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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Um... no. posted by M. Lucky on April 15, 2010 at 09:04:10:
is rarely done as a fair comparison.
Distance lends the past advantages which the present tends to be denied. For a start there's often a fairly large nostalgia element involved in our recollections of the past, especially when it comes to music which provided the experiences which formed our tastes and also fuelled our peak experiences. It's difficult for any music, even better music, to compete with music which carryies that sort of emotional resonances for us.
More important, however, is the way in which a reverse Shakespeare gets done on the music of the past by which I mean the good is remembered and the bad forgotten. Many classical music lovers point to the nineteenth century as a supposed "golden age" and there certainly were a lot of great composers then but I doubt the standard was any higher than today. It's just that with today's batch we're aware of everyone: the good and the bad; and we argue over who may be great. With the past the decisions about who is great have been made, and the music that we know and hear is the good, and mostly the best. The average and below average has been forgotten and simply doesn't get performed.
For those of us approaching/now in our 60s, the 1960's were that formative period, the time when a lot of music had those strong, often hormonally or drug enhanced emotional resonances. We remember what we loved and we forget how much of what we heard was crap.
When I listen to Coltrane, Davis, Monk and a lot of the jazz I love from the 50's and 60's I am always impressed by how good it was, but I've forgotten the pedestrian music of the time. It's no longer in my collection and it doesn't get played on the air. When I listen to today's releases I have to sort the good from the bad and, frankly, I don't think the proportion of great music being created has changed—it's still probably around 5 to 10 %—and half of what's being produced is still average or lower in quality. I listen to a lot of so so music in order to find the 5 to 10% that's going to still be in my collection in another 45 years, always supposing I live to 107 and still have the ears to listen to it.
What I do know is that I can and do find very good music in current releases, music that I keep returning to. What I also know is that it's very different in style from what I was listening to in the 60's. Coltrane's more aggressive later music still gets the occasional spin and I can still appreciate it, but what I'm gravitating to today is quieter and more reflective music, music I probably would not have spent much time listening to back in the 60's, nor would I have appreciated it as much as I do know. I've changed too, and while the music I loved in the 60's still affects me strongly, and carries the memories of 40+ years of listening experience—something no contemporary releases can do—I'd like to think that if I live long enough a lot of the contemporary music I appreciate at present would affect me similarly in 40 years time. I doubt I'll get that chance but I may get 20 or 30 years and it would be fun to see just how I feel the music being released now stacks up against the music of my late teens and my 20's when it has been given the opportunity to gather a couple of decades of emotional resonance as well.
Frankly, I think there are few genuine golden eras in music or any other art but there are periods which resonate for each of us, often because they are the periods which were critical for us personally rather than for anything associated with the quality of the art itself, and we find it very difficult to view those periods objectively. And since new people are constantly being born, it's impossible to find a period which doesn't resonate for some people in those ways, making all of the other periods pale in comparison. Once we get back further into the past before our birth, we've reached the period where objectivity is difficult simply because the bad has been edited from the performance lists. When there's so much great music from prior decades and centuries who is going to want to perform or listen to the dross?
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- Comparing the past with the present… - David Aiken 13:34:16 04/16/10 (5)
- You're right, of course... - M. Lucky 11:16:40 04/17/10 (4)
- RE: You're right, of course... - David Aiken 14:32:53 04/17/10 (3)
- awwwww.... you're sweet, Dave - dave c 21:06:14 04/17/10 (2)
- "The industry has changed irrevocably." - David Aiken 00:30:41 04/18/10 (1)
- As caveman UG said to caveman Og... - dave c 05:38:16 04/18/10 (0)
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