Relevancy of tonal compositions in the 21st century.

I was told by a friend of mine just recently that atonal music isn't supposed to be 'moving' to people, saying this in response to my question earlier. He is a lover of many atonal masterpieces, so this was not a negative criticism on his part. Do others agree with this statement? If so, and atonal/post-tonal does not have pleasantry to the ear and emotionally moving qualities as its purpose, then what is the purpose? This is totally subjective, but that's my point; I want to know music's purpose and relevance to you, any of you!

The reason atonal/post-tonal/whatever you wish to call all that music separate from common practice doesn't yet totally click with me is precisely its lack of sentimentality. Then again, it may contain a different sense of emotion, a differently sentimental quality that I can't detect yet. Isn't this getting so marvelously biased? :)

First off: "sentimentality" is not "emotional resonance". I'd be careful about my choice of words if I were you.

Second: there are MANY non-tonal works that have VERY powerful emotional resonance to those who love them. And it is a complete fabrication to state that non-tonal music "isn't supposed to be moving". That's the single most ignorant comment I've ever read.

The main objective is of art and music is to make a connection between the artist and the listener ,to convey some sort of message, meaning, or emotion. Atonal and tonal music both can achieve that. It is until tonal music becomes irrelevant to the 21st century listener that is becomes no longer is relevant to music in the 21st century. I would say the same for non tonal music. You could get really deep and try and make this a complex issue, but you might forget what music is really about.

I apologize for giving the wrong impressions wherever I go, but this is indeed a time of wonderment and choices for me. It is hard to make a concrete choice or even give solid comparisons when I am not sure which words to use. The only way I can learn is through your advice or scorn. If nothing else (and this thread is something more), this is an excellent experiment in the reactions to different musical taste and irrational musical ignorance.

QcCowboy, I have seen your compositions here and they are very interesting to me, as with many others on this site. Is it not a bit harsh to say that quote of mine is the most "ignorant comment" you've ever read? Perhaps that friend sees atonal music as cold, calculating (not in BAD ways), and interesting music, not as lacking in emotional subtext. When I asked for emotional responses to modernist music, I didn't mean to incite a stir-up or argument. I am an analytical person, prone to asking far too many questions for some peoples' comfort, and I don't often word them diplomatically. However, the responses I have received so far, while not giving direct examples, show me indirectly just how important contemporary "non-tonal" styles are to some people.

Whether quartal, dodecaphonic, serialist, minimalist, electronic, etc., I see that there is a strong current of respect and experimentation, not of bored analytical processes working themselves out. In the brief time I have been here so far, these responses are managing to change my view of modern and contemporary music. Just as the newcomer to "Classical" era works might see no difference between Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart, I, in my foolishness, have not attempted to untangle the knots of 20th century traditions in detail.

I do love many varied cuts and pieces of music from this last century, though. I have watched that clip which you, Bolanos, have given me on Messiaen. It is such joyous music, and this is what I meant by "sentimentality" and "emotional resonance". For me, there is no difference between sentimentality and emotionality; the two go hand in hand, but then again I am a dramatic, hyperbolic Romantic at heart. I am a conservative, but with my own Karajan-Histrionic flavour added in, I suppose. Something like 'Symphonie Fantastique' or 'Eine Alpensinfonie', with their dramatic resolutions, appeal to me greatly. I'm also just a na

You should google them yourself to learn more:

Wozzeck (Berg)

Threnody to the victims of hiroshima (Penderecki)

Turangalila (Messiaen - this is actually a love song. Everything else he wrote was highly religious - which is very emotive in my opinion).

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Firebird

Schnittke's Concerti Grosso I and II, sad songs filled with grief

Salut fur Caudwell (Lachenmann)

Ligeti's Piano Etudes, Lux Aeterna, Hamburg Concerto

Messiaen's Piano Etudes, 20 Regards

Grisey's vortex temporum

Murail - Gondwana, Time and Again, Tellur

and probably more that don't come to mind right now

As I have stated, emotional drive and sentimentality, as I define it in my own little world, are what make a piece truly great. It could be sloppily written by any standard, but if there is a passion within it that is made evident only by the music, I can't dislike it. That would be contrary to everything honest that I believe it.

With that said, I have heard The Rite of Spring, and I absolutely love most of it. There is a particular section just after the opening bassoon music which becomes a little... how shall I say.. muddy to my ears, but after this it develops into a beautiful ballet of sound. As for "Lux Aeterna", I listened to it alone without the imagery of "2001" as a background. I must say that its solo voices are much more suited to a lack of tonal centre than instrumental works, at least in my ear. There was also the fact that both of these pieces were performed very well by their ensembles!

I attempted to listen to a Schnittke piece a few months ago, for cello and piano. I believe it was "Suite in the old style". I found it disengaging, but to be honest I was not really listening in full due to bias. I will find it again and try harder. Though I am studying traditional harmony and counterpoint now, it never harms just to go out and attempt to hear something different. Perhaps it will inspire me!

it's really quite funny reading someone arguing what it(muzix) should be, when it's of so little importance. what is that - is it a symptom of believing that anyone has the right to music or to evaluating?

have you ever watched yourself shitting?

if you had, so - just keep it simple - you stink!

or, dear ladies, i think schnittke is so different but you know, yes, it's so you know, well, my panties drop off when i hear it, chi chi chi.

pathetic

To completely ignore the conversation, since I can't really add much...

Tonal composition is as relevant as any other stylistic choice - it evokes certain things just like atonality (or nontonality or whatever name you want to provide) does. Both - and neither - are useful as tools as composition.

Now, as to the other thing you brought up about expansion of the art? You've got a sympathetic soul here, but ultimately it's a pretty fruitless discussion. But I feel it's something that every composer has to think about himself and shape his musical worldview around it.

have you ever watched yourself shitting?

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

yes

....ultimately it's a pretty fruitless discussion.

As far as I am concerned, any conversation about or including music is de facto worthwhile. I could discuss any musical subject for all time, I'm sure. It is only fruitless if you don't care to explore your universe entirely with the time you have. Heck, even after I've explored the entire universe I'd go back to certain galaxies just to see them again. This is why I love music discussion - music is my religion; it is everything. To not discuss it would ... be boring! :)

I actually commend the OP for questioning his own sense of aesthetics and giving things a chance where he knows he's biased.

I haven't said anything because I think the OP's question already got answered way back. So.

Yes, I thank you SSC and all the others with patience. Now, I am off to study the score of Elgar's serenade for strings. I guess nothing changes. ;)

Oh, and for the sake of internet courtesty: one last...

BUMP.

Now I can let it die.

First off I apologize for answering a comment made early on in this thread - a "golden oldie" - that resulted in a post that didn't seem relevant to the topic. My bad.

I've read through this string and I must say that, generally, I'm surprised about all the confusion here. I'm not sure I have the stomach to pick through all of these posts again and find the various things that caught my attention, so let me answer, in a sense, severally:

To the poster who complained that contemporary music was only covered in the fourth year of their music education, I would agree that is cause for concern, although even if so I hope you at least paid attention to the first three. It isn't like you can't find books on such topics; the Leibowitz and Perle volumes on serialism, Jim Tenney and Allen Strange's books on other techniques, Cowell's "New Musical Resources" et al. I had to do the same thing in reverse; long after school I needed to get a book on music copying to get the skinny on things like proper stem direction and score order -- techniques not covered in my "new music" education of the 70s-80s.

The person who recalled their professor talking about their 80s music education is correct; that's exactly how it was -- there was no going back to tonality and no real reason to study it, so we got tonal music theory only, but were actively discouraged from tonal composition. I feel that my education was a ripoff and have had to do a lot of homework to get through to the language I speak now. So you should be thankful that, even though you went to an "avant-garde" university that you did get a thorough grounding in the other stuff.

To the poster who put up Haydn as an example of a composer whose "innovations" came only late in life, I appreciate that you had something nice to say about Haydn, but you are wrong. This is a common misconception - his "sturm and drang" symphonies (roughly nos. 44-64, check out no. 49 for a good example) come from the middle of this career, and the first string quartets, which - outside Telemann's "Quadri" of 1730, are the first classical string quartets of any kind - come from the very start. His creative freedom tended to wax and wane depending on the changing tastes at the Court of Esterh

Nordreise, I would suggest you give a try to Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg or the Violin Concerto by Alban Berg. These are both atonal works, but they're also very expressive. There are sections in the Berg Concerto that actually sound tonal, at least to me, because of the distinctive nature of the tone row. These are both in the earlier stages of purely atonal composition, but I'm sure there are also some very expressive works that were written more recently.

My question, put in secondary words, is: "can the change from tonal music to atonality be seen as a definite progression into "higher" forms of complexity and humanity in music (such as the shift from primarily monophonic to primarily polyphonic music around the 1600's)

Oh no Nordreise, you can't mean this. I'm surprised that I didn't notice this statement before. There has never been any "shift" from "primarily monophonic to primarily polyphonic music" around the 1600s or at any other time. I have no idea where you got this idea.

It was merely a question of notation - polyphonic music CERTAINLY existed before the first attempts to write it down came in the tenth century - we know about the use of psalm tones, parallel harmonies, organs and other ways to harmonize monophonic chant going back at least to the fifth century, and that's just what we know - there were doubtless other methods about which we know little or nothing.

Even though successful, fully readable polyphonic music can be found from the late twelfth century, monophonic chant composition continued right up until the eighteenth, though along the way the church gradually restricted the kinds of texts you could set and by the seventeenth-century practically eliminated the composition of new sequences. It only stopped as so many monasteries were dissolved in the chaos stirred up by the French Revolution, and resumed in the mid-nineteenth - only until the Editio Vaticana appeared in 1903 did Gregorian chant arrived at a fixed form, and in some aspects it's still fluid.

By the early eighteenth century, manuscript sources of instrumental and folk music recorded in monophonic notation become really common, though scant examples of that activity can be found back in the thirteenth. Of course, polyphony is on the map in a big way by the fourteenth-century, and even a lot of monophonically notated music has harmonic implications. Look at the fiddle tunes printed by James Oswald in the 1740s; they're just tunes, but any cello or harpsichord player with half a brain can harmonize them.

In other words, then as now, you use the notation that you need to write down what you need to record. There is no shift or progression as far as that's concerned, historically or practically, and I personally would be very angry with whomever told you that.

Uncle Dave Lewis

Atonality is by its nature a negative concept. For that reason it has no want to "overtake" tonality -- think of it like crappy asian fortune cookies.

I dunno, I think it took SOMEONE at some point to say "let's hum a tune," and a totally different one to say "ok, and then i'm gonna hum this other one under it OK?" etc etc

Atonality is by its nature a negative concept.

erroneous assumption.

"a-tonality" = not tonal.

it's not a negation of tonality, but a LACK of it.

besides, the very term means nothing.

semantically, modal music is "atonal" (modal music is not, by definition "tonal"... it is "modal")

Unless you choose to define "tonal" music as any music that has a tone centre of SOME sort, any sort. In which case much of the music people are refering to as "atonal" in this thread is, strictly speaking, actually "tonal".

Why do these silly discussions always pop up so regularly?

We aren't in any position to discuss the relevance of "tonality in the 21st century" since we're not even through the first decade of the century!

erroneous assumption.

"a-tonality" = not tonal.

it's not a negation of tonality, but a LACK of it.

besides, the very term means nothing.

semantically, modal music is "atonal" (modal music is not, by definition "tonal"... it is "modal")

Unless you choose to define "tonal" music as any music that has a tone centre of SOME sort, any sort. In which case much of the music people are refering to as "atonal" in this thread is, strictly speaking, actually "tonal".

Why do these silly discussions always pop up so regularly?

We aren't in any position to discuss the relevance of "tonality in the 21st century" since we're not even through the first decade of the century!

Well, a few things. I'd argue modal music is best defined as modal, and refer to atonality in the post-tonal sense. And I would also argue that the post-tonality rose out of almost defiance, especially with the relatively unschooled American composers, of tonal concepts. But I'm working from an agenda, so neither really matters.

Atonality can only be defined as to what it is not. As such it can't strive to overtake what it is not, so as to remain distinct.

And these discussions come up because some people think abstractly about the future, and holistically (and with imperfect knowledge) about the past. Wouldn't you like to know the great question of where music(art) is going? Isn't it interesting to you to see what could be?

For me the real problem is not what language you use, but what we want to express, tonal music has a fundamental importance like the composition with arrangements for fourth, second or like atonal music.

I compose using sopprattutto the tone with modal scales, with agreements for the fourth ..... but I put the question to use a modern language.

I have to say something

Tonality has relevance in contemporary art music, if and only if a composer is able to find a tonal language that is truly new, original and unlike the tonality of the past - that is, a tonal language that sounds like it could only have been developed today and that would not be able to exist if modernism (the most important development in art music in the 20th century) hadn't taken place. However, in my opinion no contemporary composer has succeeded in finding such a truly new tonal language.

Virtually all composers writing tonal music today are composing in a rather regressive, unoriginal, clich

Tonality has relevance in contemporary art music, if and only if a composer is able to find a tonal language that is truly new, original and unlike the tonality of the past - that is, a tonal language that sounds like it could only have been developed today and that would not be able to exist if modernism (the most important development in art music in the 20th century) hadn't taken place. However, in my opinion no contemporary composer has succeeded in finding such a truly new tonal language.

... Um. Yeah, cuz it's IMPOSSIBLE to do what you're proposing by simple logical reasoning.

"tonal language that is truly new, original and unlike tonality of the past," means pretty much something that has nothing to do with the traditional sense of tonality. Or the definition is so broad that it doesn't really matter because it will never be "new enough" if it uses even some ideas from traditional tonality. If it doesn't, why bother calling it tonality to begin with?

A little bit too super-modern, to the point it makes no sense.

Tonality has relevance in contemporary art music, if and only if a composer is able to find a tonal language that is truly new, original and unlike the tonality of the past - that is, a tonal language that sounds like it could only have been developed today and that would not be able to exist if modernism (the most important development in art music in the 20th century) hadn't taken place. However, in my opinion no contemporary composer has succeeded in finding such a truly new tonal language.

Don't confuse expansion with relevance, man...

Plus there's a serious question as to the possibility of a new tonal language...

Don't confuse expansion with relevance, man...

Plus there's a serious question as to the possibility of a new tonal language...

Everyone knows by now my position on this, but what the hell...

There's a serious question as to whether expansion can continue apart from the tonal language, which by and large is the most established, crafting of pitch order and organization that all other styles will be reckoned with for years to come. Will this be permanent? That's not for me to say. But let's just be clear on the treatment of music where expansion and relevance are concerned.

What reason does one need to create a new tonal language? What purpose does it even serve to reinvent something that has shown, throughout history, that it can grow and that it still grows today?

Some might not be willing to admit that this is the case. Some would side with authorities on the subject matter and try to argue that tonality reached its penultimate conclusion at the beginning of the 20th Century. Just because people stopped using it, or rather, stopped trying to expand the language more, doesn't mean it lost potential to grow further.

Wagner, at least to me, was a turning point to the language. He showed us how to create endless chains of harmonic progressions with this language. Others came along later who explored more ways to make progressions of harmony flow infinitely. There are now established ways to pivot between hexatonic pitch centers to progress from one harmony to the next. Similarly, this can be done chromatically or even using the octatonic scales.

The pallet only deepens with regard to the use of serialism. Pitch classes are now used to isolate different levels of consonance and dissonance - the remnants of tonal resolution. Yet we perceive this as disjointed from the tonal language where it can just as easily be perceived as yet another expansiveness of the tonal syntax, though more loosely defined with more possibility.

We have only 12 humanly perceived classes of pitches. We are now more concerned with interval relationships than the functional relationships of chordal harmony. But the combining thread is that this is all relative to the way we view tonality - as a source of nostalgia or as a channel of human creativity and ingenuity.

Tonality was not just about rigid ordering of functionality. It was an endeavor to cohesively combine pitches in a way that pleased the listener while pushing its own limits, to form a relationship both to the past and to the present. That's what I encourage people to do today... because this is what expansion is...

I understand the effort people put into sounding contemporary. What I find crazy is the effort people put into not sounding tonal for the purpose of sounding contemporary, as though sounding tonal is somehow sounding not contemporary. I remember the story of Berg being asked to leave the 2nd Viennese School for sounding too tonal, as though tonality grew to represent this agedness in music. What a conundrum this creates. When we stopped thinking of tonality as a syntax and started treating it as a representation of something that is not contemporary, we stopped expanding and stopped being relevant in the context of music.

Sweeping tonality under the rug, writing it off as a past time we should move beyond, was the quintessential epiphany of devolution in music for me. When I think of reinventing the wheel, packaging tonality into this box of finite-ism, we stopped expanding and being relevant in the context of music - because we stopped growing.

There is but one world of music with infinite possibilities, but that is only as fundamentally sound as the roots from which we grow it. And if we are to say that the music that is relevant today is relevant because it is not tonal, then how do we justify that what we create today is truly independent of tonality when what creates this relevance is the tonal language? The paradox is more than apparent when it comes down to it.

Which is what really strikes me when you say:

Atonality is by its nature a negative concept. For that reason it has no want[/b'] to "overtake" tonality...

I believe what this should say is that "It has no capacity to overtake tonality." One of the most important functions atonality, serialism, polytonality, and anything else I'm not thinking about at the moment has in the musical world is to grow our musical language choices. I see nothing wrong with applying any of these functionalities in this context, because the syntax we created for tonality, this "box" if you will, is the only thing that created such finality within the language.

Our predecessors stopped believing they could do more with tonal music because they began viewing it in a way that popular culture was treating it as a packaged commodity, a result of the influence of popular culture and how prolific tonal practice had grown to become in the world of music. It certainly lost its mystery, ingenuity, and spark with the advent of technology and the access to music education becoming more available. There's nothing wrong with how this happened... that I will agree was a "natural reaction." But we have several areas where we can take what we have developed as a result of this and reintegrate the tonal principles of the past with the contemporary methods we use today.

We HAVE a way to continue this growth of methodology in pitch organization. We have these tools by which to do it. The attitudes that have developed toward (or maybe I should say "against") tonality are the problem, and that's what I feel is hurting us the most in trying to be relevant and create expansion of the artform of music.

Everyone knows by now my position on this, but what the hell...

Should've stopped the post right there, really...

Man, that's a ridiculously stupid comment that is absolutely not true. A lot of non-western music uses microtones - they can easily sing/play microtonal tunes by ear and it's very natural to their musical systems.

Everything else I'm not gonna get into. I've made enough posts to go into all that stuff, and at this point I'm not in a mood to spout "facts" that even I know aren't true.

But... It's not so much microtones, that's just how we hear it. It's just different systems. In the same way, Balinese gamelan scales are either equally tuned or fit somewhat to a pentatonic idea (I remember one's called pelog...). And really, there's the whole half-sharp concept from Arabic music, though I always heard of it kind of like temperament changes based on affect...

Anyway, one falsehood doesn't deserve another.

Plus I think he was talking about standard western music...

Antitonality,

Your response is quite worrisome to me

Good. At least we shake things up a bit.

And as a side note:

Should've stopped the post right there, really...

You're the reason I keep posting.

Moving on...

I'm not sure what you mean by "expansion" but obviously the "expansion" of tonality itself cannot occur without the tonal language.

Let's see if I can sort this paragraph out for my own comprehension. First, you're saying that the "expansion" of tonality itself cannot occur without the tonal language. Wrong. It has proven to be done so before. Debussy and his interest in the Gamelan is just one example that comes to mind...

I agree with you to a certain extent that tonality has not been "exhausted" as some may have argued in the past,

I agree with me too... but then...

but the common-practice idiom is a thing of the past and we should get over it and move on.

Who is arguing for "the common-practice?" I'm not. Was anyone else? Must have missed it...

But wait, there's more!

The expansion of music in general (not just tonal music) certainly can occur outside of a tonal context. It already has in western culture and has ALWAYS "expanded" in other cultures whose music is not based on the diatonic system.

Wait wait wait! So, when you said, "...the "expansion" of tonality itself cannot occur without the tonal language," what you really mean is that, "The expansion of music in general (not just tonal music) certainly can occur outside of a tonal context."

Like I said, Debussy was not the first to make advances in the tonal language through using something not related to tonality. But you seem to assert my point (in a round-about way) that growing the language involves the use of external systems. That we invent them now is not a problem for me. That people bring them back and incorporate them into the language of tonality is something I encourage. But when I have to hear people talk about tonality being a finite language and no longer a contemporary option, I just have to scoff.

If that is discomforting to you, then so be it.

To create a new musical system/language is NOT a reinvention of tonality! It's the creation of a NEW system which may or may not draw on the old one. Modernism grew out of tonality, as a direct result of it... it's not some bastard child of western music that needs to be hidden in the basement every time people come over.

That's not quite the way it happened, at least not from the information I've been exposed to. It's interesting that you say this, but then Babbitt or Cage or Schoenberg reveals something significantly different. Granted, Babbitt specifically refers to the critics of contemporary music. Modernism growing out of tonality is more of a G-Rated way of putting it. There was a rebellious attitude in the mix as well, and let's not sweep that under the rug either. There was nothing "natural" about it in that sense, but I do think that it was, like I said before, a "natural reaction" to opponents of change to continue being more willing to explore Modernism.

People are still writing tonal music alongside people who hate to write tonal music, and many other people are mixing tonality with other practices to create some really interesting music... in this way, tonality is still very much alive and growing. It's now one of MANY tools available to composers, no longer the only one we have to work with.

Yeah, and this just presupposes EXACTLY what I refer to when I say that tonality was "commodified" or has been packaged. It's a "tool" as opposed to a system that can continue to grow beyond itself. Sorry, I don't buy into that position... not when this "tool" has had many hundreds of years to grow and reach its potential today.

Octatonic scales are not tonal.... yet it seems like you approve of them?

Octatonic scales are not Diatonic. The half-time show my old alumni marching band is playing right now, "Pirates," uses the tonal language, but the melodies are all based around the Octatonic scales. They aren't common-practice. But I already covered that...

"Consonance and dissonance" was not "created" by tonal music in some obscure magical process - it's in fact the other way around - our perceptions of consonance and dissonance (which are entirely subjective and have changed over time) allowed composers to work with tension and resolution according to their contemporary contexts, thus gradually developing the tonal system and the management of these consonances and dissonances, and ultimately pushing the boundaries of tonality towards the situation we have today.

Historical western perceptions of consonance and dissonance, Cowell argues, are in fact directly a result of the overtone series, with more prominent intervals being more readily accepted by listeners than less prominent ones. At first, octaves and fifths were considered the only pure consonants. Over time, with the development of better instruments that reach higher into the overtone series, composers and listeners grew accustomed to these intervals that are present higher up on the series, thus considering them "consonants" when they may have been called "dissonant" a few generations earlier. The more they heard these intervals used, the more they became accustomed, and they were in turn used more frequently etc. etc.

This is a very well-stated point. I'm not sure what I wrote to make you think I was disagreeing with this position... I think what I meant to say was that the relationships are very apparent between the use of consonance and dissonance in tonality just as they are in contemporary serial music - not in treatment but at least in theory and analysis. Whether that is a compositional focus depends on the composer and the piece we're looking at in a given moment, but there is no denying that such relationships can still be explored today with regard to tonality.

Man, that's a ridiculously stupid comment that is absolutely not true. A lot of non-western music uses microtones - they can easily sing/play microtonal tunes by ear and it's very natural to their musical systems.

Ah, microtonal theory rears its ugly head. Look, that's something that has little to no bearing on this discussion. Contemporary works do not require microtones to be considered "contemporary." Let's stick with the common ground and work out from there. Whether it applies in a tonal context is for another day. I'd rather keep this as simple as possible.

You can have order and cohesion without tonality, and you can have disorder within a purely tonal piece. It all depends on the composer, not the system he's using. Similar systems based off of scales that one can modulate to and from exist outside of tonality: modal music and messiaen's modes come immediately to mind. These examples are no less valid than tonality.

Okay. Great. What we have right now is a lot of "unrelated" systems with little boundaries drawn around them, as if though some have more relevance to contemporary music than others...

Your argument: "They're all useful tools..."

My argument: "We should stop thinking of them as individual tools (especially tools with some heirarchy of relevance to modern times)."

Tonality is not old. It's just being treated differently now because it has been packaged and bundled into some box - what you refer to as "common-practice."

If you listen to my music, I don't draw any real lines stylistically. Tonality is just as relevant and contemporary because it isn't just another tool for me to pick up and use when I need it.

So let's get back to this for a second...

Antitonality,

Your response is quite worrisome to me

Because I think tonality should continue to grow and that attitudes toward its use should change? I hope I've cleared some things up, but if you're still worried, then there's not much more I can say to ease your anxiety.

You're the reason I keep posting.

Dear AA:

I hope you don't have the delusional idea that you represent some sort of anti-thesis for the things I have said or stand for in this forum, both concerning pedagogic matters and the state of modern art. Likewise if you think you're somehow "competing" here, or whatever other such thing.

No, seriously, I want to make it perfectly clear that I do NOT care about anything you said, have to say, or will say, and I can safely say that many people who actually know anything about the topics you believe you are qualified to address also share a similar opinion based on the amount of opposition you always encounter at every turn, and rightly so. You are a joke in this forum regardless if you realize it or not, your arguments have placed you in this position and it is by your own merit that your reputation here ended up this way.

So if it's really because of me? Honestly? Then I beg of you, stop embarrassing yourself.

And anyone who supports your opinions must, right about now, rally and actually give some fantastically good arguments as to why all of what I've said here is not the actual state of matters. You're past the point of being able to defend yourself in any meaningful way.

I'm not sorry to be so harsh, I don't really care after all, but I AM sorry for whoever ends up caught in this intellectual dead-end.

Hugs and kisses, SSC.

I can safely say that many people who actually know anything about the topics you believe you are qualified to address also share a similar opinion based on the amount of opposition you always encounter at every turn, and rightly so. You are a joke in this forum regardless if you realize it or not, your arguments have placed you in this position and it is by your own merit that your reputation here ended up this way.

So if it's really because of me? Honestly? Then I beg of you, stop embarrassing yourself.

You and these "qualified" individuals you speak of... whoever they are... aren't my concern. You give yourself WAYYYYY too much credit, and I really, really hope that good, sensible people who encounter your inability to comprehend what you read and your elitist attitude have the good sense to go in a different direction and learn to think for themselves.

If this is any indication, you have here another attempt by SSC to attack the person instead of the position. And I hope what is more evident is SSC's need to point out my popularity as some kind of "support."

I never cared about being popular here. The ONLY thing I care about is discussing music, and if you have a problem with that, then you can go somewhere else.

There. Problem solved.