academia

I've thought about it. If academia is to be pigeonholed, then it is best considered an industry.

-C.

[Carl Lumma, TD 174.25]
> It boils down to this: music of the type made by Bach and
> Beethovan is not coming out of academia. It came out of the
> south, then from England -- the folk ethic does produce results!
> There are a handful of exceptions, almost all of them pre-1940,
> almost all of them with less-than-complete ties to academia.

Oops - in a previous posting this slipped out of my mailbox
masquerading as an original.

What I meant to add was:

Huh?

The south of where?

'Music of the type made by Bach and Beethoven' came from the
south? From England? I thought it came from Germany. (?)

A handful of exceptions of what?

Carl, you got me totally confused with this one.

I *think* I understand you to be saying that composed music
(as opposed to true folk music) that has acheived the mass
popularity that the music of Bach and Beethoven have (or once had),
- or perhaps that has achieved the 'status' of Bach and Beethoven -
is not of a kind which is steeped in academic intellectualizing,
but rather mostly is an embodiment of aspects of folk tradition,
and that older examples of composed *American* music (which you
did not specify but seem to me to be implying) to a certain extent
also embody these folk aspects.

Yes?

Joseph L. Monzo monz@juno.com
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html
|"...I had broken thru the lattice barrier..."|
| - Erv Wilson |
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>

[Carl Lumma, TD 174.25]
> It boils down to this: music of the type made by Bach and
> Beethovan (sic)is not coming out of academia. It came out of the
> south, then from England -- the folk ethic does produce results!
> There are a handful of exceptions, almost all of them pre-1940,
> almost all of them with less-than-complete ties to academia.
<

I can't figure this one out at all.

If, in fact, you would like to compose in the styles of Bach or Beethoven,
there are some excellent theory teachers in Universities or Music Schools
who would be happy to help you do just this. (Gil Miranda, now at Oberlin,
would be an excellent choice).

If you intended to make some connection between Bach and Beethoven and
later popular musics, I can't follow you at all. The oft-claimed unity
between art and popular musics in earlier times just does not hold up with
the historical record, especially since what we now call 'the public' is a
very modern development. In his lifetime, Bach was a local musician whose
activities were known very little outside of Thuringia and Saxony and whose
compositional style, while professionally respected and an achievement of
unmatched depth and complexity, was well behind the more popular stylistic
trends _within the professional art music genres_. Beethoven is the eminent
model of the commercially succesful professional composer, but one whose
work was really produced for an elite audience and for whom popular and
folk generas do indeed form compositional _topoi_, but only as stylistic
citations within the structure of a composed work. Beethoven was clearly
familar with folk and popular musics of his day, but his compositional
activity continuously sets himself outside these genres.