Bruno Loff:
I found that I am more and more driven away from emotional fuzzy-feeling types of music (such as coldplay) and more and more into music that is about sound: about the richness, texture, surprise, humour, detail, etc that sound can convey. Contrary to you, I have actually started playing more and more music recently, in this latter style (I too have a 49 key midi keyboard!

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This new way of making music is most strongly represented in the improv / experimental scenes (and, I was told, also in more modern classical music), and only rarely appears in pop. There are some exceptions, such as velvet underground.
Nice! Not to sound purist or anything, but... coming from the classical tradition, I think that the best composers I know from 1600-1900 have thoroughly explored those parameters and more, to a large extent. Haydn, Chopin, Bach, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin come to mind, along with performers like Rubinstein, Cortot, Gould, Sofronitsky, and Cherkassky. I'm actually fairly interested in where classical composition is going (because I'm a composer alive today, so I have to, maybe... swim with the fishes, so to speak). Heard of John Cage? I think it's very interesting that he studied Buddhism and then tried to put those ideas into musical context. But the problem I have with a lot of modern composition, and Cage in particular, is that I get this impression:
Here is a highly randomized set of sounds. Since all sounds are empty and arbitrary, I can appreciate the okay-ness of this cacophony. In fact, if you adhere to the tonal model, you're really limited and unenlightened, still trying to seek a gross satisfaction from pleasurable and agreeable harmony. In order to be a great composer, you have to embrace chaos and the breakdown of tonality. If you don't appreciate the chaos of my notes, you are being non-equanimious to the sounds.
I don't really know if Cage actually came to any meaningful attainments while studying Buddhism, or if he just intellectually took in the concepts and then tried to make music in light of those concepts. I haven't read enough about his personal life. I'm always skeptical though, when an American starts saying Zen-ish, paradoxical proverbs, instead of giving a more bare, non encoded description of what realizations they've come to.
My problem with it is... sunsets are beautiful, rainbows are beautiful, the ebb and flow of the ocean is beautiful, the play of night and day is beautiful, and all these things are very systematic, harmonic, and structured, easy to appreciate because the structure is so obvious. Now I know that there is still emphasis on structure and musical architecture, but it seems like people are starting to say... Red orange yellow green blue indigo violet (aka, tonality) is too generic, it's predictable and since we've already been there, we have to create systems of randomness to generate other arrangements (breakdown of tonality, atonality). But, isn't it non-equanimious to say, we have to get rid of the old rainbow, that isn't okay. I find that if I play tonal works I composed for some of the more modern-minded professors, they're just like... oh, that's shit, you're using major and minor chords! And then I think, classical music has been doing it's "thing" for a long time now, and it's not like we're just now figuring out some "correct" way to organize notes. As corny as it sounds, music, to me, is about some sort of humanistic desire to express feelings and states. What isn't humanistic is suddenly saying that within the tradition, old methods are inferior. Bach is basically the music god in the classrooms, but he lived in the 1700's. If he came back from the dead, he could do his thing and still be revered. So why can't we use the same methods he used, if we're trying to reach out and move people's emotions and thoughts, bring them to different states, etc... If you want to bring someone to some certain state or convey something, you just use whatever means you have to do so. But to shut off traditions and say, no, that is no longer what we do, is ridiculous. People don't evolve alongside modern classical music... they still like the classics, they're still moved by their methods. Thus, I like Scriabin, since he was so forward looking in what could be done when tonality breaks down, but he was still utterly consumed by trying to convey intense feelings, concepts, states, through classical forms. But then some people come and say, hey, we should just do new things, that's what this is about, is just coming up with new methods! Which was fine with me until it came to the point where I started meeting a scary number of people who were convinced art and modern classical is just about finding as many new methods as possible. My problem with a lot of modern classical is that there seems to be a minimum of intellectual and historical knowledge required to appreciate the music and know the form it's in. But with the classics I love, I feel like no intellectual comprehension is necessary to connect with it and get absorbed. I like the notion of art moving forward by freely breaking traditional methods, but I don't like the notion that the current eras of art are defined by just doing new stuff, for the sake of new-ness. Humans still have emotional response and I personally don't care much for the idea of abandoning the attempt to draw on those emotions, especially for novelty of new methods, often of pure randomness/chaos.
Lots of thoughts on music, and modern music, and on how music relates to Dharma stuff. If anyone understands what the hell is going on in modern classical, I'd love to have that discussion. This discussion also hits on the question: what is the purpose of art, and what is good art? My suspicion is that it comes down to some deep thing about compassion and how we share things with other people.