The "Pop" Question
Playing pop music these days is very easy.
Just play on the left hand the note C and on the right C E G, and just repeat, repeat, repeat that chord! Well, you can actually change chord, but as long as you keep repeating, repeating, repeating,... you are good.
Now, my question is... Is music suppose to be like that? Where are we getting to? Don't take me wrong, that repeating actually sounds good (when played right), but I wonder.. what will happen next?
Let's try to look at the future of pop music, so, let's travel in time for a minute a couples of decades ahead...
Is there anything else there? Or is it just more repetition...? Or maybe, artists couldn't find anything easier to play on their songs and went back to the "vintage way" (actually playing). Maybe, as time went by, they played less and less until they had songs with only one note? Or even easier, not playing at all (I think we don't have to travel to the future to find music like that xD) Maybe in the future people started to realize that their sensitivity to music was very low and they decided to change their playlists to include more elaborate music?? Am I going too crazy here? I guess we have to wait for the future to happen.
In the meantime, let's go back to the past. We are now in 1700s, Germany, in a room where there is a man, and a piano (or harpsichord). He is probably composing one of the greatest musical works of all time: The Well-Tempered Clavier. Then we go and start showing him the music to come in the following centuries. We show him Mozart, Beethoven, then Berlioz, Lizt, Brahams, Tchaikovsky, Wagner... Then there is a point where we have to start explaining to him how Rock 'n Roll was formed, along with Jazz, Country, Latin, .... by this time we will be submerged in a deep "Folk Music" conversation, until we get to Pop, which is merely a reduction of the phrase "Popular Music". I guess we will also be talking about the great orchestral pieces composed for movies, plus some other great compositions, but how do we explain Pop?
By now, this looks like one of those "Classical-Music-is-Dying articles, and even if I don't share that opinion ... How do we tell Bach that people simply started preferring music that sounds like Piano Lesson#5?
I don't know. Maybe I'm just going to far. Maybe we will never have the opportunity to sit with Bach and talk. But I do know one thing, new generations are being born with a great misinformation about what's quality music. They are being induced by the idea of these big media productions, where the videos are going ultra high definition, and there are a lots of camera effects, colors, lights, audio effects, and "cool movements" (or should I say "lit"). These young listeners are experiencing music more through other senses than the listening itself.
Can we do something about it? Probably yes, but, is that going to be enough? ...
I guess we have to bang that piano a little more and find out
