Folk music still strong in the US:

Absolutely no new Dylans. The same way we don't see new Verdis. The 12 tone system ruined classical music. So much so that when Poulenc wrote Dialogues of the Carmelites he apologized for writing it tonally! The work is a masterpiece. But back to R&R, I find the stuff pitched to the 12 year old crowd beyond mediocre. It saddens me to see the music industry pitch stuff to ruin their taste forever.

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
Absolutely no new Dylans. The same way we don't see new Verdis. The 12 tone system ruined classical music. So much so that when Poulenc wrote Dialogues of the Carmelites he apologized for writing it tonally! The work is a masterpiece. But back to R&R, I find the stuff pitched to the 12 year old crowd beyond mediocre. It saddens me to see the music industry pitch stuff to ruin their taste forever.

Can you expand on the 12 tone scale ruining classical music? Can you explain how and why? I see music composed on other scales like 18 or even 43 tones per octave but why is the 12 tone scale bad? Is it because it can only be an approximation of pure chords?

BTW, I invented a fret ruler, at folk festivals they called me the Fret Police🙂

I had a vision one time at a folk fest, but didn't know if what I imagined could be a real effect or not. What I saw in my mind was the idea if you took a stretchy material (my first version was using rubber bands) and took something small like a mandolin and marked out the fret positions with a sharpie on the rubber band, if it stretched out, the question in my mind was, would it hold the same proportionality on a longer scale. I visualized it happening before I made it and had to make the actual device to see if it worked and lo and behold, it did! The whole idea was to see if the instrument makers at the folk fests we went to were putting the frets in the right place. I knew the distances mathematically, 12th root of 2 and all that, and had made charts of the distances for various neck lengths just for grins. I was never going to have the patience to actually build an instrument🙂 So I tried it and it worked pretty well. I found out rubber bands are not made evenly enough so the stretching is not linear. So my next attempt used those little bands of stretchy you have on your underwear. I went to a fabric store and found out there are all kinds of that stuff in different patterns and such and selected a pattern that seemed to be the best at a linear stretch and used that and it worked ten times better! I was able to then quickly determine which luthier was doing the most accurate work. I found to my surprise a lot of them were actually mis-placing the frets, I could use my fret ruler on a guitar like a Martin and see the frets were perfectly placed but the average folk fest luthier was not perfect, maybe only half the instruments had well placed frets. That was a revelation to me because I thought they would have paid closer attention to that. As poor as 12 tone is at getting pure chords, if the frets are out of place, it is of course a LOT worse so my little invention was a great check on just who paid attention to that kind of detail.

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
Absolutely no new Dylans. The same way we don't see new Verdis. The 12 tone system ruined classical music. So much so that when Poulenc wrote Dialogues of the Carmelites he apologized for writing it tonally! The work is a masterpiece. But back to R&R, I find the stuff pitched to the 12 year old crowd beyond mediocre. It saddens me to see the music industry pitch stuff to ruin their taste forever.

I like Turner Cody, he is Dylanesque, in fact, i think hes better! yeah i said it! 😲

YouTube

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
I like Turner Cody, he is Dylanesque, in fact, i think hes better! yeah i said it! 😲

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7JDyMuDN6I

To me he sounds like a cookie cutter version of Dylan. He may have some good songs but Dylan is in a class by himself. Come back in ten years and see what Cody has done. It is 50 years on and Dylan has won just about every award there is, including an Oscar. Has your boy won even a Grammy yet? Anyway thanks for pointing him out. I googled him and found he has 15 albums now.

BTW, just found this great video from 1971 of Neil Young confronting a record store clerk when he found one of his own records bootlegged, hilarious. The clerk doesn't even know who he is!

YouTube

There is a guy who came in and asked if they buy records, the clerk said, we buy 8 tracks🙂

IMaginative solution to a vexing problem. Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari did away with frets just to avoid the problem.

The twelve tone system is imaginative, but I am convinced it was devised to impress other musicians, who seem to be the only ones who can understand it and write this music for one another. I am convinced it caused melodiousness to die. Sans melody accessible to all music has all but died a slow death. Modern opera is mostly unbearable. Recitative was better in the baroque era than opera is today and it was considered only filler. That's why I am so impressed with Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites. Now don't get me wrong, melody in and of itself does not a masterwork make. Hardly better single arias can be found than Schubert's yet all his opera attempts flopped. If you listen to any Schubert aria next to any of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio.
YouTube Gott! Welch dunkel hier! God! It is dark in here!

Alfonso und Estrella: YouTube

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
IMaginative solution to a vexing problem. Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari did away with frets just to avoid the problem.

The twelve tone system is imaginative, but I am convinced it was devised to impress other musicians, who seem to be the only ones who can understand it and write this music for one another. I am convinced it caused melodiousness to ...[text shortened]... od! It is dark in here!

Alfonso und Estrella: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRPnJ08L0ZA

Explain the 12 tone system a bit. I was thinking you were talking about the well tempered scale, but I guess not.

"Twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any one note[3] through the use of tone rows, an ordering of the 12 pitches. All 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. The technique was influential on composers in the mid-20th century." from Wiki

The central idea is the giving equal value/merit to all twelve notes and the absence of a tone center. In other words the music is atonal/dissonant and odd. One of the masterpieces of the genre is Alban Berg's violin concerto.
YouTube
Joseph Hauer, co-inventor of the system: YouTube
Or Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire:
YouTube

Here's the Wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique

I wouldn't call it awful, just indigestible and unpleasant and written only for other experts.

Schoenberg himself described the system as a "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another".[4] However, the common English usage is to describe the method as a form of serialism.

Schoenberg's countryman and contemporary Josef Matthias Hauer also developed a similar system using unordered hexachords or tropes—but with no connection to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Other composers have created systematic use of the chromatic scale, but Schoenberg's method is considered to be historically and aesthetically most significant

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
"Twelve-tone technique—also known as dodecaphony, twelve-tone serialism, and (in British usage) twelve-note composition—is a method of musical composition devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while ...[text shortened]... hoenberg's method is considered to be historically and aesthetically most significant

Real musical, eh! Didn't Charles Ives investigate that kind of thing even earlier?

Nope! Schoenberg and Hauer are credited with inventing the genre and Charles Ives emulated it. Some feel Messaien and Berg were its best exponents, some took it to extremes like Luigi Dallapiccola in his Canti di Prigionia. YouTube
Perhaps my ear has simply failed to evolve this far, but it all sounds like bad horror movie music. I don't mind innovation. I love Stravinsky, for example. I also don't mind Alban Berg's Lulu too much. YouTube

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
Nope! Schoenberg and Hauer are credited with inventing the genre and Charles Ives emulated it. Some feel Messaien and Berg were its best exponents, some took it to extremes like Luigi Dallapiccola in his Canti di Prigionia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHWhRlhlI3I
Perhaps my ear has simply failed to evolve this far, but it all sounds like bad horror ...[text shortened]... ple. I also don't mind Alban Berg's Lulu too much. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gst0tPJbuSM

Here is a Wiki on Ives:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives

He seems to me to have been a very stalwart character, keeping his job as an insurance agent so he wouldn't be sullied by having to compose music he didn't like.

Charles Ives is a true American icon. He was way more talented than he realized and wrote great music, was an innovator in his own right, but did not invent the twelve tone system. Insecure? Indeed he was, yet failed to realize the greats of his era recognized his enormous talent. Mahler thought of him as a genius, high praise by one who many considered the greatest musician ever(more consider Mahler garrulous and bombastic).

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
Charles Ives is a true American icon. He was way more talented than he realized and wrote great music, was an innovator in his own right, but did not invent the twelve tone system. Insecure? Indeed he was, yet failed to realize the greats of his era recognized his enormous talent. Mahler thought of him as a genius, high praise by one who many considered the greatest musician ever(more consider Mahler garrulous and bombastic).

They rated Mahler higher than Beethoven?

"Many", not all and no one thinks "they(many)" are right. Some think Wagner is greater than Beethoven. Wagner is more deserving of being considered in same breath as Beethoven much as I love Mahler. Mahler is indeed unique, but my knock against him and why he could never be better than Beethoven is that he did not compose in all areas of serious music like Beethoven did, that is sonatas, concerti, opera, string quartet, other chamber ensembles, masses, oratorio and same knock applies to Wagner.