Different strokes…In music, modernism as any kind of identifiable style only really emerged after WW2.
The difficulty with using any such labels in music is apparent when you deal with earlier modernist iconoclasts, such as Edgar Varese, and before-their-time postmodernists such as Charles Ives. (And it’s equally problematic in other periods - ‘renaissance’, ‘romantic’ and ‘baroque’ all have different meanings and different timeframes in music)
Fair enough and true enough.
Twas an unfair analogy to get my point across, though I maintain the points.
Musical styles have not finished evolving. But what is popular in modern music seems to be very limited. Of course once you go outside of what is popular there’s a whole other universe.
Popular music before the 1950s was treacly and as bland as butter. In the 60s, electronics in music was a novelty, and albums of electronic music were typically only created by professors. I never foresaw breakbeats becoming a central focus in electronic music for a period of time, nor being a solution to creating an entire subgenre.
For all we know, in 50 years, accordion and bagpipe duets might turn into the biggest thing in pop music.
Hey, and it was about twelve-tone western musical forms! I had originally written something longer and more detailed about Dave Brubeck and 5/4 time and syncopation and augmented fifth intervals and… well, yeah, it wasn’t terribly important except that the structure of tone and meter hasn’t really changed much, and since you don’t see dance bands falling all over themselves to write in 11/8 I figured it didn’t qualify as “popular” so I left most of it out.
And I wasn’t about to touch with a four-over-four meter pole the idea that rap was not “music,” nor that it was “popular,” in the sense that the OP meant “popular music,” although one could make the argument that rap music is just a modern example of recitativo accompagnato.
I said nothing about where music would go as a result of combining sounds, or in recording a new sample or creating a new and popular waveform; I said only that once the technology can reproduce anything we’ve heard and create any waveform we can design, there aren’t many places for the technology to go. As technology has been a driving force for quite a long time (“hey, look what I can do with this new-fangled electrified guitar!”) in musical sound for a while, the technology has sort of hit a dead-end and any further creativity is up to us.
In other words, the world is still waiting for the overdrive-distorted electric oboe ensemble’s rendition of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D to a hard-rock beat. 
I fear there’s a long wait before this stage is reached.
Quite so. The idea that the music that is listened to in the US/Europe is the be-all-and-end-all of popular music in the world is quite incredible to me. The spectrum of music that is played on the radio in the US is extremely narrow compared to what’s out there globally, even considering the entire range rock-punk-rap etc. There are all kinds of synthetic musics being played elsewhere in the world, fusions of local idioms with rock and rap along with new innovations, that sound like nothing regularly available on US airwaves - Finnish folk-punk, Indonesian synth, Okinawan dance music . . .
I don’t know about the technology being completely done. Right now the MIDI spec allows for 2[sup]16[/sup] - 1 (65,535) different instruments, and no current computer could play that much stuff in real time. But I doubt that works for a 40,000 piece orchestra will ever become all that popular.
Who cares if it can play that many instruments in real time? Just record your first 16 instruments, compact them into a single sound file, and layer 16 more instruments on top. (Or however many MIDI instruments you can get together, say 40 keyboards of 16 voices each and do 640 voices at a time).
And perhaps the technology can’t precisely duplicate the complexity of the sound of a grand piano… but you can just record the piano itself. Maybe the technology isn’t perfect yet, but it’s difficult to imagine how much better it’d have to be to drive a purely technical revolution in the manner of the piano-forte or the electric guitar or adding the clarinet into the symphony orchestra.
I don’t think the point is that we can produce any sound we could ever want, but the ones we can’t produce might not fit into the OP’s question of “popular music.” Hell, keyboard music is already capable of creating some amazing stuff which, for whatever reason, isn’t currently the mainstream popular sound. Maybe one day…
You identify the problem in your statement. ‘Perfection’, and technical capabilities, are not the deciding factors. It’s what people do with them that matters. When Bob Dylan ‘went electric’, he wasn’t doing anything that really hadn’t been done before. But he did it with such skill that it could break through barriers. This was nothing to do with the instrument, and everything to do with the musician. In the same way that replicating the sound of a grand piano is very different from replicating the ability of a pianist to perform on that piano (and replicating the differences between every performance).
If you insist upon taking the micro view, then yes, every single time a person picks up a musical instrument, “popular music” evolves. In that view, then Bob Dylan is by definition a “new sound” because he applies his own personal guitar skills and creative talent to the medium.
I’m taking a centuries-long macro view of how our tastes in music change, where “electrified guitar + percussion combo” is a very short blip on the radar scanner and individual interpretation of “electrified guitar + percussion combo” isn’t really something I’m paying attention to. In that light, the invention of the electrified guitar was an important event that cast its shadow upon the overall tone of music for 50 years and beyond.
Focusing on the technology is not, I think, the best place to look. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think that the development of jazz or the blues was driven by technological innovation; it was driven by musicians with interesting ways of combining different pre-existing musical traditions, coupled with some wholly new ideas of their own.
Again, we can imagine new musical formats fairly easily. If a popular music format appears that combines the competitive aspect of hip-hop with the melodic qualities of Gamelan, we’ll have something wholly new. If old-style participatory singing combines with electronica, we’ll have something new. Hell, imagine a theramin-like device that projects an electric field just above a crowd, and can be manipulated by the hands of hundreds of people at once, whose hands are directed by a conductor at the front of a stage.
New musical forms will come along as long as there are imaginative musicians. Some of the new forms will languish in obscurity; others will become popular forms.
Daniel
Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think that the development of jazz or the blues was driven by technological innovation; it was driven by musicians with interesting ways of combining different pre-existing musical traditions, coupled with some wholly new ideas of their own.
Having just finished Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, I’d have to argue with you on this point. The development of the form in the Missippi Delta depended heavily on technology. The development of the Sears-Roebuck mail order catalog and its wide dissemination through out the South put very affordable guitars and harmonicas in the hands of the sons of sharecroppers. There would have still been music in the Delta, but it wouldn’t have been guitar driven.
The second major technological innovation that had an effect on the Blues was the radio. Bluesmen got a chance to listen to other bluesman which had before only had been possible before for those musicians who’d chosen an ittinerant lifestyle. Now they could stay close to home and hear others play the Blues. They also realized that it was possible to make money playing the Blues, first by advertising their appearances and later advertising their recordings.
In addition, the railroad itself was an important tool in the development of the Blues. It was both an inspiration and a means for the musicians to leave the Delta to go to places like Chicago where they could earn a living and learn from one another. If by "technology’ you mean the technology of the instruments, the development of electric guitars had a huge impact on how the form developed and grew but not its initial appearance.
I was definitely thinking of the technology of the instruments around the time of the initial development of the form, since other folks seemed to be suggesting that our having reached the pinnacle of soundmaking technology meant that no new musical forms could develop (I may be misunderstanding their points, but that’s what I was getting). However, that’s pretty interesting about how other technological developments superficially unrelated to music (railroads, catalogs, etc.) could effect the development of music.
Daniel
The next big thing is probably procedural sound. Currently, to make sound on a computer, you have to go out into the real world with a big fat analogue microphone and physically record it. If you wan’t to play 100 different sounds, then you need to record 100 different instruments. With procedural sound, you input the physical parameters of an object into a computer programs and it works out how that thing should sound, based on how it behaves. This allows us to simulate sounds of things that we couldn’t physically build in real life just like computer graphics lets us draw things that don’t exist.
But more importantly, it allows the creation of interactive music, where the actions of the user influence the music in much more significant ways than they do now. I don’t know if it will pan out or not but that would definately be something new in music.