In class on Wednesday, I think one of the main ideas the discussion was heading towards was how composers are influenced by other music and how recordings have affected this. Obviously composers have always been influenced by the music of other composers. Brahms and Beethoven came up. Where our discussion was heading, I think, was whether the degree of idea circulation allowed by recording has put a choke hold on musical creativity. One fear from the article was that eventually we would reach a point where there was no ground yet uncharted, and all music would be regurgitation of the past. Though I may be biased (I prefer Sgt. Peppers to Rubber Soul and Gould’s later recording of the Goldberg Variations to his earlier one) I don’t think that recording can really have such a negative influence on creativity. The easy circulation of ideas has lead to an explosion of creativity. Just as Professor Alegant pointed out earlier in the semester, before the mid 20th century, there were clear strands and movements to follow in music, afterwords, it’s the Gordian knot. As for putting a maximum on the total number of musical ideas possible, there will always be visonaries who can jump out of the system and create something new. Merzbow is one. I believe it was an earlier article of Ross’s which told of how Masami Akita simply decided to abandon all of his previous musical training to create an entirely new sound that broke all of the rules. Were it not for Akita’s easy access to other music, how would he have known what to abandon? Ultimately, I don’t think we will ever reach the end of musical (or artistic for that matter) creativity. Ever. The more we explore, the more we will find that has yet to be explored. Recording simply accelerates the process, just as modern technology has accelerated our learning in everything else.
For this blog I just wanted to comment on the discussion we had on Wednesday.
Among the several things that called my attention, there were to points that particularly interested me. First was the idea of creativity as something new or as a recycling of old ideas. Then was the matter about music recordings and how they improve (or not) our experiences as listener and/or composers.
We discussed how we saw the recycling of old music styles, and how it can be argued than now nothing is actually creative or new, as it is all based on something done before. Then someone said something I thought was interesting in this context. It was raised that access to music recordings can improve composition, as we can re-listen to cool spots and therefore easily start pointing out to what we like and think could improve a particular composition. But doesn’t this activity of repeated listening feeds the recycling of music? If we listen a piece we like again and again (assuming that we don’t get sick of it) wouldn’t we be more vulnerable to end up copying particularities of that piece ⎯hence recycling it?
So, although I don’t think that recycling happens more now than it did in the past. I do think that recorded music does help with it. If we only had the chance to listen to something a couple of times, we would have to fill the blanks in cool spots ourselves ergo pushing our own creativity.
Just some thoughts about creativity.
What is creativity? Everything in this world can be seen as innovations, combinations of something else. I have been thinking about something that can not be traced, that is, something that comes from nowhere and that kind of thing is what I regard as original. However, everything seems to be product of revolutions. In fact, I think when people want to create something completely different, firstly they have to have an idea of what they want to achieve. Then they have to figure out the process of how they can achieve that. The process, however, actually consists of things they know. Like Douglas said how he plays music. People have to express ideas with some kind of language. And for me, everything ever exists comes from the human nature. The variety of food comes from hunger. In the process of fulfilling the need, people discovered things with different tastes. That’s the language for food. People then try to combine different kind of raw materials and seasonings to create something “new”. But is that creativity? Isn’t it simply combinations? The same with music. Even when people using different kind of things to create sound, they get the sound from nature rather than “creating” something doesn’t exist. Then people experiment with different objects to find out what they sound like. Then to innovate the sound to get what they want. If creativity means something that is completely new, I don’t think there is any creativity. What people do is to build stairs using what they already have in hand to a place they want to go.
If we just look at music, I think every listener tries to find their favorite kind of music. However, not all people find everything satisfying. That makes them to seek new kind of music. For me, I’m somewhat between indie and emo. The motivation for me to listen is to find something that I really love. Although there are parts of songs which I like a lot , there’s not a single musician or band I find satisfying all my needs so far. So maybe I will make something myself. But since there are so many musicians in the world and we human share 99.9% of our genes. It’s still possible for a majority of people to find their “favorite” music which they can stick to. So they are not the ones to blame. They are just doing what is right for them. It’s the same that people just don’t understand why we are always not satisfied with what we already have. Fortunately, although we are the minority, we are always here. There are always people trying to innovate or to “create” new stuff to listen to. This makes perfect sense. The world will be worse if there’s just too many variable and even worse if the world is not moving anymore. We need surprises but too many surprises will just make surprises ordinary. So for me, the world is perfect. : P
I don’t know if this makes any sense. I was so occupied with thinking and just couldn’t make a sound in class so I have to say this.~
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