The End of Music?

So, I was at a pub today (which is not the most unusual thing to happen). They opted to play the classic rock best-of playlist or something from Spotify at first (I remember the Stones, Kansas, etc.), but eventually the music changed. And I noticed the first, maybe second, song which followed a new pattern: AAA.

In some sense, it cannot be called a song: the most basic idea of song form is what we would describe as ABA. A song, you might say, is based on the idea of a difference, a contradiction, within itself (ah, good old dialectics!). But there was no difference in this song: it was four chords. A single pattern, repeated ad nauseum. (In music theory we would say that the harmonic rhythm of the music never changes.) This song, you could say, describes, but it does not narrate. It does not tell a story. It just stays in a place; it doesn’t take us anywhere. And it certainly doesn’t take us anywhere and then back.

This may be the incarnation of what some YouTube personalities, such as Rick Beato, often derided as the “old man screaming at clouds” in this context (and he knows!), might despair about. (Rick never said that exactly this is his problem with so-called modern music explicitly, to my knowledge.) But still, it is a very real problem—or, more neutrally, a very real phenomenon of our times.

More and more music aspires to be static, aspires to be the “endless A.” (Well, A is a good grade in some parts of this world—the rest uses numbers—so perhaps they misunderstand something here.) But furthermore, the triple A-grade is mostly observable in what we might call “popular” music—whatever that is! In our endless ocean of music out there, of bands and artists that receive no, or not enough, exposure, countless denials of this new paradigm, adherences to older forms, to the antiquated idea of “song,” still thrive. This is something that the old men screaming at clouds—and I am getting closer to being such an old man myself—like to omit: we are not talking about all popular music, we talk about the type that, for some reason, seems to get the most exposure (or marketing?).

What fascinated me about this train of thought (hey, did you assume this would just be another rant about the dearth of popular media today and how the good-old-times were so much better?) is the following: our popular music, no matter complex its form may be, is based on repetition. But the paradigmatic form of music in the Western “classical” tradition is not. The idea of sonata form, which lies at the heart of most classical music, is based on development, first and foremost: the introduction and subsequent permutation of musical themes, of ideas. This is what I find interesting: the music which we call classical, which developed during a time when the master-narrative of progress was still believed in, is itself the incarnation of a narrative of progress: directed change. The restatement of a musical phrase in verbatim is rare, perhaps even scorned. The core ideas (perhaps symbolizing us, mankind?) stay the same, but everything else never remains static: in a sense, this form is historicism, the worship of the particular, in aural form.

Is there a reason for the emergence of such music in a time when (Western) human thought shifted to a view of the world, of mankind, to an idea of progress, or is it a coincidence? And if it is not, what does it mean for us that, today, music which does not even try to go anywhere becomes increasingly entrenched in our culture?



(P.S.: I do not think anyone will notice, since its a really far out reference, but yes, the title plays on a famous phrase by Francis Fukuyama.)

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