Curate yourself!

Around 1970 I became a listener to classical music rather than pop. After all, the Beatles had just broken up, so pop was obviously over (heh!). I also transitioned from being a rock/blues musician to being a classical guitarist. For about ten years I never paid any attention to pop music. But since the early 80s I have enjoyed checking in on the pop world from time to time. Lately that has meant watching some clips from Rick Beato. Here is one that went up two days ago and already has over 5,000 comments.

If we step back a bit and take a more historical view, we might want to ask how were previous musical eras characterized? It is fair to say that the "Classical" era which was centered on Vienna between, say, 1770 and 1830 was characterized by a certain kind of musical vocabulary that, influenced by Italian opera buffa, simplified the intricate counterpoint and chromatic harmony of the Baroque in favor of clarity, simplicity, rhythmic vivaciousness and dramatic harmonic contrasts. For the details, have a look at The Classical Style by Charles Rosen. By the end of this era and the music of Franz Schubert the vocabulary has become much richer and starts to show signs of the Romantic inwardness. Where did this style or genre come from? Pretty clearly from the explorations of people like Mozart and Haydn followed by the development and elaborations of Beethoven and Schubert. Was it influenced by publishers, marketers and record labels? Certainly not as none of these existed at the time (with the exception of publishers, but they had little influence on what composers actually wrote).

Throughout the 20th century the development of recording and broadcast technologies brought to the fore the influence of business people whose main interest was ensuring a profitable return on their investment. That is certainly fair enough, but the unintended consequence we see in the 21st century is that musical taste seems to be being shaped by algorithms more than anything else. Sure, the individual curating of micro genres is happening--the Music Salon is an example as I definitely tend to promote the music that I think is significant and ignore everything else. But honestly, there is a mainstream genre consisting of Taylor Swift and similar acts with much of the songs written by that committee of guys in Sweden. To me this feels rather like the tail is wagging the dog. I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.

How do we do this in the current environment? Now that's an interesting question!

Music to meditate with, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960 by Franz Schubert, first movement, played by Sviatoslav Richter.