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Most Tympani is a Big Trick |
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Most Tympani is a Big Trick
Tympani is a big trick in music. Since ancient times, the drum beat or the striking of other objects has been used to take the place of music, as a filler to replace the labor of the real composer. Most people could not care less though they should. It is becoming more and more evident that the same, monotonous, driving beat can actually be harmful to the human brain. Even much more, the driving beat can do a lot of damage when used in entertainment, where the listener can be voluntarily subjected to it for hours on end, day in and day out, year after year. Music is an appreciation of time. In a sense, music is the song to the beauty of time and time's passage. And so every decent composer throughout history, from the classics to the gentry, from symphonies written on pages or folk tunes composed by ear and passed on by performer to listener, tympani was used to complement the work, or as a part of it. Drum cadences were complex and could only be performed by accomplished musicians. The beats were varied and the rhythms were aesthetic and beautiful, not monotonous, pointless, meaningless filler. The pop music of the early twenty-first century has so far become just cut-and-paste electronic filler to make a shallow song seem like something. Yet it's become nothing more than the same song as all the others, with enough uniqueness to avoid copyright infringement. It doesn't uplift the public gullible enough to be tricked into buying into it, but rather it has dragged them down a dark path to oblivion until they will begin to accept anything as long as it is loud, cruel, emulating a criminal life-style, and horrifies the audience into a cold indifference to any sensitivity or creativity. The ones who are the most deceived is the music industry itself, who now regards pop shallowness as the norm in entertainment until it permeates practically every venue, from neighborhoods where it blares on home entertainment systems, shopping centers and grocery stores, embraced as a morale booster by both military and business, and transported to the streets by boomers in the trunks of passing cars. The music industry has been tricked into selling it and yet can't seem to figure out why they aren't actually making money. The answer is that most people have given up on music and mostly hear it when forced to against their will by those whose only remaining pleasure in their so-called music is to harass and maim others. Of all the villains in this sad episode the greatest are many if not most of the so-called classical composers. They formed another kind of monotony than the driving drumbeat, they created the musical fillers; the monotony of endless musical variations on a given theme. Even the themes, most of the time, were not original, but were stolen from the folk music around them. Many composers went on long jaunts to see if they could get more unique melodies, not of their own creation, but stolen from the creative peasants who worked on a melody, often, from generation to generation. It was this monotonous, uncreative drivel that drove the modern musicians to pop. Because now that's where the money seems to be. Though it really isn't. As one composer once honestly confessed, "One good folk song is worth one hundred symphonies". The peasants, however, were the honest ones, working on and on with each melody and passing them on to the next generation, from bard to balladeer.
Click here to see a work-in-progress weblog entitled "Music About Time". --Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology, the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges, all by yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are feedback, a website search engine, and exhaustive contents pages. Plus my weblogs are on site, an art school and classes.
one
good folk song is worth 100 symphonies
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