How to evaluate Music
The aesthetic message of Music
Music is certainly the more visceral art, the one that lays bare our deepest emotions. The only art form that doesn’t directly use one of the most used senses by people every day: sight.
A book, a painting, a movie, we have to watch them. To listen music we can just close our eyes and let ourselves be carried away.
If we think about it, there’s a time of the day that we behave in the same way: during the night, when dreams come on. Only sleeping we can allow ourselves to the insanity of dreams, during which all meanings mingle between them and time and space become undefined boundaries.
Dreaming means temporarily be irrational; music acts on our status of consciousness in a very similar way. This makes life difficult for who, experienced or not, wants to review music.
But this intimate flow of emotions is part of the fun. Contamination between emotions and rationality that perhaps has no equal.
Music on Starico
To evaluate music on Starico were chosen two classes of judgment:
Music, Vocals & Lyrics.
Music and composition
Music is primarily instrumental, made by a set of musical rules: harmony, melody, rhythm. But the quality of a composition is not defined only by its complexity. If a song wants to convey a sense of calm and peace, it will follow different guidelines from those that would follow if wanted to convey anger or euphoria.
A minimalist piece is not necessarily worse than a very complex and elaborate progressive suite. As well as a pop song is not necessarily worse than an alternative song. There’s nothing wrong with being popular (i.e. liked by the masses), although it’s true that masses are ignorant, on average, by definition. However it’s not a phenomenon limited to music, but an argument that can be applied in any other context.
Starico evaluates primarily the originality of the music in its historical context; its main ingredients, such as quality and compositional complexity, and its natural leavening, such as arranging and mixing.
Vocals and Lyrics
One of the innovative choices of Starico reviews is the use of a suitable class to assess the strength of lyrics, exactly as if they were part of the music.
If once the songs were mostly instrumental, most modern songs contain lyrics. In some cases, these are placed as foundation of their existence. Just think of artists like Leonard Cohen or Fabrizio De André, or an entire genre like hip-pop.
The skill of a singer in interpreting a text, the know-how of skillfully blend voice and instrumentation, sometimes becoming itself a real instrument, it’s an important factor to be reckoned with.
The message embraced in a song, vitality and intensity with which it’s spread out, directly affect the final evaluation.