Music styles, etc

[Raphael]

Something random that I've been thinking about for a while:

Aren't we long overdue for a fundamentally new music style? I've got the impression that the major music styles on offer have basically stayed the same since the 1990s, except that Techno is less popular than it was back then. I mean, I'm a bald early middle aged guy now, and if I had started having kids at a fairly young age, I could have teenaged kids now - and yet today's teenagers seem to listen to the same basic music styles that people my age listened to when I was a teenager. (Though not myself - my music tastes were always a bit old fashioned for someone of my generation.) Shouldn't today's teenagers listen to something much more different, something that barely sounds like music to me?

Those kids these days, with their weird music that actually sounds like music, and not like unsufferable noise as it's supposed to!

[Pole, the]

Aren't we long overdue for a fundamentally new music style? I've got the impression that the major music styles on offer have basically stayed the same since the 1990s,

Vaporwave — as in, the genuine genre, not the random slowed-up music videos… ohwait

[mèþru]

I find today's music pretty unbearable on the most part.

[alice]

Contentious opinion: popular music has gone to shit ever since it became possible for mediocrities to create crap quickly, i.e. some time in the late 1980's.

[linguoboy]

Contentious opinion: popular music has gone to shit ever since it became possible for mediocrities to create crap quickly, i.e. some time in the late 1980's.

How is it you think this was not possible earlier?

[Raphael]

Contentious opinion: popular music has gone to shit ever since it became possible for mediocrities to create crap quickly, i.e. some time in the late 1980's.

I don't really agree with that, but, either way, I've got the feeling that late 1980s music, on average, sounded a good deal more different from late 1990s music than late 1990s music sounded from today's music. Which, if my feeling is right, would be a bit weird, given that the late 1990s were closer in time to the late 1980s than to today. But then again, I don't really know much about music.

[mèþru]

I don't really agree with that, but, either way, I've got the feeling that late 1980s music, on average, sounded a good deal more different from late 1990s music than late 1990s music sounded from today's music. Which, if my feeling is right, would be a bit weird, given that the late 1990s were closer in time to the late 1980s than to today. But then again, I don't really know much about music.

I'd say that's true with the early 2010s, but I'm less sure with 2015 and 2016.

[Imralu]

Contentious opinion: popular music has gone to shit ever since it became possible for mediocrities to create crap quickly, i.e. some time in the late 1980's.

I don't really agree with that, but, either way, I've got the feeling that late 1980s music, on average, sounded a good deal more different from late 1990s music than late 1990s music sounded from today's music. Which, if my feeling is right, would be a bit weird, given that the late 1990s were closer in time to the late 1980s than to today. But then again, I don't really know much about music.

Hmm, but there is also the effect that music that you're less into tends to sound more the same and you don't hear the differences between genres as much as music moves away from your tastes.

[zompist]

A possibility: the persistence of rock music is one more thing we can blame on the boomers.

There's already a widely popular music style that the boomers can't stand: hip hop. But because the boomers were particularly numerous, their music wasn't replaced.

And because there's still a good market for it, there are new rock bands. I don't agree with alice that rock has gone downhill; some of my favorite groups are from the last decade or two.

[jal]

In the 50s/60s, 70s and 80s, music styles were for a (large?) part driven by technology: the advent of the electric guitar, the first synthesizers, better studios with more tracks on tape (so more channels), effect generators, keyboards, even better electronical sound generation. But since the 90s, we haven't seen any real "progress" in that area, so that for the last 20 years or so, we haven't seen any really different genres. So it's a lot of regurgitating older styles, some fusion (though most genres have been fused at one time or the other), but mostly same-old same-old.

(And there's a lot to say about the way we consume music nowadays compared to the times of music television, but I'm not sure that has to do with the types of music available per se.)


JAL

[mèþru]

One new technology in music is Auto-Tune. I don't really like it outside of the realm of turning funny videos with speaking voices into even funnier voices.

[mèþru]

On the other hand, I like listening to Herman Miller's Vocaloid videos in conlangs.

[Salmoneus]

I've wondered about this myself, but I think we may be making a false assumption here that the last 20th century is somehow the norm, and there are a lot of reasons to think that it's not...

1. The Collapse of Classical Music
Going into the 20th century, popular music consumption was dominated by what's now called 'classical' music. This probably only increased in the early decades of the century, as record companies made symphonies and operas, and the music of the great conductors and performers of the age - available to everybody. Film - particularly silent film - further enhanced the popularity of the tradition. Even outside the concert hall, popular music was largely of a piece with classical: Mahler may not immediately seem much like Music Hall, but the discontinuity is only there until you add in people like Gilbert & Sullivan (and a legion of similar but less memorable composers) who filled the gap. In the big picture, there was a pretty robust continuum between a popular song in the music hall, via lieder and round-the-piano domestic music and operetta, through into the lighter operas and the "pop concerts" into the really serious stuff. And indeed, many performers of popular songs - at least of the more serious kind - also performed opera arias and lieder. Even the American popular music scene was hardly differentiated - yes, there were distinct characteristics of 'jazz' music already, but they merged into ragtime and marching music and church music and musicals (ie operetta), and composers like Gershwin and Ellington saw no difficulty in bringing jazz inflections into their classical compositions.

But then the entire tradition collapsed. It had weakened by WWII, and imploded in the second half of the century - I think the last classical single to top the Billboard chart was in the early sixties, and the last album a few years after that.

You could say that that's due to the rise of pop music. But there's good reason to think that it was always going to happen. Postromanticism and modernism had reached a point where they were, I think in objective terms, extremely difficult for casual listeners. It was recognised within the tradition that there was a problem - hence the rise of neoromanticism and nationalism, and of irony and eclecticism in the work of Shostakovich and others. But the tradition just plunged further on, right into the morass of post-war neo-avante-gardism, from which there was no escape. And the thing is, this has all happened before, at least twice: when Ars Subtilior collapsed into madrigals around, say, 1420, and when the late Renaissance polyphony collapsed into the early Baroque monody in 1600. And arguably a third time when late Baroque ostentatious counterpoint gave way to early Classical homophonous, unornamented empfindsamkeit in the middle of the 18th century. Some sort of a shift toward more popular and simple music somewhere between 1900 and 1950 was therefore, while perhaps not inevitable, certainly predictable from the point of the view of the history of the tradition.

And as a result of development of unpopular classical music, a huge gap in the market opened up for new styles to fill. It's taken some time to fill them! Many people these days listen to more than one genre of pop music, effectively using the breadth of available genres to compensate for the emotional and structural narrowness of most of them - at first, the narrow confines of pop music could replace some functions of classical music, but were too homogenous to replace them all, and so more forms arose to fill more and more gaps. Now that people have more choices, there's less desire for a new thing to emerge to meet some unmet needs.

2. The aftershocks of the fall of Classical
Classical didn't disappear overnight. It staggered out, and that had a big effect on the history of popular music in turn. First you had attempts to reform within the tradition - people like Sibelius, for instance. Then you had attempts to move gently away from the tradition. Genres like jazz and the 'crooner' style (is there a proper word for that?) broke away from the academy, but still remained closely associated with it - popular singers still sang in a style similar to light opera, and they sang songs by classically-trained composers, often accompanied by classical orchestras and ensembles. The folk music revival, meanwhile, grew out of Nationalism and its desire to rediscover and return to ancient national traditions of music (and where necessary to invent them), and much of the work of collecting, popularising and recording folk songs was done by classical musicians and their fans.

A generation later, however, a lot of this was discarded as too close to the establishment, and the work of those musicians was recombined in a more genuinely chthonic way - not necessarily avoiding everything old (Elvis' cover of O Sole Mio was a massive hit, after all), but much more novel, and experimental, than what had come before. This being the sixties.

But since they'd broken away from the establishment and were experimenting on their own, they tried pushing their genre in new directions, which often involved resorting to classical music. This generation had still grown up with classical music, and many of its leading artists had grown up as classical music fans (like David Bowie) or had even trained as classical musicians (like Nina Simone, or half of the Velvet Underground), and it was possible for classical music to still hit the charts, either new classical music cunningly labelled as pop (like the Minimalist "Tubular Bells") or just sampled or covered or chopped up by pop artists (like Bach's "A Whiter Shade of Pale"). This knowledge of, and desire to emulate the sophistication of, classical music (cf the idea of the "rock opera" and "concept album" intended to prove rock's ability to stand alongside the operas and symphonies of the classical tradition) produced a distinct phase of pop music in the late sixties and seventies. That sophistication was in turn rejected in the late seventies and eighties in movements like punk and disco, by a generation who hadn't grown up in a culture dominated by classical music and who didn't see the appeal (or, in many cases, understand the techniques).

But aftershocks only last so long. Classical music has now become almost irrelevent [though I suspect it will continue to creep back into the mainstream in various ways], and pop music seems to have come, for now, to some sort of consensus about how much musical sophistication and continuity it wants. So that impetus for change has probably now passed, or at least become less urgent.

3. Instrumentation

A huge part of how music sounds is down to instrumentation. Take a classical piece and play it with a mediaeval ensemble (shawms, crumhorns, tabors etc) and it'll sound mediaeval. Or mediaeval(ish), at least. Contariwise, when I was watching this year's Screenwipe, it took me a moment to realise that the classical piece they were playing in between the bits of Satie was actually a song by David Bowie, only reorchestrated.

Three massive developments in sound occured in the 20th century. From outside music, recording arrived. Recording didn't just mean you could get music out to the public more easily - it also changed the nature of music overwhelmingly. Take singers: before recording, singing technique was all about being able to project immense volumes to fill a concert hall (or even just a loud nightclub or pub), and that requirement meant that an opera singer and a popular music hall or big band singer were basically operating in the same sphere, in terms of techniques and in terms of sound qualities produced. Give a singer a microphone and they can do all sorts of different things. First they sang more quietly and intimately - crooning. Then they realised they could give up a lot of the old technique altogether, and you got the far looser, more personal quality we associate with pop music. Honestly, that's probably the single biggest difference in sound - get an opera singer to sing the Beatles, and it's not classical exactly but it's not pop music either. And its gone further. The Beatles began a wave of experimentation with screaming, shouting, growling, snarling and so forth. Others tried basically whispering. These days some singers just use talking.
And its not just the voice. Before recording, the guitar was a novelty instrument - heard occasionally in spanish-inflected chamber music or in domestic settings, a good instrument for a newcomer to try to play a song for himself at home on - but essentially useless in performance because of its inability to play loudly. Give that learner a microphone, however, and he can play right into your ear. Recording effectively brought the guitar into the centre of popular music, creating a whole new sound. And as a result, you could chuck out most of the rest of the band.
This had huge effects going forward for two reasons. First, by reducing the skill and sheer numbers required to make music, it opened it up to waves of amateurs. And, second, by obliterating the old assumptions about orchestration, it allowed a new era of experimentation, as people tried out different combinations of instruments that previously wouldn't have been viable. It seems that things have settled down a bit now.
This was all helped, of course, by the way that recording in turn enabled mixing.

Alongside recording, there was amplification. There needed to be: music ensembles designed for a recording studio struggled to be heard on tour in a concert hall. But because the guitar is a godawful instrument that human ears cannot bear to hear, this necessitated the invention of the electric guitar, which further developed the new sound. [basically, the sound from a guitar is awful enough that it's only tolerable because you can't hear it properly; when you amplify it, it becomes distinctly unpleasant. So people found ways to reduce the guitariness of guitars and to pick up a purer sound.]

Which links to the third innovation, which actually grew out of classical music: electronic music. During the 20th century various breakthroughs were made in electronic manipulation and generation of music, which were increasingly applied to pop music. But at first, all these different attempts had distinct and limited sounds, which helped change the timbre of music in different eras and styles in distinctive ways.

So a huge part of why the eighties are the eighties, musically, is the fact that synthesizers had reached a certain level of sophistication, and a certain accessible price, and like many new things they were seized on enthusiastically. And the nineties stopped being the eighties in large part because people decided they'd gone too far with the synths - and because synths became better and less obvious. And because synths were turned to new purposes - i.e. the basslines and rhythm, where the new synths could make sounds that were louder, lower but more attractive than any previous instrument other than the organ (which has always faced portability and accessibility issues).

Technology continues to improve. But, in a way, too far. Change and style are often driven by impossibility - the attempt to do something that can't quite be done. The sound of classic rock electric guitars comes out of an attempt to amplify guitars in a melodious way, which didn't quite succeed, but its failure was distinctive. The sound of eighties synths comes out of an attempt to make electronically generating music that sounds like a real instrument - and it failed, but the fact it failed (that those synths sound so weird and unnatural) is what gives that music its character. Now there is less and less reason to be weird (ie to change) - because you can get the sound you want now. Indeed, we don't even have to put up with new singing styles anymore, since computers can take any individual and easily homogenise them into an established, commercially viable style of voice... so any new changes in timbre will have to be intentional, brave, and visionary, and those things are in short supply.

4. The media revolution

The 20th century saw concert halls replaced as the main venue for music (and for music celebrity) by first radio and then TV. These mediums, in which a tiny number of people directly control access to the medium that is distributed to everybody, create a particular form of artistic culture. And that culture is inherently prone to change. The media oligarchs compete by finding the next big thing - and when it's "found", they use their oligopoly to insist that everyone else accept that this is the next big thing. We get a quest for the big innovator, followed by a slump of imitation as everyone copies what the innovator did (even the things that aren't really part of why they were a success). To break out from the homogenous mass of imitators, the oligarchs need to race to find the next innovator, to bring about the next era. Of course, it's not quite that clearcut. But I do think that this narrowness of the pipeline is likely to, by itself, produce a pattern of successive eras and generations in music.

But with the proliferation of radio and TV channels, and then with the internet, that oligopoly breaks down. There stops being the One Big Thing that everyone else has to follow. Artists can try to find a niche - rather than having to persuade the publishers and the networks that they were either a) a safe and uncontroversial bet or b) the game-beaking Next Big Thing. As a result, we're likely to see fewer major fads (that spawn eras, I mean - one-shot-wonder fads are probably going to be more common than ever) and a culture based less on periodic revolution and more on compromise and evolution. That won't stop change, of course, but it will probably slow it down.

It's like Venus. Venus has no continental drift, so it seems that its volcanic urges are filled by periodically replacing the whole of its crust. Revolutionary eruption, and then a new era of crust. Whereas Earth releases the pressure bit by bit, here and there, with mid-ocean ridges and subduction zones and whatnot, and there aren't necessarily distinct eras that areso easy to spot.

5. Social changes
The 20th century - I mean look at it! It was a time of many really radical changes in society. And now... isn't. Well, it might be, but so far it doesn't look to be as radical as the 20th, at least in the developed world. [I was talking to someone the other day, who was remembering someone they new. When this woman was a child, she remembered the bicycle first being introduced into her village; when she was an old woman, she saw men land on the moon.] For one thing, since the days of the early records an immense tide of lower- and lower-middle class people have entered the music-buying market, thanks to technological progress and rising incomes. That may be a shift that can't be replicated.





....well that's a bigger post than I intended!

[jmcd]

If we are limiting ourselves to the most popular (well-liked, or rather well-bought) anglophone popular (non-folk, non-classical) music, then yes music from the past few years and decades is worse IMO. And Autotune, along with the music industry, has contributed to the idea that people very poor at singing should release music albums anyway, disguising their voices as semi-talented robots.

In the case of Autotune, the technology is simply a matter of disguise, rather than electric guitar or things like this which involved new instruments and new techniques (palm muting and beat blasts come to mind as technical innovations within rock music).

But there is a whole world of music out there waiting to be discovered, whether new or old. Styles have been invented and reinvented in all four corners of the globe.

Then again, it's a lso a question of personal taste and the extent to which you're willing to delve into the world of music.

Perosnally, out of releases from the past three years, most of my favourites are Germans who play kind-of folk: Santiano, Faun and Oonagh. The only one other band I listen to whole albums' worth from the past three years is Alestorm.

And of course Sal made a list of good points at the same as writing of my own post.

[Raphael]

Thank you very much, Salmoneus, I didn't think anyone would respond in so much detail!

Hmm, but there is also the effect that music that you're less into tends to sound more the same and you don't hear the differences between genres as much as music moves away from your tastes.

Fair point.

There's already a widely popular music style that the boomers can't stand: hip hop.

But Hip Hop is more than 30 years old!

In the 50s/60s, 70s and 80s, music styles were for a (large?) part driven by technology: the advent of the electric guitar, the first synthesizers, better studios with more tracks on tape (so more channels), effect generators, keyboards, even better electronical sound generation. But since the 90s, we haven't seen any real "progress" in that area, so that for the last 20 years or so, we haven't seen any really different genres. So it's a lot of regurgitating older styles, some fusion (though most genres have been fused at one time or the other), but mostly same-old same-old.

Yes, good point.

[alice]

I wrote something like this earlier, but it vanished. Aaargh,

I don't agree with alice that rock has gone downhill; some of my favorite groups are from the last decade or two.

Of course you can still find new music you'll like, if you look hard enough; I certainly don't subscribe to the old-fart theory that no worthwhile music will ever be produced again now that The Awesomest Recording Artists Of All Time have split up/committed suicide/sold out to The Mainstream [*]. But if you look carefully you'll notice that I said "popular music", the stuff that gets played on the radio day-to-day on the more commercial stations and fills the popular music charts ("the top 40"), and not "rock", which is arguably a niche market, albeit a largeish one.

The point is that, for a variety of reasons - some which have since been mentioned by other posters, but also including money, drugs, the music video, celebrity culture, changes in listening habits, and others - over the past three decades or so in popular music the crap has steadily drowned out the decent stuff to the point where the crap is all that there seems to be left. But this is in danger of turning into a rant for which I don't have the energy, you'll be glad to hear.

[*] or, more bathetically, since Spain stole the Eurovision Song Contest from Cliff in 1968, to quote something I read on another forum some time ago.

[Salmoneus]

now that The Awesomest Recording Artists Of All Time have split up/committed suicide/sold out to The Mainstream [*].

[*] or, more bathetically, since Spain stole the Eurovision Song Contest from Cliff in 1968, to quote something I read on another forum some time ago.

I blame the fall of Stalin. Things were never the same without the threat of the gulag...

[jal]

Of course you can still find new music you'll like

Yes, of course. But it (probably) won't be a "new sound" you've never heard before. There's a lot of nice indie music, but you can easily listen all day to music on sites like Noisetrade and hear a lot of pleasent music in all kinds of genres without actually hearing anything really refreshing and new.


JAL

[Imralu]

Aren't we long overdue for a fundamentally new music style? I've got the impression that the major music styles on offer have basically stayed the same since the 1990s, except that Techno is less popular than it was back then. I mean, I'm a bald early middle aged guy now, and if I had started having kids at a fairly young age, I could have teenaged kids now - and yet today's teenagers seem to listen to the same basic music styles that people my age listened to [...] Those kids these days, with their weird music that actually sounds like music, and not like unsufferable noise as it's supposed to!

Relevant.

[jal]

Relevant.

Thanks, that was funny.


JAL

[jmcd]

A huge part of how music sounds is down to instrumentation. Take a classical piece and play it with a mediaeval ensemble (shawms, crumhorns, tabors etc) and it'll sound mediaeval. Or mediaeval(ish), at least. Contariwise, when I was watching this year's Screenwipe, it took me a moment to realise that the classical piece they were playing in between the bits of Satie was actually a song by David Bowie, only reorchestrated.

On a smilar note, here's a traditional Gaelic song followed by an unrecognisable instrumental cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv5ZxBSNjYU.

EDIT:

@Imralu: I have difficulty telling what Juhtjuhp Rett is the alternative pronunciation for.

[Salmoneus]

A huge part of how music sounds is down to instrumentation. Take a classical piece and play it with a mediaeval ensemble (shawms, crumhorns, tabors etc) and it'll sound mediaeval. Or mediaeval(ish), at least. Contariwise, when I was watching this year's Screenwipe, it took me a moment to realise that the classical piece they were playing in between the bits of Satie was actually a song by David Bowie, only reorchestrated.

On a smilar note, here's a traditional Gaelic song followed by an unrecognisable instrumental cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv5ZxBSNjYU.

Which is more amusing because the "traditional" version is so, so Anglicised that it's hilarious. The harmony and the orchestration and the whole general style are classical music via early 20th century England music halls, with a bit of "what hippies in the sixties thought celtic music was like" thrown in. I suspect the melody has been rewritten from the original too, but that was probably done by an earlier generation.

But continuing this theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9hqJTAQyjQ - Dives and Lazarus, sung by [either Peter Bellamy or Royston Wood?] in traditional folk style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl3xFnoDZ_I - Dives and Lazarus, sung by Maddy Prior in a modernised folk revival style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjAzsqzT0CE - Dives and Lazarus, sung by June Tabor in an (almost) fully pop/rock style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQKSf9A3tXM - Kingsfold, brass band version (arranged Vinson)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tukAdJYs9cM - Psalter for Christian Worship, enthusiastic country-influenced American religious version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rr_4M5LQLo - I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say, extremely Anglican version with boy soprano and cathedral choir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kBk6HaLVTg - O Sing a Song of.... oh dear gods I think I'm going to vomit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH4OVm8nzXk - I Heard the Voice of wait no vomiting again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oICWJcOKvHE - Kingsfold, by Enoch Train - these people seem to want to include all the styles just by themselves... I sort of like the mediaeval bits, but the gushy pop-folk is a bit vomity again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z3pjXmNq2g - Come Thou Font of Every Blessing / If You Could Hie to Kolob - hilarious American singer-songwriter pop version (combines two songs - D&L shows up after 2:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4k4AOgmFA - Mormon Hard Rock Version (well, not that hard, but...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvitZaqSVys - saccharine mormon piano version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxy3QIJ_-i4 - We Sing the Mighty Power of God.... seriously, if you only listen to one, try this one! I convulsed with laughter. If you wanted to know what this song sounded like when performed by an overly friendly preacher with a strong accent on sesame street, accompanied by a mariachi band, here you go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEt2XdN_TbQ - pretend 'Irish' version sung by Serbians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydhnjYe-nc - irish folk revival crossed with German Heavy Metal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCLXBvrYAO4 - irish folk revival crossed with punk. (The Pogues)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpuxrUz3q_I - pretend drunk Irish pub version from the computer game Assassin's Creed 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_j6bqLTAE - early 20th century Irish pop music version. [John McCormack, an incredibly popular opera singer and film star who also sang popular Irish and English songs - he was the original performer of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary"]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGPNjtgrL2g - intentionally bad drunk version from the TV series The Wire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoP9iLwoos - five variants of Dives and Lazarus, by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Bloody hell, I was only going to do two or three, but there are so damn many!

[Dives and Lazarus is an old English song first recorded in the 16th century but believed to be older. It made its way to Ireland, where around 1900 it became the tune for "The Star of the County Down", a new pop song. Meanwhile, Vaughan Williams collected various versions of the song from traditional singers, which he arranged into his Five Variants. He also arranged the piece as a hymn tune, called "Kingsfold", which half a dozen different hymns have been set to (although I think the Mormons may have found the tune independently of RVW).



You've probably had enough, but just for fun....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJc9-60YQjo - Terance MacDonough, original(ish)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yMVIqqvP7I - Terance MacDonough, as a modern 'traditional' Irish folk song for fiddle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTFGGKXHWY - Terance MacDonough, with modern instruments in a Baroque style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIGP4-ByxGA - Terance MacDonough, in JJ Sheridan's modern classical piano arrangement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib1h-VMxcWY - The Return to Ulster, in lieder form by Ludwig van Beethoven (and vast reservoirs of angst)

"Lament for Terance MacDonough" or "Young Terance MacDonough" is a song by the blind harper, Turlough O'Carolan (1670-1730ish). Carolan represented a tradition distinct from the popular jigs and reels, as a cultured and trained composer who was influenced by the classical music of his day, while remaining apart from it. However, some of his music has entered the Irish folk music tradition. Meanwhile, his work was popularised again in the celtic folk music revival of the late 18th and early 19th century. One of the biggest figures in folk music in those days was Beethoven, who (albeit more for the cash than anything else) wrote massive cycles of hundreds of arrangements of Irish and Scottish songs, including this one. However, since people expected folk music to have words, ideally in a respectable language like English, the publishers comissioned Sir Walter Scott to write up some lyrics (and a new title) for it.

[linguoboy]

"Lament for Terance MacDonough" or "Young Terance MacDonough" is a song by the blind harper, Turlough O'Carolan

I initially misread that as "the blind rapper" and a whole new vista opened up before my eyes for a moment before being snuffed out like Biggy O'Smalls.

[Imralu]

Biggy O'Smalls.

Bahahahaha, made my night!

[jmcd]

A huge part of how music sounds is down to instrumentation. Take a classical piece and play it with a mediaeval ensemble (shawms, crumhorns, tabors etc) and it'll sound mediaeval. Or mediaeval(ish), at least. Contariwise, when I was watching this year's Screenwipe, it took me a moment to realise that the classical piece they were playing in between the bits of Satie was actually a song by David Bowie, only reorchestrated.

On a smilar note, here's a traditional Gaelic song followed by an unrecognisable instrumental cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv5ZxBSNjYU.

Which is more amusing because the "traditional" version is so, so Anglicised that it's hilarious. The harmony and the orchestration and the whole general style are classical music via early 20th century England music halls, with a bit of "what hippies in the sixties thought celtic music was like" thrown in. I suspect the melody has been rewritten from the original too, but that was probably done by an earlier generation.

Well I never! I can't seem to find a more traditional recording of the same to compare it with. Could you go into greater detail as to what makes the music, in particular the harmony, anglicised? The instrumentation I can half-hear (I hear marching band drumming which doesn't seem something that would have been found (at least not a great deal) in the Highlands prior to the mid 18th century at the earliest)

But continuing this theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9hqJTAQyjQ - Dives and Lazarus, sung by [either Peter Bellamy or Royston Wood?] in traditional folk style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl3xFnoDZ_I - Dives and Lazarus, sung by Maddy Prior in a modernised folk revival style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjAzsqzT0CE - Dives and Lazarus, sung by June Tabor in an (almost) fully pop/rock style
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQKSf9A3tXM - Kingsfold, brass band version (arranged Vinson)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tukAdJYs9cM - Psalter for Christian Worship, enthusiastic country-influenced American religious version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rr_4M5LQLo - I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say, extremely Anglican version with boy soprano and cathedral choir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kBk6HaLVTg - O Sing a Song of.... oh dear gods I think I'm going to vomit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH4OVm8nzXk - I Heard the Voice of wait no vomiting again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oICWJcOKvHE - Kingsfold, by Enoch Train - these people seem to want to include all the styles just by themselves... I sort of like the mediaeval bits, but the gushy pop-folk is a bit vomity again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z3pjXmNq2g - Come Thou Font of Every Blessing / If You Could Hie to Kolob - hilarious American singer-songwriter pop version (combines two songs - D&L shows up after 2:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR4k4AOgmFA - Mormon Hard Rock Version (well, not that hard, but...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvitZaqSVys - saccharine mormon piano version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxy3QIJ_-i4 - We Sing the Mighty Power of God.... seriously, if you only listen to one, try this one! I convulsed with laughter. If you wanted to know what this song sounded like when performed by an overly friendly preacher with a strong accent on sesame street, accompanied by a mariachi band, here you go!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEt2XdN_TbQ - pretend 'Irish' version sung by Serbians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydhnjYe-nc - irish folk revival crossed with German Heavy Metal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCLXBvrYAO4 - irish folk revival crossed with punk. (The Pogues)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpuxrUz3q_I - pretend drunk Irish pub version from the computer game Assassin's Creed 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_j6bqLTAE - early 20th century Irish pop music version. [John McCormack, an incredibly popular opera singer and film star who also sang popular Irish and English songs - he was the original performer of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary"]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGPNjtgrL2g - intentionally bad drunk version from the TV series The Wire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoP9iLwoos - five variants of Dives and Lazarus, by Ralph Vaughan Williams

Bloody hell, I was only going to do two or three, but there are so damn many!

[Dives and Lazarus is an old English song first recorded in the 16th century but believed to be older. It made its way to Ireland, where around 1900 it became the tune for "The Star of the County Down", a new pop song. Meanwhile, Vaughan Williams collected various versions of the song from traditional singers, which he arranged into his Five Variants. He also arranged the piece as a hymn tune, called "Kingsfold", which half a dozen different hymns have been set to (although I think the Mormons may have found the tune independently of RVW).

I had previously heard a few variants of Star of the County Down but certainly not this many, and Dives and Lazarus was unknown to me.