Modern Musical Availability

A friend has often remarked that he is grateful for not having an mp3 player.  He explains that this forces him to remember and create more music on his own, rather than depending on a piece of electronic equipment.

Being between mp3 players myself, I can see what he means. It’s nice to turn off the radio, and sing a hymn, or try to remember the new piano piece I’m learning. But I’m still saving for a new ‘magic music box’.

For my part, modern technology hasn’t cut down on my own music-making. On the contrary, it’s increased it. I’ve been privileged to grow up in a diverse musical community, but there are things I would probably never hear in my hometown that I access through recordings and electronics. Last year I bought an Irish drum and began learning to play it,  after hearing it being played in several Celtic bands I learned about and listened to on the internet.

But, my point is not so much that folk music and common music-making will persevere despite modern technologies. It’s that the advent of modern recording equipment helps in further eliminating permanent social classes. It used to be that most people couldn’t afford to go to concerts, and the only way you could get music was to make it yourself. But now, anyone can have music. Right now, Wynton Marsalis is in my CD player. I still probably couldn’t afford to go to a lot of concerts, but I have great musicians’ works available to me whenever I want them.

Both expensive concert-hall music and homemade music are available to me. No one complains that everyone can now afford a variety of well-made clothing, and that making your own clothes has now become more of a hobby. We’re all happy that modern technology makes that advance possible. The same should be true for music. I can enjoy listening to recordings of Horowitz (well, I generally don’t, but that’s a story for another time) and still go jam with the bluegrass band the next town over. How can that be a bad thing? The mighty are brought low, and the humble are exalted.

Posted at 10:48 pm EST on the 31st of January 2010 by H. G. Roorda.

Under Musicology, Sundry as , , ,

There are 5 replies.
 
  1. John R. Ahern says on February 1st, 2010 at 3:51 pm

    Well, I’m not sure if it’s a bad thing, but it has some huge ramifications. People speak of bringing back Classical music as if it was at some point a dominant art form, but it was, in its heyday, totally limited to Western Europe and Russia and their highest classes at that, as you point out. Most people today have probably heard Beethoven’s 5th more times than Beethoven ever did, let alone his audience. Classical music never appealed to a wide audience—it was always esoteric and always a function of higher classes. (Which is why Bach isn’t Classical music. And which is why Classical music is dead. But I’ll stop ranting and take that up some other time. :-P)

    So, I think your point is excellent. The advent of musical availability in the 20th century is really analogous to the printing press, in many ways. At no point in history have our ancestors been able to pick up, put down, listen, listen again, fastforward, rewind, and analyze music the way we can (unless you’re a conductor or something), just like people prior to the printing press weren’t, largely, able to do the same with the books of Western culture. I think more than anything—including philosophy and popular culture— this has shaped music for the last 80 years.

  2. R.L. Bertilson says on February 1st, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    I agree wholeheartedly, Hannah. I never would’ve decided to learn to play the guitar if I didn’t have access to the music I do because of the internet and music players. Also, though this isn’t quite on the same line as your post, the internet is a WONDERFUL resource for making music–you can easily find guitar chords for songs you want to learn to play, and easily look up chords that you don’t know (although all the different options for chords can be quite bewildering XD).

  3. Lucie says on February 2nd, 2010 at 8:27 am

    How ironic. I was listening to my “magic music box” when I read this. XD
    One other thing to mention is the portability of music. If I didn’t have my “magic music box” I probably would almost never listen to music (because I always seem to be dashing around whenever I’m not working) The magic little box means that in order to listen to music, you only have to carry around a small lightweight piece of plastic that’s only a few inches long. Before electricity, you were limited by the amount of money you had (to afford a concert ticket) or by how portable your instrument was (Let’s face it. You can’t take a grand piano just anywhere.) And for a while, even radios and CD players were only so portable. (The early radios were as large as china cabinets.)
    I’m sure if I composed music that I would agree with your friend on that point, but I think that overall our magic music boxes are a great blessing.

  4. V. K. Blake says on February 3rd, 2010 at 2:02 am

    I would say that the greatest pitfall of portable music is not that it keeps people from making music, but that it keeps people from listening to things that aren’t music.
    Everywhere I go (especially at school), people walk around with things in their ears, broadcasting their own little musics into their own little heads. But there’s so much more to hear! I’m sad for the people who have never heard the lovebirds go cheeping overhead because they were listening to something else that they picked out. There’s no surprise in that!
    Next thing you know I’m going to be defending Philip Glass…oh wait. I think that’s already happened. ^_^

  5. Nick says on February 4th, 2010 at 3:04 am

    I think the connection between music and class is an intriguing one, and one you’re right to make. I’m not entirely sure, though, that music and performed music has previously been only for some elite — I mean, jazz, blues, rock and roll, these had all been folk, lower-class genres of music, made and listened to by common people, but which the upper classes later affected and appropriated.