Re:How Musicians Make Money, Or Don’t, In 2018
by bsder on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @05:49PM
(#17719801)
> It's not just the hardware.
> Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.
You are grossly underestimating the effect that technology had on music. Rite of Spring couldn't have been performed until the 20th century so there was no point in writing it.
Bach's children and Mozart (mid 1700's) were the first products of music pedagogy. Paper didn't become common until the 1800's. Interchangeable parts and factory practices made musical instruments much more consistent and available in the late 1800's.
All of this means that the average orchestral musician improved dramatically in capability over the course of less than 200 years.
It's not just the hardware.
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.
Twelve tone music, Dada music, all sort of other types of music could have been composed hundreds of years earlier, but it wasn't.
It's not just hardware and technical capabilities that evolve, but musical tastes, ambitions, and understandings of what music is and could be.
Similar things happen in other arts. The Black Square[1] painting could have been painted at any time. But tens of thousands of years passed before anyone did it.
Art is constantly evolving, and the boundaries of what is considered art and what people appreciate as art is ever growing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)