Impact of industrialism on the production of music
A couple of passages I’ve read recently have me thinking about this …
In Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave he explains that during the industrial revolution, “Concert halls began to crop up in London, Vienna, Paris and everywhere. With them came the box office and the impresario—the businessman who financed the production and then sold tickets to culture consumers. The more tickets he could sell, naturally, the more money he could make. Hence more and more seats were added. In turn, however, larger concert halls required louder sounds—music that could be clearly heard in the very last tier. The result was a shift from chamber music to symphonic forms.”
About the same phenomenon, Curt Sach wrote in History of Musical Instruments, “The passage from an aristocratic to a democratic culture, in the eighteenth century, replaced the small salons by more and more gigantic concert halls, which demanded greater volume.” Since no technology existed yet to make this possible, more and more instruments and players were added to produce necessary volume. The result was the modern symphony orchestra, and it was for this industrial institution that Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Brahms wrote their magnificent symphonies.
Now as the technology and information age sweeps over the world’s industrial societies, what effects will shape music and all art? Of course, we’ve been seeing it for decades, music produced to sound good on car stereos, and compressed to fit on duplicatable media like CDs and MP3s. With low barriers of access to listeners afforded by the Internet, large rock bands thundering into sports arenas are shrinking into geeky solo artists with laptops. In the near future, will audio and video always be linked, given that our portable devices are capable of playing both at once? If so, how will the need for a visual companion influence the music itself?
Just wondering.
