Did music fail?
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The five-minute presentation I made at the inaugural Ignite Music event on 19 April 2011 at Concrete in Shoreditch. The thesis: musical movements fail, they pass their peak and collapse under their own weight and are then replaced. This is how music progresses.
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Did music fail?
- 22. Steve Bowbrick bowblog.com @bowbrick
Editor's Notes
- Our story of epic failure in music begins in 18 th Century Germany where Johann Sebastian Bach develops a glorious synthesis of the rational and the emotional.
- Mozart elaborated Bach’s vision: emotion tempered by PATTERN... The golden section in audible form. Today we play our babies Mozart. We believe we are imprinting the blissful structures he invented on their impressionable minds...
- But in the succeeding generations this transcendent synthesis began to fall apart. Feeling overwhelmed structure. Expression triumphed. Bach FAILED.
- And then Richard Wagner – who’s the daddy? - brought on the RUSH of emotion that TERMINATED the classical experiment within a decade. Substituting feeling for structure almost entirely and beginning the next great, doomed musical experiment...
- Gustav Mahler, one of Wagner’s inheritors. A music said by some to have only one ingredient: EMOTION. A kind of distillate, something of surpassing purity...
- But itself nowhere near pure enough for the coming generation. For Arnold Schoenberg, Mahler’s disciple, and for those who would sweep away the whole of pre-twentieth century musical language and in so doing BRUTALLY CLOSE OFF Wagner’s era of passion, story, love. Wagner FAILED.
- But hold on. What’s next? Schoenberg’s savage serialist coup was itself DOOMED (rattling through the 20 th Century now). The seeds of serialism’s collapse were hidden in the very structures it promoted. Its unshakeable hold on musical form diluted to the almost unrecognisable homeopathic dose of MINIMALISM. Schoenberg FAILED.
- NEXT! Across the Atlantic, led by gorgeous George Gershwin, a hugely ambitious effort to synthesise the popular - the sad songs of middle-Europe and the black folk music of the South - with the cerebral concert-hall experience. Broadway meet Carnegie Hall.
- A younger generation - men like Stephen Sondheim - took the effort onto a new stage - Hollywood. The synthesis looked to be complete. Serious, authentic, challenging but POPULAR art was the result.
- But no. You guessed it. It was not to be. The synthesis unravelled. The centre could not hold. Popular and Serious split again. Broadway and the West End are a pop ghetto again. Gershwin FAILED.
- Every generation owns its own spectacular musical failure. PUNK is mine. They PROMISED US the demolition of all that was prissy, self-indulgent, inauthentic…
- It was noble work, tearing up the web of artifice and pomposity that was crushing the life out of music in the mid-Seventies. But, let’s face it. They LET US DOWN.
- Within a few years, cheesiness, phoniness and poverty of wit reasserted their grip. A generation of impatient situationists retired their Gestetnered fanzines and got proper jobs. Pop DID NOT EAT ITSELF. Punk FAILED.
- And now, to the final failure. A failure not of music itself but of HOW WE LISTEN. When Thomas Edison invented the gramophone and began the era of recorded music, an era COMING TO A GRINDING CLOSE NOW, he didn’t anticipate its application in music at all.
- It was more pragmatic people, people like tenor Enrico Caruso, allegedly the first to sell A MILLION OF A SINGLE RECORDING, who inaugurated the era of the ‘recording artist’ in 1902. He was unarguably a creature of the recorded music era, a man whose voice was known to millions who WOULD NEVER SEE HIM.
- Over a hundred years later, Mick Jagger is of the opinion that the era during which musicians could make a living from the sale of albums lasted FROM 1970 TO 1997. He says that he is fortunate that his career fitted neatly into that period. Others are not so lucky.
- According to a popular infographic (and one that I have no way of verifying) a recording artist must sell 849,817 plays per month on a music streaming service to make the US minimum wage. Google’s new cloud music service wants to give away THE FIRST 500 TRACKS to new customers – 50 albums or more than the average person has in their record collection.
- The Caruso of the nineties, Sean Fanning. The man who was bold enough to say it: recorded music is over.
- And another bold man. The one who said “information wants to be free” and thus predicted the HEAT DEATH of recorded music. Recorded music FAILED.
- In music, you see, PROGRESS IS FAILURE. Recorded music, punk, broadway, serialism, classical and baroque music all collapsed under their own weight and FAILED. Music CANNOT.