Syntax: Why Classical Music is Better than Modern Music

hello my name is Benedict speckled and one of the tasks of the philosopher is often to question the gods of his society and therefore he must speak of things that he dislikes and be polemical today on the other hand I would like to speak about something that I love which becomes more important if one is often forced to be polemical and today I thought about music which I think probably most people love and I had discussed in my book Artemis ethics a while back why music unlike the other art forms like literature or architecture is a medium which peaked during what we call the time of classical music and today is a lot less rich and a lot less syntactically complex even though we all have our personal tastes and preferences which are perfectly legitimate it cannot be said about the other art forms like poetry or painting or architecture that earlier work is intrinsically any better than modern work or contemporary work this is especially true of architecture in fact because the architect is less prone to whatever prejudices of the era in which he lives because his work has to be plainly useful to regular human beings if they have no use then they are no longer buildings it's no longer architecture but rather sculpture and so because the architect has to keep one foot in the real world as it were he is less likely to be seduced by whatever fashionable pseudo philosophies or postmodern outlooks happen to dominate his particular era and the architect is forced by his medium to keep the human being not himself but his fellow human beings in the center of his work and that's why we can say of architecture that it has been alive and well in almost any era of history from antiquity to the present beyond the classic arts literature can also lend itself quite easily to rebirth and renewal because just like the material of plastic arts technology and physical materials so to the material of literature is language and language just like physical raw materials or technology is always evolving which means that literature has a potential for constant renewal and for the rebirth of greatness in every era and so the rise again of a new Homer or Shakespeare or Proust is not ontologically impossible I'm a big boost fan as you can see music on the other hand is mathematical and the fact that it's mathematical and therefore universal also makes it limited which may be a bit paradoxical but the fact that two plus two equals four is true everywhere means that it is static and so to the syntactical structures of music are also static of course there are sounds today that were not known to our ancestors such as the screeching of a car or the firing of a rocket just as there will be sounds in the future that we today will never know and these sounds can then be incorporated into a piece of music but the fact of the matter is that the syntactical combinations are of tones is static in 500 years from now there will be words that do not exist today and therefore a practically infinite variety of news and technical combinations whereas the source of certain combinations of music will remain the same because there will be no tone then and that does not exist now and so whereas a new Homer or a Shakespeare or Proust is in fact ontologically possible the rise in the future of a new Beethoven is ontologically impossible if we compare the matter again to other media and we find that for example in poetry modern work is not often much less syntactically complex than earlier work now we all have our personal preferences of course but no one would consider absurd the proposition that for example TS Eliot's work is any less rich work of John Donne 300 years earlier so - it is not silly or in bad taste to admire the modernist art of Picasso as much as or more than one admires Rembrandt but no one can with any justice compared on a syntactical level the work of any modern rock group or even of respected musicians like Philip Glass or Louis Armstrong with Beethoven there was of course popular music in classical times that was syntactically simple just like there is art music or modern classical music as it's sometimes called today that is syntactically very complex but that music that is created today in order to continue to be syntactically complex has to stray out into areas that is no longer aesthetically pleasing and therefore to become academic whether one likes rock music or not or think it's better than classical music or thinks modern music is better than classical music isn't the point I personally for example like Louis Armstrong quite a lot the point rather is that music has been in syntactical declined for quite some time now and will continue to be so and in order to overcome that syntactical decline music is starting to rely more and more on repetition and loudness in order to mask the lack of innovation this however is not the fault of the modern musicians themselves because it is a metaphysical phenomenon the greatest that music has ever produced will not and cannot ever come again contrary to what one might think today Aristotle was right in the steam being a poetry about music because all he had was the music of his own day even if the music of ancient Greece were perfectly were constructible there can be no doubt that it would be no syntactical match for the classical music that we have whereas the poetry for example of ancient Greece still holds its own in comparison with any modern Canon that is to say whereas literature was always evolving and renewing itself syntactically and otherwise music started low reached a climax and then slowly began to ebb away as the static source of some tactical structures began to be exhausted one can argue of course that we should not define an art form by such intellectualist means as mathematical constructions a piece of music regardless of its complexity or lack thereof can have the ability to entrace us and to bring us into rapture on some people ba has that effect [Music] and on emotionally immature people Justin Bieber has that effect yeah well again it's a question of personal taste but that isn't miserable if one looks however at that which is scientifically measurable then there is no doubt that music follows a trajectory of rise and decline a trajectory which is not shared by any of the other art forms luckily for us however the heyday of music roughly from the years 1600 to 1900 produced such an astonishing plethora of greatness that there is more than enough listening material for into our lifetime again I bet a big belt and thank you so much for watching

Channel: Benedict Beckeld

Views: 22,059

Keywords: music, classical music, philosophy, syntax, modern music, history, syntactical structure, architecture, art, aesthetics

Id: Gg6ctmQYlhE

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 18 2018