Music History (and Why It Matters!)

0:02 Music Appreciation. Hello class welcome to music historySo I've actually been reading a lot of music history books by the way, I'm Scoobert Doobert

0:23 And the reason why I'm reading these music history books is to understand a little bit better like how the hell did we get here?

0:30 The music is crazy right now. I love it, but how did we end up making music that we're making?And by looking back a little bit sometimes you can look forwardBecause like history doesn't repeat though it often rhymes.

0:49 You know, it's that kind of vibeSo I want to talk about like what are our uniquetraits as this post post moderncomposerI think two thingsare absolutely incredibleThat we have at our disposal Number one is the perch of timeNumber two is the perch of accessSo we're able to have a long enough runwayYou know written music has been around for a thousand years nowlong enough runway that we can like look

1:20 At melody and rhythm and how it's evolvedOver the course of western music and then eventually when it starts toYou know interact with other cultures and we end up where we're at now with a globalizedmusical systemA lot of it's still rooted in western tonal music, but a lot of it isn't now

1:41 And that that's a really unique place for us to be where we are not nearly as like localizedFrench composers made French music Italian composers made Italian music now likeSure, yeah, you're influenced by your environment and what your cultureDeems to be good music, but you don't have to only make that cultural music in in fact.

2:07 I think that we're allfar more individualistic in our taste and in ourinputs Then composers have ever been in human historyAnd it's not superficial either.

2:19 I meanYou you can listen to music from other culturesExclusively if you want to and fundamentally change how you hear musicAnd that's the second partAccessYou know before it was like a big deal to go by a record And before that to buy sheet music in order to even interpret the musicYou had to know how to read and play music and you might be doing it wrongBecause even though sheet music like does have very good

2:50 Parameters so you can replicate melody and rhythm and things like thatBut there can be a certain set of emotionsOr instead of strong and weak beats some of the things that are between the linesThat are not accurately conveyed like just think about likeNever hearing blues music and trying to read sheet music of bluesIt's not going to sound right you need the culturalexposure

3:17 particularly for music that like has that sort offolkUndercurrent the imperfection the you know like necessary

3:29 articulations of a genre like the way that you sing the note the way that you glide into the note theThe strong and weak beats being reversedFrom traditionalBum to boomKa boomKa you know these things like yes, you can notate thatBut I swear if you gave a baroque musician

3:52 Perfectly notated jazz they're going to screw it up because they probably don't know how to swing very wellIt's screwed up from our perspective at least it might end up sounding coolBut I digress what I'm trying to say is like we can reach out and listen to all sorts of musicIt's not just the fact that we can pull up music at any time that alone is incredible

4:11 But the ability to listen to other cultural context of music being able to collaborate with people from all around the worldI'm doing it right now.

4:19 I'm on one call with somebody from Sweden working on awesome music with his band calledI don't speak French and then I'm you know on the other side of the world talking with Chai in Japan And I am broadening my musical horizons asking them about what they listen to getting new musicalConversations back and forth and we're doing it all in real time where I will lay down a bass part and I will send it to Japan

4:42 Or I'll send it to Sweden and then they will instantly have it into their sessionAnd then they'll start composing to the bass part send me stuff backIt becomes this conversation that we're having over thousands of miles

4:53 So not only do we have access to past but we also have access to present and future cultural musicThat's insaneSo like let's let's talk about just kind of the order of musical history that that's where we're at right nowSo it's like what do I do with all of that knowledge and I think part of it is to look even further backTo look atYou know western music tonal music from the beginningYou know

5:21 Listening to Mozart or listening to BachLike Baroque music and then classical music there's a certain sense ofFiguring out the rulesPart of the reason why it sounds so you know firm to our ears is because they wrote the rulesAnd you know part of these rules are instinctual and part of these rules are culturalBut a lot of our own

5:46 You know feelings of this note goes to this note or this chord goes to that chord comes fromLongstanding musical traditions

5:56 And understanding those traditions allow you to either break or follow to pay off or to not in the same way that grammar has a certain patternYou expect me to pause after this wordAndContinue after I say and it's that pattern.

6:12 It's that vocabulary and the grammar and the pace that is allYou know part of rhetoric like what I'm doing right now just talking into a microphone but also musicThe flow of things So you go from this classical or this Baroque into the classical the classical like Mozart they're looking for balanceThey're looking they're like NewtonYou know they're like trying to make this order and balance looking for melodies

6:38 That's like the music of the spheres I've talked about that before it's like this perfect heavenly gift every you knowPlanet is a melody singing to another planet. It's this divine structureSo we go from that

6:54 Looking for melodies in the ether trying to pluck things from the air trying to discover God's melodiesAnd once you kind of see that through and you have masters like MozartYou kind of go, okay, what do you do next?He's the same thing with like painting in Italian Renaissance art

7:13 After you kind of perfect it and you know like well, that's wow you just painted exactly what I see but better

7:20 You know in the real world. It's like it's like oh, that's a photograph basically.

7:25 What do you do from that?You turn inward you look at humanity you look at emotion you look at the selfYou use those tools of expression of culture of worldly things you take it from trying to be the divine to beingThe individual and that's where you get romanticism and romantic expression Beethoven for me is the guy that goes from beingClassical to romantic.

7:50 He is the perfect balance of having all of the chops of like a Mozart and all of the ability to you know

7:59 Have perfect balance and tension and release in the kind of predictable expected beautiful way of classical musicBut then he takes it to the next level where it's aboutHe's like I'm the man.

8:11 I'm gonna write music that moves meI'm not just gonna try to try to write music that moves God who like who am I to say what moves GodI'm gonna make music that makes me feel something And he had great you know challenges in his life that he overcame musically even though he was deaf

8:30 And that's where you know Beethoven is that move towards humanity away from you knowJust trying to find the perfect ratios and things not to say that either are better or worse.

8:43 They're both awesomeAnd then from there where do you go you start finding impressions of things you go even deeper into theRomantic expressionTo an impression of the thing and from there you get an increased intention Before tension was this thing that was to be released. It was a pushback home.

9:04 It was like the earth turning around the sunbut then when the When the like you know you flip the sun turns around the earth to the earth turns around the sun to now like we're floating in this big space

9:18 That's that's when things become a bit more existential a bit more emotional and then gravity becomes like this thing in itselfIt's not just a tool to keep the planet spinningIt's instead is its own tension and underlying tension of being alive

9:34 But then when that tension becomes your root your origin the source of emotion and lifeYou need more tension to resolve to tensionAnd that's where you get into the 20th centuryBecause like we get that withScience tooYou know you go fromBeing like the sun revolves around the earth to the earth revolves around the sun to boom quantum mechanicsYou know like everything ispercentagesGod plays dice

10:05 So from there you get atonalityWhere there's no real center of gravity every note isStrong I talk about that in the octatonic scale my favorite scale podcastBut a better way to talk about atonality is pantonality every note has equal weight and worthSo they're like where do you go from thereIs everything just discovered are we doneThat's where we use our new tools the tools of time and access

10:33 And more importantly I think the tools of timbre recording engineering and sound designA lot of people in the 20th century have already done thisI'm going to make some Spotify plays at some point that explores some of my weirder taste in musicBut now we are the synthesizers we're the explorersAnd we're also the people that can recapitulate recap

10:53 Where you can look back and you know, neoclassicism, neo-romanticism are terms in the 20th century music where it's likeI'm trying to do what Mozart did but through a modern lens that kind of stuff. I'm trying to be heightened

11:06 Where you can have both music where the universe is in balance and where the universe is chaosAnd that's a really cool thingTo be in a place where we can push back

11:19 Against you know like the world and the science that we see or lean into it or do both at the same time ordering chaosbeing tension and being consonantleaning into music that's difficultThat you know might not have a super wide audienceBut then also making music that's very pleasing and doing bothI think that that's like that's the to me the modernLike plant my flag in it

11:50 I believe we need to both make music that is beautiful and not beautifulAll at onceIt's like we're living in a quasi fever dreamWe have all of the tools the Beethoven never could have imaginedBut it's time for our music this and it's time to take you know the classical and and we weOvercame it with popular musicLike let's embrace that deeper but also embrace it with you know the feelings

12:21 That classical composers brought to their work where it's not just I'm just gonna make this thing

12:26 It's like no think of think of like multiple albums as a symphony a symphony is 90 minutes long ishSo like if you're gonna make two 45 minute recordsMaybe like think of those two 45 minute records is like this arc of the symphony like putA bit bit of your soul and a bit of your time into itSo you know go do that whatever that means to you

12:47 And as as music fans give give your artists some space to be chaotic because the world itself is pretty chaoticBut also give them give them space and embrace it when they're beautifulBecause they can pull you out and pull you up to this higher planeBut allow them to do both allow them to break

13:07 The sense of who they are in your hot in your head because that's truly what an artist isArtists are free let them be free embrace them support themLet me let me close it with with a couple with a couple

13:22 Things that are important to me. So prince said if you can bring the special effects inside your bodyThen you'll have a long careerI feel that way with recording engineering, timbreYou know all the technology how do you take that stuff and put it back inAnd then one last thingBeethoven himselfNever stands still always keep movinga paraphraseBut that's a gist don't just be a stagnant artist life is in stagnant

13:58 Go enjoy it. Let's go make some music if you want more scoobertdoobert.pizza where you can find all of my links my musicYou know see if I'm full of BS, I guess tag team next week