Okay, I know evolution isn’t the right word. But I’m using it in a common enough misusage to make my point.
Composers growing up in the mid-20th century had an experience unknown to previous generations: hearing music on stations. First radio stations; later on television. This new experience, as I’m sure has been noted elsewhere, had a potent impact on musical postmodernism, one of the hallmarks of which is jumping from style to style in seemingly random juxtapositions, as though flipping a dial from one station to another.
The contemporary version of this experience is webbing ones way through the perpetual LOOKATME of the internet, and I think that shift is audible in some of the music being made now, and will probably be even more evident in the music of the next 10 to 20 years, as composers who experienced the internet in full bloom during their childhoods master the art of explaining their worlds through sound.
So the reason I’m misusing the word “evolution” is because I think the experience of flipping through stations and current online equivalents are more closely related than not: as I say, an audible shift is taking place, but I hear a fair amount of fluency from one to the other, though others may be hearing a revolution.
How can we tell for sure? Stay tuned, as they used to say.
Only in New York City, maybe, could you see graffiti scrawled across a wall saying, “Everything is happening, all at once, all the time.” That pretty much summarizes the state of music (and art, too); never before have all periods of music, all kinds and national forms, been available to one listener, as fast as the internet can deliver them. This fact can create a generation of listeners with ADHD but a generation of composers with resources like no other in history. I fully expect some remarkable results, and think I’ve found some in new music collectives like Wet Ink and Sleeping Giant, and maybe in Contemporaneous and Bang on a Can. But the full brunt of the change may fall to even younger generations yet to emerge. I plan to stay tuned, my seat belt buckled.
Thanks for the blog, Maestro!