Project 1 - Writing About a Topic to an Unfamiliar Audience Using Simile, Metaphor, and Analogy

I see you over there with your mohawk and your piercings and your heavy-metal-pop-dubstep music blasting out of your expensive 8-decible headphones. But do you know what really rocks?

Classical Music.

No, don’t you walk away from me. Sit down son, you’re going to learn something today.

First off, most of the classical music you think you hear isn’t actually classical music. The first era of organized western music was Baroque, then came Classical, then Romantic and finally 20th century, which is weird as heck. But I digress.

Second off, the musicians of the past really knew how to wow an audience. Handel dropped the bass more than Skrillex does. They had the challenge of performing for people who could go to see different shows everyday, not just once or twice a year in desert music festivals. And the people they performed for were so rich, they could just walk out of the concert! Concerts were treated more like an IPod on shuffle than a special occasion; they could skip whenever they wanted. So imagine basically if Fall Out Boy had their audience fall out halfway through the first song. That can do some serious confidence damage.

So composers had to have real confidence to go on stage and put a piece out there. They would have people not only walking out, but sometimes falling asleep during their concerts too! Handel actually wrote the Surprise Symphony to wake up people who had the gall to fall asleep while he was performing. Go listen to it on Youtube on loud. I dare you.

So you may think that some pop musicians are amazing, having started playing at age 10. Do you know how old Mozart was when he wrote his first song? That BAMF was two years old. He wrote “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, which means you actually do know some Classical music. Ha! Anyway, he was taken on tour with his money-grabbing dad who noticed his kid had a talent for banging on the piano in an ear-pleasing way, and landed a spot at court writing music for the King of France, where he would reportedly not write down a single note any earlier than the day before a show, because he composed everything in his head. He eventually kicked out of the court for flirting with all the ladies. He was like the Lindsay Lohan of the music world.

You may now argue that the music of today has far more “meaning” and is more “revolutionary” than the music of the past. But may I remind you that it used to be only acceptable to listen to music in church. It was very limiting, like if Deadmau5 was only allowed to use 1 turntable with 6 different noises. But then the musicians of the past decided it wasn’t cool to only be able to write songs about god, and decided to do whatever the heck they want. If that isn't revolutionary, I don't know what is.

You may like your metalhead rock, and thats fine, but guys like these are what got us here. They discovered what cadences worked, what instruments sounded good together, and how to really wow and audience. So don’t scoff at the greats for not being as “hardcore” as the musicians of today. They were hardcore before hardcore was invented.