Wednesday 17 June 2009

The End of Music

I read John Horgan's book "The End of Science" recently - a compelling (if faintly depressing) investigation into contemporary science and the avenues left to explore after all the major breakthroughs in understanding the universe and its (known) inhabitants have been acheived. John Horgan argues that scientists' roles now are to fill in the gaps leftover from the big theories of yesteryear - physics now finding itself theorising about untestable hypotheses; after the discovery of DNA, biology is left with speculating about how life started on Earth and filling in the gaps of the evolutionary process; neuroscience finds itself trying to explain consciousness thus moving science into the realm of total subjectivity. Black holes, time travel, superstring theory all belong in the world of "ironic" science - ideas that cannot be tested that don't exist outside of mathematically-based theory.

So is science essentially over? The author certainly seems to think so.

Could we then postulate that a similar thing has happened to music through the years? Whilst it would take some time to go through all the styles (and bearing in mind that a lot of styles are not overly concerned with breaking new ground) if we broke it down to four main contenders - orchestral, jazz, rock and electronic - I get the feeling that there is little new ground to break that hasn't already been broken.

Orchestral music over the last hundred years has moved from more traditional diatonic approaches through to Debussy's whole-tone scales, Schoenberg's serialism and microtonalism (admittedly an Eastern import itself). If the increased use of dissonance and new ways of cutting up the octave weren't enough, the avant-garde's use of silence, minimalism, prepared instruments, tape loops and electronic sound added new colours to the pallette. After these innovations it seems that modern orchestral music now seeks to appropriate elements from "lower" culture in a desperate post-modernist attempt at seeming relevant outside a dwindling niche audience.



Jazz seems to have had its century - from the early Dixieland bands, they substituted chords, went modal, went "out" to the point where improvisation no longer needed to adhere to a key, to a rhythm - to a certain degree it no longer even adhered to the playing of the other band members in its free-est sense. Once chaos had become the peak of expression, jazz returned to deference and cool. There was nowhere else to go apart from dilution.



Were Sonic Youth the last rock band to actually break new ground? Even then, the punky vibes were secondhand and the odd-tuned guitar drones were nabbed from Glenn Branca. Maybe Radiohead if I were to be generous, but then it seemed that the parts that seemed interesting were more to do with the electronic elements than the sulky, proggy stylings. Most guitar music of today harks back to 60s mod, 70s punk and 80s new wave, with a little hark back to folk, blues and country if you feel worried that those other sounds have a threatening modernity to them.

Which brings us to the most recent of the four. Kraftwerk led to Afrika Bambata and hip hop and electro, which had inspired the emergence of techno and house by the mid 80s and within a few years we had trance and hard house on one side and the re-emergence of sped-up breakbeats in hardcore and then jungle by the early 90s. Techno and house were re-invigorated by minimalism and glitch via Basic Channel et al, hip hop led by J Dilla returned to unquantized beats (a precursor to such "fresh" sounds as "wonky") and incorporating more tech sounds thanks toTimbaland, jungle mutated into the no-holds-barred invention of drum and bass and then a combination of heavily swung beats, booming bass and a return to divas and mc's led to UK garage and 2 step.

After that, it seemed that pretty much all electronic dance music pretty much regurgitated itself - grime took the mc and gun culture from hip hop, lost the funk and gave it a darker, harder spin (not unlike the trajectory of post-99 drum and bass); dubstep took the jungle bass, techno minimalism, quacking dnb basslines and somehow turned raves into monotonous, metal gigs; bassline ripped speed garage in a hard house style and electrohouse seemed to just rewrite the same song forever. The non-dancey stuff isn't much better - has anything particularly new happened in noise, ambient or drone in....oooh... the last 20 years or so? The aha! moments that triggered the accelerated evolution of this period were created from a combination of new technologies (e.g. drum machines, synths and samplers) and frenzied experimentation with them (e.g. "impossible" drum parts, cut-up breaks, resampling). Now that we can distort, pitch-shift, timestretch, flip, reverse, rinse and repeat have we not got to the point where essentially it's all been done?

It seems to me that music in its current state can only provide diminishing returns given the amount of music available and the history involved. How many more combinations of notes can there possibly be that have not been used endlessly before? How much of what we considered imagination were lucky mistakes with technology or using it in ways that had not been tried before? What is the limit to imagination - isn't everything we imagine something that is already in our mind or a combination of sounds we already know?

Are there going to be any further innovations in technology that might allow us to create unheard sounds? It seems again that most of the major discoveries are done if we can manipulate audio at the sample level - we can now even improve on a virtuoso performance. Once we have covered the extremes, is there anywhere else to go but creating hybrids and filling in the few gaps left?

Is this the end of music?