Why do people get Rothko but not Stockhausen?

zhao

there are no accidents
One of the latest ideas in the psychology of music is that with any music, the distinction between subject and object is much more blurred than with experiencing traditional art objects (paintings, sculptures). People often imagine versions of themselves reflected in or enacting the music, so with music the psychological stakes are higher.

That's why I say that music is a socio-cultural ritual and not an art object. In a lot of 'world music' music is something you DO, not something you listen to. You sing it, perform it or dance to it. This was still the case in Western classical music up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when suddenly music was an artistic object you contemplated in silent reverence - but the ritual still applies psychologically even if physical participation was diminished. The illusion that music is an autonomous object is a very recent one particular to our culture. Music is a different game to art - it involves and possesses us in a way that art doesn't.

good stuff: music is indeed ritual, and art, sacred objects.

i dont know why i hadnt connected those dots before, but of course art and music played different roles in the initiation of modern humans to the symbolic order via shamens and the first warriar-artist-priests. and surely the ways these practices have evolved bears traces of their original functions. also i think no early social history of these disciplines can exist without also examining the rise of organized religion and centralized government as they were all connected...

"recorded music is canned music" - another quote i dont remember the author of... a jazz musician...

Just saw this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/02/classical-music-children which would seem to offer a different analysis to Stubbs at least as far as 'new music' goes.

his account of younger people getting into 20th Avant-C is only one side of the story of what is happening to "new music" these days... i witnessed first hand New Music programs get shut down due to limited funding, so that the symphony can play the Magic Fucking Flute for the 50 millionth time.

yes i blame the bourgeois death-philes who uphold bullshit outdated heirarchies through their suffocating cultural programs for... basically everything.

i want to shout at my girlfriend's sister who is a concert cellist: that Top 40 Classical BULLSHIT was created as entertainment for the obscenely rich, and you think it is "serious" music whereas everything else is frivolous?!?!?!
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Lots of hip-hop artists talk about being influenced by European electronic innovators.

and Miles answered "Stockhousen" when asked what he listens to during the electric 70s. which i always thought was the coolest thing ever...

but of course Kraftwerk owes much to Motown, Funkadelic, and various other African-American pop music which preceded them. the idea (of their mature electro-pop incarnation, not the hippie early period) was to make the funky, emotional music which they grew up with, except with machines.

truth of the matter is: Kraftwerk would not have existed if Motown, Soul and Funk did not come before. but Hiphop would still have thrived if Kraftwerk never dropped out of Art School.
 

CHAOTROPIC

on account
Sound is a process, visual art is (traditionally) an object? Something like that?

If its strength as an image is anything to go by, Stockhausen was right about 911. I never understood why people got so angry about his observation regarding the power of the image of the falling of the twin towers. He never said he admired it or condoned it, as far as I know.

(How can anyone not like Stimmung? It's just totally fucking amazing innit.)
 

subvert47

I don't fight, I run away
David Stubbs's new book "Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen" was released a couple of weeks ago, and I know people were looking forward to it (I certainly was). Has anyone else read it yet? What do you reckon? Why do people seem more at ease with Rothko than with Stockhausen?

because music is more important
painting you go and look at and then you go away again
whereas music is part of people's everyday so they have more idea what they want
and stockhausen isn't it ;)
 

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Yeah, Zhao, I don't think hip-hop wouldn't have existed without Stockhausen, but the influence is definitely there. Def for Miles and the afrofuturists, too. (Ugh you're so right about classical music being entertainment for Kings...I mean, I love it, but still it's not the absolute standard for greatness or "genius"...)

I was thinking about it and I realized that the music you grow up listening to ends up being something your brain cells differentiate around...so maybe people have a harder time with avant-garde music because the tonal system (with all of its built-in melodies and harmonies) is so ingrained in everyone's brains. I think for the average person Stockhausen just sounds very jarring and non-musical--most people tend to have an easier time "seeing" abstract "beauty" in colors and shapes, because it's less of a break from their normal experience of art as an abstract system of shapes and colors. Some people don't understand that music is an abstract (and conceptual) system...
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I was thinking about it and I realized that the music you grow up listening to ends up being something your brain cells differentiate around...

Yeah, I remember reading psychological research that said that early (pre-adult) musical experience creates deeply ingrained templates/schema through which subsequent reception of music is filtered. In fact, I think it mentioned that one can almost be blind to aspects of music that lie outside of these schema - you just wouldn't hear it.

Identity formation may also be a higher priority when younger, so associations made with music or musical scenes would be stronger and longer lasting - viz the enduring strength of many Dissensians' love for old rave music/any music of their teenage years.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I don't get Rothko really (apart from the environmental art stuff, like the chapel in Houston - not sure if there is any more stuff like that actually - mind you, I markedly prefer street/environmental art to (most) galleries).

Following from subvert47's comment, more people like Rothko than Stockhausen because people don't know many painters compared to musicians. So yeah, Stockhausen isn't what they want, because they have a far wider array of alternatives to choose from. AND, crucially, people don't have as much confidence in what they like when it comes to visual art - people feel stupid if they don't 'get it', and so if they're told Rothko is good, they'll study it until it makes sense in some way to them. Whereas music has been more democratised - if I think it's good, then fuck it, it is.

What I don't understand is this... many people readily absorb avant-garde music when it is allied to something else (eg soundtracks to horror films, or indeed lots of other kinds of films), but on its own, they often reject it.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Yeah, I remember reading psychological research that said that early (pre-adult) musical experience creates deeply ingrained templates/schema through which subsequent reception of music is filtered. In fact, I think it mentioned that one can almost be blind to aspects of music that lie outside of these schema - you just wouldn't hear it.

This is a very interesting area, but I do think that people will still accept incredibly avant-garde stuff when it is 'packaged' in the right way. This leads me to suspect that it is partly contemporary social pressures, as well as something hotwired into people's brains, that makes them reject things that lie outside typical templates.

What about children who are exposed to comparatively radical (to UK or American ears) schema?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
and Miles answered "Stockhousen" when asked what he listens to during the electric 70s. which i always thought was the coolest thing ever...

On a side note, did anyone read (or indeed, write...) the Kode9 article in the Wire this month? He referenced On the Corner a lot...
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
What about children who are exposed to comparatively radical (to UK or American ears) schema?

I would imagine that they become particularly receptive to whatever style might be presented to them at an early age.

That said, I suppose that there are natural limits to the type of organised sound that could be found pleasant or interesting. Short-term/'working' memory probably restricts the length of a memorable melodic movement to <5 secs or so; the human auditory system limits the frequency range or fineness of melodic movement possible to that which is readily perceptible; and there are probably aesthetic universals (minor chords are sad etc).
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
there are probably aesthetic universals (minor chords are sad etc).

This is a very interesting area I've been thinking about a lot. So many 'sad' songs are written in predominantly major chords - very surprising really. I'm not sure if it's the lyrical content that tips them that way, or whether it's an ambivalence about harmonies that goes deeper than the major=happy, minor=sad dichotomy.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
This is a very interesting area I've been thinking about a lot. So many 'sad' songs are written in predominantly major chords - very surprising really. I'm not sure if it's the lyrical content that tips them that way, or whether it's an ambivalence about harmonies that goes deeper than the major=happy, minor=sad dichotomy.

I suppose the simple dichotomy may be mediated by melodic or harmonic progressions, which themselves may be subject to our innate proclivities.

Another musical universal dichotomy may be discordant/concordant sound.

The Perception of Emotional Expression in Music: Evidence from Infants, Children and Adults
Elizabeth S. Nawrot

Two studies investigated the development of the perception of emotion in music. In Study 1, preschool children and adults matched nine pieces of music to five photographed facial expressions (happy, sad, anger, fear and neutral). While children did not agree with the adult majority interpretation for most pieces, their pattern of responding to the music, both with photograph choices and spontaneous verbal labels, was similar to the adults. Important methodological differences between this and previous research could explain the inconsistencies. Study 2 used happy and sad music along with a dynamic visual display in an intermodal matching experiment with 5- to 9-month-old infants. Infants preferred the affectively concordant happy display but did not look longer to the affectively concordant sad display as predicted. Taken together, these results begin to explore how emotional perception from music may be due to innate perceptual predispositions together with learned associations that develop in childhood

As far as comparing discordant avant-garde music with its supposed analogue in the visual arts, it would be useful to have some kind of means of comparison, by which one could decide whether a Chapman brothers gorescape is more or less unpleasant to experience than a Merzbow noisefest. It might be the case that the visual arts cannot be as negatively affecting as music, giving avant-garde music an unfair advantage in pissing people off.
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
In November 1995, The Wire published an article titled "Advice to Clever Children." In the process of producing the interview, a package of tapes containing music from several artists, including Aphex Twin, was sent to Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Stockhausen commented:

“ I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations. ”

Aphex Twin responded: "I thought he should listen to a track of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to"

Sorry, I always thought that was really funny.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
It's a stupid premis for a book. People 'get' Rothko cos he's really easy. People don't get Stockhausen because he's really difficult.
 

rouge's foam

a deadly secretion
in November 1995, The Wire published an article titled Advice to Clever Children.
yeah and Stockhausen said about Plastikman: "I know that he wants to have a special effect in dancing bars, or wherever it is". ! Stubbs puts that in the 'Fear of Music' book.
"Stockhausen: 'he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations'."
I've had composition teachers tell me exactly the same thing about drumloops. Both quotes are reminders that as exportable as Stockhausen's experiments and ideas are, as a composer he was still stuck considerably far up the arse of the Western classical tradition.

biscuits, you have some amazing points about identity formation in early years, but
there are probably aesthetic universals (minor chords are sad etc)
I would strongly dispute that the emotional aesthetic of major and minor scale are universal. It wasn't until the eighteenth century that the dichotomy of happy and sad really took hold. Some Renaissance theorists (eg Zarlino) had it the opposite way around. French Baroque music is often in the minor key simply as a convention and it still expresses positive emotions, and some very joyful Yiddish music uses scales that sound to our ears like minor scales. Musical cultures all over the world that don't use major or minor scales at all still manage to produce music expressive of or suited to particular emotional atmospheres.

This is a very interesting area I've been thinking about a lot. So many 'sad' songs are written in predominantly major chords - very surprising really.
I think it's something to do with a melancholy irony, and lyrics can help to create the contradiction irony needs. One of the most amazing pieces I know that is sad and written in the major key is this: which Beethoven practically wrote on his deathbed.

when it comes to visual art - people feel stupid if they don't 'get it', and so if they're told Rothko is good, they'll study it until it makes sense in some way to them.

very, very true.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
I would strongly dispute that the emotional aesthetic of major and minor scale are universal.

The major minor thing was a speculative statement on my part, but I'm happy to play devil's advocate.

French Baroque music is often in the minor key simply as a convention and it still expresses positive emotions

It might express positive emotions but not convey them, ie. not make the listener feel how he may think he should be feeling.

Or, if the minor key is a convention, there might be countervailing gladdening formulae that play off other innate predelictions.

Or, if the key is conventional to the extent of being ever-present, emotional content might be emptied out through familiarity - the listener may come to ignore hard-wired emotional responses and direct their attention towards the features of the music that are in the foreground.

Musical cultures all over the world that don't use major or minor scales at all still manage to produce music expressive of or suited to particular emotional atmospheres.

Reactions to major and minor scales can be innate without the form monopolising human expression. One would have to show that cultures bereft of major/minor do not make an instinctive distinction between them.

Even isolated cultures understand emotions conveyed by Western music
 
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rouge's foam

a deadly secretion
That psychology study is fascinating - thanks!

So hearing dissonance as unpleasant is somewhat hard-wired. Hence why people find it relevant / fitting in horror movies, and why Stubbs is swimming against the tide by protesting that people hate dissonance without solving the questions of psychology.
Or, if the minor key is a convention, there might be countervailing gladdening formulae that play off other innate predelictions.
Absolutely - tempo, accompanying texts, occasion etc.
Or, if the key is conventional [Rouge: and by extension amount of dissonance?] to the extent of being ever-present, emotional content might be emptied out through familiarity - the listener may come to ignore hard-wired emotional responses and direct their attention towards the features of the music that are in the foreground.
bingo, this is why Stockhausen fans are Stockhausen fans without flying into a panic with every dissonance, and what Stubbs could have spent a lot more time talking about in his book.
 
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swears

preppy-kei
kpunk and Stubbs on youtube

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