In which music is deconstructed

The missus and I recently got Audio Adrenaline's Underdog CD. Fantastic work. Not only are all the songs good, which until now I could only say about Paul Simon's Graceland CD album, but they're conspicuously well-produced and arranged. Good auditory feng shui. Not quite sure what it is; it's not something I've noticed on other music.

I'm a little embarrassed to say this, being an amateur musician, but I think the emperor has no clothes when it comes to classical symphonies. A symphony, as Wikipedia defines it at the moment, is "an extended piece of music usually for orchestra and comprising several movements." Now each movement, in theory, is supposed to complement the others thematically, forming this fuzzy oozing gestalt of musicality that makes learned concert-goers ooh and aah with delight. They all have different tempos and sometimes are even in different keys, and they go by such imaginative names as "Adagio," "Presto," and "Largo." But with the single exception of Beethoven's Sixth, I've yet to hear a symphony that didn't sound like the composer just threw together four unrelated pieces of music that he happened to have written but couldn't find an outlet for yet. Choose a big piece from Column A, a slow piece for Column B, something quirky and light from column C, and another big piece to finish it off. And take the last note from the last movement and play it over and over again in varying lengths for about 5 bars.

Same thing goes for Sousa marches. They're all the same: Intro, First Strain, Second Strain, Dogfight (or Breakstrain, for those with more couth than I), Trio. And you can keep stacking melodies on top of these ad infinitum and it'll sound perfectly natural. In fact, the Canadian Brass did just that on one of their albums, creating this 8 minute long Sousa march that sampled all the most famous ones he did.

OK, rant over. I'll work over 12-bar blues some other time.