The End of Music
March 29 2010

The end is near. The beginning is near.

At the close of the 1800's, physicists were declaring physics over. Everything to be discovered was discovered, they said. Everything to be explained, explained.

When VCR's showed up in the 80's, movie theatres began laying out the funeral meats.

With the Soviet Union's end, Francis Fukayama declared history's: the finale of humanity's ideological evolution, the final form of human government.

Endings loom ever near, it seems.

These endings- of physics, movie theatres, and history -never came to be. They never began. Physics found Einstein. Movie theatres, Dolby and Imax. And history, when last seen, was keeping on keeping on.

With this in mind, the Pianobabler declares: The end of music is near.

Music guru Alan Cross wrote a piece this week contemplating the end of rock music (link below.) The cause? Rock's homogenization. The same-ification of its sound and ways.

Only rock? What about jazz? Classical? Folk? Electronica?

Listen. Just listen. Artists and songs sit nestled in the thicket of an undifferentiated soundscape. Never straying more than a few millimetres from each other, they deliver the music of the format to which they belong, more because they follow the strictures of the format, than because they expose a native talent pulsing to bare itself.

Consciously or unconsciouly, templates are followed. Rules are imposed. Patterns are created, then copied. Music self-regenerates.

No more hand-made. Everything comes shipped from the same location, a central time and place. McMusic.

How did it come to this? The Pianobabbler's theory: with the abundant recording and always-on broadcasting of music (see the last Pianobabbler posting on Note Bloat- click here), our mind's ear has filled up with unprecedented quantities of music. At the same time, academic music programs have attracted unprecedented numbers of students, aspiring professionals. More and more, the business needs to guarantee them a living.

With so much music to listen to, and so many people needing to make a living playing it, the music business became more risk-averse. It became susceptible to conforming pressures. Music history became a jailer, an imperative which musicians had to follow, or risk being tagged as ignorant of the past (to which I say: so what if I'm ignorant?)

The need for commercial success drove people to repeat winning formulas from the past. When Joni Mitchell was releasing recordings, they were new and untested. Some failed. Now, the goals seems too often to sound like Joni Mitchell. Failures cost too much to be tolerated. In place of music driving commerce, commerce has driven music.

Not that musicians lack brains or independence. No. But the conforming pressures of history and commerce bear fiercely, often subtly, upon them. Institutions handing out degrees that prove their graduates are musicians, reinforce the pressures. In the end, it is the musicians who form themselves into Mcpatties. As Michel Foucault pointed out, we are brutally effective self-censors and jailers.

Consequence: more musicians than ever. More music. More recordings. More history. More ho-hum-homogeneity.

The end of music.

And yet. As I said at the outset, many ends have never had their beginning. Maybe we stand on the threshhold of music's new beginning. As T. S. Eliot said: In my end is my beginning.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below.

- Click here for Alan Cross' piece on the end of rock.

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