My World View: My tastes in music
Not really philosophy, but this is where it cropped up.
- I like much of the music of Buxtehbude, J.S. Bach, and other composers of that era, and much of the music of many composers since up to the contemporary.
- I find most Tudor era and other pre-Buxtehude music boring because of the lack of harmonic development.
- I find atonal music and much modern "serious" or "classical" music unattractive, including much Britten, most of the generation of Harrison Birtwhistle and Pierre Boulez.
- I find much opera of every era rather boring, that from Monteverdi to Donizetti because of the lack of harmonic edge, and most of the solo aria sections of all opera because of the lack of orchestral depth.
- Among the vast output of Mozart, I find the symphonies most listenable, and also concertos — those near-symphonic works for one (or sometimes two or more) solo instruments plus a full orchestra (or sometimes only a string orchestra). Likewise Beethoven and Schubert and from that generation through to the mid 20th century. My top choices are Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius, Tchaikowsky, Rachmaninov.
- In the 20th century, chronologically, Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, then Gershwin, and after him increasingly the jazzmen: Ellington, George Shearing, and the jazz bandsmen and song writers right from 1900 on.
- I like Beach Boys songs, Beatles, and a scattering of tracks from albums of others from the 1960s onwards; but I find most music by most of the performers of the popular music of the last 40 years of no interest. Most f them I couldn't tell apart or know how one differed from another, even those my age and above. I recognize just a few Rolling Stones tracks. But for such names as Led Zeppelin, Status Quo, Slade, and a vast list of others I would not know one track, or the sound, of one of them from another if you paid me. Some (just a few) I know to put a name to a sound and really loathe, and the Pet Shop Boys are an example, but only because they were in a BBC TV trailer repeated at one time so often that I both saw and heard it, and came to know who it was.