| The End of Music |
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| Written by Roger Born | |||||||
Page 1 of 5 And now the purple dusk of twilight timeSteals across the meadows of my heart High up in the sky the little stars climb Always reminding me that we're apart You wander down the lane and far away Leaving me a song that will not die Love is now the stardust of yesterday The music of the years gone by STARDUST Hoagy Carmichael Between the Renaissance of the 1500s and up until the late 1800s, the performance of orchestrated and chamber music required an afternoon to hear it completely in all its complexity. Most pieces written then were merely exercises in style and formula. Notes were played because they could be. IOW, they were boring-to-tears. Among all the drek were a few shining stars of transcendent music that survive today. -Much like the music of any age, in fact. Before Records, in the late 1800s, sheet music of popular songs was available for playing on the piano. Most affluent homes had at least an upright piano. People made their own media, using the sheet music of the popular tunes of that day, which were mostly Broadway Hits. Even the Player Piano played the popular, instantly recognizable tunes of its day. Those songs lasted less than half an hour, following complete scripts of stage plays. If you were too poor to own a piano, there was always Vaudeville. Then came the Record Player. This caused a temporary division of the listening population, which was divided between the wealthy and the rest of us. In 1905, if you were rich, the Classics on 78 RPM records is what you listened to. When you were not at the Opera or the Symphony, that is. This music was called popular music, being the ONLY music available in that media. There were less than a hundred titles available then, and the those players cost more than a new Ford Model T. This early music on the Victrola lasted an average of seventeen minutes, or the length of time for a 78 RPM record to play. Why Classical music? Only the big Metropolitan Orchestras had the clout and bucks to get recorded. Edison invented this media, but others soon owned it. I have a friend down the street who has a 1929 RCA electric motor driven 78 RPM Record Console, with a top that is held open with gas filled struts. All his surviving 78s are Classics, except two, which are black Jazz. This player cost more than a Rolls Royce when it was new. The sound is horrendous, but the media is very luxurious and cool to look at and to touch. For the rest of us, there were short music pieces in the 1920s that lasted about six or seven minutes. These were played by hopping bands and crooners, who made such memorable hits as "Flapper Girl," and "Coo Coo Ca Choo." Most of these never made it to the 78 format because ordinary people did not have access to 78s. However, the Movies were getting popular at that time, and this popular music was recorded there. Radio was getting even bigger, and the new music flooded the airwaves. Interestingly, there were few commercials in that day. It was RCA, who was so busy buying out all competitors, who paid for much of the air time and programming on the radio back then. The new radio was an invention which almost anyone could afford, again thanks to RCA. Then the music converged again. When the Big Band era came along in the Thirties and Forties, that music lasted an average of twelve minutes per piece. "Moonlight Serenade," and "Begin the Beguine." are examples. This music had elements of the Classics and popular music. It was much more technically sophisticated and superior to all the music that came before. Music of that generation has never been matched in complexity, in style, or in beauty, IMHO. This was the zenith of the music of Man. (Debate, anyone?) Dorsey and Goodman were the kings then. There were also Jazz performers coming into their own at this time, developing the modern style of Jazz out of New Orleans Blues and Black Soul music. Interestingly, their music followed the same time format of the popular music. The new record format at the end of this era was the Long Playing Record, the 33s, which could contain a selection of six or seven complete songs of a about a dozen minutes each. Movie tunes also fit this format, having been cut to match the supposed attention span of the movie audiences of that day. Enter the Fifties. First came the advent of the little 45 RPM record, with a big hole in the middle (the first purposely designed incompatible format), containing a single song per side, and incidentally causing the sale of hundreds of thousands of those cheap RCA record players which could only play that format. This record player was another RCA invention, bought or stolen from some audio engineers, which had the innovative three tube circuit. Second came the new and cheap transistor radios, and new radio stations which only played the new Rock in its new format. All the songs were under three minutes. More could be packed into an hour on the radio this way, and so could more of the brand new commercials, which had just been introduced. With the Commercials, these new radio stations were independent from the big Affiliates, such as NBC and ABC. (Did RCA have its hand in the new record companies that were born out of this format?) |
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