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| Thread: The transition of music from the elite to the masses | |
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blizzardboy
Honorable
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Nerf Herder
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posted August 29, 2015 04:55 AM |
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The transition of music from the elite to the masses
Is it better or is it worse or is it a mix of both?
Let's go back not far in history, but just a few hundred years to the Renaissance. The Renaissance birthed a lot of music, which would continue into the baroque and then the classical period. During these times, you did not have the modern music industry as we know it. Musicians were pretty much exclusively funded from two sources: 1) Royalty / Nobility / State, 2) Clerics. These two sources of funding & sustenance, "Altar and Crown", could be seen as the elite within society: they didn't necessary reflect the common man.
As we fast forward a little bit in history, we get to the "music industry" of the current time. Artists don't need to piggyback off of the graces of wealthy individuals or institutions. Getting started can still be a lot of work, but once they get the ball rolling, as long as they can sell their albums, they don't need anybody else.
How has this been a good/bad thing? Is music "better" today because of it? Can we even compare an artist like Adele to an artist like Chopin, or are the world's they come from too foreign from one another to even bother? Are the more intellectually adept artists getting trampled under the bus by the artists that are able to sell?
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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fred79
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posted August 29, 2015 05:07 AM |
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Edited by fred79 at 05:13, 29 Aug 2015.
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comparing music from different eras is like comparing food across different nations. it's all subjective.
@ that last part you added: mass-produced music will always sell better, because it has been formulated to do so. intellectual music, on the other hand, will only be enjoyed by those with enough brains to enjoy it, and by those who actively seek it out. much like food, tastes will vary; and like food, the best-tasting stuff isn't so easy to acquire by just anyone. you really have to look for it, i think.
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blizzardboy
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
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posted August 30, 2015 07:01 AM |
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blizzardboy said:
Is it better or is it worse or is it a mix of both?
Let's go back not far in history, but just a few hundred years to the Renaissance. The Renaissance birthed a lot of music, which would continue into the baroque and then the classical period. During these times, you did not have the modern music industry as we know it. Musicians were pretty much exclusively funded from two sources: 1) Royalty / Nobility / State, 2) Clerics. These two sources of funding & sustenance, "Altar and Crown", could be seen as the elite within society: they didn't necessary reflect the common man.
As we fast forward a little bit in history, we get to the "music industry" of the current time. Artists don't need to piggyback off of the graces of wealthy individuals or institutions. Getting started can still be a lot of work, but once they get the ball rolling, as long as they can sell their albums, they don't need anybody else.
How has this been a good/bad thing? Is music "better" today because of it? Can we even compare an artist like Adele to an artist like Chopin, or are the world's they come from too foreign from one another to even bother? Are the more intellectually adept artists getting trampled under the bus by the artists that are able to sell?
There's always been a "high" music and a "how" music, at least for many centuries, and I don't use those terms to say that one is necessarily superior or inferior to another; they are both unique animals. It's just that the "low" music, or vernacular/folk music of past centuries was very often not written down and much of it is lost to us, overwhelmingly more so than the amount of high music from the past is lost to us.
There as you say wasn't a 'music industry'. Most people/communities made their own music, while elites ('Church and Crown', basically, with the latter including the nobility), commissioned music just as they commissioned fine art or scultpure (or pilfered it from a rival). How much you spent on stuff like this was of course a measure of your own disposable income, and a status symbol (rich people today still amass collections of art, although much less often do new works get commissioned by them, from my observation).
To get to your question - yes it's both good and bad. Someone like Beethoven was pretty much among the first group of musicians to try to "make it on his own", without a patron (and for much of his life despite increasing fame [or infamy!] he didn't exactly have great forture which we might feel he probably deserved - generating an income primarily from sheet music sales, some freelance commissions, and benefit concerts). Previously, musicians struggled on as freelancers until they attracted royal or ecclesiastical patrons. So it's not new to the 20th/21st century anyway.
We like to think in this age that the market makes everything better - and because the popular market determines what sells, we now have a more 'democratic' music industry with popular (and thus high-earning) stuff representing what 'most people' like. But of course what comes with high-selling artists (Adele, Taylor Swift, or whoever), comes a huge marketing industry - which is paid for primarily by agencies or music publishers. Such people are the 'real' and hidden elite within the music industry - it's still the case generally that the artists who have the best patronage (these days, the most advertising/etc supporting their careers) go furthest. Do 'we' really determine what is 'the best' music today, any more than most people of Haydn's time?
In some ways, things are 'better' today because of a host of technological and economic changes which allow pretty much anyone to experience pretty much any sort of music (and some people make a pretentious point of avoiding the most popular artists of the moment!). But I do think you're right in that it's perhaps harder to be as experimental as some modern musicians ('serious'/'classical' or popular) might want to be. Someone like Haydn could afford to be startlingly original, because he had the assurance of permanent employment by Nikolaus Esterhazy. Without saying that one is better than the other
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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