Music through the ages. Here's a playlist; share yours! (+Poll)Music 

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What are your favorite decades of music? (Limited to three choices)


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dylansan

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I was listing to "Sing, Sing, Sing" by Benny Goodman, and started putting together a playlist. I decided to stick to a theme of instrumental songs, and tried to pick danceable numbers to show how dance music has changed over time.

Here's the Spotify playlist.

What's your favorite era of music? Have any interesting insight into how music has changed over time, or have a playlist spanning several decades? Please share!

I'm just in the mood to talk about music. :)
 
All right, I'll bite. :dopey:

I listen to a lot of jazz and swing, as it's one of the musical genres I actively perform. Within jazz, it's changed hugely in the past hundred years (aka its entire existence). Personally, my favorite era of what we call "jazz" is right where "Sing, Sing, Sing" belongs, where jazz was dance music - and pop music! - and big bands like Glenn Miller's, Benny Goodman's, Tommy Dorsey's, etc. ruled the day. The Stan Kenton Orchestra, which came at the end of that period, is (usually) my favorite big band. After that, jazz began the shift from dance music to art music with the advent of bebop - and that's where I stop being interested. Granted I hear and perform bebop on a regular basis because that's the prevailing style amongst jazz musicians here, but most of it lacks what I love about jazz. The great bebop players like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane are unlistenable to me. Just fast notes upon fast notes upon fast notes...at a certain point it just becomes noise, and however genius their harmonic vocabulary is (and it is often very genius) the music is gone in my opinion. I can dig the "Cool School" (Miles Davis, et al), which is a lot slower and more subdued, but it's still not something that I listen to for fun. Continuing on chronologically, some post bop stuff I do like. Some hard bop brought back rhythm-oriented (rather than lick oriented) jazz, and the introduction of Afro-Cuban influences around this time spawned one of my very favorite forms of music, Latin jazz. Nowadays there's a lot of contemporary jazz I really don't like, but a lot that I do - especially Japanese jazz fusion (but that's another tangent altogether).

It's hard to say what my overall favorite era of music is because it really depends on what genre. Classical is another genre I'm heavily involved in, and my favorite period of classical music is the Romantic period, which includes composers such as Wagner, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Strauss, and Mahler. However, I also really like the Baroque (particularly Vivaldi), and earlier (such as Gabrieli and Josquin des Prez). Josquin, who lived from the late 15th to early 16th centuries, wrote achingly beautiful sacred music, including a moment in one of his masses that I believe to be the best moment in all of Western music.

If we're talking rock, my favorite era would be the '70s and '80s. Lots of good stuff happening of course, but particularly prog rock and my favorite band (the Alan Parsons Project) were around then so that's the main draw for me.

There does happen to be stuff from the 21st century that I like, though. Eurobeat is a guilty pleasure of mine and I love it to death (definitely my favorite "pop" genre and one of my favorite genres full stop), and I also very much enjoy early 2000s trance. Finally, contemporary film and video game soundtracks make up a large part of what I listen to.

Sorry for the long post, but...you got me talking about music. :P I might throw together a Spotify playlist eventually.
 
@Driving Park

I share your opinions in a lot of aspects. I have trouble enjoying some bebop because I just can't follow it. The best songs for me are the ones I can sing or hum along to, and bebop can just be too unstructured sometimes.

As far as latin jazz, though it may not be quite the same, I'm a huge fan of Deodato, Roy Ayers, and Satnana, as well as some older, more basic Latin musicians like Tito Puente. Jazz fusion and all that is good too, though I'm not always sure what to think of when I hear these genres.

In classical music, I'm not very well versed, but I have been trying to explore a bit more. I actually did a lot of searching for classical or "art music" from the 20th century and on. Steve Reich and Terry Riley are probably my favorite composers in that category, but I have a soft spot for Ravel's Bolero and several of Gerschwin's pieces.

I can't say I have very discerning tastes, given I'm also a fan of disco and 80s pop. I'm glad to see bands like Daft Punk force disco and funk back into modern pop, and I'm also happy to hear Chic are releasing a new album and have put out a great single recently.

Not to sure about Eurobeat but I always enjoy a good Breakbeat or French House song. GT4 really shaped a lot of my music tastes with several techno and Drum'n'Bass songs that were unforgetable for me. And I never thought I could enjoy hip hop or rap until I couldn't bring myself to disable the hip hop songs from GT4's soundtrack.

I would love to see a spotify playlist from you. It seems your tastes are similar to mine, though it will probably be a bit jarring to hear Debussy followed immediately by Darude. ;)
 
@dylansan

Well, "Latin jazz" as a term is hugely broad. Tito Puente, Ray Barretto and so on are the bread and butter, and moving through Oscar Hernandez you get to things like what Wayne Wallace is writing, which is a form of Latin jazz that combines folkloric Afro-Cuban, salsa, funk, bebop, and any other number of musical influences into one new sound. For me, I love it all. When I first discovered it the first time I played with a Latin jazz group I knew that I had found something I had been missing without knowing.

Contemporary classical music is sort of a hot topic for those in that world. I do like a very select few of modern and postmodern classical music (some Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Arvo Pärt come to mind), but I find most of it even more lacking in musical content than the most frenetic, cerebral bebop. "Atonal" works such as those by Schoenberg (early 20th century), Boulez (mid 20th century), and many composition students nowadays are nothing short of sickening to me. That medium can be cool and effective, but composers trying to pass off what can only be described as noise as deep, emotional art on par with the masterworks is directly similar to what is occurring in modern art, what with monochromatic paintings of basic geometric shapes somehow being sold for millions. While some of this music is arguably more accessible to the average listener because it is typically a lot shorter than, say, a 90-minute Mahler symphony, there is no musical reward of any kind. You might like Stravinsky; he is an early 20th-century composer who wrote some very famous works that are quite contemporary. I'll put his famous Rite of Spring on the hypothetical playlist that might become real at some point.

I grew up listening to disco thanks to my dad, so I'm a disco fan as well. In fact, it's hard to find a genre of music that I don't enjoy. As far as I can tell, modern country, modern rap, the aforementioned contemporary classical music, and a good chunk of bebop are the only genres I don't enjoy listening to good examples of (as there is bad music nestled within every genre). Agreed about what Daft Punk is doing! I'm also a big funk fan (Tower of Power, naturally), and to see funk get on the scene again is nice. It's interesting that Uptown Funk got as popular as it did, being as it's basically a mediocre funk track.

Eurobeat is definitely not for everyone. :P The energy level is usually extremely high, much higher than trance or many other forms of EDM. For me, it's addicting. For...pretty much everyone else, it's too much.
 
@Driving Park
Hah, I was actually going to mention that Schoenberg is like the bebop of the classical world. I think you've hit the nail on the head. Atonal stuff is generally not my cup of tea. I do try to appreciate and understand it but it's not something I ever listen to in my free time.

I have a stronger appreciation for minimal as opposed to atonal. Every note counts in a minimal piece, and to make an emotional impact is pretty impressive. In bebop however, it's almost like there are too many notes, to the point that none of them are important, and any could be removed without changing the song.
 
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