I'm looking foward to reading more of this, but I get the sense that rock music is going to get the short shaft here from an artistic standpoint.

Ok, so you mentioned the Beatles and Sonic Youth. There's an important characteristic of rock (and some pop) that separates it from Jazz and Classical - and its not just "simplicity" or "accessability." It's sound design.

In my experience, classical music and Jazz are primarily concerned with the arrangement of notes. There are tons of different philosophies of melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc. that abound in both types of music. But it seems to me that the primary question that Classical composers and Jazz improvizers ask themselves is "what note goes here?"

Rock is more concerned with the tonal characteristics of the note (or song) than it is with the harmonic relationships of the notes. What makes a band or artist distinctive has more to do with the sounds they employ in crafting songs, as opposed to the types of chords or melodies they generate. To me, true rock music emerged in the 1960's, when the technology emerged to allow for more interesting manipulation of electronic signals, and a growing appreciation for world music. One of the best examples of this is Jimi Hendrix, who wrote great songs - but more or less redefined the idea of what a guitar could sound like.

Further proof of this lies in the fact that rock cover bands are, as a rule, lame. If I go to see a Nirvana cover band, I lose more than if I go to see the London symphony perform Mozart. Mozart and Kurt Kobain are dead, but his musical legacy was more in his notes than Kobain's was; the sonic qualities of his guitar, voice, (lets not forget Dave Grohl and Kris Novalesic) are what really made his songs great to listen to.

This point, I believe, is bound to be missed in this discussion. For example, I really don't think that radiohead's "tonal center" chord vamps are what make them interesting. Just listen to the weird, cool sounds that they make. Yes, the beatles wrote great songs, but they did so with a virtually limitless pallet of instruments and noises. George harrison didn't pick up the Sitar because he thought it would best create the notes he needed for a certain song, but because it sounded exotic and interesting.

Are there Jazz and Classical composers who approach composition from this standpoint? Of course. This isn't a closed system. but I would argue that this is somewhat of a tangent to classical and jazz music, whereas it has been a central tenet of rock music ever since the genre took hold in the 60's.

"Rock is more concerned with the tonal characteristics of the note (or song) than it is with the harmonic relationships of the notes. What makes a band or artist distinctive has more to do with the sounds they employ in crafting songs, as opposed to the types of chords or melodies they generate."

I half -agree with this. I think for much of rock and pop, sonic textures are equally important to harmony and melody, but inventive harmony and melody still separate the hits and enduring pop songs from the filler. Pop composers like Burt Bacharach, Donald Fagen, Jimmy Page and Brian Wilson to name just three are as obsessed with harmony as Broadway greats like Kern, Gershwin and Rodgers. The difference is they are equall obsessed with the textures they get through arranging and recording. Now the Ramones, I'll grant you, were primarily interested in sonic textures and not harmony. But harmony and melody were certainly a big part of pop well into the 1980s. Today, maybe not so much.

I went out of my way to use the term "rock" instead of "pop" because therein lays the difference.

Jimmy page and Brian Wilson are pop-artists, in that they are writing popular music intended to be heard by lots of average joes. It is very difficult to have Rock music without an implicit marriage to pop songwriting, (though post-rock groups like Don Caballero, Tortoise, Isis, Do Say Make Think, come to mind).

I'm not saying that rock musicians are only interested in sound textures - far from it. (and the Ramones, by the way, are catchy as hell). What I meant to say is that the defining characteristic of rock is that it is, in part, focused on the craft of the sounds as an important aspect to the composition of the music.

You touch on the great phenomenon of the Recorded Age, specifically from the Beatles onward, and that is that in most cases, it's the original composer who sounds best perfroming their composition. Notable exceptions of course (Jimi Hendrix owns "All Along the Watchtower;" many have made wonderful versions of Dylan songs). And Lennon/McCartney are probably as close to "standards" writers as the modern rock age gets (also as close to being the "Bachs" of pop music as there is), but usually theirs are still the finest versions of the songs--because of those things you mention--specificity of inventive tone and timbre taking the place of purely compositional dictates.

What we see with the recent re-mixed, re-mastered, and re-issued Beatles stuff is probably how posterity will receive modern music, even jazz--as opposed to scored performance interpretations of the classics.

Actually, one would expect that Orchestral music--of which certain Classical composers were the acknowledged masters--would have the capability of using a wider palette of tone and timbre than even an imaginative Rock guitarist like Jimi Hendrix. I think it is what Rock music left out that is the key to its popularity. Most Rock songs are three minutes long--as were the Jazz songs of the pre- WWII era. The LP hasn't really changed the format that much. Most Rock music aside from some Beatles songs uses fairly simple harmonic structures: few chord changes and simple chords. Melodies tend to be riffs. Rhythmically, Rock is simpler than Jazz, and doesn't indulge in the polyrythms which became to popular in postwar Jazz. Technically, anybody can play most Rock songs after fooling around with the guitar for a year or two, and there are no divas like Sarah Vaughn in Rock--Janis Joplin aside. The one new element is, as you've mentioned, "a technology emerged to allow for more interesting manipulation of electronic signals". This we can see particularly in Beatles albums subsequent to Rubber Soul. Frank Zappa playfully indulged in this manipulation to incorporate odd bits that would shock his listeners. But there is a limit to how much you can tweak sounds and remain popular, and the core of Rock's popularity stems from its simplicity, the incorporation of good lyrics, its danceability.

What you call the "growing appreciation for world music" sounds to me like liberal cant; the influence has most often worked in the opposite direction, and ethnic musics have had to adopt a Rock beat to attain popularity in the world-music market. Hence, there is a homogenizing effect. Ethnic musics were more varied and more individual before the advent of Rock. This again relates to simplicity and danceability, or at least forceful and simplistic rhythm.

jwschmidt:

I'm looking foward to reading more of this, but I get the sense that rock music is going to get the short shaft here from an artistic standpoint.

Ok, so you mentioned the Beatles and Sonic Youth. There's an important characteristic of rock (and some pop) that separates it from Jazz and Classical - and its not just "simplicity" or "accessability." It's sound design.

In my experience, classical music and Jazz are primarily concerned with the arrangement of notes. There are tons of different philosophies of melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc. that abound in both types of music. But it seems to me that the primary question that Classical composers and Jazz improvizers ask themselves is "what note goes here?"

Rock is more concerned with the tonal characteristics of the note (or song) than it is with the harmonic relationships of the notes. What makes a band or artist distinctive has more to do with the sounds they employ in crafting songs, as opposed to the types of chords or melodies they generate. To me, true rock music emerged in the 1960's, when the technology emerged to allow for more interesting manipulation of electronic signals, and a growing appreciation for world music. One of the best examples of this is Jimi Hendrix, who wrote great songs - but more or less redefined the idea of what a guitar could sound like.

Further proof of this lies in the fact that rock cover bands are, as a rule, lame. If I go to see a Nirvana cover band, I lose more than if I go to see the London symphony perform Mozart. Mozart and Kurt Kobain are dead, but his musical legacy was more in his notes than Kobain's was; the sonic qualities of his guitar, voice, (lets not forget Dave Grohl and Kris Novalesic) are what really made his songs great to listen to.

This point, I believe, is bound to be missed in this discussion. For example, I really don't think that radiohead's "tonal center" chord vamps are what make them interesting. Just listen to the weird, cool sounds that they make. Yes, the beatles wrote great songs, but they did so with a virtually limitless pallet of instruments and noises. George harrison didn't pick up the Sitar because he thought it would best create the notes he needed for a certain song, but because it sounded exotic and interesting.

Are there Jazz and Classical composers who approach composition from this standpoint? Of course. This isn't a closed system. but I would argue that this is somewhat of a tangent to classical and jazz music, whereas it has been a central tenet of rock music ever since the genre took hold in the 60's.