Musical Evolution

It is 3 in the morning, and I sit at my computer whiling the hours away while I wait for my late working spouse to return home.  Thinking of him, I start to search YouTube for Sinatra songs, his favourite.  Sinatra leads to Nat King Cole, and on to 60s jazz until I sit listening to Miles Davis blowing "Summertime" and all I can think about is what this song meant to me when I played it in high school.

I was a band geek.  More than a geek.  When the conductor made jokes about old movies, albums, or bands I was often the only one to laugh.  My father and I would sing songs from "Guys and Dolls" to each other during the summers... in the winter, the whole family would sing Peter, Paul and Mary songs while we drove the hour into the city.

My parents were just the same - music lovers, band geeks.  My mother had played piccolo, my father played nothing but records... But lord, what records.  One winter our septic tank cracked and flooded hundreds of records stacked in the basement of our tiny farmhouse. My father still gets teary eyed thinking about it today.  He gets angry at the loss of so much beauty.

When I was a teenager, I heard these records constantly - everything from The Flying Lizards (even their obscure second album) to Peter Gabriel to Ella Fitzgerald.  I had amassed a massive "musical vocabulary:" an unconcious compendium of sorts about music, not just the history but the way it fit together, the way it was made.  I sang every day of my life, despite constant lung infections: I recall, vividly, refusing to speak all day just to have enough voice left to croak a few notes before bed.  Life may have been confusing, hard, but music I understood.

Classical music is like math - it seems impossible until you do it once, and then it becomes old hat.  Each new song is a new equation to master, a new form of a2+b2=c2.  It was beautiful, it was simple, and it was controlled.  Jazz, however...  Jazz is painting.  There are rules, techniques, brush strokes and colour palettes, but in the end you must feel it to master it.  In the end, your understanding of how music works is what takes you to the next level.

When I led the jazz band all those years ago, when I sat the cocky teens in rows and forced them to practice songs they didn't understand, I didn't know what the song was supposed to sound like.  A few of our pieces came with CDs of cheap variations of the song, like background music for karaoke.  A few I knew through the musical vocabulary I'd built as a child - songs like "Fly Me to the Moon."  I remember that song well, for my teacher actually threw his hands up in disgust listening to us play it...  I was the only person who had ever heard it before: no one knew how it was meant to be played.

Today, any 10yr old kid with an internet connection can research any song.  Any genre, any artist, any era.  In a heartbeat.  In grade 12, I did a report on the "king of hot jazz."  We had internet by then, of course, and I waded through website after website looking for snippets of information, weighing the potential chance of bias in the source of the site.  I became obsessed with King Oliver and his role in the development of jazz, researched far more than my classmates.  But until tonight I had never heard him play.

It is not so long since I went to high school.  Long enough for my classmates to marry off, have a few kids.  Long enough for a cultural revolution - because that's exactly what we're facing.

10 years ago, you had to wade through terrible search engines to find obscure pages with information that probably couldn't be trusted.  Today, 10sec on google gave me not only a fairly-reliable Wikipedia entry on King Oliver, but youtube videos of his work:




Until the release of the world wide web in the mid 90s, information on this historical figure was restricted to obscure music history books, that I neither had the patience for nor access to.  With the internet, he suddenly became someone I could actually discover, learn about, be influenced by.

I hate the concept of "web 2.0" ... it's an empty phrase, a buzzword.  But the truth is, something did change in the past few years.  The internet became something more than what it was in the 90s - and I should know.  I was right there for all of it.  I got my first computer in 1990.  I had an email address before the mainstream media even knew what email was.  And I was coding sites and bitching with hackers long before it was cool.

What changed?  Everything.  In the 90s, the internet was as static as the library... It was the electronic form of the same books, the same discussions, the same arguments and facts that already existed in our lives.  Now, we have entire paradigms that cannot exist without the online world: Facebook chief among them.  What was a tweet?  Blogs, sure, they were fanzines, the internet just ramped up their availability and toned down the nerdiness.  But tell me, 10 years ago did you know where half your high school classmates lived?  10% even?  What is your godmother's favourite colour?  Does your ex-bestfriend like to waste time at work?  These are questions you could only answer about people that mattered to you, people you saw every day or made an effort to know.  I can tell you about people I hated in high school.  I can tell you the name of my ex's new girlfriend.  And what she looks like.  I can tell you about my fiance's ex.  I can tell you what my aunt is doing for lent, on the other side of a mountain range.

In the 90s, websites were weird books and email was a fast way to send a letter.  Now, an entirely new creature has evolved.... A world where I can find and play a video from 1961 in a heartbeat.  A world where my fiance can be in constant contact with me even while he works in another city, in another province.

What does this mean for the world? I can't tell you.  I spent 4 years researching the growth of technology and its impact on humanity and the north american culture, and I still can't tell you.

But I can tell you what it means for music.  Now, every kid has a dad like mine.  Every kid is exposed to anything you can imagine - one random youtube search, and they've discovered Talking Heads.  Or Carmina Burana.  Or Patrick Stewart reading the complete works of Shakespeare... (yah, that's not music, but it would definitely inform your view of the world!)...

In short, everyone now has access to more music than anyone could ever hear in a lifetime, at the touch of a button.  Legally or illegally, easily or with some effort, it is ALL there. (All?  Really?  What are we losing in the digital conversion?)

Everyone growing up in the web 2.0 generation now has, almost by definition, without even trying, a greater musical vocabulary than I ever had.  They have access to the songs they're learning, no matter how poor they are.  Even lazy kids will put in the effort.  Even ones who don't care.

It's a brave new world.  I'm waiting to see what comes next...

In olden times, there was only so much information.  You could go to university and learn just about everything people had to teach.  There were other things, sure, rules about crop rotation or reading the wind for good sailing, but the main rules of life - the mathematics of our understanding of the world - were finite.  Now, we have specialists for everything, because to be a generalist is to be lost in a sea of never ending information.

Now, we have access to anything, at a minimal effort.  Will this make us better, or worse?  Will these incredible vocabularies we develop help or hinder?  Will we become greater than we ever were, or wallow in self congratulation?

No one knows.  No one can know.

But I grew up reading golden age SF, and those guys didn't think too highly of the general population.
Just saying.