Modern classical music, a.k.a. “art music,” often gets a bad rap for being impossible to listen to. In fact, this is completely true. Since you’re probably very busy at work, allow me to take you on a stroll through Youtube and Wikipedia to see why.

Part 1: The Shepard Scale

First you need to understand some abstract, completely useless concepts. Imagine playing an ascending scale or a note that slowly slides upward in pitch. When you get higher and higher, you slowly fade out–get softer and softer–but you fade in with the same scale several octaves below, which goes up a while but then also fades out. Keep repeating, and you end up with a scale, actually 2 or more overlapping scales, that seems to go up forever. This is called a Shepard scale. Home exercise: try playing a Shepard scale. Home exercise: try doing that forever.

Let’s say you are a composer and instead of contributing something of tangible value to society, you want to write a piece of music using a Shepard Scale. If you have a good grad student stipend, or if that’s impossible, if you have a good faculty salary and have paid off your student loans but haven’t died of old age, you can buy an electronic “instrument” called a tone generator, and make this composition in 5 minutes–it sounds like this. It’s kind of lame, but you get the idea.

Fortunately, if you know how to click randomly on Youtube, the best kind of concept music is at your fingertips. For example, in the following video you’ll notice the hallmarks of a contemporary composition: lots of black ink, pages that don’t look like they have any notes on them and were drawn by babies, notes that require breaking appendages to play. This is known as “cryo-music,” music that needs to be frozen and revived 300 years from now when people have evolved 20 fingers on each hand:

Now listen to this–it’s written by Gyorgy Ligeti, who has two important qualities: he writes music for an anatomically plausible number of fingers, and he’s Hungarian:

The reason Gyorgy Ligeti wrote this piece is because the goal of all art is to sound like a person trying to get out of Hell by climbing a staircase, but not succeeding. Sublime.

Stay tuned for: Part 2, where I explain what an overtone series is, and why you should listen to Karlheinz Stockhausen instead of the Beatles. (Hint: it’s not to make girls like you. Actually: it’s more the opposite.)