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Piano music that sucks but that has crossed the "art" threshold

PeterN said:
Apparently he understood to make it 3.30 minutes long also, which is a plus.
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I've had tracks rejected for playlisting because they were longer than 3 minutes. For those "peaceful piano" playlists, everything must be short, naive and repetitive, totally undynamic, and ideally felted. Don't blame the playa; blame the streaming ecosystem.
 
And Einaudi - clearly now believing everything Classic FM says about him
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Having met Einaudi after a concert I can confirm this is absolute bull. He was extremely humble and down to earth.

My main issue with him now is his output is now extremely repetitive and quite uninteresting. His older works not so. But hey that my opinion which I’m entitled to. What I’m not entitled to is to push my opinion as gospel, doing so suggests I have some form of superiority which again is absolute bull 😁 but who am I to comment I like that god awful Max Richter’s works too.
 
asherpope said:
Why is this Peter N declaring himself an authority on anything?! People can like what they like. Who really cares?! Sucks to be jealous and bitter I guess
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Yea, authority on crap piano music, but I didnt declare myself pope.

Well done.

:2thumbs:
 
I think the best thing you can do is to keep an open mind, and I think a lot of people in this thread seem to want to do that (maybe some don't...).
As the conclusion of this video puts it, if you can't understand why people like some kind of music, maybe try to make yourself understand their position instead of dismissing their taste (from about 1:00:00):


As Einaudi has been mentioned several times now, I also saw this where another composer tried to create a piece in his style; some people seem to like his new piece, but in my opinion it doesn't really sound like Einaudi. I'm not an Einaudi fan though:

This was also a reminder to myself that, sure you can always say "It's easy to compose like xyz", but to actually pull it off in a believable way is probably not as easy.

I enjoyed that Philip Glass piece posted earlier. I has some beautiful small ideas and explores these in a very focused way. Not everything has to be in sonata form.
 
PhilA said:
Having met Einaudi after a concert I can confirm this is absolute bull. He was extremely humble and down to earth.

My main issue with him now is his output is now extremely repetitive and quite uninteresting. His older works not so. But hey that my opinion which I’m entitled to. What I’m not entitled to is to push my opinion as gospel, doing so suggests I have some form of superiority which again is absolute bull 😁 but who am I to comment I like that god awful Max Richter’s works too.
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Yes, I'm sure you managed to understand his entire character in one brief meeting. Of course he's a pleasant chap when you are a presumed fan, have just paid to see him, and aren't questioning his music. I didn't suggest he was a constantly ranting psycopath - I merely commented on his public responses to critics, which are delusional.
 
Well, well, got some real cool YouTube suggestions today after suggesting to burn the notes or smash the piano (as a reverse reaction to a member here suggesting to suffer).

Several burning pianos burning in my YouTube feed today. Here's one:

 
Can find "foward-thinking" composers even in the Baroque period. Rebel, for instance, was doing this in 1737.



Rebel in fact was a master of doing the unusual by Baroque standards.

For instance this piece where Rebel captures pretty much all forms of French dance known at the time in a period of about 8 minutes. Nobody else was doing music like this at the time.

 
Pingu said:
Yes, I'm sure you managed to understand his entire character in one brief meeting. Of course he's a pleasant chap when you are a presumed fan, have just paid to see him, and aren't questioning his music. I didn't suggest he was a constantly ranting psycopath - I merely commented on his public responses to critics, which are delusional.
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Just as you have with random quotes on the internet which I’m sure were all provided with full context 😁
 
PhilA said:
PhilA said:
Just as you have with random quotes on the internet which I’m sure were all provided with full context 😁
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You miss the point. I'm simply commenting on an interview that contained extremely clear comments, claiming that critics didn't understand his music. Wasn't a random quote ripped from it's context, and it would be hard to misinterpret. I'm not commenting on him as a person, or what he may privately believe about his music - merely the role he plays for the media, the effect of which is the same whether he buys into it or not.

You, on the other hand, are calling BS because you met him for a few minutes, and think you have enough of a handle on his personality that you can declare what he would and wouldn't say.
 
A few hours actually, not minutes, as I was working at the venue and he spent an extended time in conversation with myself and the other technicians during the afternoon. I can see how my saying after a concert would suggest minutes, that’s my error, apologies for that.
I’m sure he’s far from the first artist to claim critics don’t understand him, that’s probably a fairly common attitude.
 
I mean ... for and given work of any given artist there exist some critics that don't (or won't) understand their work.

The guys in Metalica are, I think, quite legitimately the Lennon-McCartney of their genre (something I think the "Black Album" is kind of riffing on). But for a long time, I really didn't get it at all. I still don't much care for most of their work, with a few significant exceptions, but I do understand that this is really good music within the context of the genre (and a genre which they helped significantly to bring into existence).

Ambient piano, like thrash metal, as a genre is ... something I could mostly take or leave.

Sometimes a really good ambient composer will tiptoe into the minimalist edges of the neo-classical, which completely changes my reception.

But assuming that we're taking the ambient piano genre as ambient piano music quo ambient piano music (ie. and not trying to make it neo-classical, much less holding it up to Lizt), what would the work of the "Lennon-McCartney of the ambient piano genre" even look like?

I have no idea. Because I just don't care enough about the genre to even wonder too vigorously.

But suppose a given composer genuinely is the "Lennon-McCartney of the of the ambient piano genre" ... it would make perfect sense, I feel, for them to rail against critics that make Lizt or Beethoven or Metallica or Lennon-McCartney comparisons. In much the same way that compared to my favourite Beatles records, Oh My God Metalica sucks!

So for a critic too project Metalica onto the Sgt Pepper ideal and make evaluations would be simply to misunderstand the genre.

So I don't need to like the music of an ambient piano composer very much to be sympathetic with pushing back on critics who don't understand their work. In fact is seem entirely inevitable.
 
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I'm not a fan of Philip Glass, but "Opening" doesn't suck. To begin with, it has very interesting harmonies. Also, the rhythmic pattern is quite nice, with that 3:2 polyrhythm. It is a piece in the tradition of the baroque prelude: some chords with an interesting rhythmic pattern applied to them. We could compare it to, say, the first prelude from the Well tempered keyboard by Bach, a piece that I think we would agree that doesn't suck and it is well regarded as a piece of art. This piece has also interesting harmonies. The rhythmic pattern is not so interesting as the Opening one, though (IMO): it is simply a repeated arpeggio, so... I think that if we establish that Opening is crap, how can we say that the Bach's prelude isn't it?
 

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mikrokosmiko said:
I'm not a fan of Philip Glass, but "Opening" doesn't suck. To begin with, it has very interesting harmonies. Also, the rhythmic pattern is quite nice, with that 3:2 polyrhythm. It is a piece in the tradition of the baroque prelude: some chords with an interesting rhythmic pattern applied to them. We could compare it to, say, the first prelude from the Well tempered keyboard by Bach, a piece that I think we would agree that doesn't suck and it is well regarded as a piece of art. This piece has also interesting harmonies. The rhythmic pattern is not so interesting as the Opening one, though (IMO): it is simply a repeated arpeggio, so... I think that if we establish that Opening is crap, how can we say that the Bach's prelude isn't it?
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Very well said. The Chopin C minor Prelude comes to mind as well.
 
mikrokosmiko said:
I'm not a fan of Philip Glass, but "Opening" doesn't suck. To begin with, it has very interesting harmonies. Also, the rhythmic pattern is quite nice, with that 3:2 polyrhythm. It is a piece in the tradition of the baroque prelude: some chords with an interesting rhythmic pattern applied to them. We could compare it to, say, the first prelude from the Well tempered keyboard by Bach, a piece that I think we would agree that doesn't suck and it is well regarded as a piece of art. This piece has also interesting harmonies. The rhythmic pattern is not so interesting as the Opening one, though (IMO): it is simply a repeated arpeggio, so... I think that if we establish that Opening is crap, how can we say that the Bach's prelude isn't it?
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I'm neutral on Philip Glass, too, and Opening is, to me, fine and serves its intended purpose.

But in comparing it to the Bach prelude (as far as one can meaningfully compare two pieces of music by two composers centuries apart), the prelude is much more than a repeated arpeggio, but a repeated arpeggio articulated by a harmonic scheme, and the scheme itself is not merely a progression in the conventional sense, but is built on two hidden canons that intersect for a bit near the middle.
__________
 
ism said:
I mean ... for and given work of any given artist there exist some critics that don't (or won't) understand their work.

The guys in Metalica are, I think, quite legitimately the Lennon-McCartney of their genre (something I think the "Black Album" is kind of riffing on). But for a long time, I really didn't get it at all. I still don't much care for most of their work, with a few significant exceptions, but I do understand that this is really good music within the context of the genre (and a genre which they helped significantly to bring into existence).

Ambient piano, like thrash metal, as a genre is ... something I could mostly take or leave.

Sometimes a really good ambient composer will tiptoe into the minimalist edges of the neo-classical, which completely changes my reception.

But assuming that we're taking the ambient piano genre as ambient piano music quo ambient piano music (ie. and not trying to make it neo-classical, much less holding it up to Lizt), what would the work of the "Lennon-McCartney of the ambient piano genre" even look like?

I have no idea. Because I just don't care enough about the genre to even wonder too vigorously.

But suppose a given composer genuinely is the "Lennon-McCartney of the of the ambient piano genre" ... it would make perfect sense, I feel, for them to rail against critics that make Lizt or Beethoven or Metallica or Lennon-McCartney comparisons. In much the same way that compared to my favourite Beatles records, Oh My God Metalica sucks!

So for a critic too project Metalica onto the Sgt Pepper ideal and make evaluations would be simply to misunderstand the genre.

So I don't need to like the music of an ambient piano composer very much to be sympathetic with pushing back on critics who don't understand their work. In fact is seem entirely inevitable.
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Slightly specious argument. There's a difference between not getting an artistic work, and not getting why it's popular. There is nothing at all to get about Einaudi.

Imagine if someone wrote a book that consisted entirely of the word blue, over and over and over and over. People would buy it, some may even claim it resonates with them, and that the monotony has some kind of profound effect. And that's fine. But imagine book stores market it as better crafted literature than Shakespeare, you would naturally get critics pointing out that it clearly isn't. The author could rightly tell the critics they don't get why he wrote the book, or what he was hoping to achieve, or why people are reading it - but he couldn't realistically tell them they don't understand the book itself.
 
Pingu said:
There is nothing at all to get about Einaudi.

Imagine if someone wrote a book that consisted entirely of the word blue, over and over and over and over.
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I mean, the idea that there is literally no content in the music of Einaudi is obviously false. And these old-man-yelling-at-cloud arguments have been had over and over again vis-à-vis jazz, pop, punk, techno, etc etc.
 
SupremeFist said:
I mean, the idea that there is literally no content in the music of Einaudi is obviously false. And these old-man-yelling-at-cloud arguments have been had over and over again vis-à-vis jazz, pop, punk, techno, etc etc.
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I didn't say there's no content at all. I said there's nothing to get. It's very straightforward, tonal music, with an extremely limited harmonic vocabulary, and little development.
 
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