Western common practice music is an emotional medium unlike any other. Its vehicle, tonality, is a finely tensioned and balanced mechanism for delivering complex feelings and inexpressible ideas.
I have never had any problem with pop music, nor any serious objections to contemporary atonality. But it has always been my contention that to forsake the great music of western culture is to miss out on an entire range of emotions and experiences that cannot otherwise be obtained.
What music is written today with the expressive power that Antonio Vivaldi commanded, with which he vividly described the singing of springtime birds, the oppressive heat of the summer, its tempestuous gales, the jollity of harvest time in the fall, and the treachery of the slippery ice of winter, with the string orchestra as his implement?
Can any four minute song parallel the shear ecstasy of Brahms’ first symphony, when the trumpets finally bellow their unbridled exclamation, after 16 minutes of waiting and building dramatic, majestic tension?
Try as they might, when have the giants of pop–Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, talented as they may be–or the masters of serialism, like Boulez or a great deal of Schoenberg’s work, ever told a story with their music as richly, graphically and powerfully as Rimsky-Korsakov did with his symphonic poem, Scheherazade? They cannot be blamed–for with the combination of the many textures of the orchestra and the finely tuned power of tonality, Rimsky-Korsakov had tools at his disposal that these others simply lacked.
This is a blog dedicated to propagating the greatest music of all time.
(Header photo by Ryan Hutton on Unsplash)
All the Feels 