Bach was a baroque composer, you are hearing the difference between baroque and classical music. You are getting at counterpoint used in baroque and homophony used in classical composition. Counterpoint has multiple independent but interrelated voices or musical lines going at once and homophony is basically the opposite where all voices or musical lines move together in a harmonic progression.
I’m super impressed with what you recognize I’ve had to do some digging and reading to even start to hear what you picked up on naturally.
I’m not just talking about counterpoint, though. (funny story, my introduction to baroque and early music started after I went frantically searching for counterpoint after seeing an old Ethel Merman movie on TV as a kid.)
Counterpoint is all brain-tickly, but the real payoff for me is… uhh. Patterns that are obvious in retrospect, but weirdly hard to predict ahead, given how simple they are. You can get this all the way back to plainchant, and the more basic the construction, the more impressive it is.
Conversely, once you scrape off all the drama and fussy bits off most classical composers, you’re left with something very basic indeed. You pull the ends, and for all its loopy squiggling, it doesn’t actually make a knot.
Meh. I not words good. There’s a concept there, but I lack the tools to reason about it.
No, I do understand what you mean and it’s the same thing I like about the baroque music. It’s almost like modern house music, the kind where they take one riff and play it out fifty different ways, it is sort of trancey and doesn’t yell at you for attention, it pulls instead of pushing.
Bach was a baroque composer, you are hearing the difference between baroque and classical music. You are getting at counterpoint used in baroque and homophony used in classical composition. Counterpoint has multiple independent but interrelated voices or musical lines going at once and homophony is basically the opposite where all voices or musical lines move together in a harmonic progression.
I’m super impressed with what you recognize I’ve had to do some digging and reading to even start to hear what you picked up on naturally.
I’m not just talking about counterpoint, though. (funny story, my introduction to baroque and early music started after I went frantically searching for counterpoint after seeing an old Ethel Merman movie on TV as a kid.)
Counterpoint is all brain-tickly, but the real payoff for me is… uhh. Patterns that are obvious in retrospect, but weirdly hard to predict ahead, given how simple they are. You can get this all the way back to plainchant, and the more basic the construction, the more impressive it is.
Conversely, once you scrape off all the drama and fussy bits off most classical composers, you’re left with something very basic indeed. You pull the ends, and for all its loopy squiggling, it doesn’t actually make a knot.
Meh. I not words good. There’s a concept there, but I lack the tools to reason about it.
I thought your very basic indeed video would be the pachelbel rant.
No, I do understand what you mean and it’s the same thing I like about the baroque music. It’s almost like modern house music, the kind where they take one riff and play it out fifty different ways, it is sort of trancey and doesn’t yell at you for attention, it pulls instead of pushing.