Contemporary pop music demonstrates the same disparity: its computer technology exhibits an unprecedented capacity for the manipulation of sound, and yet the vast majority of the music it serves insists on a primitive, repetitive simplicity. Rock music is rhythmically some of the most impoverished music the world has ever heard, a fact that is hard to square with the sophisticated technologies that produced it. Julian Johnson. Who Needs Classical Music?

What does it mean that society cares so little for things of the mind, that art galleries, concert halls, and libraries become increasingly empty while half the population pursues aerobics with a mixture of passion and guilt that was formerly the preserve of the church? This obsession with physicality and appearance extends beyond our bodies and is widely reflected in a culture obsessed by packaging, image and design. The surface is everything. We live in a visual culture that attaches primary significance to the exchange of signs - of power, attraction, status, wealth, desire - that are overwhelmingly visual. Even in music visuals are everything: hence the ubiquity not only of the music video but the marketing of the star. And when it comes to the music the surface sheen is everything; the music is literally one-dimensional - it has one sound, one timbre, one kind of material. It rejects polyphony and discursive forms. It is as if the art of costume design were replaced by admiring pieces of cloth.....Julian Johnson. Who Needs Classical Music?

What is good about Pop music idioms is that because they are made up of extremely simple musical materials, and the formation of a piece of Pop music is so easy, requiring very little talent or hardly any compositional skills; it allows almost anyone, even compositionally unskilled people, to have the wonderful experience of creating music. Richard Byron Strunk, Composer.

Many times the rules of play in pop music are, you know, dumbing down the audience, don't give them anything they can't understand or don't give them anything different because they won’t be able to deal with that, they only want to hear what they've heard before. Michael McDonald, Pop Singer.

It [classical music] is not like pop music, which is just repetition; anyone can do it. Will.I.Am, from the pop group The Black Eyed Peas.

It's not dumbing down. It's simplifying everything. Dennis Welch of the pop group, The Revenge, talking about the music they play.

I dumb down for my audience and doubled my dollars, They criticise me for it yet they all yell “Holla”. Jay-Z.

"You can make anyone sound professional (and I have!)" Mitchell Froom, a producer who has worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others.

Creativity and facility aren’t quite the same thing. When it’s creating something like a symphony, it’s not like writing film music. One can probably write two hours of film music in a couple of weeks and it’ll take you a couple of years to write half an hour of a symphony. William Walton.

It has made them afraid to argue what their knowledge, taste and sophistication tell them, which is that classical music is an important art form and potentially achieves more depth and complexity than popular forms, however wonderful those are.

As for charges of "elitism" if it is elitist to create works over average people's heads then why is it allright to have schools to educate them? There is a remark attributed to the playwright Bert Brecht that I like very much. A state official castigated him for creating art that only appealed to a small circle of connoisseurs. This was undemocratic, the official stated. Brecht said something like: "Then let's work to expand the connoisseurs into a large circle of connoisseurs, because art requires knowledge." Roger Rudenstein. Classical Music: Alive and Kicking.

While waiting to receive the classical music accolade, British composer Harrison Birtwistle listened to music by the Kaiser Chiefs, K T Tunstall, X-Factor reality TV show winners and James Blunt. When his turn at the microphone came, the composer said, “I’ve never heard so many clichés in a single day...and why is all your music so effing loud? You must all be braindead”. Composer Sir Harrison Birtwistle, collecting the classical music prize at the Ivor Novello awards, 2006. He was referring to contenders for the pop categories.

What I find difficult about it (pop music) is its level of false consciousness. It’s pre-eminently a youth culture - the change in it today, I suppose, is that 50 is the new 30, and people can now continue to listen to pop music and be influenced by it at an older age - but musically its not very interesting. And it’s odd that we should take so seriously something that as music per se is not really being pursued at a high level. I mean, the whole thing about art is its increasing complexity and reflexivity and the thing about pop music as music - not necessarily as social commentary or even as art in a more general sense, but just as music - is that it’s not really reflecting upon itself very much. Ian Bostridge.

These two pages on pop and rock are only completely understandable with reference to the previous dumbing down pages: Dumbing Down, Thinning Mainstream, three Evidence pages and an Opinion page.

Imagine that you have been transported into a parallel universe in which you find a strange form of football. The Premier League is very popular, so no change there. However, when you investigate, you discover that players are selected at the age of 17 or 18 on the basis of their photogenicity, their quirkiness, or the colourful nature of their private lives. They can kick a ball but their ball skills are often minimal. This seems not to prevent the adulation of their fans, however, who avidly buy their merchandise and hang their posters on their bedroom walls. They can be excused because they are ignorant of any comparison that might highlight the deficiencies of the objects of their adulation.

When you attend a game you see the players competing in their posing. The game play seems to you to be fairly rudimentary, consisting of short and stereotyped passes and a lack of variation and creativity. These players are limited in the extreme. To make up for this, and to create a sense of excitement, their every contact with the ball is transmitted to huge screens that fill the arena, so that everything appears significant, an enormous event in fact. Much of the excitement of the fans seems to be created by the players engaging in strange and eccentric dance forms, pulling faces, fouling other players, or engaging in deliberate and wildly diverse forms of eccentricity. The media seems to play a role in this, with its preoccupation with the personal foibles, posturing, and private lives of the players: much of this coverage could be described as gossip. And because the industry knows that the fans like goals at least five are provided in each half. This elaborate piece of theatre, you quickly decide, is based on a huge industry of deception.

In contrast, you discover that there is a non-league organisation. The players here are selected before the age of 10 on the basis of their ball skills and their ability to play in a team. They undergo an intensive training lasting many years which focusses on the theory and practice of the game of football. By the time they qualify (and many do not), they will be ready to join a team in which every player will display enormous skills of ball control that often appear miraculous. These teams, as you witness, display a balletic sense of movement, style, and organisation. This is football as an art form. There is movement, form and organisation, fluidity and breathtaking creativity.

Unfortunately, there is a small audience and this area of football frequently comes under attack as elitist and excluding of the man in the street. The small amount of money the state provides for training and education is often highlighted in the non-quality press as a national disgrace. There are also complaints that the money the advertising industry contributes to the sport acts as an indirect tax on the whole population because of the higher price of food and other goods when the cost of this advertising revenue is passed on to the population. “Why should I pay for this elitist rubbish” is a frequent complaint. The skills of the players are denigrated or ignored. The popular perception is that this game is boring because the focus on skill and performance is “too highbrow, too intellectual” and takes the excitement out of the sport. This year England won the World Cup but this was covered in just two specialist publications. The national press ignored the event as they have all other events. Media coverage, in the small specialist press, however, focuses on the skills of the individual players, rules and strategies, and is based on a deep and elaborate understanding of all aspects of the sport and its history.

The audience is dwindling and ageing in the face of competition from the League Industry. Young people, understandably, are attracted by the bright lights of the League and can no longer be recruited as audience members. It is also harder to recruit English players who can no longer be attracted to the hard work and long training of non-league football because the rewards of the League game are much higher and gained through considerably less effort. Therefore, most players are recruited from overseas.

You now return to our own universe. You cannot avoid thinking about the similarity between pop/rock and the League Sides, and classical music and the non-league sides. Your thinking about music is changed irrevocably............

It is a truism that pop/rock is intended for popular or mass consumption and this limits it to an endless regurgitation of the cosy and the familiar whilst playing to the lowest common denominator of intelligence, whilst art music is intended to examine and push the limits of what can be expressed within musical forms, it is exploratory and continuously radical in nature and intent.

It is not only rhythmically that pop and rock music is limited and impoverished in comparison with other types of music. It is also impoverished melodically, harmonically and structurally. It appeals to basic responses by the use of strong rhythms and repetition ad nauseam. The music places relatively little value on melody, harmony, timbre, texture, contrapuntal effects, rhythmic complexity, dynamics, the complexity and variation of musical form, and innumerable other interrelated aspects of ordinary musical fabric. The essence of music is conveyed mainly by the tactile feel of its thumping bass line. There has been an overemphasis on sound as opposed to music, on the dominating beat of the percussion, and on such anti-harmonic devices as the 'power chord', produced by electronic distortion. We all know that pop and rock music endlessly repeats itself, each generation discovering the same finite vocabulary of chords, vocal inflections and attitudes. Deja vu experiences are built into the genre. Pop and rock is easy listening, easy watching, easy thinking. It is trashy, unimaginative, poorly written, slickly produced, inane, repetitive, and juvenile. Although the final product is slick and technologically sophisticated, the music is generally mechanical, undemanding, and simple to a fault. We are presented with flaccid, predictable harmonies and instant gratification. Cliché and bombast prevail, the music is repetitive and incoherent or laughably wooden and there are not infrequent passages of jaw-dropping banality. The popularity of this music is due to the power of hype: the transformation of music into a commodity targeted for the largest possible audience or aimed at the lowest common denominator and relentlessly pushed by a high-powered promotional mechanism. The product is aimed cynically at an undiscriminating target audience. This music remains stolidly within its own fossilised conventions, yet has the nerve to bill itself as radical. Its composers rarely have the technical ability to record and convey their intentions with any accuracy even if their intentions might aspire to venture a little beyond convention.

This page will elaborate on these claims and provide an analysis of pop and rock music.

My contention is that the musical language of pop and rock is extremely limited, the “literacy level” of the typical composition being fairly low on a scale of musical vocabulary and complexity. If this were language we might be thinking about a reading age in single figures and this may be the reason for the popularity of this music with the preteens. Pop and rock are the aural equivalent of a Big Mac: homogenised, standardised, pasteurised, certainly not “grown up food”, and ultimately damaging to taste and discrimination. It is clear that the only reason that many UK restaurants are able to serve the public reheated, pre-packaged food without complaint is that customers eat ready-prepared meals at home - they become addicted to this high salt, high fat, high sugar diet, not recognising the poor quality of the underlying ingredients. Taste becomes degraded and coarsened, discrimination dies, and quantity and immediate impact substitutes for quality. Pop and rock music produce the same effects and are aspects of a wider culture that tends towards the palid and deracinated. Additionally, pop and rock music can be seen to have a number of negative social and psychological consequences.

The making of pop and rock music recordings is obviously big business. Like any other industry, it is concerned with profits and treats music and its performers as commodities. Though it is ruled by the market laws of supply and demand, it is as much concerned with creating, as responding to, the demand to which it caters. Companies face pressure to create a product that will stand out in a market crowded with duplicates and look-alikes. This might be done by offering slightly idiosyncratic performances of standard works. More often, though, the desired result is achieved by promoting the cult of the performer, hyping yet another undistinguished clone to the skies, or by packaging the music in a way that might make it accessible to, and hence desired by, a wider, or previously untargeted, public. Aesthetic values are regarded as market corners and reduced to shopping opportunities.

Noël Carroll sets out to analyse the ontological character of mass art, which includes commercial movies and TV sitcoms. He concludes:

x is a mass art work if and only if 1) x is a multiple instance art work 2) produced and distributed by mass technology, 3) which art work is intentionally designed to gravitate in its structural choices (e.g., its narrative forms, symbolism, intended affect, and even its content) toward those choices that promise accessibility with minimum effort, virtually on first contact, for the largest number of relatively untutored audiences.

If he is right, it is no fault in mass art that it offers 'accessibility with minimum effort' so long as we value its purpose, which, presumably, is to provide undemanding entertainment. The formulaic approach and unexacting content of such works is not an unfortunate accident but a product of planning and the context within which the work is produced. Mass technologies seek a mass audience and, to attract one, must offer a product that appeals to denominators that are common because low.

An outcome of the decontextualizing of music is, as I put it earlier, the dumbing-down of the listener. She is trained to treat all music as if it belongs in the category mass art. She has (or is assumed to have) a short attention span and a preference for the diverting, the unambiguous, and the unsubtle, as opposed to the intellectual, the difficult, and the challenging. She looks for immediate access and effortless gratification. This person finds things to enjoy in the music of Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven, but she attends only to those features of their works that are shared with mass art. She is attracted by the veneer of charm, or vitality, or emotional bathos, and is conditioned to expect no more and to explore no further. If classical works display an appealing surface, as many do, a wide market is ensured for them, though this is one that depends on their being appreciated at something less than their full artistic potential.

At worst, one gets a listener who is attracted to the noise made by music but who is not interested in the music that is there. This person wants music that sets a pleasant ambience or apt mood but does not demand his attention. He wants music that need not be listened to, and he thereby reduces everything he plays to the level of 'moozak'. Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Stephen Davies.

"We're conforming to the way machines pay music. It's robots' choice. It used to be ladies' choice — now it's robots' choice." Donald Fagen, producer and Steely Dan frontman.

Pop and Rock is limited in the following ways:

1). The vast majority of the music is in 4/4 time. Thus, other time signatures, the common 3/4 and others such as 12/8, 5/4, 7/8, 6/8, 7/8, 7/16 etc. are not part of the vocabulary. Metre changes within a piece are not allowed, this is set at the beginning and never varies. This is one element in the reduction of complexity and the limitation of musical vocabulary in pop and rock music.

Additionally, there are no tempo changes within a piece of music, no changes of pace, either gradually as in accelerando, or sudden changes of pace. Tempo is invariant and usually strictly and fairly mechanically follows the beat imposed from the outset. This limits the possibilities of using and demonstrating “musicianship”.

Dynamics are also avoided - the music is at one level of loudness and dynamic changes such as pianissimo, forte, crescendo, diminuendo, are not part of the vocabulary of pop and rock.

Modulation is the process of changing from one key (tonic, or tonal center) to another, also known as a key change. This may or may not be accompanied by a change in key signature. Key changes are not allowed in rock and pop: once the initial key is set there is no variation. Possibilities for the development of the musical material are therefore severely restricted.

Complex rhythms are also avoided, the “groove” is restrictive, confining, and limiting of the rhythmic structure. A few basic rhythmic templates tend to be used universally.

Musical forms are also restricted to a few basic tamplates repeated ad nauseam. There is no development, an absence of the complex forms used in other types of music. The thematic development of the material is avoided, so that musical themes and fragments are merely repeated rather than developed. The typical length of the typical rock and pop song also prevents development and creativity and becomes another musical straightjacket.

Harmony is also restricted and commonplace. There is no room for the augmented and complex chords found elsewhere and the use of dissonance is restricted.

Timbre is severely restricted to a small number of templates. A small number of instrumental sounds tend to be used time after time, electronically processed to create the standard sound and timbre of the typical rock song. Timbre tends to remain the same throughout a piece and is not allowed to vary. This is “clone music” - music that has to repeat the formulae. The aim of constructing a piece of music is to mimic what has gone before rather than to act creatively.

2). A great deal of rock and pop use a fairly limited number of scales and modes. Pentatonic scales, often used,  are composed of only five notes in contrast to standard musical scales that contain eight notes. This necessarily limits the complexity of the music that is possible using these scales and explains the lack of melody, the lack of variation in the music, and the standardisation and formularisation of much pop and rock music. It really is all the same since its basic building materials reduce the scope for novelty and creativity to a drastic extent. Even when other scales and modes are used they are confined to a limited set of the range of possibilities.

Additionally, no key changes are allowed in a piece of music - the key of the piece is set at the beginning and is not allowed to vary, to modulate to related keys.

Moreover, when we examine sequences of intervals in pop and rock we find that cliched, commonplace, and easy sequences of notes are enormously favoured over the more difficult, the less conventional, and the innovative. Musical sequences can frequently be broken down into short and standardised phrases that are endlessly recycled, akin to clichés in speech. The point of calling a repetitive speech pattern a cliché is that it contains relatively little meaning and it therefore communicates little. It contains a high level of informational redundancy in a cybernetic sense - so, “it’s cool”, “it rocks”, “like”, “at the end of the day”, “bottom line”, “to be honest”, “touch base”, are annoying just because they are meaningless additions to speech and they are used when an individual’s powers of expression fail. (Cybernetics Links: Communication and Information; Gregory Bateson: Cybernetics.

And even some more difficult single intervals are avoided. For example, the interval C to F is frequently sung in pop and rock music - it is a standard and common interval in all western music, the basis of “Away in a Manger”, to give just one example. But the much more difficult interval from C to F sharp is rarely in the repertoire of pop and rock singers. This interval is more difficult to sing, less conventional and more adventurous. The lesson of this seems to be that pop and rock is based on easy and conventional building blocks and that there is a real reluctance, and ability, to attempt less conventional and more difficult musical challenges.

3). Polyphony is largely absent and the vast majority of the music is driven by chord changes that are fairly simple in nature as in pop/rock. Compare, for example, the highly complex chord sequences that can be found in jazz music with the simplicity of the chord changes found in pop and rock. Because polyphony is restricted pop and rock music demonstrates limited harmony and use of counterpoint. It is certainly true that both improvised jazz and pop are "simpler" or less “deep” forms of music than classical by a considerably wide margin in this way as in other ways. I know from experience that there is considerable satisfaction and artistry in jazz improvisation but this form of music making is limited in scope just because it is not written down, planned, and thought about in a fully developed way. We would not expect a painter, necessarily, to produce an instant doodle that held as much interest as a painting that had been worked on over months if not years. However, the best jazz compositions are of extremely high artistic and creative merit.

An important rider to this point is that the emotional reaction to music or other art forms is not independent of its complexity: greater complexity and differentiation, a wider use of tonal and harmonic palette, and greater subtlety creates a wider range of emotional response to the music. And music is all about emotional response.

What, then, is polyphony? As commonly used it implies the use of counterpoint and is the opposite of homophony where the melody is confined to one line of music, the other sounds acting as accompaniment (i.e. melody with chordal accompaniment). The most important purely polyphonic forms are motet, round, polyphonic mass, canon, polyphonic chanson, canzona, ricercar, and fugue. True polyphony was first written in the 11th and 12th century AD. It was preceded by two other compositional methods which are progressively less complex and predate the development of polyphony by increasing amounts of time. The first to appear was monophonic music in which a melody is played without accompaniment. The next to appear was homophony in which a single line of music is supported by a chordal accompaniment. Finally, we get the combination of more than one melodic line each of a distinct character welded together to create a harmonic coherence, as in much of the music of Bach, and this is called polyphonic music. The important feature here is the independent interest of the various melodic lines in combination with each other. So, in polyphonic music, instead of the parts marching in step with one another, and without particular interest in their individual melodic curves, they move in apparent independence and freedom though fitting together harmonically.

Related to the above, counterpoint is the simultaneous combination of two or more melodies to make musical sense, one melody being spoken of as the counterpoint of or in counterpoint to another. Double counterpoint is when two melodies, one above the other, can exchange position; similarly triple, quadruple, etc. counterpoint, where three, four or more melodies can take up any positions relative to each other. Independence of melody is of two kinds, melodic and rhythmic. Counterpoint is not a musical form, it is a manner of organising musical material that became an essential technique for any serious composer from at least the sixteenth century when its teaching was first systematised.

One example of the art of counterpoint is Bach’s The Art of Fugue. This begins with four fugues (a fugue, at its simplest, is a contrapuntal composition in which the different voices enter successively in imitation of each other), two of which present the theme, the others presenting the theme in contrary motion (back to front). Then there are counterfugues, in which the original subject is inverted (turned upside down) and combined with the original. There are double and triple fugues, several canons, and three pairs of mirror fugues. Karl Geiringer helpfully says “Bach presents all the voices first in their original form and then, like a reflected image, in complete inversion. To make the mirror reflection doubly realistic, the treble of the first fugue becomes the bass of the second fugue, the alto changes into a tenor, the tenor into an alto, and the bass into a treble”.

See further information about counterpoint at the following sites: Site One; Site Two

As we can easily hear, polyphony and counterpoint is largely absent from pop and rock music and these share with much folk music a lack of harmonic and melodic complexity and the use of a very early, less complex, and more archaic set of compositional principles, based on monophony or homophony rather than polyphony. The complexity of contrapuntal music is mastered by very few music students today, and it is certainly not even attempted by most rock musicians, whether they are performers or composers.

And yet, for all the impressive array of computer manipulation and electronically generated sounds, its musical proposition is essentially simplistic, often characterised by the repetition of its already undeveloped materials. Because the outward technological means are of primary importance, the fetishization of the sound world, the performers, and the style position that they represent can easily obscure an underlying musical inanity. To return to my analogy of children’s books, it is as if a prosaic proposition - “Janet likes John. John likes Janet.” - becomes profound or exciting simply by being projected onto a vast screen by computer-controlled lasers. The extreme restriction of vocabulary and syntax prevents the text from delving into a greater sophistication of thought or feeling. In its place, one savours the intoxicating pleasure of being overwhelmed by the force of the technological means. Julian Johnson. Who Needs Classical Music?

Normative ["pop"] music, defined above all by its melodic and tonal materials, has simply bypassed musical modernism as if it had never happened. Since our culture is saturated by the normative, to encounter music whose processes and materials are genuinely modern can be disorienting. This is one reason modern music continues to bewilder if not shock: it lays bare a historical disjunction that we normally evade. That evasion is embodied in dominant culture by a music whose surface of technological complexity stands in an odd, contradictory relation to the simplicity of its basic musical materials. The underlying materials and formal patterns of much music made today are not just simple but archaically so. -Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?

Speaking of the popularisation of talent shows such as "X-Factor" in recent years, Damon Albarn said: "It's creating a mindset that suggests you can get something for nothing and that it's easy to acquire status and fame. It should be one of the hardest things to do. We need to dismantle very significant parts of our culture and really re-examine them. I suppose you start with the celebrity thing". Damon Albarn, Blur and Gorillaz.

Naturally no composer is content to write in perfectly regular note-groups with a relentless beat; as in poetry, half the game consists in varying the position of the stress. Otto Karolyi, Introducing Music

The listeners are a passive mass, which is prepared to accept standardised forms precisely because they are the product of the same processes as the musical forms themselves. Middleton.

Pop is a battening sub-art. Anthony Burgess.

The unthinking use of amplification in many kinds of music turns what should be an intimate and sensitive experience into a soul and ear-numbing imitation of a Hitlerian or Stalinist rally, with all sensibilities subsumed in blather and beat. Peter Maxwell Davis.

Pop culture is a spreading ooze. Dwight Macdonald.

Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children. Allan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind.

It's not true to say that only bad books make the best seller list. But it is a little bit true, and it is always the case that bad books greatly outnumber good ones at the top end of the charts. Sometimes, too, you come across an example of pure negative correlation between the quality of a book and the level of its sales. John Lanchester, Short Cuts.

The function of high culture is to validate the experience of the individual. Creation is a purely aesthetic act in pursuit of truth and beauty, and, that being so, therefore self-justifying. 'Art for art's sake' is a phrase generally applied to allow for creations that are non-representational and totally without use or even meaning … The art piece is designed aggressively to confront us, to challenge our assumptions and beliefs about art and life, and to identify the unanswered questions about existence. Thomas Inge, The Handbook of Popular Culture.

One should not forget that much "popular" music is manufactured purely for commercial gain. Since the possibility of making megabucks out of young people by feeding them the lowest common denominator of "music" has been realised, "music" became an industry, not a profession, where, for the least possible work put in, the maximum profit is extracted for the fat cats, with "music" becoming ever more zombie-like, and the bands ruthlessly exploited. Peter Maxwell Davis.

4). The musical language is conservative and old fashioned. Despite its apparent and claimed modernity, pop and rock uses the musical tools and the musical language of the nineteenth century or even earlier - see point number 3, above. When we peel away “the big beat” we find a limited and simplistic use of the musical language of a past century. There is almost no use of the advances in musical language and vocabulary that have occurred since the late nineteenth century. It therefore seems not an unfair verdict on pop and rock music that they have not invented or created anything fundamentally new. They have borrowed rhythms and formulae from jazz; they have borrowed from white and black American folk music; they have taken many harmonies and instrumental colourings from Western art music. What has been borrowed has been reduced to a mechanical process.

Take Bartok, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Varese, Berg, Sibelius, Britten, Janacek, Messiaen, Hindemith, Stravinsky or even Debussy and Wagner as just a few examples. Where is the rock/pop group that utilises the groundbreaking harmonic language of these composers? There are none. If there are, let me know, but I don’t expect a reply anytime soon.

5). Structurally, the music is extremely simple. There are generally no musical progressions. A song is in one key with a main part and perhaps a chorus. There is no movement between keys, little complexity of structure or musical organisation, little sense of progression. The limitations discussed above, together with the shortness and simplicity of the musical phrases militate against any level of complexity of organisation of the musical material. As a contrast, it was common for classical composers from the late 18th century to move between a number of keys in a small number of bars, and they used complex musical forms such as Sonata Form and Fugue. One example is Haydn’s Op. 76/6 string quartet, written in the 1790’s. The slow movement of this quartet wanders through such a labyrinth of keys that Haydn allocates no key signature whatsoever to the movement. At one point, the harmony becomes so complex that he notates one part in a sharp key and the other parts in a flat key. Only when the music eventually settles into the home key does a key signature appear - five sharps indicating B major. The first movement of this quartet invents the common nineteenth century form of variations and fugue. Classical music is more complex and more disciplined than pop or rock and it's hard to compare a 45-minute symphony to the standardised three-minute pop song. Classical music requires patience and open-mindedness and an ability to pay attention to process and musical argument over lengthy stretches of time. However, there's really not much in rock or pop about change. It's lack of contrast and movement is mostly about falling into a simple “groove”, a repetitive and repeated rhythmic scheme. In contrast classical music, for example, usually involves more modulation (changes of keys), less repetition, a wider use of musical phrases that are not of a standard length, a wider range of tone palettes and harmonic complexity, greater contrasts between loud and soft, and compositions that are lengthy, complexly organised, built in contrasting sections, and that attempt to build musical arguments and structures.

Much pop and rock music is based on a very simple form, typically a thirty-two bar sequence. The frame consists of four sections of eight bars each, of which the first and last are usually the same, and the second is a repetition with only a very slight variation of the first (alternatively, as in some rock music, there is a lack of organisation or form and the musical material is unstructured, incoherent, unorganised, and ultimately just meaningless noise. Lengthy “jamming” without organisation quickly becomes monotonous and boring, particularly if the restrictions of the performers also make it repetitive because of the lack of musical options available to the performers). The pop industry has taken over this formula from march, dance, and folk music as an almost universal standardised pattern. If this were to be used as a basis for improvisation it might have some degree of interest, but its constant repetition as the basis of a single composed lyric and melody is monotonous and trivial. Additionally, given the simplicity of the musical material, melodies become brief gestures that cannot develop since they are swamped by rhythm, and they have minimal harmonic texture. This all adds up to “assembly line” composition. This is formula music written for a certain audience and the creator of this music either has no freedom because in order to sell this music it must meet the standards or fashion of the day, or they do not wish to extend themselves beyond the formula because of limited horizons, a lack of ability, or laziness.

One respondent to this site disagreed with the above, saying that “a couple of songs on the Hotel California album by the Eagles remind me a lot of classical music. On Side One, the song I'm thinking of is Wasted Time. A sad song but very well arranged. On Side Two, the song I'm thinking of is The Last Resort, which has a tremendous message in its lyrics and doesn't sound like Rock hardly at all” (sic). He was seeking to make the point that some pop music is based on classical music principles. However, it is obvious from his reply that he is assuming that the sound of the musical material is of prime importance rather than the organisation and treatment of the musical material. Because the music “sounds like classical music” (i.e. it might have violins or some kind of orchestral effect) it is as good or just like classical music. He fails to recognise that it is the purpose and treatment of the musical material that is different. A static, unchanging song three minutes in duration is completely different from a symphony that lasts an hour and that difference lies in the musical development and organisation of the material. Even within the three minute format there is a difference: no pop song will show the same link between the words and the music as a Schubert song, or require the same skills of interpretation in varying vocal tembre, dynamics, rhythm, etc., in order to tell the story.

Theodore Adorno recognised that popular music is based on repetition rather than liking and appreciating good music. The main pleasure is in recognising a hit record and buying it at the same time as everyone else, producing the illusion of immediacy and intimacy. Adorno’s view is clear: that the pop music fan is a victim because the industry liquidates the individual, creating an attitude of surrender and resignation (passive consumption) and a stupidity in listening. Adorno believed that society and culture form an historic totality that makes the pursuit of freedom within society inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture.

There is a historical and cultural reason for the essential simplicity of modern popular music idioms. Until the late 1950’s Western popular music was a lighter version of Western art music, and used the same vocabulary, structure, and syntax. It should be understood that Western art music is fairly unique in the world and is harmonically and structurally more highly developed than any other form of world music. It has a density of meaning and emotion not found elsewhere. This fact is not entirely unrelated to the Enlightenment and the tradition of Rationalism that allowed the development of science, philosophy, art, and other cultural areas to a higher degree of complexity than anywhere else in the world (The Enlightenment; The Enlightenment & Music; Baroque Music; Rationalism; Yahoo Rationalism Links. However, after the mid-20th century popular music became based entirely on American folk music and was commercialised, commodified and packaged in the same way as many other cultural products. It became restricted in scope, ambition, aspiration, language, syntax, and in its intellectual reach and rigour. It sidelined melodic and harmonic complexity and emphasised rhythm. This has produced a number of generations who are able to react to rhythm but who seem unable to listen to or appreciate harmonic complexity and the privileging of melody in musical material. In other words, melody and harmony are a foreign language to many whilst rhythm is the focus of the known linguistic homeland. This fact is at the root of the modern musical illiteracy.

Culturally, there has been a parallel change since the 1950’s, in relation to all artistic activity, and this has turned the literary and artistic marketplace into an environment characterised by the absence of any aesthetic criteria. So with books, for example, the distinction between literature and trash has been eliminated from the marketplace, mere fame ensures publication, there is an overvaluation of ordinary accounts of ordinary lives, the distinctive and unusual is downgraded as a homogenised cultural uniformity holds sway, and bad writing is lauded. It is the same with music. Popular music becomes increasingly narrow-minded and conforms to a narrow uniformity, it is soapified, literalised, commodified, and globalised. This is music denatured, homogenised, pasteurised, and sterilised. There is a fetishism of right-wing, individualistic, capitalistic, and narcissistic preoccupations, despite the surface impression of dissent and rebellion (which might, more accurately, be seen as adolescent-style narcissism). Rock music both embraces, and withdraws into the Capitalist Dream - see the next page for more on this.

The fact that one or two performers or phenomena may fall outside the profile outlined in these two pages in some way or ways does not invalidate this assessment which is an attempt to draw up a Weberian “ideal type” analysis of rock and pop. These arguments are certainly, in an “ideal type” way, accurate. Link to Ideal Type site.

The changes outlined in the second paragraph above are aspects of a new fascism: the intolerance of creativity and individuality, and the pressure to appear ordinary and conform to the standards, appetites, fantasies, and tastes of the modern mass. These trends are apparent across all realms of culture, including the standardisation of politics and political debate, to the “new managerialist” philosophy imported into the public service arena (creating real pressures to standardise and conform, and an intolerance of questioning, dissent or disagreement, producing a dumbing down of discussion and debate), to the trends in art, literature, music, and culture discussed in other pages on this site. Thus, pop and rock music can be seen as one symptom of a wider cultural ailment.

Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson

During the last few decades, most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between "high" and "low" art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and "Blue Suede Shoes" are equally valuable as cultural texts. In Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson challenges these assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The author maintains that music is more than just "a matter of taste": while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other music claims to function as art. This book considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to most of the other music that surrounds us.

What Julian Johnson says, essentially, is that the trend of seeing so-called 'high culture' and particularly classical music, as elitist, as exclusionist, is itself actually elitist. He reasons that people or organisations who set themselves up as today's cultural arbiters are in fact exclusionary, because they are determining what is right for the public, what they desire.

Johnson gets to the core of classical music, its essence, what makes it different from any other music in history, by discussing how it is put together, how it develops, how it works through time, and then shows how these techniques are not present in today's popular music, which rely instead on simple, short repetitions to create and reinforce a mood, a moment, a feeling. Thus, he argues, pop music is more about feeling, about gratification of the senses, about 'taste' and subjective preference, while classical music, from a musicological point of view, has traditionally measured greatness by how the individual work exceeds the expectations and limitations of the form in which it is set. Classical music's tension is (generally) in this structural conflict between the formal and the individual, whereas pop music's (generally) is from the personal reaction the listener has to the textures, sounds, and lyrical message, conveyed through repetition, circular (non-developing) structures, and novelty of sound conveyed through electronics more often than not. And there is a difference, as he points out, between novelty and originality. What all this means is that classical music has a unique value as a cultural artifact that today's musics, no matter how different they try to be on the surface (with new synthesised sounds, new volume levels, new extraneous gimmicks such as costumes and props), cannot convey. He insightfully points out that often the most advanced technology is used (under the banner of progress) to create the most rudimentary of song forms and structures, and that people are responding to the surface 'lust,' the sheen of the soundworld, rather than intellectually to the construction, the stretching and reevaluating of boundaries. We come to the ironic realisation that technologically-crude music made hundreds of years ago is actually more 'cutting edge' than the most advanced pop manufactured on synthesisers and computers, because (although he does not quite say this) technology does not replace the human intellect, but it can allow it to hide behind a curtain, much like the old man at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

6). Pop and rock music operate largely at only one emotional level and therefore produce a musical impoverishment if they are the only musical diet chosen or available. The emotional range of the music is restricted and its achievements are modest in stature, even the achievements of its historical figures such as the Beatles. The Beatles are, in fact, an interesting case since it can be convincingly argued that what was distinctive about this group were the contributions of George Martin, a classically trained musician who nevertheless had to operate within the constrictions of the pop format. The work of the individual Beatles, without Martin, has been undistinguished. Even so, even with Martin, the band’s output was original only in so far as it used clichés from popular music other than pop and rock, such as music hall, nursery rhyme, and brass band music and other fairly simple material. This would not matter, in itself, if the compositions rose above the level of predictability, but they do not. Take as an example “Hey Jude”. Most pop songs have no more than five or six chords and this song is fairly typical of this. The verses consist of a simple structure of four chords with a slightly rearranged middle eight and lots of “na, na, na na’s” at the end. It is certainly more than a little musically limiting - it is fairly obvious that music does not have to be restricted to the same four of five chords, for example, it can, among other things, modulate into other keys, extend the range of chords it uses, vary in terms of rhythm, dynamics and so forth.

Active selection of impoverished and emotionally restricted music is, it seems to me, just one aspect of a more general cultural zeitgeist. In a culture in which instant gratification is the norm, where instant meals are available from supermarkets, children are ferried around in family cars without effort or waiting, the latest media sensation is instantly available and might well be expected to be downloaded at no cost on the web, and where comfort and ease is easily purchased because of increased wealth, the complacent, the familiar, the readily-accessible-without-effort cultural product becomes that which is selected. The challenging, that which requires effort to understand and appreciate, and the disturbing and demanding become rejected as “rubbish” or “irrelevant” or “elitist”. These trends are producing a saccharine-sweet cultural menu of easy consumption - the pudding and ice-cream without the need to eat the main course.

Are we, actually, becoming less able to deal with “problematic” emotions in the context of this cultural backdrop? I’m reminded of a talk I attended, given by a writer who described how his personal psychoanalysis had given him the desire to write. He said that he had been unable to listen to Beethoven before his analysis because the music stirred up too much emotion that he found unbearable, and he avoided listening, preferring music that was more "superficial" and perhaps saccharine. It was only in his analysis that he recognised and understood that he had avoided Beethoven because difficult emotions were evoked and this was a symptom of a more general inability to feel strong feelings. He only came to know about his emotional deficiencies through the analysis and he was eventually able to use therapy to become more spontaneous and alive.

So there is clearly an emotional element that is important in relation to the ability to appreciate music and for some people there is an aesthetic block that may be about avoiding certain (or all!) deep feelings, difficult feelings, conflictual feelings, any challenge to assumptions, any contact with pain, depression, grief, anger, violence, etc. I suppose this might also explain why some people prefer Mills and Boon and other genres of literature that do not challenge, rather than the great classics that might well disturb one's world view and create uncomfortable emotions. It is useful to ask whether we, as a culture, are becoming less able to tolerate the non-saccharine, the non-superficial, and the non-sentimental. In all areas of culture, from novels, to TV, to film, the old classics are no longer read, viewed, or experienced and there has been a move towards activity, as opposed to contemplation, and towards the superficial, rather than the complex. All this might, on the surface, appear to be a simple problem of attention span and ignorance, or a proneness to boredom, rather than, more accurately, a deeper inability to tolerate and experience conflicted, complex, ambivalent, or problematic emotions.

The first time anyone openly acknowledged music as a weapon may have been during the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. soldiers bombarded the Vatican envoy's house with rock-and-roll in an attempt to chivy out the fugitive Manuel Noriega. But the truth is that we all are terrorized by music nowadays. It's not so much the high school kids parading down the street with boom boxes, or the college students partying away a Saturday afternoon, or the insomniac in the next apartment pacing up and down to Beethoven at 3:00 a.m. It's, rather, the merciless stream of 1960s golden oldies drenching suburban malls, the disco-revival radio thumping out Donna Summer in the back of a taxi all the way to the airport, the tinny Muzak bleating from storefronts as you walk along the sidewalk, the tastefully muted Andrew Lloyd Webber seeping from recessed speakers above the urinals in the men's room. America is drowning in sanctioned music -- an obligatory orchestration cramming every inch of public space. There's hardly a bar in which to nurse a quiet drink or a café in which you don't have to shout your order above the upbeat swing of 1940s big-band standards.

In 1981 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published After Virtue, an influential attack on the fragments of Enlightenment philosophy that constitute much of our contemporary moral discourse. Part of his argument is a devastating account of the rise of twentieth-century "emotivism," and nearly the only thing he missed is its curious parallel in the rise of recorded music. People began to imagine that morality was a set of feelings rather than a system of ideas at around the time they began to be able to evoke any mood they wanted by putting a 78 on a phonograph.

Both Plato and Nietzsche would have been surprised by how undangerous America's indulgence in music has proved to be. Why music hasn't melted us down into Nietzsche's unconstrained beasts is hard to say. Rock-and-roll certainly sounds as though it has this goal. But even as we recognize that music claims to unleash emotion at its most primitive, we also understand that it never will. "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises," Adorno wrote. "All it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu." J. Bottum.

7). It is commonly claimed that pop and rock music prizes “tone” and colour rather than virtuosity and mastery of an instrument, and this is contrasted with classical music where, it is claimed, the emphasis is on virtuosity and technique (the implication is that classical music is sterile and “academic”). This argument is clearly an excuse for the lack of skill of pop and rock musicians. Poor things, though, they are often taken in by the hype and think that they are virtuosos on their instruments. Put another way, the claim is that pop and rock musicians cannot play their instruments to any degree of mastery but they can make “interesting” noises by distorting the melody in a variety of ways, more often than not these days through the medium of manipulation of the sound by computers. The so-called “power chord” (composed of the root and the fifth of a more complete chord) is one example of this and illustrates the technical limitations of the performer. I've only ever seen the term "power chord" used by people talking about distorted electric guitars. The basis of the power chord is that if you turn up the gain enough (on an electric guitar amplifier), the harmonics will be more pronounced. The fretted third will clash with the harmonics - equal temperament vs. natural harmonics. So you end up hearing a major chord (with a subdued third, unless the gain is turned up extremely high), even though only root & 5 are played. Thus, the illusion of a complete chord can be achieved by playing just two notes.

It is also claimed that classical music focuses on the melody and harmony whilst popular music focuses on timbre and rhythm. Whilst it is true that pop and rock music demotes the role of melody and harmony to a startling degree, it is not true that classical music ignores timbre and rhythm - indeed, these aspects of music are often more complex than pop and rock - see the arguments above to learn about time signatures, changes of key and rhythm, etc.

There is clearly, here,  a degree of ignorance about classical musicians whose training is largely about tone production, coloration of the tone, and developing instrumental technique. This argument neglects the fact that, if one is to be able to fully express oneself musically, there needs to be a mastery of all aspects of the instrument that is used. If this mastery is poor and inadequate the range of expression that is available and the range of tools for creativity will be restricted. Poor instrumental ability will limit the musician just as a limited knowledge of the strategies available to a football team will limit their success on the field. However, on the football field is is not common for the participants to attempt to make a virtue of the fact that they cannot play the game or kick a ball with any degree of skill or accuracy and in this way it differs from pop and rock.

Where is the pop or rock musician, for example, who is capable of playing any classical concerto? Even if he wanted to, the rock musician is incapable of playing the music. Before you argue with this, are you able to point to an example of a rock/pop musician playing a concerto that is in the mainstream repertoire? Benny Goodman, from the jazz tradition, certainly did. No rock/pop musician comes close to him in instrumental virtuosity.

It is clear that rock and pop musicians are not at all noted for the technical mastery of their instruments. It is simply beyond the popular musician’s technical ability to produce the subtle gradations of dynamics, tone, musical line, texture, and co-ordination with other players demanded by the classical repertoire. And this is even before we consider the popular musician’s ability to get around the notes, to play in many keys, to modulate at an instant’s notice, to rapidly change rhythm and tempo, to play in unusual time signatures, to hold one’s own part in competition with other parts that may be melodically, rhythmically, harmonically different, and so on.

Amplification is frequently considered an advantage in the pop and rock world because it enables distortion of sound patterns. However, the problem with electrified, amplified instruments is that subtlety of tone and detailed control of the sound one produces suffers to a considerable degree. An acoustic guitarist, for example, is able to produce a much more complex sound than any amplified. guitarist because amplification takes away sound quality , it reduces the sound to a flatter, more monochromatic tone. It makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to naturally colour the tone or to insert dynamics into the music. This is one reason why dynamics are absent from pop and rock - amplification makes gradual and incremental changes in dynamics difficult. So the problem is that the rock guitarist, because amplification makes their instrument cruder and less playable, has to resort to crude, wholesale, and extreme artificially created effects instead of being able to rely on the natural resources of the instrument. The same applies to other instruments - violin, flute, saxophone, piano - all instruments lose much of their richness and complexity of tone when they are amplified.

Incidentally, this is also the reason that high level hi-fi systems are wasted on pop and rock, although the manufacturers would like us to remain in ignorance of this fact. Pop and rock recordings are reproducing amplified sounds that are less complex and differentiated than natural sounds. On top of this, much pop and rock is highly compressed and equalised to make it sound good on cheap equipment; it is manufactured for its market of fans who mostly do not possess real hi-fi equipment. Compression distorts high frequencies, flattens dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and softest sounds), obliterates dynamic contrasts (the slight variations between loud and soft), smothers low frequencies (the bass), and smears transients (the front edge of, say, a drum smack or a string pluck). Studio sound results in quiet and loud sounds being squashed together, decreasing the dynamic range, raising the average loudness.

Additionally, the saturation level for a sound signal is digital full scale, or 0dB. In the 1980s, the average sound level of a track was -18dB. The arrival of digital technology allowed engineers to push finished tracks closer to the loudest possible, 0dB.

The curves of a sound wave, which represent a wide dynamic range, become clipped and flattened in studio sound to create “square waves” which generate a buzzing effect and digital distortion on CD players

These shortcomings wreak havoc with drama and rhythm, the life and essence of much music. In contrast, there is a point in buying high level equipment to more effectively reproduce the natural , rich and complex sound of acoustic instruments and ensembles.

“David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

That distortion effect running through someones Oasis album is not entirely the Gallagher brothers’ invention. Record companies are using digital technology to turn the volume on CDs up to “11”.

Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. However, Britain’s leading studio engineers are starting a campaign against a widespread technique that removes the dynamic range of a recording, making everything sound “loud”.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

“Peak limiting” squeezes the sound range to one level, removing the peaks and troughs that would normally separate a quieter verse from a pumping chorus. The process takes place at mastering, the final stage before a track is prepared for release. In the days of vinyl, the needle would jump out of the groove if a track was too loud. But today musical details, including vocals and snare drums, are lost in the blare and many CD players respond to the frequency challenge by adding a buzzing, distorted sound to tracks.

Oasis started the loudness war and recent albums by Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen have pushed the loudness needle further into the red. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, branded “unlistenable” by studio experts, is the subject of an online petition calling for it to be “remastered” without its harsh, compressed sound.

Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.” Mr Mew, who joined Abbey Road in 1965 and mastered David Bowie’s classic 1970s albums, warned that modern albums now induced nausea. He said: “The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump.”

Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, said: “A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don’t trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up.”

Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites.

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding pop records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song”.

Val Weedon, of the UK Noise Association, called for a ceasefire in the “loudness war”. She said: “Bass-heavy music is already one of the biggest concerns for suffering neighbours. It is one thing for music to be loud but to make it deliberately noisy seems pointless.” Robert Levine article in Rolling Stone, 2007.

8). Singing. Well, the above arguments also apply to pop and rock singing. What can one say about pop singing? Well, it is amplified and this encourages lazy singing. The microphone creates its own coloration to the voice and makes it possible to use small ranges and vocal restrictions. One of these that is common is the use of the “baby voice”, a high tone that will penetrate above a backing but that only comes across adequately when it is amplified. Most pop and rock singers would sound very unimpressive without amplification. The microphone encourages the use of a restricted head tone, and a limited use of the chest voice that would produce a fuller and more resonant tone. Additionally, most pop and rock songs have limited ranges and have fairly similar “tunes”. Adorno, the sociologist of culture, perceived a lack of authentic talent in the popular forms of music which equated singers with the ability to speak and their capacity for performing in front of audiences. These songs seem to have been designed for those who can only sing in limited ranges and manage songs that are predicable and lack complexity, surprise, and any degree of difficulty. Additionally, most pop and rock singers lack an understanding of how to phrase a melody, of how to shape the musical material. This criticism can also be applied to instrumentalists in the rock and pop world: phrasing, shaping, and dynamics are unused arts in these traditions of performance. So is the art of producing a beautiful tone, the art of voicing a chord and bringing out a cantabile line, to give just a few examples.

“The bigger the humbug, the better people like it”. Phineas Taylor Barnum, American Impresario who maximised mass appeal by emphasising supreme puffery and personal imagery rather than supreme talent, even when supreme talent existed.

“Sentimentalism is the working-off on yourself of feelings you haven’t really got. We all want to have certain feelings: feelings of love, of passionate sex, of kindliness, and so forth. Very few people really feel love, or sex passion, or kindliness, or anything else that goes at all deep. So the mass just fake these feelings inside themselves. Faked feelings! The world is all gummy with them. They are better than real feelings, because you can spit them out when you brush your teeth; and then tomorrow you can fake them afresh”. D H Lawrence.

It is not possible to evaluate the worth of any area of culture without detailed knowledge of the context within which it operates. How can it be possible to know anything about the worth of J.K. Rowling without a knowledge of Shakespeare, Milton or Enid Blyton? Similarly, it is impossible to say anything worthwhile about Roxy Music in the absence of an intimate knowledge of the symphonies of Beethoven, the works of Bach or the recordings of Vera Lynn. T. Birchmore, 2005.

Usually a pop "song" starts by drawing attention to itself. Contemporary pop has little harmony. Quality writing often contains independent musical lines that stand in vertical relations to each other, but nope, you usually won't find that in pop music. If you do hear it, like in a Nirvana "song," they simply move their fingers in the same position and play parallel triads -- the individual lines make no sense. Melodically the music uses only a few curt modal and diatonic phrases with no variation or prolongation. It simply makes no claim for our attention. Percussion chugs along like a machine with little relation to what little musically is happening. Attempts to be lyrical can be cut and pasted with no change in effect. And as one obviously can tell, there's no cadence either-- the music bursts out, assembled like a machine in motion, can't move toward anything since it lacks harmonic movement, and then fizzles out since ending a composition takes preparation. There's no musical argument and no musical thought. This "music" with no organisation is simply reprocessed noise. J H Bowden.

As long as [my students] have the Walkman on they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say. And, after its prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf. Allan Bloom.

This muck cripples consciousness. Therefore no concessions should be made to it. William Gass.

Rock music is based on a selfishness that becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality. It is rooted in three great themes: sex, hate, and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Harold Bloom.

The orthodox and politically correct view that there is no meaningful difference between so-called high and low art, I think must be challenged anew. James Macmillan.

Sonorization. Harsh sounds or annoying music can be (is being) used as an instrument of torture designed to extract information, especially if is used to deprive detainees or prisoners of sleep. But, like torture itself, sound is everywhere these days: not just "muzak" in the elevator and the supermarket, but electronic prompts, recorded voices and "sound effects" coming from every single computerised device, and -- of course -- everything is done by or with computers these days. Silence is disappearing, even from "silent movies," which have had soundtracks forced upon them (the auditory equivalent of "colorization"). Worse still, these sounds are not "natural" or recorded by analogue recorders: they are digitally created sounds, simulated, and they sound "better" or "more realistic" than the real things. In the society in which the spectacle has reached the stage of virtuality, even sound becomes "spectacularized." 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the SI.

9). Pop and rock music has been, and is increasingly, a music for charlatans. There has always been a place for those who can neither sing nor play instruments and this has been “dressed up” or inflated as something remarkable and excellent. And it is certainly true that the word discipline is absent from the rock musician's vocabulary. It takes many years of discipline to learn how to write the kind of music composed by a Beethoven or Stravinsky. For most pop and rock musicians, amplification replaces the disciplined study to perfect vocal or instrumental technique. Pop and rock musicians are addicted to mediocrity.

Modern trends make this genre an increasing refuge for the impostor. Take note: pop and rock is increasingly produced, in whole or in part, by electronic means, with the aid of computer software. This enables individuals to steal (“rip”, “sample”) sections of music from other sources and use it themselves. The music that is stolen can be manipulated and altered by changing the sound’s waveform in a variety of ways and this process is necessarily largely a trial end error process. The individual will then typically fit pieces of stolen music together like a jigsaw puzzle, pasting sections together. The environment from which this music springs is supremely empty and robotic, and the machines that produce it are set to “enhance” (ie devitalise) the final product.

For example, EQ will allow selected bands of musical frequency in a musical fragment or a whole piece to be emphasised or reduced at will. Thus, a bass part can be exaggerated at the expense of the rest of the music. This computer manipulation can often completely change the feel or even style of the music that is thus manipulated. Probably the majority of modern recordings are made up of what is known as "comps", a composition vocal in which every phrase has been taken from a separate take and stitched together into a flawless whole, then doubled up with a matching backing vocal just slightly out of synch, which gives it a kind of sensual echo. The use of synthesisers and other computer software takes the emphasis of composition away from complexity of structure, harmony, form, dynamics, rhythm, etc. to producing unusual “novelty” (“novelty” is used deliberately not to convey the idea that this is anything new, but to convey something of the essential tackiness and ephemerality of the object) sounds that will entertain and distract the listener from the essential vacuity of the music, or spending vast amounts of time on trying to imitate and replicate the sounds of instruments such as the guitar or saxophone.

Thus, the process of making a piece of music is akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of previously recorded music from disparate sources and then changing its character through a variety of computer-based changes, a process that requires very little real creativity, skill, or knowledge of music. The “composers” usually suffer from the illusion that a masterpiece can be produced by tinkering with small pieces of stolen material, denying the need for knowledge, skill, technique, or the hard work and effort involved in genuine musical skill and creativity.

In fact, there is a profound laziness and absence of curiosity and exploratory motivation in the “composition” of a pop or rock piece in general: composition is akin to solving a crossword puzzle when all the answers have been provided, or writing a short story by copying paragraphs from other stories, or mechanically following a limited and simplistic formulae. This must be the case given the restrictions of musical form found in this genre of music.

Another example of charlatanism is the widespread use of miming and “lip-synching” in live shows. It is widespread knowledge, for example, that Madonna mimes her live acts - she has been seen to drop the mike with no noticeable effect on her “singing” on stage, and the small size of her band is obviously not nearly up to the job of producing the heavily synthesised and orchestrated sounds coming from the stage. Much, if not all of this has been pre-recorded.

One small proof of the essentially “bad faith” nature of this music: even the home computer user can purchase, at a small price, a piece of software (Autotune or Vocal Lab are examples) that will correct the pitch of a vocal part that is recorded into the computer. This software takes a poorly sung note and transposes it, placing it dead centre of where it was meant to be and there is therefore no need, any more, to be able to sing in tune. It is increasingly used in commercial recordings, ubiquitous and therefore misused . Other software will improve the quality and timing of the vocal, thus singing well, tunefully, in time, and with good voice, is no longer a requirement. It is also true that in multitrack studios, one can endlessly re-record vocals until even the most average of vocalists can achieve technical perfection. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this music is fake and false, it lies to us since we are presented with the product of manipulations rather than real music making.

Pop and rock music is largely music standardised to a pattern - the music uses a set number of templates that are endlessly regurgitated by the industry. There seems no obvious reason why a machine or a computer program could not produce a passable imitation of a pop tune. In fact, this is absolutely possible and software such as Band in a Box and Jammer are able to produce passable pieces on the basis of the user supplying a few chords. Band in a Box asks the user to supply the chord sequence for the piece and the user can then apply a wide range of different “styles” to the music, ranging from jazz, through pop and rock, to classical, all in 4/4 time (the program is unable to produce pieces in 3/4 time, etc.). The styles provide backing, harmony, instrumentation, and even melody to the tracks in the style that is selected. It is as easy as that! What is clear is that very passable imitations of pop, rock and jazz music can be produced but the program is not at all good in producing a piece in the style of a classical composition, just because the range of possible options, such as length, key changes, organisation of the piece, harmonies, instrumentation, are so much greater and more complex. Computer software, at least at the present time, seems unable to produce a passable version of an original classical piece.

10). “The big beat”. Need I say more? You know what I mean, that rhythmic thump that emerges from cars and other sources, invariant, same tempo, same beat, plodding, heavy and far from subtle. This is why melody, harmony and polyphony can be limited and basic. The fact is that “the big beat” is all that is needed, the most prominent and important part of the music, yet it is repetitive, very very basic, and unstylish. One element that is certainly lacking is “swing”. Compare rock and pop drumming with jazz drumming and you will immediately notice the difference: jazz drumming is usually rhythmically complex, it varies in tempo and pattern, and it “swings” - a far cry from the heavy, insistent, unchanging, plodding pattern of pop and rock drumming. Complex rhythms, and certainly polyrhythms, are avoided in favour of rigidly following a simple and repetitive “groove”. Technically, it is easy. Musically, it is poor, limited, uncreative, and uninteresting. And increasingly, pounding rhythms generated by computers dominate this arid musical culture.

Even in the eighteenth century music was rhythmically more complex than the pop and rock music of today. To give just one example, in Don Giovanni Mozart has several "orchestras," each playing in a different meter. Orchestra 1 is in 3/4, Orchestra 2 in 2/4, Orchestra 3 is notated in 3/8, where a full measure is equivalent to one beat of the 2/4 meter. To make things even more complicated each of the singers enter in one of the various meters.

Some classical music is based on simple “tunes” and approximates to the level of organisation of popular music. Much is based on melody and complex organisation and structure that treats the units of music as an abstract language that must obey certain rules and principles. Jazz and classical music are the only types of music that treat the process of composition and musical organisation in this way.

There are some who claim that, rhythmically, pop and rock is more complex than classical music. This really depends on the particular piece of music we are talking about, and the word “differentiated” is usually more accurate than “complex”. The beat is often more explicit in pop and rock than in much classical music and typically it is syncopated, that is, emphasis is put on the off beat and playing is across the beat - and the beat is still clearly much more emphatic, insistent, and unrelenting than is the case in most classical music. However, it is the use of the beat that is most significant and when we ask about this we come up against the basic poverty of means in pop and rock. The underlying beat is most often common or 4/4 time, the beat is invariant throughout the piece, unlike jazz for example, and extreme standardisation applies - the same invariant beat and rhythm is applied to thousand of different pieces of music as if the only materials available are a few basic patterns. This is musical poverty and poverty of invention. And then there is also the issue of what is inserted above this beat, which leads us to further contemplation about poverty and deprivation.

Playing on the off beat is related to “the groove” that appears to be an idolised idea in the pop world. “The groove” is often presented as a semi-mystical idea, because it cannot be described and explained in words by the individuals who use the term, and something that makes pop and rock special against which other types of music are found wanting. In reality “the groove” is nothing more than syncopation and emphasis of the off beat - very simple in reality. And it is a prison for the pop and rock musician because once it is set, and since “the groove” is the main emphasis of the music, there is little one can do with it - it has to remain constant, there is little room for motivic, harmonic, rhythmic, tempo, etc. development.

It is interesting to note that most folk and blues guitar finger picking is fairly easy even when the music is highly syncopated as in ragtime. Chords are fairly limited and standard (C, G, F, A7, B7, B flat minor, etc) and once one has the feel of the syncopation things flow without much variation until the end of the piece. But when we try to play, for example, Dowland or Byrd, two early music composers both composing in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, we find that things are more complicated. The rhythm is much more difficult to get hold of and variable throughout the piece than most modern finger picking pieces. When we try to play Mozart something strange occurs: for one thing the chord voicings feel, and sound, more unusual and interesting than in modern finger picking, and the way the music is written demands, in a very strange way, that we have to pay attention to phrasing and interpretation, to put our own stamp on the music, in a way that folk, ragtime, and blues finger picking does not demand. The music seems to, inherently, demand more “musicianship”. This later more popular music is just not as demanding on the performer or the listener. Most pop and rock music is “easy listening” music and will probably be labelled as such in the future when it has become outdated and outmoded. It is certainly not art music but a branch of the light entertainment industry.

Adorno on Popular Music

"A clear judgement concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardisation. The whole structure of popular music is standardised, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardisation. Standardisation extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardised: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit--the beginning and the end of each part--must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasise the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

The details themselves are standardised no less than the form, and a whole terminology exists for them such as break, blue chords, dirty notes. Their standardisation, however, is somewhat different from that of the framework. It is not overt like the latter but hidden behind a veneer of individual "effects" whose prescriptions are handled as the experts' secret, however open this secret may be to musicians generally. This contrasting character of the standardisation of the whole and part provides a rough, preliminary setting for the effect upon the listener.

Serious music, for comparative purposes, may be thus characterised: Every detail derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme. For example, in the introduction of the first movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony the second theme (in C-major) gets its true meaning only from the context. Only through the whole does it acquire its particular Iyrical and expressive quality--that is, a whole built up of its very contrast with the character of the first theme. Taken in isolation the second theme would be disrobed to insignificance. Another example may be found in the beginning of the recapitulation over the pedal point of the first movement of Beethoven's "Appassionata." By following the preceding outburst it achieves the utmost dramatic momentum. By omitting the exposition and development and starting with this repetition, all is lost.

Nothing corresponding to this can happen in popular music. It would not affect the musical sense if any detail were taken out of the context; the listener can supply the "framework" automatically, since it is a mere musical automatism itself. The beginning of the chorus is replaceable by the beginning of innumerable other choruses. The interrelationship among the elements or the relationship of the elements to the whole would be unaffected. In Beethoven, position is important only in a living relation between a concrete totality and its concrete parts. In popular music, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves its function only as a cog in a machine.

Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. This has nothing to do with simplicity and complexity. In serious music, each musical element, even the simplest one, is "itself," and the more highly organised the work is, the less possibility there is of substitution among the details. In hit music, however, the structure underlying the piece is abstract, existing independent of the specific course of the music. This is basic to the illusion that certain complex harmonies are more easily understandable in popular music than the same harmonies in serious music. For the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. In jazz the amateur listener is capable of replacing complicated rhythmical or harmonic formulas by the schematic ones which they represent and which they still suggest, however adventurous they appear. The ear deals with the difficulties of hit music by achieving slight substitutions derived from the knowledge of the patterns. The listener, when faced with the complicated, actually hears only the simple which it represents and perceives the complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple.

No such mechanical substitution by stereotyped patterns is possible in serious music. Here even the simplest event necessitates an effort to grasp it immediately instead of summarising it vaguely according to institutionalised prescriptions capable of producing only institutionalised effects. Otherwise the music is not "understood." Popular music, however, is composed in such a way that the process of translation of the unique into the norm is already planned and, to a certain extent, achieved within the composition itself. The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. Not only does it not require his effort to follow its concrete stream; it actually gives him models under which anything concrete still remaining may be subsumed. The schematic build-up dictates the way in which he must listen while, at the same time, it makes any effort in listening unnecessary. Popular music is "pre-digested" in a way strongly resembling the fad of "digests" of printed Material. It is this structure of contemporary popular music which in the last analysis, accounts for those changes of listening habits which we shall later discuss.

The musical standards of popular music were originally developed by a competitive process. As one particular song scored a great success, hundreds of others sprang up imitating the successful one. The most successful hits types, and "ratios" between elements were imitated, and the process culminated in the crystallisation of standards. Under centralised conditions such as exist today these standards have become "frozen."(2) That is, they have been taken over by cartelized agencies, the final results of a competitive process, and rigidly enforced upon material to be promoted. Non compliance with the rules of the game became the basis for exclusion. The original patterns that are now standardised evolved in a more or less competitive way. Large-scale economic concentration institutionalised the standardisation, and made it imperative. As a result, innovations by rugged individualists have been outlawed. The standard patterns have become invested with the immunity of bigness--"the King can do no wrong."

In terms of consumer demand, the standardisation of popular music is only the expression of this dual desideratum imposed upon it by the musical frame of mind of the public--that it be "stimulatory" by deviating in some way from the established "natural," and that it maintain the supremacy of the natural against such deviations. The attitude of the audiences toward the natural language is reinforced by standardised production, which institutionalise desiderata which originally might have come from the public.

The necessary correlate of musical standardisation is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardisation itself. Standardisation of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or "pre-digested."

The most drastic example of standardisation of presumably individualised features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so "normalised" as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualisation: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardisation of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations--passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted ("Swing it boys")--are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme-. In a great many cases, such as the "break" of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardisation of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardisation of its own deviation--pseudo-individualization.

The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either.

In our present society the masses themselves are kneaded by the same mode of production as the arti-craft material foisted upon them. The customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music. Their spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. It is a means instead of an end. The power of the process of production extends over the time intervals which on the surface appear to be "free." They want standardised goods and pseudo-individualization, because their leisure is an escape from work and at the same time is moulded after those psychological attitudes to which their workaday world exclusively habituates them. Popular music is for the masses a perpetual bus man's holiday. Thus, there is justification for speaking of a pre established harmony today between production and consumption of popular music. The people clamour for what they are going to get anyhow.”

Once one has appropriated Adorno's vision, one finds his ideas confirmed over and over, day after day. Innocence is lost, the self is distanced from media culture, detects its standardisation, pseudo-individualism, stereotypes and schemata, and the baleful effects of cultural commodification and reification.

ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

Culture industry reconsidered

11). Pop and rock music exist in an everlasting present that denies even its own past history. The culture of pop actively denigrates the achievements of musical history and rejects the knowledge and experience accumulated in previous times. The absence of thought easily passes for hip or up-to-date. Immediacy, instant and easy gratification, and pre rationality are the order of the day. It is as if the claim is made that something excellent can be created from a denial of previous knowledge and through using only the most basic and crude building blocks - as if a great building could be constructed from a child’s building blocks or wattle and daub, or a great novel constructed with monosyllables. There is an attachment to a one-dimensionality of experience here: a focus on the present at the cost of the obliteration of the past creates a thin veneer of experience that is relatively conflict-free because it raises no questions or issues - it just is all there is since a contrast or comparison has been ejected from mind and thought. It is only possible to assert that pop and rock music is excellent, nay the product of genius, if there is no knowledge or understanding of the greatest musical products of the human race, music that encompasses much, music that reaches far and that raises the bar of human achievement and accomplishment beyond the ordinary.

We live in a world that lacks any deep connection with the past and the culture of pop and rock is therefore reflecting the wider assumptions and world view of it’s populist context. The ties that connected to a common cultural past, a heritage that provided identity and a sense of belonging to a community have disintegrated under the impact of globalisation and modernism. These ties - a sense of social class, active religious participation not necessarily based on faith, a secure and unchanging labour market, a culture of storytelling, strong political movements and an interest in political debate - have disintegrated. The sense of connection to, and knowledge of, a shared and valued past has largely disappeared.

It is unfortunate that pop and rock arises from a culture that is obsessed with superficial skill and slick salesmanship while ignoring the more important issues of soul and substance. The young in our culture, especially, think that pop and rock music are excellent only because they have not been educated about the culture of music in the West and their ignorance is, sadly, progressively increasing because of the declining standard of musical education. Once we had municipal concert halls offering Beethoven and Ravel; now we have a nation whose youth deafens itself on monotonous electronic rhythms and a culture that blinds itself to the loss of depth, meaning, complexity and emotion.

The argument is continued on the following page. Click on the link at the bottom or side of this page to follow the discussion.

Terry Birchmore