How wide or narrow is your musical taste?

[Paul Sherratt]

gurnemanz,

Just reading those names it's possible you may also appreciate Gillian Welch. Her first album for eight years is due out any minute.

[Serial_Apologist]

My mother was a fine pianist of the early Romantic repertoire, especially Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann, who performed for BBC radio in the 1930s; my father played piano (and sang Victorian parlour songs!) very amateurishly at home but had the collection of 78s bought in the 30s and 40s especially of Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Rhachmaninov; with the coming of the LP he cautiously expanded his listening to encompass Holst, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Bartok and Kodaly. He had no time whatsoever for popular music beyond the Swing era, as neither did my mother, whose tastes in classical music never advanced beyond Debussy and Ravel, apart from Poulenc, I guess.

So I was bought up in the classical tradition and Mum tried teaching me to play piano from the age of six, but without success, me being too lazy to learn my scales.

The teachers discovered I was by all acounts a fine boy soprano. At age 13, as head of my junior school choir, I tried for a choral scholarship but failed, due to my weakness in sight reading. Part of the business of adolescence involves separating ones ideas and tastes from those of one's parents; rock'n'roll and pop music in general was in a pretty dire place in the early 60s to one who had been raised a musical snob, and as far as peer group pressure applied the only alternative place to "squaredom" was jazz, back then fanatically divided into its followings for "trad" - the commercialised fag-emd of the New Orleans revivalism fostered by Barber, Bilk and Humph Lyttelton - and "modern jazz", which meant new trends from 1943 on. One took the jazz appreciation route from the former to the latter, casting friendships and alliances aside for "cool" new associates. At the same time I started listening to 20th century "modern music", courtesy largely Radio 3 and the Proms, then under Glock's enlightened curatorship. To cut a long and probably boring story short, these twin musical interests progressed by degrees, interrupted by "more important" preoccupations in the 1970s in the form of radical politics, and in the wake of the defeat of the Miners I returned to jazz, got involved in promotion and presenting where I was based, and eventually committed myself to writing about the music, as a thank-you for all the pleasure and enrichment it had given me over 40 years. Most of my friends and acquaintances are followers of the music, or the musicians themselves, and a more wonderful, authentic, witty, creative, knowledgeable (about any music at its best) and contradictory bunch of humanity would, imv, be hard to find or feel comfortable with anywhere, beyond the music's broad reaches.

Debussy is still the grandad of modern music for me - almost everything great that happened in 20th century music can be found in embryonic form in his music at some point, except for serialism and electronica, obviously. That said, in the classical traditions with which this thread is really concerned, Schoenberg represents some kind of epitome, for me, of white, western, Eurocentric, male-dominated culture was capable of creating in the musical field... after which - a few names aside, (Eisler, Xenakis, Berio, Birtwistle, Goehr, Carter) - it's slow decline, I fear. Varese's quip to the effect that, contrary to the artist being ahead of his time, most people are far behind theirs, was once a challenge, and one grappled with, and eventually got to grips with, Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono and the rest of the 50s and 60s avant-garde who really were any good. Is what the public has finally caught up with worth the effort any more? Was their commitment to the possibilities the pioneers found in music that led them to resist fascism and stalinism, or die in exile, all in vain?

So yes, I guess my musical tastes are covered by jazz, and jazz-related free improvised music, as well as some experimental and avant-garde musics, particularly up to about 1980, i.e. fairly broad, though one has particular dislikes: almost all pop music, rap at its most macho and misanthropic, Rutter, muzak of one sort or another, most "neo-minimalism" (Glass, Adams etc) come most immediately to mind.

There - I've poured my heart out. Now telephone for the men in white coats!

S-A

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I detest pop music and always have done. I was considered very strange when at school, but however much I tried to conform, it all seemed like junk, and still does. However, some junk is better than other junk.

[Paul Sherratt]

>>>Now telephone for the men in white coats!



They're a bit busy at the moment, Serial ..

[Serial_Apologist]

>>>Now telephone for the men in white coats!



They're a bit busy at the moment, Serial ..

[MrGongGong]

White coats ?
its a bit more like a silver suit but you get the idea !
great piece though

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG-Rq-zgwnE

[EdgeleyRob]

I think that I like a wide range of music however I dont listen to much pre Bach. I couldn't live without classical or rock music (I even have some Blondie and Barry White in my collection which I unashamedly like.)

[StephenO]

Having abandoned pop in my extreme youth, about the time the Beatles broke up, I spent my teenage years discovering the wonders of Wagner and Mahler, both of whom are still high on my list of favourite composers. I'd say my taste stretches roughly from Mozart to Shostakovich, with the emphasis on the Classical and Late Romantic periods. The older I get, though, the wider it seems to become, encompassing Renaissance polyphony, trad jazz (particularly if it features a clarinet) and Minimalism. Baroque music doesn't really do it for me, though, and, of course, I have a total blind (or deaf) spot where Gilbert and Sullivan are concerned.

[EdgeleyRob]

In my car at the moment I have CD's of-
Stanford string quartets
Bach piano music
Brahms violin concerto
Mozart C minor mass
The Jam
and the very best of The Vapors.

Don't really know what that says about my musical taste.

[MrGongGong]

You are obviously becoming a nikkeijin

[Paul Sherratt]

>>You are obviously becoming a nikkeijin


Does that apply to me, Mr G, as I have this album on the pod in the car ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1xOooGSjYQ

[MrGongGong]

no
but if you had this (which you really should ! IMV of course) you would

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00GHP4T-2s8

[Paul Sherratt]

>>but if you had this (which you really should !)

You're right, Mr G.
I should indeed.

All I can offer, which is on the car pod, are Daisyworld labelmates, Sohichiro Suzuki's 'World Standard' who was a one-time associate
of a musician friend, Jim White. You hear it from time to time in Fiona Talkington's Late Junction programmes.

[hackneyvi]

My music taste ?
Wide and shallow

As it should be, Pavel. People whose taste is wide and deep are missing out on many other things

I find this rather describes me, too, but for reasons I regret. I don't find I can listen to a great deal of music; perhaps an hour or so per day is as much as I can tolerate. I don't find I'm able to concentrate on and absorb from too much more than that. I have a puritan streak in me which dislikes hearing music without trying to listen to it; but I think that's actually an expression of a tolerance to music itself. I become full quickly.

whether you like it or not doesn't always mean that it's not worthy of serious consideration

Nor the converse; that music which means a great deal too one can be serious without requiring the sort of examination that can effectively be vivisection resulting in a death.

I very much liked Fr Fr's comments above - that she has moved on from some kinds of music to others, and doesn't need to cling ...

I find I am quite 'clingy' with music but equally that my difficulty with musical tolerance means that I throw out most of my music - I've done this physically with LPs, CDs from the moment I began acquiring them. I've always reached a point where I can no longer decide what I want to play and have to simplify the process for myself.

My mother was a fine pianist of the early Romantic repertoire ...

So I was bought up in the classical tradition and Mum tried teaching me to play piano from the age of six, but without success, me being too lazy to learn my scales.

I grew up in a house largely without music though it had a piano/pianola inherited from my mother's mother and a few LPs and old 78s. Mum very occasionally played Mendelssohn, Messiah and such on it with what I recall as happy competence. I was sent to a piano teacher, one Miss Brian, but on reflection I think music-making was too solitary for me to be of interest. I can't have been more than 7 because my abiding memory of the lessons was of being given an old sixpence for bus fair and choosing to spend thruppence of it on a Milky Way and walk home. Young children don't tend to eat sweets very quickly, do they? So, I always had to smuggle the Milky Way in to Miss Brian's and take sneaky bites when she turned her back or left the room for a moment. I suppose, my mind was too catastrophically-focussed on chocolate for my musical genius to thrive.

White coats ?
its a bit more like a silver suit but you get the idea !
great piece though

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG-Rq-zgwnE

I found myself appreciating this piece but had to remove the images to find out whether the sounds were responsible. It seemed they were.

Having abandoned pop in my extreme youth, about the time the Beatles broke up ...

I had forgotten how significant The Beatles were for me and how they may possibly have been responsible for a musical hiatus of 10 years or more. When they released their Anthology albums - of alternate takes/versions etc -, I really got to know their studio albums. At about the same time, Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head was published. This was the first book about music that I'd ever read and its impact was colossal. I began to see how much The Beatles' timelessness arises from its timeliness, its growth out of and influence on its times, the diversity of cause and effect on their music and pretty much all other popular music, by comparison, became uninteresting. It killed other pop music for me stone dead. Even bands that I'd previously adored like Talking Heads and The Smiths, though they contained fine musicians, seemed small, artificial, affected, and often insincere.

However, living classical music offered me very little. I'd found Tippett's a few years before, but that music is it's own world and I found little or nothing in contemporary music which met my needs; for some degree of song, dance or 'heartedness'. I use that word to avoid a much lesser equivalent, warmth; though warmth can be wonderful, by 'heartedness' I mean that music contained and communicated some clear, some recognisable feeling, spirit, intent.

I wonder now if jazz might have been a natural music for me but it simply wasn't one I found my way to (though I see in my paltry CD collection, albums of Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Chris Barber, Thelonius Monk, (the disputable) Ella Fitzgerald and Albert Ammons to which I've lately added Michael Garrick and Craig Taborn).

I find I like individual tracks more than albums; individual albums more than bands; individual bands more than genres; genres more than times. I like at least a little of every sort of music I can remember ever having heard. I sympathise with Roehre's point that he likes music of the last 1,000 years with exceptions but I find I'm not closed to the rest; I often need either assistance or simply the assistance of encoruagement to find the music's virtues.

[teamsaint]

I think that I like a wide range of music however I dont listen to much pre Bach. I couldn't live without classical or rock music (I even have some Blondie and Barry White in my collection which I unashamedly like.)

nothing to be ashamed of in Liking a bit of Blondie ER.
They made some great pop records, and anyone who come up with as many good tunes as they did on Parallel Lines is doing ok !!