Vultraz reviews: Musicology and people who act like Musicologists without knowing anything about music.

This is probably going to sound stupid after my previous post or if you've seen my comment history on YouTube, but at least I don't claim to be a "musicologist". And I know my Soundcloud doesn't exactly suggest that I take music seriously, but I probably know it better than somebody with no experience in music at all.

For background, I have learned classical violin for 8 years. In the past 3 years, I've taught myself (rather poorly) guitar, piano, drums, jazz theory, and DAW programming.

In my opinion, musicology should really rank among "Gender Studies" or "<insert ethnic group here> Studies" in terms of credibility as a major—no, scratch that. Musicology should simply cease to exist as a fucking field; the only part of musicology that's even remotely worth keeping is historical musicology.

Why? Well, what do these people do? They bullshit about music eloquently, pretentiously, and academically. They bullshit about music even harder than gender studies majors bullshit about gender, or science fiction writers bullshit about science. They do shit that the entire fucking layman population, including all musicians, is capable of—commenting on music—only they made the wise decision to spend however-many-years writing bullshit essays for a fucking certificate that makes them more special than the rest of us, even people who write and play music, just so they could develop their skills at writing redundant art shit that nobody, except for people who "read" unintelligible bullshit to feel smart, needs to read, when everyone could just listen to the fucking music on YouTube, buy it on iTunes, or torrent it instead. These people don't even serve a real fucking purpose for anyone; they just suck their own dicks.

Half the shit written by musicologists doesn't even make any sense. In spite of my musical background, I apparently lack the expertise to decipher what in this goddamn world these smug college fucks and critics who claim to have majored in "musicology" are talking about whenever they try to tell me that whatever my opinion about music is, it's shit, and proceed to spend twenty fucking pages rattling out bullshit in English interspersed with bullshit in Italian and words in both English and Italian that I'm fairly certain don't exist, telling me I don't know shit about music and raving on about some obscure atonal composition that Schoenberg violently shat out of his ass one night when he was drunk on baby piss and high on codeine and meth, or the latest folk-punk noise-machine they've coincidentally discovered while looking for scat porn on YouTube, or some fucking silicone-mold pop song that isn't even remotely interesting enough for anybody to write more than a sentence about. When I read the pseudoscientific shit musicologists write, sometimes I start to wonder what portion of these guys' college lives were spent giving oral to a fucking thesaurus.

This field is not just disgraceful to itself—it's disgraceful to its own fucking name. Musicology means "the study of music". But I have ample reason to doubt that anybody involved in this field even knows how to play a fucking musical instrument or read sheet music, let alone compose it. I'm not even sure they can analyze music any more deeply than the average non-musician. For all the pretentious bullshitting these people do, you'd expect I'd be able to give them "B#9b13" and they'd be able to tell me what fucking notes were in that chord on a dime, but apparently not. Maybe that's too Western and too corporatist for them, but I've never seen any of them ever talk about Indian raga either. I swear to fucking god I've never seen anybody involved in the field talk about specific modes or scales or chords—the only theoretical terms I see musicologists use, if ever, are words like "dissonant", "key shift", or "modulation" and Italian terms like "adagio" and "staccato" and "detache". Often, when they do use these theoretical terms, they're used inappropriately or in the "GO2 socket" manner—such that they could've replaced that word with any other musical term and it would've stuck.

The majority of musicology writing, however, appears to be composed of bullshit that doesn't examine the actual fucking music in any manner not immediately known to the viewer but rather coldly records emotional effects and obvious things that you can hear in the song that you'd PROBABLY UNDERSTAND FIFTY TIMES BETTER IF YOU JUST LISTENED TO THE FUCKING MUSIC. The only information musicologists even contribute to the human knowledge is historical context of musical pieces. Really. If you're a fucking academic musicologist, you should understand music and interpret it in terms of music convention better than the fucking nonmusician, and you should be able to explain it to the nonmusician in a simplified but accurate manner just as a scientist should relay his findings to the public, not tell the nonmusician what he already fucking knows or can easily figure out on his own, just with more verbosity.

But then again, this is all based upon speculation. I'm never entirely sure what musicologists are actually trying to say; for all I know, I could be
criticizing a secret society that writes coded recipes for cucumber sandwiches.

Musicology also does a great disservice to the public. As a result of pop musicologists and published writers who like to act like they're musicologists whenever they're describing music or musicians and pretentious musicians—the people whom the media like to call "music experts", many people seem to be convinced that music is this mysterious, esoteric magic with which only random special people are blessed, as if God points his big glowy dick down at random people and says, "Let this man be a Musician!", or "Let this violinist play con fuoco!", or "Let this composer's next symphony be in G major!".

You know what I'm talking about. That fucking Griffon-thing just pulls out a fucking clarinet and just starts playing it. After a couple of hours of practice, in spite of her complete lack of musical knowledge, Sweetie Belle gets to play both parts of Axel F on a fucking keyboard.

Unless you're Jesus Christ himself come down from heaven, that's not how I think it works at all (but maybe I'm the exception and I'm the only person in the world who had to practice to get better at anything). There's nothing sacred, satanical, or sorcerous about learning music. Musicians are not that way because they were gifted or blessed by God. People don't take LSD or feel *INSPIRED* and magically become musicians. EVERYBODY was bad once. Everybody was rough in the start. Everybody had to practice. From Vinnie Colaiuta to Allan Holdsworth. Why is Holdsworth so good at guitar? Why does nobody else sound like him? Well, when he was young, he wanted to be a saxophonist. And when he was young and he had a guitar and access to a piano, he took a fucking pen and some fucking paper and wrote out every mathematically fucking possible chromatic scale in existence, and then he crossed out the ones that had more than three semitones in a row. Even Mozart, the classic example of the musical prodigy, took around two years to start playing music on the clavier (at four years old).

Being a musician involves both more and less than what people are told: it involves being able to physically play some kind of music-producing instrument. And it involves putting time and work into practicing your instrument, whether that be a violin, a computer, or a table.

No, you don't fucking "feel the music". You either listen to it or you read it. Telling somebody learning an instrument to just "close your eyes and feel the music" is akin to telling a bus driver to "close your eyes and feel the road". I can guarantee you that cutting off one of touch, hearing, or sight while learning a musical instrument increases the amount of time it'll take for you to learn ANYTHING by two orders of magnitude. Oh, sure, Ray Charles was blind. Oh, sure, Yanni didn't know music theory. But they had instruments and many years, and as far as pianists go—and I know this is heresy, but I'll say it anyways—Ray Charles is not that exceptional of a pianist, even within the world of jazz. As far as composers go, Yanni is not that innovative of a composer. I can also guarantee that emotionally experiencing the music does not mechanically translate to your playing it any more than wishing that Equestria were real makes it real. And no, you don't "find the music in you" when you're writing it, any more than Da Vinci found the woman within him when he was painting the Mona Lisa. You go listen to some other music or go get some ideas about what you want to write—references—and then you fucking apply your knowledge of theory and the notes on your instrument to write it.

So if you'd like to learn guitar one day, save up for a fucking guitar and some books.

I give Musicology a 0/10.