The music we compose; the music we listen to, in concerts and in the car and at home and on our MP3 players; the music we dance to and sing along with --- that music is not mere distraction or entertainment, not merely the sound track to our lives, not merely sound to drown out the silence. Besides being all those things, all that music is also representative of how we think about ourselves, each other, and the world.
Music, in other words, reveals and represents the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist. This is more true of our time than of any other because music, for the first time in history, is available to everyone all the time; and the nature of the music we listen to is formed by the tastes of the great mass of people as never before. Or, rather, the incredible variety of musical types is formed by the tastes of the unfathomable diversity of the listening audience.
It's worth noting that historically this is a great oddity. Through most of the history of the West, the experience of listening to music was limited to performance and performance was usually for the privileged few. It wasn't until the late 18th Century that the performance of music had moved from the chambers of the aristocracy to the public halls, and not until the 1950's, with the invention of the transistor radio and the car radio and the home stereo system, that listening to music all the time became possible. We have no idea what the great operatic voices of the 1770's sounded like but we have every recorded note of contemporary singers available to us through a variety of media.
And music, like almost everything else in modern life, has been commodified, so that giving the customer what he wants has become the driving force behind musical creativity. This has many drawbacks, as does the commodification if so many inherently worthwhile things, but it also means that contemporary music is more revealing of the zeitgeist than music has ever been. Previously, one could argue that while the great musical composer might have seen the world in a certain way, it was impossible to say with any certainty, using music as evidence, how the great mass of people understood human nature and the nature of the rest of creation.
But if we allow that music is representative of how we see ourselves, how we see our relationships to one another, and how we see our place in great scheme of things, then we have a historically unique amount of data to use in the process of using music to reveal the spirit of our time.
I write this because I have lately been in mind of a clever cultural insight from a mid-20th Century English author: "When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order. When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling 'Look at me! Look at me!'" With apologies to him, and with well-deserved humility, I want to try expand that insight, both backward and forward:
When I listen to Bach, I hear the divine order.
When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order.
When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
When I listen to the "serious" music of the 20th Century (Stravinsky, Cage, Glass et al) I hear confusion and disorder.
This last is not an insult, although I admit to loathing 20th Century music. Confusion and disorder were the self-conscious goals of musical composers, choreographers, and visual artists of the early 20th Century, a revolt against what they saw as the unnatural and repressive constraints of the past. To me it is clear that the talented, even gifted, composers and choreographers and artists of our time have succeeded grandly.
What is particularly interesting is how confusion and disorder inform so much of popular music. While much --- but not all --- of contemporary balladry still maintains a clear language, there is a whole world out there of very popular music which is little more than beat and rhythm covered by lyrics that are not only incoherent but which, under any kind of analysis, reveal no clear meaning, even line to line.
The interesting part is that this is exactly what the aesthetic revolutionaries of the early 20th Century were pushing for. They believed that there was no meaning and that rules of composition were arbitrary and without meaningful purpose. Their goal was the sensational, the shocking, the momentary. Life was made up of a series of feelings, insights, desires, fears, etc., without pattern, and certainly without meaning, and art --- if it were to be genuine --- should represent that reality. Life was chaotic and mostly based on the senses and an honest art should reflect the truth of that experience.
Whether in the concert hall or on ear-buds, music reveals and reinforces an understanding of reality and one's place in it. While many of us are prone to dismiss the criticism of contemporary distractions by saying, "Oh, it's just entertainment," on some level we know better. We live in a time when what the people want is the ultimate arbiter of taste, so what do we want? Or, to really push it, what should we want?
Loved this!
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