Your reference to two poles- originality and quality sorta makes sense, but the 'quality' still leave a lot of room for subjective thinking.
According to the 'music listening' class I once took, humans judge music based on novelty vs. familiarity. Too much familiarity- its dull Too much novelty- its noise But obviously different people's novelty/familiarity thresholds are different. Then- you start to factor in the non-music influences (ie- interviews, books, E-MAIL LISTS) and how they color your impression of a type of music (techno=future) and how those impressions subsequently produce standards for music beyond resonable expectation (Americana, by definition, never has to worry about constantly sounding futuristic) whatever- not my most well thought out statments, but Dinosaur L in the backround has me distracted with its goodness. On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Dennis DeSantis wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > > but the point is, all I hear is badly recycled ideas. > > and worse, this seems to be acceptable for some reason. > > Are they bad because they're recycled? Or are they bad, independent of > their relationship to history? > > There was a thread on one of these lists (this one, maybe?) about 6 > months ago about whether or not there was an inherent "quality-boost" > applied to things just because they were new. > > I mentioned that I thought this was crap, and gave some examples from > 17th and 18th Century music to explain why. > > Basically, my argument was that there are TWO unrelated things that > determine whether or not art will stand the test of time. One is real > quality. The other is real originality. There's PLENTY of stuff out > there that's lasted because it was new - NOT because it was good. > > Personally, I could care less about originality. I'm only interested in > quality. Give me a 4 chord pop song. As long as it's GOOD, I'm satisfied. > > Frankly, it's dead easy to make something "new", as long as you're not > concerned about making it good. Contemporary concert music (a world I > know pretty well) is full of composers who write 3-page program notes > about why their work is ground-breaking and important. Very little of > that work is worth hearing. > > > My $.02, > > -- > Dennis DeSantis > www.dennisdesantis.com >
