people do not care about Williams or Holst either. It is neither leftists banning Mozart(this has never happened) nor stiff pretenders at Rieu's who are responsible for the public's lack of interest in classical music. You have to be on the spectrum to not get that classical music is an acquired taste. It is a niche.

Exactly. After all, art really only is about meaning. Composing a mirror fugue for the most part is more of a technical exercise than deep introspection and many operas have no meaningful plot. Yet they often make up for that through intricate compositional devices. If a work has no personality or emotion, one should at least exercise his technical skills. This holds true for other genres as well. Best example: technical death metal. Batshit insane lyrics you cannot understand anyway paired with a wall of sound, but they still have nice grooves and scales going for them. I still do not understand what Tantacrul's problem is. Actively enjoying classical music beyond Rieu's hitlist will always have a high barrier of entry. That is true for all of art. I for myself do not care about painting at all, but not because hipsters ruined Monet. I just do not get it and it will probably stay this way.

That is exactly what I mean. Of course one can just "hear music", but a duck could do the same, as Stravinsky (supposedly) quipped. Active listening is an integral part of the classical experience. With simple music, you get away with diverting your attention to something else. Just because aristocrats in Mozart's time were fools with too large a fortune on their hands and how Rieu plays simplified versions for the superficial masses, this does not take away the potential depth of classical music. I wonder why you think that "watching random garbage on youtube" is below reading but do not apply this scheme to music genres. Moreso since there are many genres in literature(Young Adult might be the most prominent) which might as well be below random YouTube garbage themselves. Kudos. I myself always recommend listening to reharmonizations of jazz standards to keep your vocabulary flexible and identifying or harmonizing sounds in daily life. Putting a tritone on that one annoying water boiler truely is the peak of modern art.

One gets the most out of classical music by attentively listening to it exactly because of its qualities. It is a pleasure, but also a mental exercise, given the right circumstances. Taking one's time, listening closely, familiarizing oneself with the music are timeconsuming entry barriers. As most people do not care that much about music, they could never really enjoy it. Same goes for theater and literature. But by this standard, "The Big Bang Theory" and mac 'n' cheese would be most valuable because the majority does not care about better crafted alternatives. The entry barrier for Shakespeare is even lower since all of his texts are in the public domain, yet you need time and dedication to actually read one of his works.

Interesting pedal point from M. 62 on. The rhythm in M. 2 seems to work when it is supplemented by a steady stream of sixteenth notes because otherwise it strongly suggests the preparation of a cadence, at least to my ears . In M. 14 and M. 46, I (aurally) stumble over it, but in M. 73 it serves as a perfect way to end the fugue, I think. This nitpicking aside, I could not spot any glaring errors. Really solid counterpoint and nice theme, as far as my (definitely rusty) fugue skills allow me to judge. A pleasant and skillful work for sure.

It is almost as if classical music, despite all the progress in accessibility, still inherently is higher art which you need to invest time and dedication into where most people just want to have something to blare over them sitting on the shitter and this discussion has been about the former, not the entire music market. But surely, if it were not for Rieu cosplaying as an 18th century aristocrat, people in the back of the bus would be terrorizing passengers with Beethoven's "Große Fuge", maybe even some spicy "Gesang der Jünglinge".

Yeah, but the question was why (untrained) people flock to classical music and why it is seen as artistically (not economically) valuable in comparison to other music. Well, because hundreds of years of music tradition have produced a loose canon of rules which allows us to write comprehensible, pleasant music. Mozart's music follows an intrinsic logic, just as Strauss' pompous waltzes, Desprez' motets and many more do. Of course, Ligeti, Stockhausen and even early modernists like Hindemith cannot fairly be judged by these standards, but they deliberately break with this tradition and, as you yourself noticed, are far less popular.

@SSC Nobody cares about the LTV. Why would you determine the value of art empirically? How hard is it to accept that judging a composition based on rules emerging from hundreds of years of music practice is as objective as it gets? This discussion has been a rollercoaster of amusement and absurdity, you might as well tell us that a woman is anybody who identifies as one.

@SSC Oh, you misunderstood me there. I meant that in terms of craftmanship, art music is more valuable than a simple pop song. Everybody can produce music, but the Western tradition is a distinguished discipline, built upon a long lecay. I personally do not care about symphonies(especially Beethoven's) at all, since I am more partial towards small-scale works. Still, I can admire the work involved in constructing such a work objectively. A simple song however, as it is easy to construct, can only be evaluated subjectively. I also do not care about popularity at all. I am always searching for apocryphic composers(a few I can recommend: Joseph Ermand-Bonnal, Jean Cras and Joseph Jongen) and seldom listen to the popular works. Not out of elitism, but because I am intrigued by compositions in the vein of Debussy's and Ravel's String Quartets for example. But, to return to the video, I still have to disagree. Andre Rieu is not elitist: he is the epitome of pop-classical pretentiousness, presenting shallow shows to everyone. At least, everyone can enjoy some Rieu. Elitism, however, I see in the works of Tantacrul himself and academia producing unintelligible music based on foreign (often purely mathematical) ideas. To enjoy these works, you have to be part of the musical elite. These works are vastly unpopular. Again: How can one call Rieu, who at least sells out overplayed classics to the common man, elitist, when he himself composes music most musicians would not even appreciate? This is some marvellous cognitive dissonance at work. If anything, works like "Herostratic" are at fault for classical music being percieved as elitist.

Oh, I did not mean to offend you, but I think your other works worked better because you had less going on in parallel: Rather homophonic, but with more emphasis on the melody and (really delicate) harmonies. In this work I have trouble keeping up with the individual voices and feel quite lost, hence I suggested you to make it more comprehensible by removing some of the irregularites. Or, to answer your question: No, I did not notice the constant repetition in the pedal. Visually, I could spot it in the score, but not aurally. You may have introduced ideas which are hard to spot by ear.

Yet it is is almost insulting to suggest to the trained musician that anyone can do just as well. Rachmaninov's 3rd ist a masterpiece of craftmanship and very nice to listen to. Yes, there is a difference in value between minutiously crafted composition, be it classical or jazz, on the one hand and a (pop) song I just made up on the other hand. Orchestration is an entirely separate challenge, something you do not have to care about if it is just you and a guitar. A well-written sonata requires training no songwriter knows about. Nobody in their right mind would call this distinction elitist.

Oh, I was just confused that you would expect others to be able to join in the discussion of this sixty-two minutes long video without mentioning what exactly you found compelling. As nobody seems to have the time to comment on a two-minute piece by a fellow user, this seemed rather expectant to me. But really, it was just meant as a snarky comment, nothing more. On topic, because I made it through the video: I think he is conflating many things. Why does he mention the social standing of musicians in Mozart's time while completely glossing over how in Liszt's time already, musicians were basically revered celebrities? How is commercialized pop music elitist? To the contrary, merely academically succesful music(have you heard "The Sandpiper") seems elitist to me(as he acknowledges in the case of Babbitt). Pop music is commercialized entertainment. He really conflates entertainment and art. How can you mock the West for being snobbish about Classical Music and fail to see that all this vain materialism and performance of the Rieus of this world is what drives China to investment into Classical Music? No, it has to be some Confucian tradition. What I think: Music has never been more accessible to youths all around the world. Open up Spotify, type in 'Debussy Préludes“ and you are there already. Just as every other craft, music requires (expensive) training and dedication. Go around and ask people: They do not care about music at all. Why would one dedicate so much time to music if it were not for thinking it to be higher art? Why listen to 62 minutes of Tentacrul if not for that? And this is true for many other things. People also like to flaunt their belongings. Has he ever heard people talk about expensive(not fine) food, sports or anything like that? He really conflates enthusiats(as on this forum) with people who just pretend for status. To top it off, he himself writes purely academic music and in this very video talks about ancient China for ten minutes which is not even tangentially related to anything else he talks about. It is almost comical how he has his gripes with the correlation of wealth and Classical music while uploading hour long video essays to his YouTube channel.

These are beautiful, really! Quite somber and atmospheric, reminding me of the better tunes of Jeremy Soule("Distant Horizons" and "Dawn" come to mind) of all things. However, I wonder whether the balacing between the voices' volumes is a bit off. For reference: In the last measures of Widowers(MM. 44-fin) and the first measures of Coronation(MM. 1 f.), I can hardly pick out the soprano, who I would expect to be the easiest to follow. Mind you, this might well have been your intention, but I am still curious whether you intended to blur the voices and how you did it(by adding reverb, I suppose)?

It would be nice if you could tell us more about how your piece is structured or name specific sections you would like to hear feedback on. I really like the intro with the sudden chromatic shift and the iv-I resolution in the introduction. Also, I am quite fond of the bluesy section in the middle and the more calm sections. Then again, the intermittent sections somehow remind me of videogame music with their harmony quite different from the common practice period and the (MIDI) brass, but in a good way, I might add. What I think does come sudden and unexpected is the ending. After the chromatically shifting arpeggios and the four-note motif traded between the instrument groups, the ending is rather surprising. Also, did you check the instrumentation? Transposing instruments and winds and brass are my kryptonite, so I could not tell whether it is fine or not. It is definitely a unique and nice piece, hard to pigeon-hole. Structurally, it works better than the first piece you posted here("Bad Deads"). Keep composing.

tl; dw Criticizing elitism via rambling about Confucius, Mozart, Mao and Taylor Swift in an hour-long video essay reaches layers of irony deemed impossible before.

The pickup-figure in the bass in M. 9 B. 2 is rather spicy because of the chromatic diminished fifth and the non-stepwise resolution. Transposing it down an octave however would extend the jump down an octave, so I would keep it. In M. 7, the movement from Ab to g also clashes with the melody(implied Abaugmaj7 in first inversion), I would change the upper voice in the left hand to C-Bb-C-G. The cross-relation in M. 16 B. 2 and the minor ninth in M. 17 B. 2 are rather jarring, same goes for M. 35 B. 2(cross-relation), M. 49 B. 1(fifth in the bass). The sixteenth-note figure in M. 63 might work better with eighth-notes, in M. 70 however it sounds fine(though, this arguably foreshadows the figure in MM. 72 f.). M. 113 B. 2 might also work better as C-E without the intermittent D. (M. = measure, B. = beat) Quite an accomplishment! Really solid in terms of form and sprinkled with catchy rhythms. In MM. 72, I would have expected you to prolong the ending of the B theme to really milk the sudden burst of velocity. Also, really nice codetta. Minor qualms concerning voice leading aside, this is a solid small work.

Yeah, that's better. I suppose a .midi-file would work better for analysing a piece because of the fine-grained control, but then again, some people come to this site and steal pieces to upload them to MuseScore or elsewhere. More on topic: The upper voice has a constant two-measure phrase, where every note is on the beat. In contrast to that, the middle and lower voice use held notes abundantly and are of varying phrase length. Middle voice: 4 measures, then 6(or 3+3?), then 4 again, 4 again, then 7, then 4 again(measured by the upbeat sixteenth note). The lower voice is even more irregular. This is already hard to follow, because the phrase lengths do not line up. When you add your irregular rhythms to that, which often accent different beats, it gets really confusing. I would try to limit the freedom each voice has. Give each voice a regular phrase length(e. g. #1 stays at 2 measures per phrase, #2 gets 4 and #3 gets 4 or 8). The middle voice plays small note values, so maybe it should try to play a long note on a constant beat and. The lower voice does not follow the 1+2+...-pulse of the upper voice, so maybe you should select one rhythm(maybe take 2 measures of 3+3+4+2+4). It is not that what you are doing is wrong, it just seem like you are biting off more than you can chew. Of course, it is all a matter of taste, but I would take a regular model and then try to modify it instead of starting with such free voices.

Reminds me of Debussy's "Pagodes", the parallel fourths definitely manage to make it sound bucolic. However, the short repeating phrase structure, rhythmic clash between the middle and lower voice and the lack of breaks and cadences makes it hard to follow the piece, which contradicts the folk atmosphere of the first bars. I took a quick listen to your other organ pieces and the change of harmony as well as pauses in the melody in your Song No. 2 are much easier to follow. The same goes for your first Song. Maybe you should insert an audible cut at the end of each phrase(i. e. cadential movement) and tone down the velocity of the middle voice? As it is, it sounds quite frantic and diverts attention from the lower voice. Also: Sadly, the volume is quite low and the left hand is the hardest to pick out, so maybe you could upload a differently mixed version?

Your treatment of the voices works well, alternating between parallel, contrary and oblique motion. Solid four-part writing, I think. Also really nice to listen to. Simple as you sought it to be, but without being overly repetetive and with a nice sense of breath in the melody. Definitely more than an exercise in four-part writing. How long did this take you?