The democratization of music

I've long been fascinated by the idea that the way we experience music today has very little to do with they way our forebears experienced music. Let's start, say, forty years ago and take a meandering journey through music history. 8-tracks. They were the rage! You could easily control your musical selection in your car, a first since the radio music was still at the mercy of a dj. Then came cassette tapes, a more compact way to tote music. Walkmen started showing up. Let's not forget ghetto blasters as some sort of paragon of portable music. Then we moved into CDs, Discmen, mp3s, mp3 players, and the mass popularizer of the last item, the iPod. This progression shows that music has become more and more portable, and at the same time, more and more private.

Before 8-tracks, there were records, which were played in a more stationary setting. Before that, you pretty much relied on live performance. Over the last several hundred years, live music with instrumentation was most often found in the church, as chamber music for the noble class, or with cruder minstrel instruments. Celebrations such as weddings found live music, but again, this was more of a luxury. Without instruments, communal singing occurred in the setting of work (or religious chant, but that's beside this point). Chain gangs or plantation workers sang together. Women sang in the kitchen or over the wash. Perhaps a couple of people with a banjo or harmonica played on a porch on summer evenings, a la the minstrel.

The point is, technology has brought about a democratization of music. Just about everyone in America has some form of personal music player. What's more, these devices are giving us an unprecedented amount of control over our music selection. I can choose the very song I want to listen to and almost instantly access it. Contrast this with how instrumented music happened all the way up to the early 1900s. Outside of church music, people rarely heard highly trained and talented musicians playing music. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most of the population. I call on Cake to give us the picture, in their song "Commissioning a Symphony in C." An Austrian nobleman puts on a symphony. "With money you squeezed from the peasants/To your nephew you can give it [the symphony] as a present." Part of the subplot is the nobleman's self-consciousness and his attempts to impress people. "You enter the room with great caution/Though no one in the hall is even watching/They are transfixed/They are forgetting just to breathe/They are so taken by your symphony in C." Most of the people in attendance could only experience this kind of musical mastery once in a great while. The nobleman probably had a chamber orchestra to entertain him at regular intervals. But the common folk are mesmerized by the beauty of the performance.

So the question is this: Were we meant to enjoy music in rapturous once-in-a-lifetime moments? Or on a completely on-demand basis? Somewhere in between? We still have the "Symphony in C" moments. People listen to U2 for years and years and have every one of their songs memorized. Then U2 comes to town. An individual will drop hundreds of dollars to be in attendance to hear well-produced songs they've memorized be performed imperfectly. But live. Those are the moments we grab for. We can relive them only in our minds. There's no way we can experience the frenzy of the crowd (at the rock concert) or the delicate harmonics (at the orchestra) again, or at least till we go to the next event. We savor those moments that we've shared with our fellow concert goers. But in the meantime, we come back to our well-produced albums in the (dis)comfort of our earbuds to listen to the same songs over and over again.

Think about how special music was before electronic technology went all crazy and made it accessible to everyone all the time.