It's true that too much music sounds predictable and boring, says Ian Stewart, but it's too easy to blame technology — the real reasons lie elsewhere.
For some reason, there is now a common view that technology has made making music too easy. Sample CDs, preprogrammed drum machines, and keyboards that can produce dance music at the touch of a button often stand accused — but why? Before the days of good drum machines, composers would use a real drummer, and I doubt that the composers would work out the drum rhythm themselves. More likely, they would describe the rhythm they wanted, or sing and play the song on piano or guitar and the drummer would work out his own rhythm. Has anyone said that working with a good drummer makes music‑making too easy?
The fact remains that the rhythms used in most forms of music work within narrow limitations. Music is probably never totally original, and working within stylistic limitations or reworking established concepts or ideas does not necessarily make music uninteresting. Even a composer as original and way out as John Cage had precedents in the early American eclectic composers, Satie, serialism and what was probably a complete and utter misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism. The early church composers would base their masses on masses by other composers. Be‑bop musicians used the chord sequences of the standards that they played in dance bands, and although they extended the chords and added to the original sequence, the harmonic origins of their pieces are clear. If you take the chord sequence of a standard and try to write your own be‑bop theme over it, it is still difficult. That is because creativity is rarely easy. It is definitely no easier to produce creative electronic music than it is to write music for traditional instruments. Yes, you can press the buttons on certain keyboards that a child could operate and produce a sort of dance track — and yes, you can also patch together some obvious chords and melodic patterns, give them to a jazz group and produce a sort of jazz.
It can be the working out of established ideas that produces creative music. Some great jazz musicians could work within well established idioms and make standards we have heard thousands of times before sound new. There again, other great jazz musicians seem to come from nowhere and create their own idiom. Creativity cannot be produced by either technology or years of formal training. Along with the unexciting music produced by technological means there is also the unexciting music produced by highly trained, academic, classical composers.
I believe there are three reasons which go a long way to explaining why music is now too often unimaginative and unexciting, and these have nothing to do with technology. The first reason is that everyone wants to compose because there is a large amount of money to be made, in the form of royalties, if the music can be placed in the right areas. Bad music attracts the same royalties as good music in any given situation. The second reason is that the art of composition is no longer valued: some people will pass off the most awful concatenation of random notes as compositions, and as often as not these will be accepted.
The third and most depressing reason of all is that there is an all‑embracing conformity in almost everything at the moment. Compliance and conforming are essential to getting through the education system and having any chance of success in the job market. This need for conformity means that creative composers and musicians rarely fit in, as social skills, business skills, image and matching preconceived ideas of what a composer or musician should be like are more important than any degree of creativity. In fact, if you do not have these non‑musical skills you will probably not get anywhere near the right people in the first place.
Although clichés such as 'innovative' and 'cutting‑edge' are bandied about, it is conformity that is valued and rewarded: anything slightly different is met with suspicion or considered unsuitable. So if there are any new Velvet Undergrounds, John Coltranes or Lou Harrisons out there, it is your duty to make as much noise as possible before we all sink into this quicksand of conformity, mediocrity and marketing plans.
Ian Stewart is a freelance composer/musician specialising in electronica and music for classical saxophone.
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