I was inspired by this bbq thread to create this one.
I’m positing the theory that it is now impossible to create music that hasn’t been created before and thusly not derivative of anything else. (Assuming the fact that even if the creator was never exposed to music to create its derivations from, said creator would not create anything that isn’t already around.)
Imagine tones which progresses thusly:
12,000 Hz for 5 seconds.
11,200 Hz for 10 seconds
5,000 Hz for 5 seconds.
Repeat.
Of what is that derivative?
That would explain the increasing dependence on sampling.
I would venture to say that experemental noise music (ala Psychic TV and old Current 93) are/were attempting to make music that wasn’t based on any existing style, but was completely new and used completely new instruments and equipment.
Also Sprach Zarathustra?
the question presumes that there is some sort of “pure originality” possible regarding the creation of music.
isn’t music itself always a form of mimicry?
or at least mimicry is an essential element of music.
there are many assumptions made in the OP. i think if one takes these assumptions as they are presented, that there can be no novel music is trivial.
if i may ask, what music was ever novel?
the tones of John Mace present a repeated pattern of notes, which has already been done.
if there is no repetition, or indeed any pattern at all, there is no music.
so once you have a definition of music, and one piece of music, there is no more novel music. it is all derived from the one piece which follows the definition.
how can there ever have been new music by those terms?
to put it another way, what would constitute novel music at any point in history? what do you mean by new music?
Follow the link to the BBQ thread where derivative is introduced.
Using that as the basis for the theorem, we’ll start at Green Day.
Per allmusic.com Green Day’s influences and roots are:
The Undertones The Sex Pistols The Jam The Clash Buzzcocks The Who Tsunami Bomb The Ramones Cheap Trick
So then we’ll take one of those bands, The Sex Pistols, and look at their roots and influences, which are listed as:
Mott the Hoople The Ramones The New York Dolls Faces T. Rex David Bowie The Kinks The Stooges The Who Alice Cooper The Velvet Underground The Rolling Stones Chuck Berry MC5.
Then take Chuck Berry’s roots and influences: Louis Jordan Bob Wills Muddy Waters Elmore James Nat King Cole Charlie Christian Ray Charles T-Bone Walker Big Joe Turner
Etc etc etc…
So, Green Day and Nat King Cole are then distant cousins on this evolutionary chart. Using that quick synopsis, I was putting forth a theory that yes, what Green Day is doing is different from Nat King Cole, but it is derivative.
So, to put it simply as you had done:
Of, course, music hasn’t been around forever so at the very beginning it would have had to have been novel. The question really is, is there a way to break the evolutionary system that music has?
As the technology of music production improves day by day, new genres of music are enabled by new modes of creating music that simply would not have been possible in the past.
There’s a lot of work going on at the moment in this vein, things like AudioPad and BeatBugs.
Besides this rather obvious avenue of the creation of new genres, the meaning of the very word “music” and the aesthetic sensibility that defines it, changes over time in context of human culture and lifestyles. Classical music would have caused riots among cavemen. Minimalist music would have driven Victorian audiences mad. Grunge rock would have horrified early 20th century listeners. As time goes on, we open our minds more and more to the possibilities of what can be considered music. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that progress in this regard will be retarded in the long term.
Of course music has a history and alll musicians have influences. That doesn’t make it derivative (or not in a pejorative sense), that makes it evolving and culturally grounded.
But there’s no need for a lack of originality, except for the marketers trying to repeat old successes. I suppose if you never listen to anything but top 40 channels you won’t hear much new.
Consider it mathematically - music is about pattern. How many patterns can there be? And then you can have patterns of rhythm, of notes, of tone qualities - all of these, covarying, independently varying, varying rapidly or slowly, some left out… There are voices, instruments, electronic morphs of voices and instruments. There are potentially way way more pieces of music than there are elementary particles in the universe - not all of them sounding good of course!
This thread OP is wack but it did bring up something about rock that’s been bothering me for years now.
From about 1964 to about nineteen-eighty-something, rock continually, rapidly, went through new styles, new ideas, new bursts of creativity. The Beatles completely rebooted the whole idea of what rock-‘n’-roll could be. Then Dylan hit with folk-rock. Then came psychedelic rock, acid rock, blues rock, country rock, heavy metal, progressive rock, reggae, funk, jazz fusion, punk rock, New Wave … every time you turned around, something new and exciting was happening.
But starting in the late 80s and throughout the 90s until now, I don’t really hear anything so innovative. The new “styles” sound like the same old same old to my ears. There have been a lot of variations (like “grunge”) on punk and metal, but hey, they’re still just punk and metal retreads. Nothing much in the way of plain rock has changed in 20 years. Electronica, plus its gazillion spawn that all sound alike, is the only new sound that’s come along. Also rap/hip-hop, but that isn’t really music. It’s just talking.
The only really creative, innnovative area I hear in music the past 15 years is world beat, in which rock is hybridized with various kinds of traditional music from around the world. Reggae was the first inkling most Americans and Brits had of this. Also George Harrison playing the sitar. The world is a big place, so that allows lots of wide-open potential for new sounds.
BTW, this thread ought to be moved to Café Society.
Electronica is not a genre. It’s an umbrella term for a thousand genres, everything from Club House to Progressive Trance to 2-Step Garage to Trip-Hop to Goa to Electro-Funk.
People are doing some amazing things and pushing the envelope in all sorts of directions with electronic music. Listen to some Brian Transeau, Chemical Brothers or Cut Chemist. There’s more to electronic music than what your local ClearChannel station plays for you.
IMO that depends how you define originality. True artists, as e.g. Annie Lennox (my personal choice), convey more than just “music”, they offer emotion and personal messages way beyond just the musical tones.
So, in that sense, her music is not derivative.
Moderator’s Note: Moving to Cafe Society.
well, I’m glad that you’re here to tell me which of the things I listen to are music and which aren’t.
by the way, Ulysses and House of Leaves are not books.
Here is a theory, I am not copying any one elses theory that I know of, but I am sure it is derivative.
All art is derivative, from other art and ultimately from nature. At a very general level, an artistic thing is something that stimulates the brains pattern recognition capabilities and leads to pleasurable neural re-enforcement of these pattern recognisers. Patern recognition is a primary function within the neural systems of even simple life forms, and has emmence importance in any activities involving the senses. Art is an experiment in stimulating the pattern recognition systems of a person, by either presenting complete patterns to a person causing a sense of wholeness and completeness. Or presenting an almost complete pattern and then breaking the pattern with something that does not fit the pattern, causing a sense of dissjointedness excitement and a wish to find a deeper pattern. These are reactions that help animals survive in a natural setting and so respond to natural stimuli the best. Art being music, or painting, or dance, or … first recreates the natural stimuli, and with further derivation builds on these natural stimuli to create more and more artificial paradigms. Each artificial paradigm would not work if it was not for earlier forms back to their natural roots.
The blues of the Mississippi Delta was created by descendants of people who were brought there from Africa as slaves.
Fearing revolt, the slave owners cut the slaves off from almost all aspects of their culture, which might have provided a unifying force.
The result is a music created around 1900 pretty much from scratch.
Although the first true blues recordings were made more than twenty years after the music coalesced from earlier African American music forms, some selections by artists such as Fred McDowell, Son House, Charley Patton and others may be pretty close to what the first blues sounded like.
Apart from such cases, I would agree that all music is derviative, but the degree varies. E.g., although YMMV, Green Day’s music is much closer to that of their influences than, say the Beatles’ music is to theirs.
It’s OK, I’ve worked out your problem. You have become what is known as an Old Fart. Your premise that music is not innovative is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You state that music is no longer innovative. Anything that is innovative (hip hop) isn’t music.
And Electronica, as has been explained above is an umbrella term for thousands of different genres, and I don’t understand how anyone with ears could possibly say it all sounds the same. Does Bjòrk sound like Daft Punk to you? Does Moby sound like Peaches? Does Kosheen sound like Fatboy Slim? They’re all vastly different genres with different elements, as disparate as different forms of rock music are. You are right though; some of the most innovative music around is being made on laptops around the world right now.
Your non-music is doing the same thing to such an extent that it’s even charting. Missy Elliot’s Get Ur Freak On and Jay-Z and Panjabi MC’s Mundian Te Bach Ke both combine Indian rhythms to take hip hop to new places. Meanwhile, the Brits are mixing Garage dance with hip hop to create new perspectives of the genre (Dizzy Rascal, The Streets).
As far as guitar music is concerned, Radiohead continue to break apart rock and stitch it back together with electonic seams. Hip hop artists have begun looking at the guitar in a new way, using it for purposes other than the rap-metal pastiche favoured by Limp Bizkit et al and actually properly combining rock and hip - try the Talib Kweli song Feel The Rush. Then again, Outkast are using guitars to add rhythm to their hip hop, such as in their latest track Hey Ya.
The Montreal Post-Rock scene is doing some pretty out there stuff.
And as all good artists know, if you plagiarise from enough places, its called research. Find the Avalanches album Since I Left You if you can’t stand sampling. This will change your mind. If tongue-in-cheek brazen robbery is more your sort of thing, have a listen to the plentiful bootlegs around - the most famous of which is probably Freelance Hellraisers mix of the Strokes and Christina Aguilera called Different Strokes. 2 Many DJ’s have also become well known for similar ventures. And if you still can’t find anything that sounds new to your jaded old ears, do a Google search for Dsico and download his track entitled Keep It Real, Bitch, a remix of J-Lo’s Jenny From The Block.
and at what point does the same musical genre stop being original and start being derivative? Were the Sex Pistols-era punkers derivative of the Ramones? Were the hardcore early-80s punkers derivative?
Is today’s indie rock derivative of the early 90s? Was early 90s indie derivative of the late 80s? even within genres it becomes too confusing to determine when “original” starts, so I don’t even try.