Quote from: robcat2075 on Today at 03:48 PMNonsense has been tried.
Starting with Schoenberg and continuing on with every clueless academic who thought they could scold people into admiring their very cerebral musical-formula gibberish.
People who probably couldn't write a Girl Scout campfire song have written very serious treatises and taught very serious university classes as if they had discovered some monumental truth that civilization was just too backwards to see.
They pretty much ruined the audience for new music. Symphony PR departments know a good way to kill ticket sales for a concert is to headline a "world premiere".
Wendy Carlos nailed when she said, "they killed music."
I probably shouldn't respond and get what you're trying to say, but if you're going to make that argument make it in a way that doesn't completely ignore tons of well documented history. I'm not disputing your argument about aesthetics (which is entirely personal and no one should dissuade), just the content.
Schoenberg is widely considered to be one of the greatest minds in the understanding of traditional functional harmony to ever live. When he fled to Los Angeles, he was the teacher great film composers sought out to improve their education and understanding. Much like Nadia Boulanger, he and his students very much could write a camp fire song.
Schoenberg created the post tonal system he did because he was an inventor. He invented hundred of things in his lifetime (most of them non music related). He saw that music had become so chromatic (Strauss, Wagner, etc) that there was no where for it to go if composers were to continue pushing forward. Whether or not pushing forward is what people agree with isn't really the issue- he felt like it was his responsibility as a member of a German lineage to find a system to hold harmony together as traditional functional harmony no longer applied to the music being written (much like what developed in after contrapuntal music ran its course with Bach).
Dislike his music? Cool. Imply that his work was pointless and clueless? nah. He was an incredibly intelligent and skilled composer with a deep understanding of music history and the German tradition he came from, and he sought to help preserve it's identity and traditions.
Milton Babbit, whose music I dislike, was a great expert on Tin Pan Alley, could sing and play on piano any of those tunes. If you got a beer with him he'd want to talk about American popular music, not academic music. But he wrote the music he did because that was how his brain worked and it was genuinely what he wanted to write.
Wendy Carlos studied with one of the major figured in academic music and has been able to do what she's done, in part, because of it.
In every type of music there are hacks, but don't insult people who aren't with a weak argument that is arbitrarily based.
I get what you're saying, but insult it well. Having a ton of things that simply aren't true undermines a very fair argument.
To the OP, I totally agree that there's nothing wrong with feeling like your music is simple. If it's the music that you want to write then you should stick with it.
One thing to also consider is Schoenberg's book on harmony. It's a really fantastic book for expanding understandings of traditional harmony and form. It just helps understand and become more fluent in functional harmony, which might help feeling like you can do more without needing to move towards other materials that don't appeal or feel genuine.
Also +100 to what Andrew suggested.
