I’m back from taking a few weeks of “summer break” to catch up with family and friends on the east coast. Its fun to visit them, but its nice to be home.
So I have been following the very interesting group blog ArtsJournal: Critical Conversation that asks the somewhat wordy question :
…Now we are in a period when no particular musical idea seems to represent our age, and it appears that for the moment – at least on the surface – that there is no obvious direction music is going. So the question is: what is the next chapter in the historical conversation of musical ideas, and where are the seeds of those ideas planted?
Or
What is the next big thing?
The blog makes for great reading and should not be missed, but has devolved into a discussion of semantics. needless to say a very entertaining discussion on semantics.
Since the arguments are so far along, I am not sure if it makes any sense to join the fun, but I would like to pull back a little bit and point out a few directions that I think are important.
So what is the next big thing? (I hope this doesn’t turn out like a horiscope prediction)
Well I think it probably will not have anything to do with the modern orchestra, but I think calling it dead is as just as passe as calling religion dead. It was a popular view in the late 60’s but doesn’t mean anything anymore. Maybe it probably should move into the museum with where we can visit it when we want to remember the “good ole days”
With that being said, i think a smaller, more mobile group (like the paul bailey ensemble) that combines electronic, wind and string intruments is a good solution. It allows a more reasonable financial circumstance to create music. It deals with instruments that are readily available in most communities, and can be easily copied, expanded, and improved upon. The idea that a violin, electric guitar and trombone can make music in the same room is now possible because of amplification.
The real revolution is in the medium, if you change the method of delivery, you get a different audience. Maybe the laptop, dj heads are what is next. But I really think the thing that makes any of this work is the people. A great artist adapts and creates within his surroundings. A piece that transcends its medium and then when you see it being imitated by all the wannabe’s !! wammo !! THE NEXT BIG THING.
Until then, I am here to plant my flag somewhere between Peri and Monteverdi and continue soldiering on.
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i’m not sure what the ‘next big thing’ will be and i think it would be hard to see anyway, since we’re kind of in the middle of it and living in the now. i think it’s hard to say ‘this is the musical idea that’s going to represent our age’ because i think the historians and musicologists will make that decision for us 150 years or so from now. i’m also not so sure that our current age won’t be known as ‘the commercial period’ where composers, starving and needing to eat, flocked to hollywood to compose film scores after the public got fed up with their snooty music that they couldn’t understand and stopped going to concert halls. so maybe the students of the future will be studying film scores instead of art music. the only good that will come of that turn of events is that eventually some composers will have to rebel and ‘poof!’ art music returns rising like a phoenix from the ashes refreshed and loaded with new and interesting ideas!