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Originally Posted by pbradley
And John Coltrane and various modern composers are easier to qualify as real music? What right does composition have to quality? It should be taken as indicative to the placement of the composition class if it isn't advanced enough to address complex music.
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I don't care about defining what makes music 'real'. It's something that isn't important to me. 'Real' in most musical conversations is understood as 'authentintically part of x'. Willie Nelson is not 'real' music in the context of a lecture on hip-hop.
Composition, as I either said or alluded to or intended to allude to, defines the parameters of description. It also tends to expand the vernacular of description. This is a null-statement.
The quality in the context of modern composition is not the same quality as in, say, Khoomei singing.
If I was teaching a class on music (and thank fuck I'm not), I would be very inclined to dismiss lots of sorts of music not because they're not good but because they're not conducive to the purposes of education. If, as a lecturer, I'd had 30+ years of people mentioning the Beatles, I'd probably dismiss them out of hands not on the grounds of their merits, but on the grounds that I'd be paid to explain fugues, not whether straberry fields forever is 'really' about acid.
I'm not intimating a sense of quality in any, I just reckon it just seems very self-explanatory that in a classical music class certain sorts of music are not really part of the deal. Obviously, you're right that Coltrane and the like potentially provide a challenge to that, and you could always put forward a Simon Williams-esque argument for Wonky, or whatever, ought to be included in the critical lexicon. But there is definitely a time and a place for that sort of criticism, and I imagine the hitherto mentioned professor was intimating this.