Music as torture?

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,colin
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 07:04 AM

banjos and bagpipes.. played singularly or collectively

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Senoufou
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 07:16 AM

I adore banjos and indeed bagpipes. There's a chap who stands outside Marks and Spencer in Norwich piping away, wearing a very smart Highland dress complete with hairy sporran. It always brings tears to my eyes (I lived and worked in Scotland for some time) and I usually give him a few bob. Banjos have a sort of trying-to-be-cheerful-in-spite-of-adversity air about them. And seeing a homeless person sitting on the pavement sadly blowing a tin whistle makes us both tearful. My husband knows what poverty and destitution are, and he's the first to succumb and put some coins in the 'musician's' hat.
Bodhrans...well, why not? I say. 'All God's chillun got a place in de kwaya' and all that.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 08:50 AM

Well if it were owt to do with me, all God's bodhran-owning chillun would go to heaven with the bloody things wrapped round their necks, and the sooner the better!   See how I don't wish them ill? 👹

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Senoufou
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 09:08 AM

You utter beast Steve :) At least you're directing them to heaven and not the Other Place.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Will Fly
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 11:04 AM

The Other Place is reserved for people at sessions with shaky eggs, pineapples, bones and other assorted rattles.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 11:11 AM

You forgot rain tubes. Although I once saw someone with one of those at a session seriously piss off a rather uppity recorder player...

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Senoufou
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 12:39 PM

Oh I had a rain tube once! Are they those large stalks (size of a didgeridoo) of a cactus-type plant, with the thorns pushed into the inside, then filled with broken shells or some such? When you up-end them the shells fall down and it's supposed to sound like rain? I used to do it in front of our cats and they would freak out! But when we moved house, I sold it.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 02:48 PM

A wise decision!

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Senoufou
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 03:16 PM

Well I think my husband was a bit afraid of it. Anything with so-called 'magical properties' is a bit off-putting for him. And we get enough rain as it is!

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,DTM
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 07:23 PM

Re bodran players. Alas, I am sorry to say I don't like them -even the good ones. Apart from "I will go" they just don't t add anything good to a song.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: CupOfTea
Date: 06 Dec 16 - 08:30 PM

Covering the facetious and serious sides of the question:

Hearing someone slaughter a song that is precious to you.

Any song that has ear worm potential played repeatedly till it wears a groove in your brain.

Too much too loud anything- gets to the physically painful point. Experienced this ONCE: National Lampoon's road show spoofing Woodstock, "Lemmings" ended with the Pink Floyd-like band cranking up the volume till the audience started leaving in droves. The vibration made your insides rattle, and empty chairs moved across the floor. Painful gimmick.

Something with a catchy tune that makes you want to sing along that has horrid lyrics you wouldn't utter unless subjected to some physical torture.

I'm with Senoufou on torture being wrong as well as ineffective, and truly don't like the idea of any music, however bad, out of tune, or inane it might be, used as a weapon against someone.

Joanne, who has already exceeded her lifetime allotment of "MacArthur Park"

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Mr Red
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 04:48 AM

Call me a philistine.
Radio, records etc is "Mental Wallpaper"
I prefer to participate. As a musician (OH! OK a drummer) or a dancer.
So I guess if a band don't understand music for feet then torture is close.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 04:55 AM

Any minimalist crap by Steve Reich.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 09:20 AM

I love and play music semi-professionally but I NEVER listen to music on the radio (don't have a TV).
I do listen to CDs etc I've mainly chosen my self. Why on earth listen to somebody else's choice of music?
It's bad enough to listen to a friend's choice while visiting, but on a long term basis listening to other people's choice of music??? Noooooo... that IS torture!

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: leeneia
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 09:46 AM

Surely one reason people listen to radio is to hear new music and new musicians.
==================
Here's a form of musical torture for me:

I go to a symphony orchestra performance. I'm seated fifteen minutes early so I can read the program and compose myself for beautiful music. Out comes a trombone player. He sits himself on stage, starts practicing his hardest bit in a given key.

Out comes a viola player. Does the same thing, only it's from a different piece, in a different key. Out comes an oboist...

You get the idea. Soon there are a lot of people on stage producing a god-awful musical madhouse. If a melody is like a lovely fragrance wafting through the air, then this is like a mental patient with really bad BO.

I've quit going to the symphony because of this. I'm a music lover, not an item of livestock.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 09:49 AM

Is there any worse experience than waiting in a draughty tyre bay on a wet November afternoon watching a greasy skinhead in filthy overalls fixing your car as Radio 1 blares out from a tinny ghetto-blaster that isn't quite tuned in?

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 09:52 AM

Are you sure it was just practice, leeneia, and not one of those trendy new pieces of avant-garde music? 🤓

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Will Fly
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 10:33 AM

Well - that's quite a mixed list of dislikes.

I have to say I'm quite fond of the occasional mass tune-up and mini-practice by orchestras before the leader appears and they tune up properly prior to playing the first piece. To me it's a pleasurable cacophony of anticipation, and I like picking out the individual bits. Great fun.

As for the radio, I don't listen in the house because I'm usually playing or practising or arranging my own stuff, but a long car journey can produce some new finds, depending on what you listen to. And I like a classical music programme or a jazz programme while I'm cooking. I also like friends sending me material or playing me sounds they like if I'm at their house.

Good grief, how would we learn about different music and new, potentially interesting music if we didn't expose ourselves to other sources of sound information? I can play my own choice of music on CDs, SDHC discs or my iPod in the car any time, but I can also weary of just hearing the music that I've collected constantly played back to me. There's nothing greater than hearing something that you've never heard before, something interesting that tickles the music buds and makes you want to hear more, to get home and get an instrument out and play it or research it.

Which is the joy of a good session. We can beat up the same old tunes every time, but it's always a treat when a stranger introduces a new tune, or one of the regulars plays something new and we all say, "Hey, what was that called?"

If we're lucky, we never stop learning.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: leeneia
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 01:30 PM

Good one, Steve.

But yes, I'm sure it's not avant garde music because it's not listed in the program.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 01:43 PM

That's just about the only way you can tell with some of it! 😂

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Stephen Harvey
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 01:44 PM

Any song performed poorly (as per the example in Will Fly's initial post) but especially a performance designed solely to allow us plebs to bask in the glory of the performer's impressive vocal acrobatics, never mind the disservice it does to the song.
This seems mostly to occur in 'pop' music (however one defines that - and some of which I enjoy) where it seems to be a horrible mutation of Black Gospel styles. It works in the original but seems ill-conceived in adaptation.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Pete from seven stars link
Date: 07 Dec 16 - 05:50 PM

Back to the OP link . I thought the dog one was hilarious.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: GUEST,Guest 7 Dec 0920
Date: 08 Dec 16 - 02:45 PM

I don't listen to music programmes on the radio because however much I might respect the presenter, they work from playlists of APPROVED music from the station owner. There is very little scope for such a
presenter to play what he wants to, enabling me to make a judgment about whether to listen again. I'm a far better judge of what I like than a vast media corporation.- the days of John Peel are OVER, sadly.

I am not prepared to iisten to ANY radio programme where Murdoch, Denis O'Brien, the Sony Corporation or any other commercial interest decides what is played!

I don't except the BBC or RTE from this- even when a 'traditional' or a jazz programme is advertised, you can almost hear the gritting of teeth from some presenters when another load of commercial crap is imposed on them (and us!) from above.
So still, no thanks, I have a vast collection of recorded music & still surprise myself by what's there & almost forgotten.   
Not to mention what's available online!
Mind you, Steve's memories certainly ring a bell although an hour of Radio 1 without all the rest of it would make me give a lot more than name, rank and number, and very quickly.

Subject: RE: Music as torture?
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 08 Dec 16 - 10:57 PM

This thread immediately puts me in mind of late 60s / early 70s mood music compilation LPS..
The sort you'd see stuffed in racks in Woolworths for 50 or 75 pence..

..and the more upmarket themed Hi Fi test LPs my dad used to bring home from the shops most Saturday afternoons..

Ah.. those Sleeve artworks of moodily lit scantily clad dolly birds, or the more boring abstract patterns and landscapes...

"Music For Torture" Hugo Montenegro and his Electro Shock To The Gonads Orchestra RCA 1972

[HI FI Choice Magazine - Best LP for stereophonic speaker demonstrations]
[CIA Monthly Digest - Cleanest and least bruising alternative to Water Boarding & Pharmacological torture 8/10 - June 1973]... 😱