Is there still such a thing like instrumentalist snobbery around?

[jancivil]

And argumentum ad populum is such a well-known fallacy.




My experience in music school ran the gamut; from a sehr-conservative Music History professor who I developed such an animus towards, the text History of Western Music by Donald Grout just grated at me. The whole western hegemony trip and the ignorance, the arrogance of it all. He called my room in the dorm one of the mornings I couldn't get out of bed to go suffer this class at 8 AM, where we mutually agreed I shouldn't even be there.
We'd spent the first two trimesters on the Holy Roman Church polyphony, and had to write essays.
(f**king Honors matriculation (based on testing), which I didn't ask for. It did mean the better theory course. The idea was to do the regular's two years in these courses in the one year. I'm not sure why, but for me in my second year I pushed for more knowledge as to 'theory' so I got a thing called Form and Analysis where I wrote a paper. There was no class, just pick something substantial and write a paper on it.)

To: a composer I and a friend would breakfast with. I wish I could remember his last name, as he is one of the rare people who made it being a pure composer. Andrew-something. I found it in a search a few years ago but can't now. Brilliant, forward thinking, funny... and this opened my eyes up to possibilities. I was a performance major, not a composition focus in the least.

Then I transferred to SFCM. The original notion to do this I'd had when I was focused on guitar*. By the time I got out there, I had an inferior instrument, due to theft and a rushed replacement via insurance and I was sick of it. And *Michael Lorimer was nowhere in the vicinity, having moved on. So I suddenly switched to Electronic Music Lab as what to do with my time there. And it was all about the tape machines for me. The composition students there, and this is my experience in the late 70's, 1980 now, were hip; what I'd found in school was that 'composer' meant 'avant-garde'; serious people were forward-thinking. So why would one get bogged down in conservative or reactionary ideations or opinions? Who cares who is a 'snob'? Side point: there was a little space in front of 'Lab' (where the Buchla, the mixer, the tape machines and all the attendant paraphernalia where), a desk and some shelves. This was, among the general use of, John Adams' office. He was not world-famous yet. I didn't have a lot of interaction with John. It was like "Do you know who took my aspirin?!" He was also my neighbor in the Panhandle, so it was mutual recognition from school and 'Hi' as we walked our dogs. So he was kind of conservative, albeit one of the original Minimalists. SB had him as his teacher for a time. We laughed about this recently, J.A. would use Ableton Live as a DAW... or Fruity.

But by this point, why do I care what people think? This was when I decided to focus on writing my own music, 1980. I did NOT want to take lessons and hear what to do from someone else. But my friend was doing this; living in the same flat we were musically quite close. So I would get some information from his experience. Including once he took something of mine into orchestration, where you'd get a recording out of a group made to read thru the thing.
Mine sounded fantastic BTW. It was funny because it didn't sound like him at all so he had to lie some more about it.

We were deliberately OUT THERE, our goal was composition in real time, we improvised freely all the time working out and colliding our ideas of things. We reminisced the other day, wasn't this the best of times...

[jancivil]

Oh, I'm definitely this instrumentalist snob. I think if you have no instrument under your belt you're not ready to write music yet, and if you never do you never are. And if this is you, let the butthurt flow all through you

[fluffy_little_something]

Interestingly, Jazz musicians are often very good, but the art of Jazz is improvisation, not so much composition.

[vurt]

Think of the music of the Middle Ages, most of it was simple and jolly, to brighten up the difficult lives of the masses.

yeah, but they had no sanitation or no expectation of a decent life span.
so intellectualism and musical elitism have improved things obviously.

[jancivil]

I was among the first electronic musicians rising in the light of synth-pop, krautrock, industrial (EBM) etc. that entered professional music schools in my small country in the late 1980s. At my school, I was actually the only electronic musician among 80 Debussy, Miles Davis, Coltrane or Chick Corea wannebees.

Sorry, but this whole thread is flame bait at heart. It's not very collegial to start with, unless you're looking for other people lacking in certain skills to commiserate with. It looks like you want to dredge up a division here and see it fought out. It's depressing, but leaving it alone I didn't find preferable to getting a couple things about this off my chest. I wish I had never clicked on the thing.

I know why I lack keyboard prowess, for example: I didn't put in the time. So do I go around acting like keyboard-related virtues are suspect? I can tell you this, though, if I make a piano solo in the piano roll, its virtues will be because of the time I put in on the other instruments.

[fluffy_little_something]

What small country was that by the way?
Different countries have different music cultures and scenes...

[jancivil]

n/m

[fluffy_little_something]

Maybe they just don't agree with your view regarding off-topic...
Threads like this one tend to branch out, this is not a discussion on a specific VST or whatever.

[vurt]

What small country was that by the way?

mos eisley.

[dellboy]

So now I ask you, do you have any experience in this regard? are there still instrumentalist snobs around or have they become extinct?

So what happens if the power goes down permanently and the only thing left to make music with are old fashioned acoustic instruments ?

No electric power = no music

I made music long before I got into electronic, and if the power goes down I will still make music.

Yeah, I am a snob.

[vurt]

So now I ask you, do you have any experience in this regard? are there still instrumentalist snobs around or have they become extinct?

So what happens if the power goes down permanently and the only thing left to make music with are old fashioned acoustic instruments ?

No electric power = no music

I made music long before I got into electronic, and if the power goes down I will still make music.

Yeah, I am a snob.

id hate to be around when you get down to two strings

cmon dell, we gotta get out of the city before the zombies kills us all...


no way! im not leaving without some new strings and a funky strap!

[fluffy_little_something]

I assume such snobbery also exists within an orchestra.
Some instruments tend to be featured, such as piano and violin, whereas others just kind of play in the background. Maybe a violinist looks down on a kettledrummer, who knows

[IncarnateX]

Sorry, but this whole thread is flame bait at heart. It's not very collegial to start with, unless you're looking for other people lacking in certain skills to commiserate with. It looks like you want to dredge up a division here and see it fought out. It's depressing, but leaving it alone I didn't find preferable to getting a couple things about this off my chest. I wish I had never clicked on the thing.

Jan.
Until now, members have been discussing this nice and informatively. In so far as I can call this “my thread” they are entitled to say anything related to the topic. I liked your own story from music school so can you plz keep it at this level and not use sledgehammers to crack nuts? People are exchaning personal views, not dog fighting. If you regret clicking on the thread, it shouldn`t be that hard to leave it again. How compulsive can such an issue be to you? You already have your mind set up, so there is really nothing for you to see here.

[jancivil]

However, the contempt could be mutual because on my side, I considered many of those "instrumentalists" nothing but self-obsessed masturbationists who turned their instruments into penis enlargements and litterally acted as if anyone else in a group was nothing but personal backing to their oh-so-fast-played improvisations.

What would figuratively acting like that look like?


I remember one guy in one jam who basically thought this was the time to cut everybody, who didn't listen but just blew chunks. It was an unusually inclusive jam session and really kind of too social to be much of anything, though.

Guy's name: Paul Hanson. Bassoonist. There's a wiki on him! He endorses Légère reeds.
After school he jobbed with Eddie Money for a bit. I suppose he grew up, he went on to join Bela Fleck and the Flecktones around the turn of the century. Imagine my surprise to see him onstage with Paul McCandless.

https://qello.com/concert/Live-At-The-Quick-7391

There is an upshot to giving the anecdotes I'm giving. What I found was getting proactive with an instrument led me places and expanded my horizons. There was no chance of music school with no instrumental prowess in those times. A composer, I mean to get in for a composition emphasis you had to have something to SHOW.

My choice of school, trying to get a good guitar program, was limited. Fortunately there was Cincinnati, which had serious opera money behind it, it was a training school for NYC big-time opera stardom. Yes, some of these virtuous singers were real snobs. That weren't even responding to you in the elevator, nose up in the air like a cliche.

Maybe your school was limited, being that it let you in, with, by your own words no competitive chops. So maybe you got some real mediocre assholes in there, who colored your worldview heavily.

I don't know what point you have except I detect a strong whiff of inverse snobbery.

[IncarnateX]

What small country was that by the way?
Different countries have different music cultures and scenes...

Denmark, we are about 6 million people, so that is small, especially in comparison to the states.