Posts Tagged ‘new music artists’

When pedagogs write books on music, they often look back at the performance and compositional practices of the past and try to present models of how composers of a particular era always did things. While these are quite useful if you are actually performing some of these works, it begins to be taken as an implication that there some sort of ‘rules’ that were used in creating these works.

Upon actually looking at a number of these works, however, it becomes immediately apparent that these  new musical artists of the past all had their own way of approaching the task and they often varied it from composition to composition.

This pedagogical line of thinking has accrued in modern times to the point where the pedagogs believed they had arrived at a sort of pinnacle of musical evolution and the route for a new music artist was plainly to utilize one of these ‘superior’ methods of musical composition, (which have now fallen into such disuse that no one today is even aware that they exist.)

One can see a distinct parallel in the pop music industry where the record companies have believed in a particular formula that has worked for them in the past and dogmatically tried to use it over and over in their selection, creation and promotion of the new music artist.