Music
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
<GUIDE>
<BODY>
<PULLQUOTE>An Incomplete And Inaccurate Guide To The Best Music On Earth</PULLQUOTE>
I have to say that this title was chosen for reasons of honesty. It's not exactly aspirational, is it? My hope is that together, dear friends, we can build up a guide to the music which we would wish casual visitors to our planet (or at least h2g2) to hear. We must aim, in the usual way of these things, if not for accuracy, then at least definitive inacccuracy.<P/>
Of course we are aided here by the normal conceit of the music lover. After all, if we haven't heard it, it can't possibly be worth the effort. So the incompleteness will also, in time, become definitive.<P/>
And now all we need to do is categorise all music into handy bite-sized portions. Hah! That's the easy bit!<P/>
Of course, the success of this exercise is wholly dependent on people being interested enough to say something. Or rather, type something. You can say it too, if you like, but I can guarantee that I won't transcribe it for you because (a) you're probably more than one mile away, therefore I'm unlikely to be able to hear you too clearly, and (b) I can't type worth a damn anyway. I'm optimistic about this. I sometimes find that the fridge with the beer is outside my <LINK H2G2="P175745">apathy radius</LINK>, but I still spend hours exchanging views on music with people I've never met. That's you, by the way. Hi, we haven't met. I'm Guy. Oh, you know that. Right.<P/>
<BOX>
<TITLE>Musical Genres</TITLE>
<TEXT>
The thing about music is, you have to sort it into some semblence of order. Otherwise you end up playing Pink Floyd right after Couperin, which jars on the senses a bit. Some people are so anally retentive that they alphabetise them on the shelves. Others group them chronologically, charting the progress of each band or composer. The most basic form of categorisation is "things that sound vaguely similar," and that's what musical genres are.<P/>
In fact, genre is just a posh word for a collection of things which aren't too different from each other, but are recognisably different from that other group of things over there. It's just that the sort of pompous arse who talks about classical music on the radio can't possibly bring themselves to utter a sentence which doesn't include the word "genre" so, quite understandably, it's come to be viewed with some suspicion by us ordinary folks.<P/>
<UL>
<LI><LINK H2G2="P175763">Classical</LINK>
<LI>Jazz
<LI>Rock
<LI>Soul
<LI>Pop
<LI>Rap
<LI>Comedy
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
<BOX >
<TITLE>Musical Periods</TITLE>
<TEXT>
It looks like these are classical music periods, but that's only because there is a real dearth of authentic 14th Century rock and roll.<P/>
<UL>
<LI><LINK H2G2="">Mediaeval (400 - 1400)</LINK>
<LI><LINK H2G2="A175817">Renaissance (1400 - 1600)</LINK>
<LI>Baroque (1600 - 1750)
<LI>The Classic Era (1750-1820)
<LI>The Romantic Era (1820 - 1920)
<LI>Impressionists (1860 - 1910)
<LI>Modern (1900 - )
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
<BOX >
<TITLE>The Last Five Decades</TITLE>
<TEXT>
A recent survey on the BBC's web site asked the great unwashed who was the greatest composer of the milennium. They came up with Paul McCartney. For those of us who believe that fine music, like fine wine, should be allowed to mature for a century or two before consumption (an opinion shared, I might add, by the audiences of several of Beethove's premieres), this is rather a strange choice. What of the incomparable Bach? Mozart? Tchaikovsky? Or my own particular favourite, Tallis? Alas, none of these have been interviewed on television recently<FOOTNOTE>generally on account of having been dead for up to four hundred years</FOOTNOTE>.<P/>
So there you have it: the modern perception that more music happened in the last five decades than in any previous period of history. This is, of course, b******s. But all the <I>dross</I> which was written before 1900 (with the notable exception of gems such as The Lost Chord, which are kept alive to remind us exactly why it took so long for the phonograph to catch on) has faded into the kindly mists of obscurity.<P/>
The difference now is that with CDs and the Internet the worst of the modern dross is, perversely, the most widely available. Copyright is cheap on dire recordings, and record producers have to fill up the empty space between the three good tracks they hope will be enough to persuade you to pay ten quid for "Hits of the 70s" or whatever.
<UL>
<LI>The 1950s
<LI>The 1960s
<LI>The 1970s
<LI>The 1980s
<LI>The 1990s
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
</BODY>
</GUIDE>
<BODY>
<PULLQUOTE>An Incomplete And Inaccurate Guide To The Best Music On Earth</PULLQUOTE>
I have to say that this title was chosen for reasons of honesty. It's not exactly aspirational, is it? My hope is that together, dear friends, we can build up a guide to the music which we would wish casual visitors to our planet (or at least h2g2) to hear. We must aim, in the usual way of these things, if not for accuracy, then at least definitive inacccuracy.<P/>
Of course we are aided here by the normal conceit of the music lover. After all, if we haven't heard it, it can't possibly be worth the effort. So the incompleteness will also, in time, become definitive.<P/>
And now all we need to do is categorise all music into handy bite-sized portions. Hah! That's the easy bit!<P/>
Of course, the success of this exercise is wholly dependent on people being interested enough to say something. Or rather, type something. You can say it too, if you like, but I can guarantee that I won't transcribe it for you because (a) you're probably more than one mile away, therefore I'm unlikely to be able to hear you too clearly, and (b) I can't type worth a damn anyway. I'm optimistic about this. I sometimes find that the fridge with the beer is outside my <LINK H2G2="P175745">apathy radius</LINK>, but I still spend hours exchanging views on music with people I've never met. That's you, by the way. Hi, we haven't met. I'm Guy. Oh, you know that. Right.<P/>
<BOX>
<TITLE>Musical Genres</TITLE>
<TEXT>
The thing about music is, you have to sort it into some semblence of order. Otherwise you end up playing Pink Floyd right after Couperin, which jars on the senses a bit. Some people are so anally retentive that they alphabetise them on the shelves. Others group them chronologically, charting the progress of each band or composer. The most basic form of categorisation is "things that sound vaguely similar," and that's what musical genres are.<P/>
In fact, genre is just a posh word for a collection of things which aren't too different from each other, but are recognisably different from that other group of things over there. It's just that the sort of pompous arse who talks about classical music on the radio can't possibly bring themselves to utter a sentence which doesn't include the word "genre" so, quite understandably, it's come to be viewed with some suspicion by us ordinary folks.<P/>
<UL>
<LI><LINK H2G2="P175763">Classical</LINK>
<LI>Jazz
<LI>Rock
<LI>Soul
<LI>Pop
<LI>Rap
<LI>Comedy
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
<BOX >
<TITLE>Musical Periods</TITLE>
<TEXT>
It looks like these are classical music periods, but that's only because there is a real dearth of authentic 14th Century rock and roll.<P/>
<UL>
<LI><LINK H2G2="">Mediaeval (400 - 1400)</LINK>
<LI><LINK H2G2="A175817">Renaissance (1400 - 1600)</LINK>
<LI>Baroque (1600 - 1750)
<LI>The Classic Era (1750-1820)
<LI>The Romantic Era (1820 - 1920)
<LI>Impressionists (1860 - 1910)
<LI>Modern (1900 - )
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
<BOX >
<TITLE>The Last Five Decades</TITLE>
<TEXT>
A recent survey on the BBC's web site asked the great unwashed who was the greatest composer of the milennium. They came up with Paul McCartney. For those of us who believe that fine music, like fine wine, should be allowed to mature for a century or two before consumption (an opinion shared, I might add, by the audiences of several of Beethove's premieres), this is rather a strange choice. What of the incomparable Bach? Mozart? Tchaikovsky? Or my own particular favourite, Tallis? Alas, none of these have been interviewed on television recently<FOOTNOTE>generally on account of having been dead for up to four hundred years</FOOTNOTE>.<P/>
So there you have it: the modern perception that more music happened in the last five decades than in any previous period of history. This is, of course, b******s. But all the <I>dross</I> which was written before 1900 (with the notable exception of gems such as The Lost Chord, which are kept alive to remind us exactly why it took so long for the phonograph to catch on) has faded into the kindly mists of obscurity.<P/>
The difference now is that with CDs and the Internet the worst of the modern dross is, perversely, the most widely available. Copyright is cheap on dire recordings, and record producers have to fill up the empty space between the three good tracks they hope will be enough to persuade you to pay ten quid for "Hits of the 70s" or whatever.
<UL>
<LI>The 1950s
<LI>The 1960s
<LI>The 1970s
<LI>The 1980s
<LI>The 1990s
</UL>
</TEXT>
</BOX>
</BODY>
</GUIDE>
