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| The Sound of Things to Come |
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| Talk,
Justin Harries,
16 January 1999 | |
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The year is 2000, and we’re all partied out after 1999. As we look toward the new horizon what shapes do we see shimmering in the distance? And what melodious sounds do we hear, carried by the wind from afar?
The end of the decade (sorry, century, sorry, Millennium) passed rather quietly. Not that we needed some G.G. Allen style apocalypse to mark the passage of time, but no zeitgeist made itself know. So, if you’re looking for change, some way of defining the timeline in musical terms, you’ll most probably have to wait until we get some way into this century.
Let’s look at the one now five foot under. The beginning of the 20th. Century was a tumultuous time for composers. The Austro-Hungarian thang had got so bloated that the music itself resembled flatulence. Strauss, Mahler et. al. let a few rip, but it was Arnold Schoenberg who finally produced a left cheek sneak that shook the foundations and stank the whole place out. By dumping tonality (a language gradually evolved and then maintained by his predecessors), Arnie opened the book to all contenders. From this point on, classical, or what many people would term serious music, became a grab bag of mutations. These days, due to a bunch of very lovely and very rich people collectively called the music industry, all manner of person can pretty much dictate what they want to hear on their very own, new fangled hi-fi. The joyous warblings of Canadian chanteuse to the screeching sound of a thousand cat drownings can be purchased at your local record emporium, it’s all for you. Fragmentation and specialisation means the breaching of a conservative core of overriding values cannot be repeated. After all, how can you smash something that has already been smashed; only by smashing the remaining pieces into even smaller bits, which all seems a little pointless really.
A lot of musicians want to be subversive, make a difference (rock & roll goes with that kind of malarkey), but these days it’s a hard nut to crack. Many of the rap fraternity get away with it, but a return to blackness is just that, a rightful penetration into a game that was originally your own. Of course you could spice up your act with a few tales of random killing and teen rape, and now it bizarrely helps if you’ve got the novelty of being white and not being called Vanilla Ice. But Schoneburg himself was not a rebel, he want to prolong the tradition he loved, he though he was doing good.
Perhaps music will over specialise to such an extent that it renders itself extinct. Or the true revolution will not be about tonality, content or the actual music itself, but concerned with the technological, the industrial, the material – how we consume the bloody stuff. All sorts of computory stuff will alter our access, but the real shake up will be to do with what we do with it. DVD’s and enhanced CD’s have show they alter the narrative aspects of the form and the passive aspects of the recipient. The real change may be that the ball will be in our court, that the specialisation will be even further directed, nichised – all things to all people. Anyone for tennis?
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