Too ambitious!  Exploring the past and future of western music’s evolution requires a semester (I had one hour).  As I frantically cleared and filled the board with concepts, the accumulation of black “dry erase” ink found its way first to my hands and then my face, and a lot of examples were cut for time.  Still, it seems Peabody’s computer composition students got the point… all the techy-toys in the world mean little without a clear perspective on why you are using them.  Before launching into my 3D music visualization demo, shouldn't we explore the historical context?

I broke western music’s evolution down into seven stages.  We covered everything from the fundamental physics of sound to simple rhythms in early cultures, eventually arriving at modern harmony and counterpoint, its expansion into three-dimensional sound images via modern orchestration, and the various schools of thought that have challenged this evolutionary perspective.

When the modern-era became more about experimentation and breaking with tradition, the notion that you must fully master and incorporate the teachings of previous generations lost favor.  However, this isn't the first time lasting musical ideas have skipped a generation, and I still subscribe to the old theory.  In fact, I'd argue that you can trace a more or less straight evolutionary line from the earliest forms of music to the most advanced.  At every stage, the composers we remember were building upon what came before.  Many of the last century's composers went on strike and stopped contributing to this thousands-of-years-old structure, but they weren't able to tear it down.  The fundamental physics of sound upon which it is based haven't changed.

Case in point.  When polyphany finally emerged after about 500 years of Catholic ritual, it was as if music had been living on a flat piece of paper for centuries and finally started to rise into the surrounding room.  The only problem was that these new multi-layered masses were so devoted to pure musical beauty that the religious purpose of the text was obscured (that's why the church leaders almost banned it... fortunately for the evolution of music, a particular work by Palestrina changed their minds and counterpoint has been going strong ever since).

A similar expansion of our sound world occurred with modern orchestration, first with the classical-era masters and now embedded within our sound-sculpting software.  In Mozart’s scores, careful orchestral layering and on-stage positioning created the illusion of three-dimensional imaging long before the various knobs and plugins of Pro-Tools were even conceived for that same purpose.
 
For those who subscribe to the theory of musical evolution, the implications are clear.  If you want to do something important, your work should carry on the larger tradition.  Not a new idea, but in our time a strangely foreign one (have we not seen a generation of composers turn their back?).

Sometimes the most enduring musical forms impact their era with such force that they must bounce accross a century or two before they can be fully appreciated again.  Even Bach was forgotten by the generation immediately following him.  It wasn't until the Romantics that his  music was re-discovered and earned a place in the repertoire of the  emerging virtuosi. 

In any case, as I told the students before whipping out the laptop for my demo, there's a lot more going on here than messing around with techy toys.  At least I think there should be...

e