What exactly is "Musical Genius"?

[kenneth]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Beyond Within:
[B]There seems to be two types:

performance and compositional.

I have a problem with applying the word "genius" to someone who has lots of innate music talent, but cannot compose anything inventive. Are musical savants "genius's"?

So I do not think there is a performance "genius", to me your not a genius unless you create a work of genius.

No one could say that you opinion is either right og wrong. A genius is just a person that is supirior to the average mind. If someone could show you things that is hidden to you, you would proberly say that the person is a genius. A preformer in a tv show, is he/she genius as well?

[Tegan]

Originally posted by Beyond Within:
I however, fail to see a degree of profundity in the works of, for instance, Tchiachovsky to justify that position.

Do you dislike Tchaikovsky, or just not find him a genius? Genius is a pretty controversial term, but I think Tchaikovsky was an incredible composer.

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
Steppenwolf wrote : "But I think my original point extends beyond those who loose their talent through drug abuse. As just a single example (and I could name many more) - although Paul McCartney tried marijuana in the Beetles-days, I don't think he ever became a regular user, and unlike John Lennon, got married, had children and lived a fairly respectable ordinary lifestyle .. and yet whatever song-writing ability he had has long ago dried up. It lasted for a while, through the seventies - Band on the Run and Moll of Kintyre, etc. - the songs he has written recently fall far, far below the standard that you would expect from someone who co-wrote Sergeant Pepper. And there are many other examples in pop music, of stars unblemished by serious drug use, whose talent dries up with age in the same way. There seems to be something about pop music that it is the product of youthful energy, whereas the ability to write classical music just gets better and better as the composer matures."

Paul McCartney's settled family-oriented lifestyle is not incompatible with a fairly regular use of marijuana as a recreational drug. As for the others you mention, I think it is difficult to know whether or not they've used marijuana regularly. As I've said, I believe that in spite of its relativiely benign reputation, this drug can sap creativity when used fairly regularly over a period of time. Yet any rock composer who uses it this way would not be noticeable as a 'serious' drug user the way one who used the 'harder' drugs would be.

Urtextmeister wrote:
"Traditionally, I think the term genius is applied to those in the classical fields that require discipline and some amount of "learning." The peasant out in the field noodling on a flute is not a genius, but Beethoven, inspired by that sound and immortalizing it in the Pastoral symphony is. Can the same be said for pop music--rock and roll, heavy metal, etc,--types of music that have been around barely fifty years?"

Try a hundred years. As I said yesterday, although jazz is generally unappreciated by posters on this board, between 1900 and about 1960 or 1970 there was a great deal of high-quality art music produced in this pop-based form. And to my mind at least two improvisors who fully deserve the name genius, Armstrong and Parker. You just gotta take me on faith with jazz, guys; and not judge it by whatever indifferent stuff you've happened to hear, or by the fact that you may not like the sound of it upon relatively light acquaintance. Think of yourselves as your friends who know classical music thru the first four notes of B's 5th, a little Liberace, and the Lone Ranger theme. I've been experiencing the arts for a long time, and I know genius when I see or hear it. These two are the real thing, but neither lasted artistically past his late thirties, and indeed Parker was dead by that time because of drugs.

Armstrong is to me a good example of the results of regular marijuana use. The trumpet solos he recorded in the 1920s and 30s (not afterwards) are on the high level of variation-form music by the great classical composers. They are not peasant-noodling-on-the-pipes, but contain music of great emotional and formal power, as well as a use of rhythm for emotional and formal ends which was unknown to the classical composers (and is also unknown to rock musicians). These solos are restricted by the 3-minute recording span of those years. As a live improvisor he was known to play and improvise for 20 or 25 minutes at a time. As an artistic influence during this early period he almost singlehandedly put jazz on the map and can be thought of as a combination of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and one or two others, all rolled into one.

Rock is more recent and will need time to achieve some historical perspective. But some of the high creativity that has been exhibited I think goes way beyond what a canny record producer can accomplish thru artifice. To my particular taste, I think Bob Dylan before 1975 was on a very high level, and descended to the plains thru marijuana use, and perhaps other drugs, also. I recommend the albums "Blood on the Tracks" of 1974, or "New Morning" of about 1970, to anyone who may like rock but not be appreciative of earlier, non-protest music by Dylan.

I agree that pop-based music such as rock, jazz, soul (not mentioned here yet), etc. is in a shorter form than classical music. I don't think there is anything inherent in this that prevents it from being great. Shorter pieces by the classical composers are great: short-form variations are great, as in many of Beethoven's variations and in some of his piano sonata adagios; in Bach's Chaconne and Passacaglia; in Brahms' two great sets of variations on themes by Handel and Haydn. Shakespeare's sonnets, a huge amount of other great short lyrical poetry by many poets from Sappho onwards, the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, the Decameron of Bocaccio, the sketches of Rembrandt and Watteau, well, I could go on and on about short forms. They are a fine outlet for genius.

The problem is what is it about pop-based music in our times that leads to artistic burnout? This is not an across-the-board contemporary phenomenon. I like the work of several living architects, writers of novels, and filmmakers who are getting older and older but still producing art of very high quality. The American writer Philip Roth is burning with a bright flame in his seventies, producing a great novel almost every year or two. Why not these pop musicians?

I once again suggest the reason is not the shortness of the form or the times we live in, but that they are using marijuana and/or other drugs habitually, and thereby losing long-term contact with their own creative wellsprings.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited January 23, 2004).]

There is something very strange about 'pop' music it has to be said.
When you look at the history of it from Bill Hailey onwards, you see a handful of pleasant songs and balanced against that an immense load of grief and misery and both practicioners and followers succumbed to drugs. The amount of wasted lives that 'pop' music has left in its trail is truly horrifying. Compare this with classical music. In virtually every case it leads to lives which are enobled and eriched, and people who live a sort of golden mean, without too much excesses.
I think this is because 'pop' music is really a very degraded form of folk music, but because it has cut itself off from its roots, it is sterile, banal, and ultimately pointless.
Of course modern classical music in a sense is heading this way also, because modern society is, to say the least of it, rather confused.
Drugs and rock music go together as a sort of 'social suicide'. I am sure Beethoven, who was an appreciator of folk music of course, would have been virtually rendered speechless by the sounds produced by heavy metal bands and the like today. And would never be able to understand how anyone could ever listen to it.

Rock music is of course dumb, and skilled practicioners like the Rolling Stones find it quite easy to exract and exploit their
audiences with colossal prices for their tickets. Good business for the Stones, but, Oh dear! their really are some vulnerable people out there!. Just think you can get an excellent recording of Beethoven for a few dollars and it will do more for you, I would respectfully suggest, than listening to rock music.



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited January 26, 2004).]

[Rob]

I suppose "Musical Genious" is a rather simple thing, yet very rare. It's a "surpluss" of ability which expresses its self through the right side of the brain in whatever area controls "musical ability". I know that sounds cold and clinical, but when given a clinical question, above all NO POETRY.
It's obvious that Beethoven and others were posessed this ability to an staggering degree. There have been studies with brain scanning which show this heightened ability in certain people. One is most likely born with this. It is not merely learned, it's part of the person's makeup, education reinforces and fosters it's growth.

In my own experience, my parents were told that I was "retarded" and I'd never learn to read or write, and I'd certainly never be an artist like my mother. I was, infact, dyslexic and synathstaisic, and I've found these "disabilities" to be very helpful both in performance and composition. Dyslexia enables me to know a phrase in retrograde and inversion fairly quickly, and synasthasia enables me to recognize music by color, smell, taste and shape.
But, I digress... Enough about me,
Beethoven rules!