Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2015–2023years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Mozart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2zDJPIgwc
My favorite piece of all time. It encapsulates what I want to feel about life
- "I know I like "classical" music, but I dont know what. The problem is getting to know it. The barrier to entry is so large."
Decades ago when I was young the percentage of people listening to classical music was much higher that the 1% shown here. I can't tell you what that percentage was exactly but as an illustration quite a few radio stations that now play pop or rock music were once classical music stations.
Also, when I was at school music was a compulsory subject and we didn't listen to pop or rock music in lesson time but rather classical music. And it wasn't just listening, I still recall us kids having to follow full orchestral musical scores in time with records. One such work that still sticks vividly in my mind is Morning from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x463zoWpiVI. This score was chosen for us kids because it's comparatively easy to follow.
What that amounts to is that we had much more exposure to classical music at a very early age and thus we had become familiar with it even though pop and rock were also completing for our attention. Moreover, we were deliberately exposed to the 'pops' from the classical repertoire at that young age specifically because these works were much easier for young minds to assimilate. For example, Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Ravel's Boléro, Dvořák's Humoresques, Rossini's William Tell Overture (aka the Lone Ranger theme music)—this was another score I recall following at school.
That classical music cultural background has now essentially all but died so it's little wonder that the classics are left to the 1% or so of Diehards like me.
The trouble is that the percentage of the population who has the potential to like classical music hasn't changed but rather, unfortunately, it's the opportunity to be exposed to it at an influential age that has.
- The story in this challenge reminds me of one I heard from Peter Samson, one of the original MIT hackers who worked on their PDP-1, at the Computer History Museum. Back in the early 1960s Peter, a classical music buff and musician in his own right, wrote a four voice music synthesizer program [1] - one of the first ever written, I have to think - for the PDP-1 and arranged several classical and baroque pieces for it.
Sometime in the 2000s, I think, when the Computer History Museum was restoring its PDP-1, they stumbled on some tapes or something that held inputs - entire classical works like Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - for Peter's synthesizer. Unfortunately they couldn't locate a copy of the synthesizer program itself but, being one of the OG hackers, Peter was able to examine the data on the tapes, reverse-engineer the data format he'd invented decades prior, and write a brand new synthesizer for the PDP-1 that was compatible with the original tapes. All of those adages about data structures being more important than code suddenly rang true in a very real way :-)
He told the story over a live demonstration of the PDP-1 playing music with his program - it's a wonderful experience and if you have the chance to see it, you shouldn't pass it up [2]. If you have a chance to see him at the Computer History Museum, don't pass it up! Steve Russell joins him with a Spacewar! demonstration (you get to play it!) and they're happy to answer questions and recount stories about their old days in the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club :-)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmony_Compiler
[2]: They have the PDP-1 demo on two days of every month, twice a day. http://www.computerhistory.org/hours/
