Bad times for good music
This post was written eight years ago, when CD's were still sold. One day I will revise it, but it still has some good ideas.
1.- Do we really like music?
We can find music everywhere. When you turn the TV on you hear a barrage of different melodies in advertisements, chat shows, series and films. Once we have entered the underground station our ears can be delighted – or more often, punished – with music which apparently comes from nowhere. As you get into the train, you note the loud volume that issues from the headphones of some passengers, as well as a brief melody announcing the name of the next station. These are some examples of how music is somewhat omnipresent in our society, although it is often considered as a hobby that you can’t take seriously.
Everybody seems to like music, and music itself arouses many different feelings and emotions, accompanying some of the happiest and unhappiest moments of our life. But I suspect we don’t like music as an art, but merely as a means to get fun. How can we explain the success of songs like “Macarena” or “Aserejé” if we do not recognize that the more stupid a song is, the more it makes people dance, the more it is whistled and the more it is listened to?. Today, you don’t need to have any kind of musical background in order to have success in music, whereas in past centuries a theoretical and practical foundation of music was needed for all who wanted to develop their career in this art. If we really liked music, we would tend to follow our personal inclinations, and we would try to distinguish between worthy and unworthy music. That is why I personally think that the vast majority doesn’t like music: they like fiesta and shaking their limbs.
In this paper I express my personal point of view about the situation of music today. First, I try to discern the means of being objective when it comes to consider someone’s value as an artist. Then I criticize both commercial and serious contemporary music, and I conclude expressing my impressions about the social causes of this situation.
2.- Can we recognize the true value of an artist?
Much as it may seem a difficult question, I personally think that we can answer it if we consider what happens to some artists when they have become not fashionable anymore. It is some time after an artist is not on top of the wave when we can think more clearly about his talent. What is more astounding in the case of some composers is that they are still heard hundreds of years after their death. How can we dare to compare the everlasting music of Beethoven and Bach with the use-and-waste music programmed in radios and music channels?. Is anybody going to listen to Tamara in the 23rd century?. It seems quite difficult, due to the ability we have to forget songs and their authors. Does anybody remember which was the summer song in 1994?.
If we assume this point of view, there is an obvious question: how much time do we have to wait until we can say that this musician has true talent? . If we consider the case of Johan Sebastian Bach, who was rediscovered eighty years after his death, we may conclude that whether the musician or composer has wit or not, one cannot be sure about the preferences of future generations, and thus it is useless to talk about ever-lasting music. When facing this argument, I can only say that people with musical background tend to recognize the true value of music despite of fashions and temporary tendencies. As I explained before, Bach was forgotten by the audience during eighty years, but musicians like Mozart and Beethoven were taught of his works and techniques of composing, and appreciate his music in the same way we do today. It is clear that not everybody likes the same kind of music, but the vast majority of musicians appreciates the same styles of music and are not interested in some others due to its lack of value. It is very significant that even the composer of the last Spanish Eurovision theme declared on TV that he would rather compose symphonies and serious works, but he would not live on that activity because the number of people who listen to good music is much inferior to those who listen to other kinds of music.
3.- Pop artists or pure marketing?
Pop music has been a revolution in the way of conceiving music business. From being live performances the principal source of money, business has become more and more a matter of selling records. There are pseudo-artists who sell millions of CD’s, numbers which were hardly imaginable little time ago. As any product, it is not the quality but the way of present it to the consumers what really makes the miracle of selling many units of bad products. Today’s pop music can be compared to fast food: it can taste good, but it has no real nutritive value, and it can damage your health if you consume it every day. Big Mac’s and David Bisbal have in common that they are designed to be bought, tasted and forgotten. They are also preceded by an intense campaign of marketing, and we can see Mc Donald’s advertisements everyday on TV, as well as Operación Triunfo fauna in almost any program of certain channels. However, if music had some quality, It would be wonderful that many people bought those records, but I think that the composers of “Ave Maria” spent the same time in writing the lyrics and melody of that tacky theme as the employees of any Burger King establishment spend preparing the special hamburger of the month.
What is even more horrible is the way that records industry has to present their products. We can watch on TV several different programs filled with videos in which it is more important the number of attractive women and men than the music itself. What can we say about the perverse intention of some “music programs” in which there is not a single live performance?.
As it is said, one image is more powerful than thousands of words. The problem is that the vision of some artists and their videos can be more important than the music they are trying to sell. The influence that TV has on people preferences is dangerous for the future of music and arts as they have been until this century. Does it make sense that the more important in music career is personal appearance? Should not it be the talent and personal devotion to this art?
4.- Musical extravaganza
I’m not going to criticize only what I don’t like, but also what I really consider as interesting music. I think that classical music has abandoned the attitude that has characterized it during past centuries. Today, we can listen to some contemporary classical music in which it is not important what it tries to express, but the complexity of the work and the techniques employed. That can be wonderful as an exercise, interesting as an experiment, and even funny as a divertimento, but what these composers don’t tend to ask themselves is: does it really sound good?, do I really express my feelings with these twelve-note melodies?, or, even more important, do I really like this peculiar sound?. This can also be asked to some improvisers of free-jazz who, despite of being very gifted, play in a strange way that maybe is not understandable at all. Artists have their own personality, and that must be respected, but sometimes it becomes more difficult to understand what is the musician trying to express than playing it. Contemporary fashion in music is like contemporary style in painting: some works seem to have been painted by children, not by artists – we could also discuss if gifted artists are like children, but that would overpass the extent and intention of this essay - .
Never before had serious music arrived to the point in which it is more important to compose something unheard before than creating a expressive piece of music. A brief anecdote I read depicted this situation very well: a young musician told Arnold Schönberg that Igor Stravinsky had declared that “the colder a music is, the greater it becomes”. Schönberg, disgusted, replied: “I said that sooner than him”.
5.- My personal point of view
Done the circumstances in which good music is treated by mass media, we may think that it is bound to die, but I believe that it has always been in this situation. Only certain economic elites can afford going to certain cultural events, and that is, unfortunately, what makes difficult for people of lesser economic levels to enjoy some of the highest works of all times. Middle class opera lovers must conform to buy records, while upper class personalities can have a reserved box in the Liceu Theater, even though they found opera a boring show.
Although only certain economic elites have supported good music during centuries, I think that there is a perilous difference with today situation : composers cannot live on serious works, and cannot be independent to create what they wish as they desire. Moreover, young people listens to commercial music, or to worthless noisy electronic music that is suitable only to dance, but not to feel all the beauty of human spirit, which is the main profit that one can obtain from listening to good music.
I think that the situation of music today is a reflex of the worrying situation of education in almost all Western countries. Music is only one of the several victims of the rubbish culture that is preponderant in the mass media. What is even more noteworthy is that a large number of people who consume worthless music would be interested in good music if they had the chance to listen to it. This is not easy due to the constant bombing of bad music with which radios and other media punish our ears daily.
As a conclusion, I will quote two apparently divergent opinions of musicians which reflex very well what music should consist in and what is today reality:
“ Music is a kind or revelation higher than religion and philosophy” Ludwig Van Beethoven
“The most important in a musician’s career is to have good hair and a good lawyer" Frank Zappa
1.- Do we really like music?
We can find music everywhere. When you turn the TV on you hear a barrage of different melodies in advertisements, chat shows, series and films. Once we have entered the underground station our ears can be delighted – or more often, punished – with music which apparently comes from nowhere. As you get into the train, you note the loud volume that issues from the headphones of some passengers, as well as a brief melody announcing the name of the next station. These are some examples of how music is somewhat omnipresent in our society, although it is often considered as a hobby that you can’t take seriously.
Everybody seems to like music, and music itself arouses many different feelings and emotions, accompanying some of the happiest and unhappiest moments of our life. But I suspect we don’t like music as an art, but merely as a means to get fun. How can we explain the success of songs like “Macarena” or “Aserejé” if we do not recognize that the more stupid a song is, the more it makes people dance, the more it is whistled and the more it is listened to?. Today, you don’t need to have any kind of musical background in order to have success in music, whereas in past centuries a theoretical and practical foundation of music was needed for all who wanted to develop their career in this art. If we really liked music, we would tend to follow our personal inclinations, and we would try to distinguish between worthy and unworthy music. That is why I personally think that the vast majority doesn’t like music: they like fiesta and shaking their limbs.
In this paper I express my personal point of view about the situation of music today. First, I try to discern the means of being objective when it comes to consider someone’s value as an artist. Then I criticize both commercial and serious contemporary music, and I conclude expressing my impressions about the social causes of this situation.
2.- Can we recognize the true value of an artist?
Much as it may seem a difficult question, I personally think that we can answer it if we consider what happens to some artists when they have become not fashionable anymore. It is some time after an artist is not on top of the wave when we can think more clearly about his talent. What is more astounding in the case of some composers is that they are still heard hundreds of years after their death. How can we dare to compare the everlasting music of Beethoven and Bach with the use-and-waste music programmed in radios and music channels?. Is anybody going to listen to Tamara in the 23rd century?. It seems quite difficult, due to the ability we have to forget songs and their authors. Does anybody remember which was the summer song in 1994?.
If we assume this point of view, there is an obvious question: how much time do we have to wait until we can say that this musician has true talent? . If we consider the case of Johan Sebastian Bach, who was rediscovered eighty years after his death, we may conclude that whether the musician or composer has wit or not, one cannot be sure about the preferences of future generations, and thus it is useless to talk about ever-lasting music. When facing this argument, I can only say that people with musical background tend to recognize the true value of music despite of fashions and temporary tendencies. As I explained before, Bach was forgotten by the audience during eighty years, but musicians like Mozart and Beethoven were taught of his works and techniques of composing, and appreciate his music in the same way we do today. It is clear that not everybody likes the same kind of music, but the vast majority of musicians appreciates the same styles of music and are not interested in some others due to its lack of value. It is very significant that even the composer of the last Spanish Eurovision theme declared on TV that he would rather compose symphonies and serious works, but he would not live on that activity because the number of people who listen to good music is much inferior to those who listen to other kinds of music.
3.- Pop artists or pure marketing?
Pop music has been a revolution in the way of conceiving music business. From being live performances the principal source of money, business has become more and more a matter of selling records. There are pseudo-artists who sell millions of CD’s, numbers which were hardly imaginable little time ago. As any product, it is not the quality but the way of present it to the consumers what really makes the miracle of selling many units of bad products. Today’s pop music can be compared to fast food: it can taste good, but it has no real nutritive value, and it can damage your health if you consume it every day. Big Mac’s and David Bisbal have in common that they are designed to be bought, tasted and forgotten. They are also preceded by an intense campaign of marketing, and we can see Mc Donald’s advertisements everyday on TV, as well as Operación Triunfo fauna in almost any program of certain channels. However, if music had some quality, It would be wonderful that many people bought those records, but I think that the composers of “Ave Maria” spent the same time in writing the lyrics and melody of that tacky theme as the employees of any Burger King establishment spend preparing the special hamburger of the month.
What is even more horrible is the way that records industry has to present their products. We can watch on TV several different programs filled with videos in which it is more important the number of attractive women and men than the music itself. What can we say about the perverse intention of some “music programs” in which there is not a single live performance?.
As it is said, one image is more powerful than thousands of words. The problem is that the vision of some artists and their videos can be more important than the music they are trying to sell. The influence that TV has on people preferences is dangerous for the future of music and arts as they have been until this century. Does it make sense that the more important in music career is personal appearance? Should not it be the talent and personal devotion to this art?
4.- Musical extravaganza
I’m not going to criticize only what I don’t like, but also what I really consider as interesting music. I think that classical music has abandoned the attitude that has characterized it during past centuries. Today, we can listen to some contemporary classical music in which it is not important what it tries to express, but the complexity of the work and the techniques employed. That can be wonderful as an exercise, interesting as an experiment, and even funny as a divertimento, but what these composers don’t tend to ask themselves is: does it really sound good?, do I really express my feelings with these twelve-note melodies?, or, even more important, do I really like this peculiar sound?. This can also be asked to some improvisers of free-jazz who, despite of being very gifted, play in a strange way that maybe is not understandable at all. Artists have their own personality, and that must be respected, but sometimes it becomes more difficult to understand what is the musician trying to express than playing it. Contemporary fashion in music is like contemporary style in painting: some works seem to have been painted by children, not by artists – we could also discuss if gifted artists are like children, but that would overpass the extent and intention of this essay - .
Never before had serious music arrived to the point in which it is more important to compose something unheard before than creating a expressive piece of music. A brief anecdote I read depicted this situation very well: a young musician told Arnold Schönberg that Igor Stravinsky had declared that “the colder a music is, the greater it becomes”. Schönberg, disgusted, replied: “I said that sooner than him”.
5.- My personal point of view
Done the circumstances in which good music is treated by mass media, we may think that it is bound to die, but I believe that it has always been in this situation. Only certain economic elites can afford going to certain cultural events, and that is, unfortunately, what makes difficult for people of lesser economic levels to enjoy some of the highest works of all times. Middle class opera lovers must conform to buy records, while upper class personalities can have a reserved box in the Liceu Theater, even though they found opera a boring show.
Although only certain economic elites have supported good music during centuries, I think that there is a perilous difference with today situation : composers cannot live on serious works, and cannot be independent to create what they wish as they desire. Moreover, young people listens to commercial music, or to worthless noisy electronic music that is suitable only to dance, but not to feel all the beauty of human spirit, which is the main profit that one can obtain from listening to good music.
I think that the situation of music today is a reflex of the worrying situation of education in almost all Western countries. Music is only one of the several victims of the rubbish culture that is preponderant in the mass media. What is even more noteworthy is that a large number of people who consume worthless music would be interested in good music if they had the chance to listen to it. This is not easy due to the constant bombing of bad music with which radios and other media punish our ears daily.
As a conclusion, I will quote two apparently divergent opinions of musicians which reflex very well what music should consist in and what is today reality:
“ Music is a kind or revelation higher than religion and philosophy” Ludwig Van Beethoven
“The most important in a musician’s career is to have good hair and a good lawyer" Frank Zappa
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