Since I’ve been prattling on about music for the past few weeks, I thought I’d share a little of mine with you. Here’s a whimsical short film, set to one of my recent recordings:
I extracted the video images for Mermaids of the Pterodactyl Cult from an old sci-fi movie called “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,” now in the public domain and part of the Prelinger Archive. The movie centers around male American astronauts who travel to an alien planet where they kill a pterodactyl and lose a robot, but never discover the aquatic hotties, who’s lives they forever alter. I reused the best part of the old movie, and sped it up substantially. I love the way the sea roils at this speed and that seemed to work with the roiling rhythms in the music. I hope you will check out all of my music, and many more music videos, at my music blog: www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
but it is not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 first)
Music is a strange thing. I don’t understand it and I don’t pretend to understand it, I simply recognize it as an interesting characteristic of human life. I don’t rationalize it or objectify it. Instead, I explore it for the mystery it presents, and as a means of learning about myself, my relationship with my community, and our relationship with the world we inhabit. For me, the exploration of music is a way of studying the world aesthetically.
When you study something aesthetically, you acquire an appreciation for the beauty of it. It is not enough to understand the science of physics to make music. That knowledge must be incorporated into practice and presented in a form that makes it irresistible to the ear. Music makes the science of physics real, in a way that math never will, and reducing physics to math, strips our world of its natural beauty and aesthetic appeal. Aesthetically, we have the capacity to appreciate the beauty of things we do not completely understand, like music, while music itself teaches us directly, what we can understand about physics, and the physical world around us.
Science, on the other hand, ignores aesthetics, and strives for emotional disconnectedness. That’s how scientists are able to dispassionately conduct all kinds of cruel experiments on animals and brew up persistently toxic chemicals without regard for their long term impacts on the ecosystem. Science has no appreciation for beauty, nor does it feel any connectedness with the rest of life on Earth. Science is essentially psychopathic and tone deaf, which is why so little of what it tells us about the world really means anything to us, and why science mostly enables the development of deadly weapons, toxic pollution, and high-tech surveillance systems.
Music can teach us a lot about the world around us, ourselves and each other, without killing anyone, or poisoning a single stream, and our aesthetic sensitivities, when sufficiently developed, make much better guides as to how to live in the world than does our, so called, “scientific understanding.” Our failure, as a culture, to recognize this basic fact of life is the primary reason our society has gotten so ugly, crass and dysfunctional, and why we have no idea what to do about it. The more ugly, crass and dysfunctional our society gets, the less real beauty we see around us, and the less aesthetically sensitive we become. The internet has only magnified and accelerated the process.
We explore music to develop our aesthetic sensitivities, and to find out what we really like. I kinda liked “Country and Western” music when my dad played it on the radio in the car when I was 12, but I don’t care much for it now that I choose the music. In fact, I’m kinda tired of guitar music altogether. If you’ve read my last post, you know that I’m pretty well done with classical music too. Honestly, we’ve all heard it all before, haven’t we? I’m as sick of it as you are.
I still feel nostalgic for a lot of early electronic music, but modern EDM mostly leaves me cold. I heard Paul Oakenfold live at Burning Man in 2000. To me, his set sounded oppressive, impersonal and empty. A lot of people will say that Paul Oakenfold no longer counts as modern EDM, but he was the last EDM artist I heard that stood out enough to make an impression on me. Back in the ’70s, synthesizers were brand new, the future looked bright, and technology held so much promise. Today, technology dominates our lives, and it spits music at us in a million different flavors 24-7-365. To me, it all sounds oppressive, impersonal and empty.
Besides that, there’s been an explosion in the number, and variety, of high-tech gadgets for making music, and for making new music out of old music. High-tech machines don’t interest me as much as they once did. Machines have let me down too many times already. I know that “Intuitive user interface” means the designer thinks they know how I intend to make music, and that those machines will be full of sounds that instrument designers think I want to hear, based on what is popular in music today. That’s not what I want to hear, and I don’t want to “interface” with my music.
I don’t want to sit at a computer and assemble my music graphically with a mouse or from a panel of illuminated buttons; I want to play music directly, in real time, in real life. I think that’s important. I don’t think music is a purely conceptual thing. It’s not something you dream up in your head, and transfer to the real world by means of technology. Music comes from that physical relationship between the musician and the instrument, the subject, to the object. Music is about how we relate to the real world. Working in a DAW and composing music graphically is one particular way of relating to the world, but that is not how I relate to it.
It’s also about economics and the environment. I love my high-tech, digital, multi-track recorder, but I can’t really justify spending a lot of money on electronic gadgets that just make noise. Besides that, I live off grid, so any electricity I use, I have to make out of sunlight, which I don’t see much of, especially in the Winter, when I have the most time to make music. Besides that, the thought of spending a bunch of money on another electronic gadget that’s just going to end up in the e-waste pile just makes me sick.
I say it’s about economics and environment, but really, it’s about aesthetics. I went off grid because I thought it more beautiful and elegant to make a little bit of electricity from sunlight, and use it efficiently, rather than have an unlimited supply of high-voltage juice delivered to my home by wires connected to nuclear power plants. I don’t find most of those new machines attractive because I know that they contain toxic compounds and heavy metals that cause a lot of environmental destruction that destroys rural communities and kills people, in their manufacture, and that those machines create further environmental problems when they stop working. It’s hard for me to imagine, and it seems a burdensome responsibility to me, to attempt to make enough beautiful music with one of these machines, to compensate for all of the ugliness involved in producing, distributing and disposing of it.
My music is about my relationship with the world, so increasingly, I incorporate things I find in the real world into my music, especially the oddball detritus of our industrial society that I find scattered across the landscape. Geologically we live at a very unique time for the kind of things you are likely to find in the world around you. Even deep in the woods where I live, the bizarre collection of exotic man-made materials I find out here would surprise you.
Where the piano demonstrates the power of empire, with elegance, the ubiquity of manufactured garbage shows off the inelegant side of empire, but making musical instruments out of recycled materials is not a political statement about empire, so much as it is the reality of my time and place in history. I make music from the stuff I find around me because I want to cultivate my relationship with the real world and the unique sonic palette it makes available to me, rather than use the power of empire to take from the world whatever new gizmos I can afford.
I discovered a primal link to music, that bypassed a lot of cultural conditioning for me, about 15 years ago, when I learned to play the didgeridoo. The didgeridoo short-circuited my musical relationship with civilization and empire and completely changed the way I think about music The didgeridoo is a very simple instrument that produces a very complex sound. While the didgeridoo only plays one fundamental note, the player can vary the timbre of the sound fluidly, and in a number of dimensions, much like an analog synthesizer.
Learning to play the didgeridoo opened my mind to a very different approach to music. Playing the didgeridoo feels good, and it changed the way I experience music. Playing didgeridoo made me realize that music is not about melody and harmony and notes and keys, but that music is about sound and our direct connection to the Earth. I realized that music is not about precision crafted musical instruments or brilliant compositions. Music is about listening to the Earth directly, which is essential to finding an elegant and beautiful way of inhabiting it.
Last week, I wrote about how the Greeks unlocked the key to music theory when Pythagoras discovered the Golden Mean. The Greeks elevated the study of music to an intellectual pursuit on par with geometry, science and philosophy, and this new attitude and knowledge about music spurred the development of precision crafted musical instruments, which, in turn, inspired the precision machines that powered the industrial revolution. Besides demanding better instruments and inspiring precision craftsmanship, this new, highly intellectual attitude towards music yielded many technological applications as well as well as producing a lot of mind-blowingly beautiful music.
The Romans also embraced the classical approach to education, and when a decadent Roman Empire turned Christian, in the 4th Century, the Catholic Church put the power of music to work for the Holy Roman Empire to maintain, and even expand the extent of their power by spreading this new religion all over the world. The Roman Catholic Church used music as a sort of psy-ops propaganda tool to win over hearts and minds, and to break down resistance to Roman rule.
Rome started sending missionaries armed with hymnals instead of Centurions with swords to their colonies abroad, but the Catholic Church burned folk instruments all over Europe in the Middle Ages, calling them tools of “the Devil’s music.” The church denounced folk music as profane and blasphemous and banned it from “The House of God,” but the Catholics built classical music into the architecture of the stone cathedrals they built for European peasants to pray in.
The Catholics built huge cisterns into the foundations of their cathedrals to power the enormous pipe organs they installed inside them, and then built soaring stone bell towers to house huge bell carillons high overhead. The bells woke everyone up, got them out of bed and brought them to church, where they heard choirs, accompanied by a pipe organ with banks of deep bass pipes resonating in optimally designed halls. This was the first time most Europeans ever heard a musical bass note so low and full that they could feel it in their chest. While Catholic Mass mesmerized the peasants, nuns busily taught their kids catchy little songs about Jesus. The Catholics put classical music to work as a tool of empire, and used it to subjugate people with other cultural traditions.
Of course, the Catholics used this music to reaffirm their own faith as well. I’m sure that hearing music with tight harmonies, pure tones and rhythmic discipline must have seemed absolutely heavenly, and miraculous. Honestly, it still seems that way to me. There’s just something about how music makes you feel, that encourages you to continue doing whatever it was that made you feel that way. That’s how musicians learn to play, but when someone presents music to you, in a way you do not understand, and in a form you can not replicate, music becomes a kind of magic that inspires awe.
Awe can be a powerful tool for an empire that seeks to express power abroad. You’ll recall that inspiring awe was an essential component of the US military’s recent offensive in Iraq, code named “Operation Shock and…” Despite the violence, clerical sexual depredation, and economic pillage, somehow, music always restored people’s faith in God, by inspiring awe.
The Roman Catholic Church demonstrated the true power of music, and it’s ability to inspire awe, as a tool for empire, and it serves them well to this day, but subsequent empires have not failed to learn from the Romans. Music had been weaponized. Music became political because music has power and anyone who wants power, needs music. That is the “gospel truth” as taught by the Holy Roman Empire.
By about 1600, medieval craftsmen had made great strides in the field of instrument building. They called their crowning achievement, the “piano-forte.” “Piano,” in musical parlance, meaning played quietly, and “forte” meaning played loudly. This room filling instrument had an elegant ivory keyboard, and employed a complex system of hammers and dampers to sound an enormous iron rack of tuned strings. It was the first keyboard instrument that allowed players to vary the volume of the note sounded by how forcefully they played. Today, we simply call it a “piano.”
It takes an empire to build a piano. While the instruments of our indigenous ancestors were likely built and played by the same hands, from materials on hand, no one could ever build a piano from materials on hand. One lifetime is not long enough to learn all of the skills necessary to build a piano from scratch. It takes skilled machinists, cabinetmakers, wood-workers, felt-makers, blacksmiths, iron workers and more to build a piano, not to mention ivory, exotic woods, metal and materials from all over the world. Today, most piano players have never even tuned a piano, let alone built one. The piano is a product of hierarchy and empire and you would be hard pressed to find a better ambassador for either.
The piano became the king of precision crafted classical musical instruments, but of course, only kings, and popes, could afford them. Most kings and popes really didn’t play the piano very well, so they hired people to play it for them, and to teach them and their kids to play. Johan Sebastian Bach got one of those jobs, and elegantly mapped out the complete melodic and harmonic potential of the twelve tone chromatic scale, on the piano. He’s been teaching the whole world how to make music ever since.
People recognize J S Bach as the “Father of Classical Music” but his music represents the culmination of hundreds of years of technology, mindset and discipline, that includes the piano. With more than a seven-octave range, the piano became the principle instrument of composers, who wrote arrangements for entire symphony orchestras, while sitting in front of it. We should not underestimate how much the piano shaped the golden age of classical music that followed.
The piano, despite it’s amazing ingenuity, has limits, like any instrument in the real world. The piano offers an impressive seven-octave range, but it cannot change pitch continuously, the way a guitar player can bend a note note up, or the way a violin player can add vibrato, for example. The piano can play loudly or quietly, and you can let the sound ring, or damp it off, but the piano only makes one sound. If you play violin, you can pluck the string, or you can bow it, to create two distinctly different sounds. Horn players use mutes to change the tone of their instruments, and organ players can often choose from a multitude of voices. Also, a piano cannot start a note quietly, and then make it louder, as a horn player might do, nor can the piano articulate words and syllables into a pitch the way a human singer can. Those are just a few musical limitations of the piano.
The piano makes many musical compromises in order to give the player the maximum flexibility for melody and harmony. Classical music is all about melody and harmony. Add in rhythm and dynamics, and you’ve described the complete palette of classical music. I bring this up to point out that in order to delve deeply into these four elements, the classical music tradition completely overlooked not only sounds and techniques, but whole ways of looking at and appreciating music. For example, overtone music, such as Tuvan throat singing sounds alien to us, because our classical tradition choked that whole approach to music out of western civilization.
Everything but melody, harmony, rhythm and dynamics got squeezed out of classical music, as it ascended to it’s pinnacle with composers like Mozart and Beethoven, who composed their masterpieces at the piano. It was an age of empire, and these composers produced music for kings, emperors, and even God himself. Our classical music tradition strongly reflects this. That’s why classical music sounds so grand, reverent, and orderly, and why it is so very careful not to offend the ear.
Flash forward to the turn of the 20th Century at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Several new inventions greatly increase the reach and the power of classical music, but they also would eventually change the way we relate to music. Radio, the phonograph, and eventually the tape recorder revolutionized music even more than the piano.
Before long, even people who never learned to play an instrument, could experience the sound of a full orchestra in the comfort of their own home, thanks to the magic of radio. By the 1970s, electronic sound reproduction technology reached it’s zenith. If you had a decent stereo, most bands’ records probably sounded better in your living room than the same band did playing live at a concert hall. It no longer made sense, if you wanted music in your life, to learn to play an instrument. For the price of a single musical instrument, you could buy a whole sound reproduction system that would allow you to listen to studio polished performances by the world’s most renowned artists, right in your own living room, right out of the box, and with no practice.
By this time governments, churches, and corporations all started using music to express power and influence people’s behavior, and our modern technological media helped them do it. Where once, the only way you would hear music was if you made an instrument yourself, and learned to play it, by the 1970’s when the FM band opened up, anyone with a radio had their choice of music, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Suddenly, music was just there, everywhere, all the time, everywhere you went. Classical music had become an institution. Kids still learn to play an instrument and read music in school as part of their classical education, and charitable foundations continue to keep symphony orchestras playing in most major metropolitan areas, so long as they keep playing the old classics, but the playing field has changed. Disciplined performers and precision machines no longer impress us. We take them for granted. Not only that, we’ve heard it all before, and we no longer feel any connection to it.
We don’t know how any of it works anymore. We don’t know where it comes from, how it is made or why it works, just like all of the high-tech gadgets we surround ourselves with these days. The proliferation of artificially flawless, studio produced music has the same effect on our self esteem as seeing images of people with artificially flawless complexions and perfect smiles in the media. We no longer believe we are capable or worthy of a direct relationship with music, so mostly, we leave it to the professionals, and consume music passively, second-hand.
Meanwhile, the whole classical music game got stale. Composers got tired of grand, reverent, orderly and inoffensive and started looking for ways to make classical music more aggressive and challenging. Some sought to subvert the classical system of tonality, while others looked for ways to add new sounds to the repertoire, and still others looked for entirely new ways to approach music.
Some of these composers embraced this new sound reproduction and sound production technology and incorporated it in creative ways into their music. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Iannis Xenakis’s Diamorphosis, and saw the written score to it in an elementary school music class. Xenakis composed this piece on magnetic tape, from a variety of recorded and electronically generated sounds.
Karlheinz Stockhausen composed pieces full of weird electronic sounds that came at the audience from all directions with discreet multi-channel sound systems,
and John Cage used microphones and electronic transducers to amplify ordinary household vibrations into bizarre sounding compositions.
I love all of that weird music, by the way, and it still turns me on. That music is rebellious in a very intellectual kind of way. These composers all recognized just how finite the tradition of classical music really was, and they understood the oppressive nature of classical music, as only a classically trained musician would, so they went exploring, to see what else they could do with music. I still love that music because of that rebelliousness, and how earnestly revolutionary it all sounds, in that deeply intellectual, symbolic and inconsequential way that privileged people embrace radical ideas. Still, it spoke to me at an impressionable age and I still love it because of the nostalgia I have for it, and for what it was in it’s time.
Today, empires of all shapes and size compete for your attention with music, but music no longer wows the peasants as much as it once did. Marketers continue to use music to ambush us and invade our space, because they know how powerfully music can convey their message. As a result, we’ve become music resistant. Music has become a pervasive noise that we learn to tune out, and we resent catchy jingles that stick in our head. We get subjected to so much weaponized music these days, that we no longer trust music, and we no longer respect music. We assume that anyone who makes music these days, has an agenda, and serves an empire, or wants to build one.
That’s too bad, because we need music to build culture. Our culture has disconnected us from the musical process, in order to subject us more completely to its power to inspire awe and manipulate behavior. At the same time, music has died in our culture. Classical music has long since exhausted itself and folk music has succumbed to the lure of capitalism. When the music of your culture dies, your culture dies too. You might not notice it for a while, especially when there are so many great recordings of it to replay, but there’s no real future in our culture anymore.
Stockhausen, Cage and others saw it clearly decades ago. They saw that it was over, and because they knew it was over, they had no enthusiasm for musical convention. Instead, they cast aside everything they had been so painstakingly taught about music, since they were school-children and they went looking for whole different approach, starting from scratch. They weren’t afraid to offend the ear, they showed no reverence for tradition, and to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever been able to use any of their music to sell anything. That’s what makes them some of the most important composers of the 20th Century.
This has been a very brief and very broad overview of the last 40,000 years of music in our culture. From this perspective, anything that’s happened since then is still today’s news, so I think this is a good place to end. I’ll tell you what I still find compelling about music next week.
Scientists speculate that music preceded language in our early human ancestors, and that singing together in groups may have spawned the development of the earliest human language. I say “speculate” because very little of those ancient human cultures has survived the ravages of time, so we paint the portraits of these ancestors from the pile of stone tools we’ve recovered, some skeletons, and a few carvings, sculptures and cave paintings. Among those very early artifacts, however, archeologists in Europe have unearthed several bone flutes that they estimate to be about 40,000 years old, give or take a millennium or two.
Here we see the earliest incontrovertible evidence of music in humans, and it predates the earliest evidence of language by many thousands of years. We will probably never know whether these flutes were played as solo instruments, or what other instruments may have accompanied them, because instruments made of wood, skin or plant material would not have survived the eons, but we can tell what key they played in, and what their scale sounded like. Today, we can, pretty accurately, recreate the sounds of those early instruments because we understand the physics of sound and have made careful replicas of these early instruments.
In those days, however, people made music with whatever sounds they could make, and they must have thought about music differently that we do today. Anthropologists have not found any indigenous cultures which do not incorporate music. However, they have found that the music of indigenous people around the world varies widely, and that different cultures use music in very different ways and for different purposes. For tens of thousands of years, thousands of distinctly different ancestral cultures each developed their own musical tradition, along with their own instruments and scales, for their own purposes.
For indigenous people, and for our ancient ancestors, music was simply the audible portion of their culture. The song and the dance were not different things. Music entwined itself into these cultures in many different ways. Many cultures, including ours, use music for war. Nobody makes war quite like we do, but lots of cultures make music for it. Many cultures use music for healing and for medicine. Many cultures use music for ribald celebrations, but also for sacred rituals and magic.
In Australia, some cultures use music to connect their cultural history to the geography of the land in a way that allows them to navigate long distances, by song. We have plenty of evidence that indigenous people incorporate music into their culture in ways that civilized people simply do not understand. I think that this is an important point to make here. As I describe what happens to music as it becomes more “civilized,” please understand that I do not believe that modern civilization constitutes an “advance” in human culture in any way, over any other way of life.
As early farmers burned the forests and exhausted the soil beneath them to grow grain crops to make beer, they displaced, and assimilated what was left of those indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures. Farmers destroyed the habitat that hunter-gatherer tribes needed to survive. When those indigenous tribes could no longer find enough game to hunt, they either starved to death, or went to work for the farmers and started drinking beer. That is the story of civilization. Ancient language scholars tell us that civilized farming people in the Nile River Valley, developed the first written language, primarily to keep track of people’s bar tabs, establishing a tradition for civilized people that continues to this day. No longer do we hunt and gather. Civilized people build pyramids and drink beer.
Civilization became a melting pot where all of these, once functional, self-sustaining cultural entities, became assimilated by this new way of life. Through this assimilation, functional cultures get reduced to ethnicities. Through assimilation, a way of seeing the world, and all of the subtle knowledge about how to live in it, gets reduced to a recognizable costume, some quaint customs and a few catchy tunes or favorite recipes. This happened to thousands of distinct and unique human cultures as civilization continued to expand around the world.
Fast forward to about 2,500 years ago, in Greece, where Pythagoras has just discovered the Golden Mean by mapping the harmonic overtone series on his monochord. Ancient Athens must have been a pretty quiet place back then because a monochord, a simple, one-string, musical instrument/physics experiment, is not very loud.
Pythagoras would have had to listen very closely to hear the upper harmonics he mapped out on that string. By now, too many of us live in environments so loud that we probably would have never heard those upper overtones, had not Jimi Hendrix introduced us to them at earsplitting sound levels with his electric guitar.
But Pythagoras listened closely to his very quiet instrument, and by mapping the harmonic overtone series, he unlocked the key to understanding all of the different scales he heard in the folk songs sung by his slaves, or by the nomadic people who sometimes came through town, or of the songs he learned to sing as a child. These idiosyncratic musical idioms being all that was left many, once thriving hunter-gatherer cultures, that got subsumed by this new way of doing things.
The Greeks figured out that if they added five half-steps into their seven-note harmonically derived scale, they could recreate all of the folk scales they heard around them. In so doing, the Greeks gave us modes and keys and music theory and harmony, but the problem was, music theory was still mostly theoretical. You could dream of an instrument that would allow you to play music in any key, but in reality, you didn’t have many options, except singing.
You can play a string instrument in any key, and you can tune a string to any pitch, but string instruments of the day were not very loud. A flute can make a louder noise than a string, but no flautist has enough fingers to cover twelve holes, as is necessary to play in this new, “chromatic,” 12 tone scale, so Greek discoveries about music theory mostly presented technological challenges to future instrument makers and musicians.
I’m sure singers took it all in stride, and percussionists just ignored it, but besides changing the way we thought about music, the Greeks also gave us another way of looking at the world, and at music. Before Pythagoras and the Greeks, people happily played the traditional music of their ancestor’s culture with traditional instruments, because that culture nourished them and kept them alive. After Pythagoras, however, the Greeks saw music in an entirely new way. People still played and sang old folk songs, but they began to think about music as something new and hi-tech, with serious potential for development. Music’s appeal had transcended it’s tribal cultural roots, captured the imagination of civilized people, and began to shape our vision of the future.
The Greeks ushered in the age of classical thinking, which eventually brought us the age of classical music. Since then, music has continued on two tracks. On one hand, we have folk music, what’s left of our traditional indigenous music, as interpreted and expressed by their assimilated descendants, and passed on, generation to generation. On the other hand, the Greeks adopted this new approach to music, and taught it, along with geometry and philosophy as part of a classical education.
The Greeks taught music as a strict discipline, not unlike geometry or logic, but with an added emotional dimension, and they understood that learning to sing and/or play a musical instrument was prerequisite to understanding the important knowledge to be uncovered through the study of music. Thus, the classical approach to music education was born. Soon, little kids started carrying violins to school and quickly learned to hate practicing.
Over the following centuries luthiers rose to the challenge of developing louder string instruments that project a clear tone, and wind instrument makers developed mechanical contraptions to enable wind instruments to play the chromatic scale. Flutes and reed instruments sprouted a system of finely crafted keys that allowed players to cover several tone holes with one finger.
Most brass instruments added a few valves that lengthened the air column when depressed.
One notable exception, the trombone, evolved a continuous fast-action slide, allowing it to change pitch fluidly, despite inhabiting an increasingly fixed-pitch musical world.
The physics of sound are unforgiving, and the demands of music, uncompromising. Together, they motivated instrument makers to create some of the first precision crafted machines the world has ever seen. At the same time, musical scholars developed a way of writing music that all classically trained musicians learned to read, called “Standard Notation.”
With these new precision instruments, Standard Notation, and a pool of classically trained musicians, creative composers could show off, not only their own creativity, but also the discipline of the musicians as well as the precision craftsmanship of the instruments, with a brand new form of musical expression that must have blown people’s minds.
Classical music demonstrated the potential of this rigidly structured, strictly disciplined and precision crafted approach to making music, first in chamber music, then in larger ensembles, and eventually in huge symphony orchestras with more than 100 musicians. Classical music so wowed audiences with the seemingly magical potential of this classical approach to music, that it inspired the development of a whole wave of precision machines for every possible application, as well as the disciplined workforce that worked a highly structured schedule to create them. In this way, classical music inspired the Industrial Revolution, leading to the next major transformation in civilized society, away from the farm, and towards an urban manufacturing and service oriented economy.
As civilized humans, inspired by classical music, continued to produce ever more precise machines for more and more purposes, they eventually developed a machine that could faithfully reproduce, mechanically, a live musical performance. Suddenly, an event in time could instantly be transformed into an object in space. Eventually, we had machines that could reproduce music faithfully, and allow it to be edited after the fact, and we developed the means to amplify even the smallest sound to room-filling volume.
Having met the technological challenges that classical music demanded of early instrument makers, and having fulfilled the promise of classical music, by impressing audiences everywhere with tight harmonies, clear intonation and rhythmic precision, classical music then inspired a whole culture to go absolutely apeshit in developing new precision machinery for every imaginable purpose, including, eventually, the tape recorder, microphone, amplifier and speaker, which would eventually push classical music itself to the sidelines of cultural relevance.
That’s enough for this week. Next week, I’ll explain why classical music no longer inspires us as much as it once did, and why fewer of us know how to read music anymore. I’ll also talk about how technology has changed the way we experience music and perceive the world, and finally, I’ll talk about how music continues to shape our future, and why it continues to inspire me.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 