bad music

[bloke]

Whenever an ensemble is about to play a piece that sucks, you can always tell ahead of time because one of them - or their conductor- talks about it to the audience.

[Worth]

What a great idea for a thread. This is something that has always been a pet peeve of mine. For this reply I will call "bad" music that which is self-indulgent and not geared toward the audience, regardless of how well it is executed. Add to this long-winded intro narratives (corny jokes, awkward moments, intimate background) and you will have audience and ensemble members alike sitting there rolling their eyes and waiting for the moment to end.

There can be valid reasons for these introductions. Some audiences are genuinely interested in knowing the background of compositions, maybe in an academic or pay setting. Many conductors or ensemble members are quite accomplished and worthy of the listen. Others just think they are. Additionally, some players (smaller ensemble) need a chop break. I have trouble understanding a chop break in an hour set, that's another thing entirely.

For me, it all boils down to knowing the audience and playing to it. Our BQ plays often to assisted living facilities where the average member is "regular folk" who is not especially musically inclined or educated. They are either a "captive audience" or maybe want to escape their current situation for an hour or so and feel alive, not sit there falling asleep or heading off to the bathroom. As "regular folk," they also like to hear what they know from the radio. Program self-indulgent charts (slow, pretty, really old, obscure, classical, etc) add a bit of narration to in an attempt to "educate" the audience, and many look like they long for the grave. We've all been there.

The older I get, I realize I'm not far from their age and want to make them feel more engaged and happy, even if it means indulging our own tastes less. When we play Sweet Caroline, You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, Rock Around The Clock, Crocodile Rock, Michael Jackson, Bee Gees, whatever, they come alive and no long introduction is really needed. We've even had a raucous response to David Rose's "The Stripper" at one place! Bad music is that which is poorly programmed for the audience at hand. Music, that is perhaps best saved for self-gratification at rehearsal or when the proper gig presents itself.

Edit: Of note we recently did a HS Festival of the Arts. I arranged "Watermelon Sugar" by Harry Styles, and "good4u" by Olivia Rodrigo Another member did a version of "The Wellerman." We also played Seb Skelly's arrangement of "Leave The Door Open" by Silk Sonic, and Zack Smith's "Spiderman." The kids absolutely loved these and got up dancing and came alive. We got crickets on really well-played versions of "Stardust," "Music of George Gershwin," Dukas' "Fanfare," and many others. Bad music or poorly programmed? The kids were there to enjoy themselves, not for us to try and educate them. We learned a lot that day.

[York-aholic]

^^^^^

One of the best posts I’ve ever read. Thank you.

[DonO.]

While we’re talking about “bad music”, let me vent a bit about tuba solo literature. So much of it just sucks! My best example is “Encounters II” by Kraft. Honestly, does anyone actually ENJOY listening to that thing? To me, just a bunch of random notes written specifically to be difficult so that show offs can prove they can play it. But even when played well, not pleasing to the ear in a musical way. Then there’s the Hindemith Sonata. Back when I was a college student I had my senior recital all planned out. As a music education major I was only required to do a “half recital”, that is I would share it with someone else doing their junior recital. I planned everything with my teacher during my junior year. I wanted things to be challenging but I also had in mind an audience pleasing performance, to show that the tuba could make beautiful music just as well as any other instrument. I programmed “Ricercar” by Gabrielle/arr. R. Winston Morris, “Introduction and Dance” by Barat, and the Vaughan Williams Concerto. But for my senior year my teacher went on sabbatical to work on his doctorate, and temporary professor they hired to take his place threw out my entire program except the Ricercar. He forced me to program the Hindemith in lieu of the Vaughan Williams. I hated working on the thing. It’s easy to make musical sense of the VW, but not so much the Hindemith. If you’ve ever had to perform it you know the piano part is a real bear. My accompanist was a fine player but even he struggled with it. The temporary instructor and I were like oil and water working together. We argued about everything regarding the Hindemith, right down to how to pronounce the composer’s name. I KNEW I was saying it correctly (Hin-deh-mit), but HE thought it should be “Hin-deh-MITH” and would yell at me terribly about it. When my recital finally came up I just wanted to get it over with. My accompanist and I could never get the third movement up to standard so we just played the 1st and 2nd. He made some mistakes but I played my part perfectly competently. But the professor still marked me down on the recital grade. When I asked why, he said it was because I didn’t play the complete concerto. He said NOBODY programs a concerto unless they perform it in its entirety. I’m thinking to myself, but you forced me to do this piece that I didn’t want to perform in the first place. But what really pissed me off is that I wanted please the audience as well as show my competence. And I couldn’t do that because of the material. I ask the question, does anyone actually listen to the Hindemith because they enjoy it? And for that matter we can go beyond Encounters II and the Hindemith Sonata and add dozens if not hundreds of other pieces of tuba solo literature that sounds equally bad. What is a tuba player to do? The truly musical and entertaining tuba solos are so limited, and the bad ones are so numerous!

[Paulver]

Great topic!!!
I am a firm believer in playing to the audience. The conductor/leader of any group should "know" the type of audience they are going to perform for. You can "educate" the audience once or twice during the performance, but any more than that, you're asking them to tolerate the music.

That said........ picking good, solid, and interesting arrangements is crucial to the success of any performing ensemble. I can't tell you how many high school district, regional, honors, state, and national concerts I've attended during my tenure as a music educator, and watched the audience scratch their ears, pick their noses, and squirm in their seats during a piece that was just a "sucky" piece of music. Then, politely applaud....... like they knew what they were doing when it finally stoped!!! College level........ sometimes resembles that, too. Although, at that level it's pretty much expected. I always told my kids that just because a piece of music is published..... doesn't automatically make it a good piece of music!! One has to look at the structure, level of challenge, and a host of other elements, before deciding to use it on a concert program. Too many conductors go directly, and only, for the "difficulty" and "it's different" factors, thinking that they will impress everyone involved, with their particular musical selection and their own conducting ability. You can't make ice cream out of $h*t.

I am well aware that as musicians/educators, we must expand our horizons, and those of our students. But, man, a steady diet of atonal, non-melodic, non-lyrical sound effect music, can only go so far before the listener's ears, kidneys, and butts start to think alike!!!

Every individual has their own ideas as to "what" is good music. Sometimes they will be in agreement, and sometimes they won't. But, as musicians and educators, we should analyze the music before deciding to subject the performing group and/or audience to it. Most often that will take only a few minutes of listening to a recording of the piece, or a couple of rehearsals of it to come up with the right choice.

I was always taught that when planning a concert program.......... something for the kids, something for the conductor, and "more" of something for the audience.

Sorry...... I got carried away. Here endeth the gospel........ according to Paul!!

[bloke]

Not all music - that is not based on major and minor key signatures - is “bad”.
Paul Hindemith’s Tuba Sonata is not a terrible piece, but it is a piano piece, and only parenthetically a tuba piece. As with most all music, for it to be realized to be good, it must be performed with sparkling virtuosity - and it rarely is. (Think of some of your favorite music in various popular genres, and then imagine the artists who record/perform at making a whole bunch of mistakes and displaying technical inadequacies in those performances.) I performed the Hindemith piece one time when I was barely 21 years old, and hired a *piano virtuoso to play it. (We rehearsed it once only - one time through, the day before the recital. He played it perfectly.) I did not discuss the piece with the audience, prior to us playing it.
______________
* https://music.indiana.edu/faculty/curre ... d-don.html

[Mary Ann]

The local university has a music department that continually wants to prove how smart it is, which means they continually play what I generally classify as "technically difficult noise" and pat themselves on the back. I don't know when this trend started, but it's been a while. Back in the 1970s when I was trying to study composition, I had a teacher who sneered at anything that looked or sounded like music. I don't know what he had stuck in his craw, but it was getting in the way of anything resembling music, and I stopped studying composition. I never got any instruction in composition anyway. It was "bring something in and we'll tell you how horrible it is because it actually looks and sounds like music."
I think sometimes "arts" associations that are trying to "keep up with the times and support the latest" will fund these horrible soundscapes (and visualscapes, too, if you want to broaden the subject) and I don't know who funds them. People with money to burn.

Whose music is going to live on? John Williams. Lloyd Weber. Etc. Not the noise that may have a fabulous intellectual structure to it but no discernible music.

[RJ]

The local university has a music department that continually wants to prove how smart it is, which means they continually play what I generally classify as "technically difficult noise" and pat themselves on the back. I don't know when this trend started, but it's been a while. Back in the 1970s when I was trying to study composition, I had a teacher who sneered at anything that looked or sounded like music. I don't know what he had stuck in his craw, but it was getting in the way of anything resembling music, and I stopped studying composition. I never got any instruction in composition anyway. It was "bring something in and we'll tell you how horrible it is because it actually looks and sounds like music." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Chadabe

I think sometimes "arts" associations that are trying to "keep up with the times and support the latest" will fund these horrible soundscapes (and visualscapes, too, if you want to broaden the subject) and I don't know who funds them. People with money to burn.

Whose music is going to live on? John Williams. Lloyd Weber. Etc. Not the noise that may have a fabulous intellectual structure to it but no discernible music.

Not sure it's a good idea to include the composition teacher's name; I'm no lawyer or anything but people are really sensitive to their names being used on the internet.

A lot of compositions these days (and composers) are trying to push the envelope of the art these days in the "art" facet while neglecting the actual craft. There's underlying reasons why, say, a Hindemith piece sounds "structured" and "coherent" despite its dissonance, while, say, most of the compositions you find on ScoreFollower are just an array of noise. People will handwave it off as "the music's just difficult," but, really, if you can't tell what's going on in a piece, is it in the service of "exphreshun," or is it doing not only the composition a disservice, because it lacks the structure to really be enjoyed, but doing music as a whole a disservice, because there really is a lot of good innovation in the timbre front being done these days. (though I could do without hearing another string quartet piece with that "too much pressure on the bow" creaky noise)
When you have just noise structured by some background pretense instead of something that's, you know, audible in the music, it makes even reasonable people think "well, modern music is just noise." Even Schoenberg, as little as I like dodecaphonic music, strongly structured his music and developed his themes in a coherent manner.

In the service of being on topic, though, no, I don't think most concerts should schedule "difficult" works if they're appealing to the average joe, because not only does the average joe not care about the "fractal structure" of your composition, said "pitch-class sets" and other unappealing sounds will probably turn him off from classical music as a whole and reinforce the stereotype that classical music is just in some ivory tower where pretentious fops pat each other on the back for making the ugliest new noise.
That being said, it is still important for fledgling composers to have their music played by an actual ensemble so they can get the feedback of how different things that they write actually translate to an acoustic space. (and in a perfect world, get some feedback from the players about just how much they appreciate the twelfth leaps they wrote)

----
RJ

[humBell]

Whenever an ensemble is about to play a piece that sucks, you can always tell ahead of time because one of them - or their conductor- talks about it to the audience.

Does what they say matter?

A counter example (sort of) is a conductor i know who always has something to say between pieces more to distract the audience from the percussion setting up. He essentially rehearses this during rehearsals no less, so we as folk in the band have heard most of it ad nauseam. All this to say that he does it alike for the good and the bad, so it is not much of an indicator, unless perhaps you listen to what he says...

And as i think about, i appreciate this evenhandedness more. He takes on a MC or Ringleader role at the concerts.

Also, what does this say about a Peter Schickele intro, where perhaps again, it isn't so much that it is bad, but how?

[bloke]

I strongly suspect that most people are not all that different from me, but that many people (for various reasons) are not as outspoken as am I.

If they're paying hard-earned/after-taxation money to be at an entertainment venue, they are hoping to be entertained - rather than "educated" - whether with "difficult" music or with music selected for non-music-related reasons.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the scheduled game today between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox will - instead - be a rousing contest between the most athletically-gifted representatives of two groups of indigenous people - engaging in a rousing game of Itti' kapochcha to'li'."

Peter Schickele...??
He based his career/living on lampooning the very mindset (classifying particular types of music as "serious") which is an underlying theme of this thread...or am I wrong...??

Finally, making over-generalized statements (such as the one I made in the first post of this thread) - as well as subsequent eyebrow-raising statements, is a wonderful way to get others to chime in.

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[DonO.]

Whenever an ensemble is about to play a piece that sucks, you can always tell ahead of time because one of them - or their conductor- talks about it to the audience.

And going back to my Ill-fated senior recital, I did as I was told regarding addressing the audience. And I would add that this was common practice at my college for ALL recitals. That is, don’t offer any commentary at all. Just play. That’s it. We were all taught that if you wanted to say anything at all about your piece, put it in the program notes. The only words I spoke the entire time was to dedicate the recital to my parents (who were in the audience) at the beginning and I was chastised for doing even that.

[bloke]

...The only words I spoke the entire time was to dedicate the recital to my parents (who were in the audience) at the beginning and I was chastised for doing even that.

and understandably so:

The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible.

[Rick Denney]

Ralph Vaughan Williams famously told a student (paraphrase): “If you happen to think of a melody, be so good as to write it down.”

Schikele is a musical comedian, and talking is part of the performance. The problem is that a lot of conductors think themselves comedians. They usually need someone close to them to speak TRVTH: “You’re not funny”.

I like pre-concert lectures, because I like to know more about the music. And the pre-concert lecture relieves the explainer stress.

Explainer stress is worst with college professors, who are often guilty of assuming an audience is like their students: forced to be there.

Rick “a professional explainer” Denney

[DonO.]

Explainer stress is worst with college professors, who are often guilty of assuming an audience is like their students: forced to be there.

Rick “a professional explainer” Denney

Yes! At my college the jokey phrase was “you are cordially required to attend all ensemble performances and recitals”.

[humBell]

Explainer stress?

Am experiencing that by not being sure what it is?

Or am i (also?) imposing it on you all by complaining about it?

I get a sneaking suspicion that Explainer stress is crucial to a good magic trick...

[humBell]

...

"Ladies and gentlemen, the scheduled game today between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox will - instead - be a rousing contest between the most athletically-gifted representatives of two groups of indigenous people - engaging in a rousing game of Itti' kapochcha to'li'."

...

Will it be less than 5 hours long?

Some of those Red Sox-Yankees slugfests over the years are aptly discussed in a thread about bad music...

[bloke]

Orchestra concerts - often featuring variously-balanced combinations of good and bad music - are always well over 5 hours for me.

5:00 shower, and remove 5:00 shadow
5:45 head out (typically a 1:15 drive to various venues)
7:00 arrive and change into concert dress
7:30 show
9:30 done
10:00 head home (after changing into street clothes (which allows a suit or tails to stay clean and nice for a season, rather than a couple of concerts).
11:15 arrive home (NOT stopping on the way home to play a late-night game of stick-ball with a Cherokee nation team, EVEN THOUGH the prospect is tempting)

bloke "with a nod to @Rick Denney, just about as good at comedy as most music directors"

[Paulver]

I'm actually surprised that anyone....... besides me..... actually knows of Peter Schickele....... and actually remembers him!! We'd listen to PDQ Bach recordings for hours in college, and laugh ourselves silly in music history class, when the prof mentioned a piece that was "lampooned" by him. Of course the prof had no idea why we were laughing..... which torqued his jaw quite a bit, until we played some PDQ Bach for him. Then, he started to incorporate some of the "schtick" into the classes, which definitely made the class more tolerable!!

[bloke]

Schickele is 86, and seems to have been pretty quiet, for well over a decade.
I hope he's in reasonably good health.
What the internet tells me is that he's actively selling hats/T-shirts/etc., but I see no sign of any appearances.

[Jperry1466]

I strongly suspect that most people are not all that different from me, but that many people (for various reasons) are not as outspoken as am I.

If they're paying hard-earned/after-taxation money to be at an entertainment venue, they are hoping to be entertained - rather than "educated" - whether with "difficult" music or with music selected for non-music-related reasons.

Talk about hitting the nail on the head. In Texas, and I suspect other states, we have this discussion with young band directors during marching season who call us "old and less evolved". They insist they are trying to "educate" the audience, instead of entertaining them, when all they are doing is using the audience as a practice venue for the next competition. And that's why the bleachers empty out at halftime, except for the loyal band parents. My bands, before marching band became known as the "Marching Arts" (good grief), were quite successful, but I figured if I took care of the people who actually paid my salary, they would keep me around.

Two of us write most of the arrangements for our local tuba ensemble. My friend who is the tuba instructor at the local university writes stuff that is aimed at what is expected for college venues. It is very good, but not really written to entertain "Joe Popcorn-Eater". We play for church services, patriotic events, senior living centers, Octoberfest, Christmas venues, etc., and our music is aimed at pleasing the crowd we are facing. I'm glad you brought this subject up. We've all done the college thing, played the game, and enjoyed it, but the rest of the world has a lot of good people who want to be entertained. If we bore them, they don't invite us back.