1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach.
2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough.
I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172
I think (1) is sort of wrong. Many good/great composers do want to compose Bach-like music, and there's a subculture in the classical music world of them. What really stops people from building "masterpieces" in this way is the money. There's just no financial reason to do it.
On commissions, when you are charging $500/minute of symphonic music (a mid-market rate), you just can't write a minute of a Bach cantata and have it make financial sense. It takes a long time to develop the material for a big work of counterpoint like that, and even Bach didn't write his cantatas off of nothing - he was a working church organist, so he had plenty of time to try his new material (improvising at the organ during services) that was paid for.
Music has always been a business and there's no money in neo-Bach.
Bach probably brings in more money for classical musicians than most classical composers (I assume he's in the top 10-20 behind the major symphony orchestra composers), and that music definitely is "good" according to many people. He is also the inspiration for a lot of subsequent musicians. There just aren't good economics in writing more music that is Bach-like.
The money today for classically-trained composers is also mostly in film music. The next biggest market is video game music. After that, symphonic works (eg openers and large works for full symphony orchestras) are a distant third.
The money has always been in commissioned music,* it's just about what is getting commissioned. Counterpoint rarely gets commissioned, let alone enough counterpoint to become Bach.
* Mozart's catalog is a great example: Salzburg Mozart wrote masses and organ fugues, while Vienna Mozart wrote operas and secular pieces. It's what he was paid to write.
> and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees
I'm glad to be on the other side of this, I agree with you and can totally relate with you.
I like to view artists as mediums that can channel and manifest art, but that art stands on its own. Bach just happened to be the one in our lifetime to do that with what he discovered. — The strongest evidence to me for this is that art can outlast the artist every single time.
Interesting. To me music is a form of communication. So then obviously I care about who’s on the other side. I guess how people perceive this is quite subjective.
I can appreciate that and I can still agree with that definition, could be just a semantics discussion. — what I call music doesn't sit well with what is music as defined by our language. (Taking the blame here)
I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual.
The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible, and I love it, I am myself a musician and I rely on it a lot for this matter. — That said though, emotions are deep and complex and there is too much loss when attempting to convert them into a message. — _Maybe this is why there's a lot of copyright out there when artists channel similar sounds trying to express their feelings despite never hearing of those others who came first? Think the language being both extremely rich and poor in terms of what it can offer for this_
> I like to view artists as mediums that can channel and manifest art, but that art stands on its own. Bach just happened to be the one in our lifetime to do that with what he discovered. — The strongest evidence to me for this is that art can outlast the artist every single time.
> I like to think music exists beyond humans and humanity. Maybe far out there in the galaxy or in some other dimension not yet seen. Not exclusive to us, not an anthropological view, maybe spiritual.
I write about this very frequently. I have a strong interest in Art and aesthetics, and play guitar, and write poetry. I'm going to try to not post an essay, which is hard, but
I could talk about this for days and am open to any others that want to talk about music and art.
I think I mostly agree with these quotes.
I specifically think that Art is so transcended from humanity it escapes it, it escapes the emotions, it
escapes the day to day. One might be emotional about it, but emotional intent isn't a part of it
since Art is beyond emotion, and thus also the communication of emotion.
If you want a good definition for what I think of as Art, read Zarathustra. My thoughts on overcoming
are similar as to do with Art. Which is, is it something we can really achieve? Or is the intention
enough to make it? And if so, how much intention is needed?
However I will leave you with something else about Art, something that I think is more closely to how
we most of the time experience music.
John Dewey describes Art as the relationship between the artist, the medium, and the audience. All
three are needed for it to be Art.
When you go see a live show, one with skilled musicians which are able to improv (playing with modal changes,
and knowing how to build and release tension without thought), you get something new, an experience, that only
exists in that moment. That experience cannot be captured, the audio can, even video of the audience and
performers can, but that experience only exists during that improv, it will never happen again. And in my
opinion that is the closest thing to Art, not only for music, but for other traditional art forms as well.
> The fact we channel it to express our emotions is incredible...
This conflicts with my first definition of Art (Platonic) but sits nicely with the second definition (John Dewey).
There is something inescapable communicated listening to Pavarotti, but there's also something inescapable being
communicated listening to Grant Green. Two completely different forms of music, communicating different things,
but it's still very human and powerful.
You do know that when you listen to music there is nobody there, its just a vibrating machine that replays communication that someone did a long time ago? So they aren't communicating to you, that is just an illusion.
So I don't see why you even need that recording, in the end there is no communication happening there in either case. When you go to a live concert sure, which is why people care so much about those and why they wont go away, since then you get the real communication, everything else is just fake, so why not generated communication instead of recorded?
Also the person singing is often just replaying a message written by other people, they aren't communicating anything of their own they are just relaying and repeating the same message someone showed them over and over and over. That isn't communicating any more than what computers do.
An answer to somebody asking the title's question would be:
They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time.
Do you go their concerts or listen to their records? If not, then it's not so much that they don't, as that people don't give them sales, success, and exposure, so you'd know about them. And apparently you didn't even bother to Google about such artists, so...
> They do compose new baroque and romantic era style classical music all the time.
But it isn't that good, what people want is that level of quality not just that style.
I think to compose great music the entire culture need to support it, you wont get to the same heights when most of society don't care about what you do.
If you ask “Why do we have to compose music in the style of the past?”, it’s pretty ironic that you give two examples of styles that are explicit throwbacks. Why is your new music trying very hard to seem like it’s 40 years old?
We still play Jazz standards from 100 years ago. It seems if you want to be able to have your own take on something you should be able to do it the intended way, capture l'espirit, and then impart your own.
Also it's much cooler to switch back and forth between styles.
Synthwave is pretty cool, but it'd also be pretty cool to hear a Moog play a piece from an old composer instead of a simple drone.
>> Why'd we have to compose music in a style of the past?
> Because we like it.
Nothing against that, but there seems to be a group of people who dismiss anything except classical music as if we lost the ability to make acceptable music today.
I also like some styles more than others, but I'm not going to make generalizing statements about humanity's abilities due to my personal preferences.
> Those tools are not our masters to impose us making different styles on us.
They most probably do affect the style, just like how 16-color pixel graphics produces a different visual style than playstation-style polygons. And that's a good thing, more styles = more variety, there isn't some particular style of some particular era that's somehow better than others
>Forcing new composers to conform to what old people want from because tradition, damn it is a recipe for creative disaster.
Is it? That's how music and culture was preserved and slowly enriched over millenia, from Gamelan music to masterpieces like Bach.
I'd say forcing new music for the sake of it, especially to the degree and speed we do in the latter half of the 20th century onwards, leads to music following "fast fashion" like deappreciation, lack of understanding of its legacy, lack of leaving a legacy, spintering of audiences to individual echo bubbles, and ultimately commercial crap.
Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone, that's why every famous artist in history at one point got fed up from copying the past's masters and finally did their own thing achieving greatness.
>Because we already have Bach? It would be stupid to be just a copycat of someone
Never prevented us to have tons of artists doing music the style of other artists...
The premise is wrong anyway, people do make music in the style of Bach, both exactly in that style and borrowing from Bach, but also in general baroque/romantic/melodic classical styles.
Exactly. There are so many questions like this that all have the same answer: why don't they paint like Kandinsky <pick your own favorite>? Why don't they write like <pick your favorite writer>?
"Greatness" is a quality we give to a person as a society, Bach himself risked being forgotten because only a small part of society remembered him. Greatness is of course a question of luck, because no matter how skilled you are you are still at the whims of history.
Howard Goodall has a great analysis[0] of how classical music was dying in the 1950s and 1960s until The Beatles indirectly saved it. It had taken a shift to avant-garde and strongly experimental sounds until The Beatles' influence reminded composers that good composition following the fundamentals could produce great music. I'm not tuned in enough today to know if that still holds true, but it was an interesting analysis. He does a much better job of explaining it than I did.
Prokofiev's Op. 25 is not intended to have been a period-accurate pastiche. The "classical" title is meant to indicate a tongue-in-cheek theme, as in a costume party. And to answer the OP question, the social context in which compositions in the past were written no longer exists. From the vantage point of the present, a composition which is restricted to the vocabulary and the techniques of a single past era seems to be arbitrarily excluding possibilities which have since become known to all of us.
Because we don't listen to music the same way we listened in Bach's time.
The Italian movie director Frederico Fellini hated television because it destroyed the ceremony of movie theatres. He complained that before television watching movies was a ritual. People would program it in advance, invite friends, dress sharply, take hours to go downtown (no multiplexes back then) and discuss the movie at length with others. That's how you'd get dense movies like the ones from John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.
When television came it banalized the experience. As Fellini said, people would watch movies in pyjamas while the dog was barking outside spoiling it all. True, after some time, television learned how to make solid drama (Sopranos, The Wire, etc). But that was just a glimpse, streaming will erase that.
Similarly, in Bach's time, music was rare and, because of that, meant to be transcendental, to be extraordinary and to be played in extraordinary gothic cathedrals, audiences expected it that way. And, btw, Bach-like music was extremely rare during baroque times. Apart from a few Italian and French composers, no one in the Baroque era did anything really remarkable.
Today, music is played on Spotify. It is cheap and discardable. Can't be Bach, will never be.
Edit: remember, the shift from Bach's standards began during his late years (1750). He was considered old-fashioned and his sons (Carl Philip Emanuel and Johan Christian) began composing in a style different from his father's. 3 crucial elements to understanding this change were the rise of a bourgeois class demanding entertainment, the growing market for concert halls and the industry of music publishing for private entertainment. This lead to the production of music more "accessible", simpler and easier to play. Mozart and Haydn were the new masters.
There is a point of view that all the western music is divided by Bach. The before era when music is mostly based on intuition and imitation, and the after era when music is strongly based on elementary theory. Bach himself, interestingly, belongs to the "before" era and as such is a pinnacle of intuitive pre-elementary music.
Just yesterday I found an album of Elizabethian remakes of Nick Drake's songs mixed with John Dowland's. The difference in composition is staggering. And Nick Drake was not a typical songwriter himself. Yet a 50 years old song is principally different from a 500 years old even when played by the same people on the same instruments.
Of course. Fun fact, the father of Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Galilei was a musical theorist who, long before Bach, established the idea of equal temperament.
I myself don't believe in before/after thing. It's not that one day all the composers in the world agreed to write music by the book. I think things shifted slowly but steadily along with the technological progress. Compared to Galilei's time, in Bach's era there were more books to learn from, more and better developed instruments, and with the rise of bourgeoisie, more listeners (and musicians).
As a person with a music degree, albeit not in composition, but I had several friends who were composition majors, my impression is that composers often do write music in old baroque or classical styles etc., which are academically well understood, but they do it more as an exercise. Probably some composers even do compose exclusively in those styles. But the point is we don't know it because there isn't much interest from general audiences in anachronistic music and of course there isn't much commercial interest either.
Bach of course produced a lot of music that came down to us, but he was paid to do it as a court and church composer. He had to have something new ready to play every day in the styles that were popular at the time. That was his job. And he improvised much of it and then wrote it down and developed it later, which was very common at the time (and even now).
Because there’s no money or prestige in it. There are plenty of people who understand the craft and could do it. It’s easy enough to imagine some cultural moment - say a popular romance set in the era - bringing it back for a season of baroque hype.
The real reason is because we tune instruments differently.
Anything about "why would you want to be a copy cat of Bach?" is just non-sense - musicians have been copy-catting each other endlessly since music existed, and still do today.
The writing technique of the baroque era revolved around line conductions that dodged harsh-sounding intervals in the temperament of the time.
Nowadays, we tune using equal temperament. Equal temperament doesn't have harsh-sounding intervals (except flat 9th on a major chord), which makes classical writing technique obsolete.
Not really. I agree with what he says but listen to what he says: he's talking about popular music. He has explicitly stated he's not talking about music subcultures, of which there are many and many are thriving. If there was a Bach like composer subculture that was significant but unable to break into pop then he'd be giving the answer.
bach wasn't exactly subculture either. i mean back then you played some shingles in a pub or you were in cahoots with the royals who paid you for making music. but i get your point. i've no competent position really, anyway.
I don't know about Bach. However, one thing that strikes me is that the easiness of producing something of high quality probably means that it's just high enough to seem so for most people and not really as high as the things that were considered high.
Rick Beato had an interesting video on this phenomenon. I'm not very musically literate but I found the general idea quite insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bZ0OSEViyo
I didn't really get into Bach until after 4 hours of listening BWV 988 (Goldberg Variations), then it just clicked and I could enjoy it deeper than anything before. Mozart does not work for me the same way. It's good, but somehow just clever bullshit at the same time. Music is subjective.
I'd suggest the obvious elephant in the room here is that the market Bach is targeted at is quite small - people who understand and appreciate technically good music (that doesn't include me). Most people have music they'd rather listen to that is not composed by Bach. The market has completely changed. Ordinary people listen to music regularly nowadays. Possibly daily. That was never a crowd that Bach did well with.
So we probably still have Bach-style compositions but most people neither know nor care.
I subscribe to Fanfare Magazine, "The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors" i.e. classical. It comes out 6 times a year. The current issue is 512 pages and has about 10 reviews of new or re-released Bach recordings. I'd guess there are modern Bach-style compositions mentioned a couple of times a year.
Note that the magazine only has 1102 paid subscriptions!
What the banality of your comment says is that you never cared to pay attention to the man and his music.
I strongly recommend you watch the excellent BBC documentary about him, by the maestro John Eliott Gardiner [1].
You'll discover a world where music wasn't yet associated with "fashion", where the "market" for music (i.e. concert halls, music publishing, etc) didn't actually exist and composers were paid employees of cities.
Just because there wasn't Twitter and App Stores doesn't mean there weren't fashions and markets -- they were located in different places in the culture. I don't mean to deflate your lofty romanticizations of the man and his craft. Take another listen to your documentary and observe how his career reflects and reacts to the on-going musical-cultural discourse of his time.
In that way, he truly is like any other artist (so engaged.) At the same time, rest assured we can celebrate and enjoy the extraordinary achievements made in that paradigm.
It takes years to learn to compose in Bach's way. However, if you go to a university for this, they will tell that they don't want new compositions in Bach style, they want some "modern" classical music. So what is missing is some kind of Bach academy, where they would promote composers writing new music in this style.
I believe students of composition will usually "cover" that era and intentionally write music like Bach, but it would be very strange if the teacher then said, "That's it. That's the pinnacle. Now, get working on your resumes."
It's a bit like asking, why don't they do math like Euler anymore?
we haven't exhausted the Bach we have. It's a lifetime's work just to study and appreciate it all. There are composers who have written great homages, my current favorite is Agustin Barrios' "La Cathedral," second movement (https://youtu.be/dmc6KV0_UVM?t=271), which has most of the elements of one of Bach's preludes.
It begs the question of what would it even mean to compose like that? You can't reproduce it with fractals or anything procedural. You might be able to use AI to imitate it, but each voice is a distinct set of musical ideas and someone has to have those to write them. The start would be to just start doing arrangements of his work to begin to understand them. It's a different relationship to music, where it doesn't bear imitation.
It's like asking, why they don't paint like Caravaggio or sculpt like Michelangelo. There is a reason why these pieces of art are called classical. The same goes with classical literature. They don't write like Plato.
The book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is a challenging read, but it highlights some of the magical depth in Bach's music. What he accomplished was very unique and brilliantly complex.
Because they can't. If you mean "like Bach" in terms of the specific stylistic tropes - he literally spent a lifetime developing them, they're exceptionally complex, and there are very very few people with the same combination of taste, cognitive capacity, and book learning who might reproduce them convincingly.
And if even if someone did that - what's the point?
If you mean in terms of complexity etc - this is an era of shallower, more emotionally direct music. The complexity is all in the production, sound design, and mixing, and not so much in the writing and arrangement. A lot of skill goes into pulling a good mix together, but it's a different, much less obvious kind of skill.
If someone wants to experiment with equivalent levels of intellectual complexity - get a copy of Csound or something, pick a language for a front end to generate Csound events using composition rules, and see where you get to.
IMO that's the biggest unexplored area in computer music, with the potential to combine new sonic structures - designed with taste and aesthetic awareness, not just for the sake of tinkering - with new kinds of sound design.
Is there a market for it? Absolutely not. But so what?
This is pretty much it. Music is always a business, and composing things "like Bach" (whatever TFA wanted that to mean) is very hard and time consuming. It's just not worth doing.
On top of that, the taste of contemporary music buyers is often toward things that are downright weird rather than things that sound like old music.
FYI, the article is about Nikolaus Matthes who did actually write a very good (but not as good as Bach best according to critics) Passion in the style of Bach in 2019 and why nobody cares.
I think it had to be said because, at the time of me writing this comment, none of the other 16 commenters had apparently bothered clicking on the link they were commenting on.
Bach is timeless, some of his music was sent into outer space, and the old astronomy joke goes one day, they would detect a message using a radio telescope that said "Send more Bach!". If there is life outside of Earth, no doubt there'd be demand for it; they just don't know yet what they are missing...
More seriously, if people imitated the music of the Baroque period, it's perhaps more as an exercise to improve rather than a personal opus magnum that will be published, because that time is just over. The same may be true for imitating some specifics of Bach's style (Johann Sebastian, there are many other Bachs that are likewise recommended, e.g. C. E. Bach also wrote excellent organ music IMHO).
However, there are also timeless patterns in Bach's music that invoke/exploit recursion, symmetry, variation, reference of others and self-reference that are perhaps mandatory if you want to write the best music ever - see Douglas Robert Hofstadter's seminal book on that topic (and many fascinating others), "Gödel Escher Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid" (Basic Books, New York, 1979).
Asking “why don't they compose music like Bach any more?” is like asking “why don’t they make smartphones like the original iPhone anymore?”.
Bach has certain appeal (to some—not every connoisseur of classical music is in love with it), and he’s certainly been a massive influence, but culture moves on. He was among the first to really get into harmonic modulation and a lot of other ideas—and composers have been exploring them and have since taken to new levels.
If everyone mimicked Bach, we would regress; and some do mimic Bach, as the post itself states in the first sentence. There seems to be little substance in asking this question (other than to advertise one’s preferences, perhaps).
I always feel like this question begs this elitist perspective on progress and art. I don’t hate classical music, but I also don’t deify it. Classical jazz, other forms of “art” music, they’re great, and maybe they do reflect some kind of intellectual pinnacle, but as someone who was a big clubbed in my youth, I don’t see how sitting in a concert hall in a 3 piece suit is a more peak human experience than sweating and grooving in a dance hall.
I would like to see some fusion, I like longer works, concept albums, I’d really like to see more of it in modern aesthetics. I keep meditating on the phrase synthwave symphony for my next project.
Equating sitting for 90 minutes focusing on a single thing with a single or maybe two senses to jerking your limbs along to droning sounds in a dark room surrounded by drunk people is pure cultural nihilism. Sounds harsh, but that kind of thinking just makes me sad.
I’m curious why it makes you sad? I feel exactly the opposite. Dancing is an old cultural tradition that has meditative and spiritual qualities. What about that is cultural nihilism. Or maybe I just don’t think cultural nihilism is a bad thing?
I had to second guess myself because I don’t know if I really know what cultured means, but Apparently the dictionary definition of the word cultured is “produced under artificial conditions” so I would say I agree with you. Can’t argue with refined. Probably won’t reasonably argue with intellectual, but then again I think I don’t know that I think that I get into art for intellectual reasons exactly, I would describe them as spiritual reasons.
The concert hall environment used to be a practical approach to hearing the music, now is a traditional approach, but due to technology of the past 50-100 years is no longer needed.
I'm a super+++ fan of classical music from a little before Bach through Wagner and some since him.
E.g., the end of the Republican National Convention had a live performance of Nessum Dorma with none of the environment, e.g., the singer was not on the main stage.
I like classical music as art with the definition "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", and according to that definition to me that music has some astounding examples.
For Bach, okay, at one point I wanted to convert over from listening to the music to playing some of it, got a violin (easier to carry than a piano), some lessons (Indiana University, where I was a math grad student, with a terrific music school) and got through most of the famous E major Partita and, transposed up for violin, the famous cello piece. Both are very popular sometimes in surprising circumstances, e.g., the cello piece was used in an ad selling bathtubs!
Tough to put either piece into words, but a rough attempt is: They start with something simple, not very emotional, but suggesting someone beginning something challenging. Then the pieces move forward with some changes in different parts of the scale but with the rhythm slowly changing as if the person's experience was progressing, developing, but in a way that was close to clockwork, maybe driven, no big interruptions or distractions, even irresistible and inevitable. But in both cases the development leads to a climax of some success or, for the cello piece, some grand success. Well, from that a listener can conclude that they are not the only one progressing on some situation that has some irresistible challenge and ending with a victory.
The grand case of this, in words, roughly, moving ahead on a challenge, having a sweet, happy victory (2/3rds of the way through), having a catharsis after the victory, and then slowly reaching a deeply understood resolution is, of course, the Chaconne.
It was written for solo violin but is taken seriously in transcriptions for piano and full orchestra -- there is a good Stokowski performance; he seems to really understand the music and presents a good, expressive version.
So, I like the music for the effectiveness of the art.
Uh, in summary, to write music like, as good as, Bach's have to write not just in his style but with comparable effectiveness in his art. The tough part is the art, not just the style.
I’m glad classical music has done this for you. I’ve always heard of people appreciating the an ability of music to tell a story, and I’ve wondered if it would make my music better if I used a story as inspiration, and maybe this is the post modernist in me, but I’ve always appreciated music as a form that expressed something you couldn’t put into words, even as you’ve expressed here, the narrative is fairly simple, isn’t there a much richer je ne sais Quias or spirit behind the music? In which case I’ve never really gotten the richest version of that from classical.
"And yet no one cares. Have you heard of this work before? How many times will you hear of it from now on?" I think he might have answered his own questino.
1. Really good composers don't want to compose more old music. They want to do something else. Merely good composers can't compete with Bach.
2. It's not about the 'objective' value of the music that matters. Bach is a huge brand. The music itself is not enough. It must be composed by Bach, music like Bach is not enough.
I made the counterargument for 2 "Only the music matters, not who or how it is made. Anything else is just posturing." and just as I thought, almost everyone disagrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40670072#40670172