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vanblah---you cannot possibly be serious.
there's a thread about new music.
no-one talks about that stuff here.
it's hardly elitist to know about it and to enjoy it and to find that maybe it'd be nice for once to have a conversation about contemporary composition in the space that was, once upon a time when cultural monopolies were differently controlled, classical music.
and there's a ton of newer classical/experimental music. lots and lots and lots of it. and unless you seek it out, you won't know about much of it.
it doesn't get the kind of exposure that 19th century forms get.
people like to like what they're told they like to like in the way they are told they like it. it's just how it is. we're free like that.
i know i know: pop musicians can have greater aspirations and if it wasn't for this conspiracy of other people they'd be able to fulfil those aspirations. and anyone who questions those greater aspirations obviously has a problem. so yes billy joel is making classical music these days and because it is off limits to question the grand aspirations of pop musicians, it is not possible to talk about the lots and lots of contemporary classical and related forms of composition. and it is bad form to see in a discussion of those grand aspirations of billy joel, which obviously stand in for those of each and every musician, a derailing of a thread about new music.
besides, i don't personally question the aspirations of billy joel or anyone else.
but i also see in this nonsense an attempt to substitute a frame of reference you and others know about for the possibility of finding out about stuff you don't know about.
but whatever.
i'm apparently an elitist like that.
go figure.
for the record, there's lots of people making lots of music all the time and it's entirely ok for people to like as much or as little of that music as they care to take in. some of it does require some work to get used to, a bit of ear training--but so what? if there wasn't pleasure in it, no-one would do it. so you either find something interesting and take the trouble to figure out how to hear it or you don't.
what i find strange are your remarks about what you regard as "noise."
that seems terribly rigid of you.
isn't rigidity of preference a subtext in your use of that nice and welcoming category
"elitist"?
or is that fine category something that pertains to folk who listen to or make kinds of music you don't enjoy or understand?
more broadly, how did you get appointed adjudicator of this sort of question, what is and is not "noise"?
was there an election and i missed it?
why doesn't anyone tell me about these election things?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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