the age of experimentalism?

[Tash]

i've been trying to think of now in historical terms, like say i live in 500 years time, how will they see this period of time? like humans have the wonderful obsession of categorising every single thing and giving it a very general characteristic, so what's ours? and so i was like people do whatever, there are no rules, you can do what you like. and then after listening to my baroque music lectures and observing that all the baroque composers did have different things in mind, and even within that period there was continuous change. so i thought, well, like monteverdi and others were interested in expressing the meaning in the text, we're interested in experimenting and attempting to create new sounds. but give it maybe another 100 years or so, people will get bored and start focusing on something else. we think everything is continuously changing, but it's all generally based around the same thing, and it'll take ages for any looking-back-on-it-in-100-years-time to see it all as one fat block of time. so of course i don't know what the next phase will be, thinking about it, it's like well what else is there? but it's hard looking into the future cos it's not here yet.

agree? disagree? any comments are welcome:)

[Bob]

I agree.  No one can tell what we're in right now.  It will take fifty some years to get an idea.  I've heard music is in a neo-Romantic/minimalist time.  Since we have technology and access to the past to some extent, I think the future will involve many branches of new ideas combined with past ones.  If technology becomes more user friendly, we might have more composers but at a novice level.

I think we're in a technological revolution for sure.  Better, faster, smarter technology.  We're getting more connected, but possibly less private.  The individual might have a greater effect -- blogs and viruses, for example.  I think the West will pull far ahead of others and China will compete.  There will probably be more of a spread between the haves and havenots.  Then there are the middle eastern countries that will continue to argue and the nutzos.

[Siberian Husky]

i think your on the right track tash..several perspectives can be taken at this..for instance...lets take the romantic period...we look back on it as simply the romantic period...and we may even be able to distinguish early romanticism from the later deeper richer romantics..but we still, in our positions, arent able to really disect the music because we werent present and ermmersed it in personally...im sure there were many subcatagories of this romantic music...a great analogy could be new age music..rock pop rap whatever...im sure in 100 years theyw ould classify it as something else with maybe sub catagories along the lines of..the 70's 80's 90's etc etc...but only we..as listeners and lifers in this era..can really disect into portions only we will fully comprehend..for instance..we can take hip hop itself..its only 20 years old...but it has changed more than 5 times..with diferent focuses/lyrical styles/commercial distribution...same goes for rock..the look the sound and the lifestyle continues to change..i believe we are only abkle to view baroque music..romnatic...classical..and even some 20th century..in limited fashions...we will never truly comprehend their identities simply because we are on the outside looking in...

[Derek]

I personally believe that the future of music cannot produce anything radically different from what we already have. In a very real sense, it cannot be said that the music of the past 250 or so years is drastically different from the folk music which came before it. It became more detailed, the instruments became somewhat more varied. But all the same basic principles were there and still are there.

In the same sense the future of painting dreamscapes or still lifes or anything for that matter cannot be radically different. We won't have a different rainbow of colors in the future. We won't perceive two dimensional and three dimensional objects in any different ways in the future, either.

It seems to me sound is the same way. Octaves, fifths, thirds, and every other interval have a very tangible sound to the ear. They are just as real as colors!

Experimentalism hasn't really achieved much, has it. Minimalism isn't doing anything except rewriting the first few notes of a vivaldi concerto a thousand times over rather than Vivaldi writing the "same concerto" 400 times over.  New scale systems don't seem robust enough to allow for anything radically different from famliar melodies and chords that have always been in use in Western and Eastern music.

So, if music has a renaissance, it will probably bear some similarity to music of the past. Perhaps a greater number of people will realize how vast the dimension of rhythm is, that it can go beyond the concurrent and the clock-work like. Perhaps people will realize originality does not lie in shockingly new innovation, but in a strikingly personal fingerprint on one's work.

I think I just like to see myself type. Somehow I doubt anyone will read this entire post. Hey, I'm bored.

[pianistimo]

i read your post and agree!  there's something inherent in a melody.  (whether eastern or western scale).