Will the music die?, page 3

A lot of the comments on here give me the impression that people are taking a very short-term view of music, that somehow, what is happening now is new or unique. The reality is that practically every generation asks much the same questions.

The idea that 'in my day, bands wrote and played their own material' is an odd one. Popular music over literally hundreds of years has owed far more to the playing of other people's material rather than writing original works. Folk music (which isn't some 1960s subgenre) is generally based on the transmission of a form of 'standard'. Songs mass-printed as early as the 15th century in the form of 'broadside ballads' encouraged mass audiences to perform the same songs. Yes, these songs were written by someone in the first place, but that's far from the idea that performers were writing their own material.

This along with two other strands of music - sacred music and fashionable classic - ran pretty much on similar lines: the vast overwhelming majority of people who played music, played someone else's music.

This went on through to the 19th C and 'music hall' which more or less created the roots of what we understand as being popular music. This, in turn, informed the jazz standards that are still massively popular 80 or so years later. How many songs did the likes of Sinatra write themselves? You had the 'Tin Pan Alley' type of writers who had a similar relationship to popular music. Even during what's considered to be the 'golden age' of popular music, and a time when the writer as performer phenomenon really began to emerge, much of popular music was propped up by professional song-writers, often aligned to specific studios or artists - look at the likes of the Girl Groups, Motown &c., look at people like Elvis.

Yes, from the mid-1960s onwards and following on from the Beatles and the British Invasion, there was a significant rise in performers writing their own material, but performers singing standards, covers or specially-written material has always been around too. Even at the time of the 1970s version of Do-It-Yourself 'skiffle', punk, there was a massively successful disco movement which was based on studio created songs.

The boy band and girl band phenomenon that's apparently polluted the charts over the last decade or so is something that's neither new nor the 'death of music'. Music is still here despite having been based on 'people unable to write their own material' for whole centuries.

Regarding playing instruments, what is a 'real' musical instrument anyway? The thing we're most familiar with ourselves? Where do we draw the line? Is a hammond organ not a real instrument because it's a poor substitute for a 'real' church organ? No, that's ridiculous. Is my Korg K-61 running the Native Instruments B4 module not a real instrument because it's not a 'real' hammond organ? No, that would be equally ridiculous.

Technology changes all aspects of our lives including how we make music. I don't particularly like a lot of modern music, but it would be foolish of me to dismiss sounds because of the way they are made. Where do you draw the line?

We're living an an increasingly technologically-rich society and with that comes choices - choices that previous generations just couldn't have imagined. Are we all so sure that the kids who grew up with piano lessons in the 19th and 20th centuries would have had them if there hadn't been other 'done things' and status symbols (which musical ability was and to an extent still can be) to drive parents as well as distractions for the kids themselves? I'm certainly not.

As for things like Guitar Hero, I'm not particularly keen on them myself. Yes, I'd rather people be playing 'real' musical instruments, but then again, I'd rather have people playing Guitar Hero than played First Person shoot 'em ups.