Jul 28, 2012

Modern Classical

Now that I have a real office and can have music on while I work, Pandora is about the second thing I open each morning. I punched up "Classical" yesterday for something new, and when something grabs my attention giving it a thumbs-up.

It seems the vast majority of things I've been thumbs-upping are relatively modern pieces, many of them from movie scores. In particular, the Harry Potter movies have been coming up a lot ... interesting.

1 comment:

Bob said...

Exactly. My own theory for many years now is that classical music composers abandoned strong melodies at the end of the Romantic era - - they couldn't match the lyricism of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Dvorak, et.al. so they moved in a different direction that the audience didn't like, e.g., 12-tone, atonal, etc. Similar things were happening in the visual arts with "abstract expressionism," aka "what the fuck izzit?" art. The strong melodic tradition was picked up by the composers of music for film, because the film producers were interested in turning a profit rather than stroking the composers' egos. In the last 100 years you're more likely to remember music from a film score rather than mainstream classical music, which wasn't particularly "mainstream" at all.