Morgan Owens wrote:
Certainly, I wouldn't call Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire" -- to pick one well-enough known example -- harsh nor dissonant,
Neither would I. I enjoy Vangelis' music as much as I enjoy Beethoven or Mozart. Vangelis' "Heaven and Hell" served as the theme music of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" TV series.
and serves on its own as a counterexample to Jim Muth's claim.
I never meant to imply that all older music is consonant and therefore good, and all modern music is dissonant and therefore bad, my claim was that older music, which is labelled 'classical' because of its age, tends to be more harmonious and therefore IMO more beautiful than what is known as modern 'classical' music. And even the modern 'classical' music has many exceptions, such as the unabashedly tonal 'minimalistic' music of Philip Glass. (One cannot intentionally compose 'classical' music simply by scoring it for the standard symphony orchestra. The music must earn the status of 'classical' by its own worth and staying power.)
The insistence that I compare harsh music of today with harmonious music of the past is entirely spurious, and serves only as a vehicle for another of Jim Muth's installments of "What I think is wrong With Our Society". As such further debate is pointless.
A comment with much insight and truth. I assume Morgan sees the social situation as far less serious than I see it, or perhaps feels that the problems should be ignored. I find the situation hard to ignore. Listening to the morning news, I hear that my city, Baltimore, with a population of 550,000, has already had three murders this year, which is but 9 hours old. This rate will continue throughout the year. Perhaps Morgan feels that the social situation is already hopeless, that the carnage is natural selection in action, and the only thing to do is stand back, observe, analyze the self- destruction, and hope to remain uninvolved. Or perhaps Morgan wants to avoid the topics that are lurking just beneath the surface of the discussion. One thing not questionable is that this thread is off topic on the Fractint list. Let's move it to the Philofractal list before Tim slaps our wrists. Jim M.