DIY - Celebrate Diversity

So, I've been listening to a series of lectures on the history of European Concert Music, and the lecturer does a great job of describing the cultural context and how it shaped the music of various periods.

He pointed out how Enlightenment values led to the Baroque era music of Bach and Corelli and all of them.  It was the time of scientific and intellectual advancement, and of Martin Luther, and so the focus of the culture was off of God and onto human experience.  The rise of the Middle Class meant that more people could attend concerts in the concert hall, and it led to a homgenization of concert music, driving all compositions to the common denominator.  There was a demand for music that everyone would like.  He pointed out that all national character was driven out of composition, and illustrated the point by playing sections of three sonatas of the time and asked us, the listeners, to try to identify the nationality of their composers.  I guessed, maybe German, maybe French, maybe English?  But it turns out all three composers were Czech.  It was a powerful demonstration that all music sounded basically the same, and it was driven there by a desire to reach everyone and have everyone be equal - all compositions became equal as well.

In contrast, by the time you get to Beethoven, and then even more so during the Romantic era that followed, the emphasis was on the composer's individual expression.  The lecturer played a section of a Baroque chamber music piece, and then played a section of the first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.  He described how we would identify the first piece - Continuo instruments, sonata form, regular tempo, theme expressed in polyphonic lines - Baroque era.  It turns out it was composed by Corelli, but unless you were a Corelli specialist and were directly familiar with the piece already, nothing about it would tell you that.  In contrast, the 5th Symphony is recognizably not just a piece from its era, not just from Germany, not just a Beethoven piece, but as that specific work.  It sounds like nothing else but itself.

So, music history moved from compositions designed to appeal to everyone that ended up all sounding the same, to compositions designed to express the individual experience of the composer that have complete originality.

But that Romantic period was also the era of stars.  To his point, we can now listen to Baroque pieces by any composer and appreciate them as works from their time, but even though there were probably just as many people composing during Beethoven's time, their work hasn't survived down to us, because Beethoven, the star, takes all the cultural bandwidth.

So, where are we today?  We know that we are again in a period that emphasizes individual expression.  That grand Communist impulse to form us into one big culture and one big political entity and have everything equal by being exactly the same, that fell when the Berlin Wall fell and is over and done (I remember running across that vision when I read the book "The Motorcycle Diaries", and hearing that the young Che Guevara had a dream of united all of South America into one big unified country, celebrating what they all had in common.  It was so strange, an idea I not only had never heard of but just seemed completely unfathomable, given the era of revolution and nationalism and restoring of old boundaries out of the formerly large countries - the old Yugoslavia, the old Soviet Union, East Timor separating from Timor, South Sudan separating from Sudan).  Here in the US, we have moved past the "Melting Pot" era, where we consider all Americans as Americans first, and encourage assimilation and casting off of one's home language and culture.  Can you imagine that was ever the idea?  Now we celebrate our patchwork identity.  "Tossed Salad" is the new metaphor.  We celebrate diversity.  Every person is encouraged to express their authentic identify, and not be worried about conforming to old paradigms.

And, at the same time, the means of creative production have fallen into individual hands.  The tools for making a film, taking an artful high-quality photograph, recording a multi-track record, using "Paint" to make an original image - and, of course, not to forget, self-referentially, free access to tools for writing and publishing your writings, yes, like this right here that I'm doing right now - the means of creative production are easily available and (almost) freely available to to (almost) all.

That new access, sure, has led to fragmentation.  We're no longer in a "Hey Jude" era where everyone is listening to the same song at the same time.  The magnitude and duration of our stars has declined.  It has profoundly changed the industry and the means for making a living from artistic pursuits, However, it has enabled individual creative expression on a profoundly more broad scale.

So, that's my prediction, that we are in the culture era of fragmented, local, diverse composition.  No one composer, no one performer, no one band, no one song may define our cultural moment.  This moment is defined by all of us, each of us, finding our compositional voice.

The aspiration, then, should not be to become rich and famous like a 1960's rock star (the 1960's was the last hurrah of Romanticism, wasn't it, with debauched and overemotional heroes like Jim Morrison?  I remember reading a piece about Dylan Thomas, who confronted his writer's block by drinking himself to death, and contrasted it with professional authors of today, one of whom said when he gets blocked, "Usually I go for a run."), because famous rock star is no longer a viable career.  The aspiration, the aim, is to find your own sounds, and put them down (outside yourself and outside your own head), not so that the masses ever listen to them, but just as an indication that you are here.