Music Video Lesson: Has Technology Ruined Art? Part II: The Connected World

Hi, this is Robert Estrin at livingpianoss.com and virtualsheetmusic.com with the second part of a three-part series, "Technology's Impact on Music."

Today, we're going to talk about the connected world. That's right. Everything is social media, and the immediacy of email and texts is really something brand new, socially. And, of course, this is having an effect upon music.

Let's regress a bit and talk about the advent of music technologies for recording. It goes way back to the end of the 19th century with a Vorsetzer, which was a player piano type of technology that could record musical performances of pianists with technical and musical accuracy. And, of course, then the advent of audio recording which has steadily improved over the years.

Interestingly, if you listen to the performances of pianists, violinists, and symphony orchestras, and even opera singers from even the 1930s where there was a lot of 78 RPM recordings made, many of which been transferred to CDs and to streaming now. And you'll notice something extremely interesting. Once you get beyond the substandard sound, by today's standards, you'll notice that there is very, very unique individual expression. In fact, I love listening to the early performances of Cortot or Milstein, or Horowitz, Rubinstein, Hoffman, Heifetz, you know, the violinists, the pianists, the orchestras. There's a recording of Ein Heldenleben with Mengelberg, I believe is the conductor from the '30s. And there's very different stylings that instrumentalist played in.

More than that, there is more individuality among performers. Listen to Rachmaninov, and Hoffman, and Levine, and Horowitz, and Rubinstein, early recordings made from 70 RPM. And listen to the exact same pieces with many of these artists and you will be amazed how different the performances are from one another. Were people just more creative back then? Well, I have a theory about this.

Growing up, I grew up in an age where you could go out and buy several recordings of a piece that you were studying. So, course, we all did that. Today, it's even easier. You just whip out your phone, go to YouTube or some other site, and bingo, you've got dozens of performances of almost any piece you can imagine! So everyone hears everyone instantly.

What does this do? Well, this makes everyone know what the norm is and how far things are deviating from that normal. Therefore, there's more of a commonality of performance which is true across the board.

So the connected world has that one component of, kind of, homogenizing performances to some extent. At the same time, it's an exciting time for discovery as cultures that were never connected before are now keenly aware of one another. Which is why you could have music of Edgar Meyer, you know, a classical double bass player, collaborating with bluegrass banjo players and such. The fusion of different ethnic styles is one of the trademarks of some of the most interesting music being written today, both concert music and more popular idioms.

So we have the kind of a duality. We have... the good news is that we can hear everybody. Everybody can hear everybody and that's also the bad news perhaps because people might feel a sense that they have to stay within a normal range of accepted performance practices, as well as compositional practices. On the same token, we can have a rich resource of ideas and stylistic diversity literally at our fingertips. So there is the possibility for creating new genres of music that were never possible before.

So, I'm very interested in all your opinions about the impact of technologies and how it's affected your music. And opening up your eyes to what's around you next door and around the world. Thanks again for joining me. Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com. Stay tuned for part three and if you haven't seen part one yet, go check it out. Thanks for joining me.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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