The Character of Modern Music

Modern times set some distance between us and what was always close to us – the immediate surrounding nature, our past and our psychological inside. Science fired up our imagination and entered in the world of art on a big way. Constant premonitions of changes make our future look very dynamic and alive, as there is something just beyond the horizon worth dreaming about. Also, we are somewhat disconnected from our own past, looking at all traditions from a certain transcendental viewpoint of our own. All of these features are in the same time the key features of our modern music.

Alghough electronic music revolution happened due to scientific advancements of XX century, it should be made clear that the art of this new scientific era is not necessarily the art of science. It is rather art made possible by science.

Science is never an outlook of the world itself, but only makes a new outlook possible. Carl Gustav Jung

The outlook of the world made possible by science we can call cosmopolitanism. What we talk about in electronic revolution in music, and art in general – and even life in general, is not deep down so much a technological revolution, or environmental evolution etc., as much as a revolution of taste. Scientific revolution did not only change the way of everyday life, but also brought changes on spiritual level − it changed the way we think about the world, it changed us inside. In ancient times existential and physical problems, physical suffering and fear, were much bigger that today; but spiritually, people were back then much more settled than today. Today and in the future, it is much more spiritual discomfort and suffering that is our problem. Point of life; self-worth; temporariness; justice; power, choice and determination; truth and lie, communication and misunderstandings; God. These are the things that more and more torture the modern man, while physically he is more and more comfortable and sufferless.

On this way new music could be seen as the music of physically sufferless, yet spiritually unsettled and uncomfortable creatures, that seek enlightenment. Therefore, todays man does not need music of even deeper and grandiose pathos than Beethoven, even more human than Schuman; he expects music to show him that there is something higher, more enlightened than ordinary lives of his and people around him, and something more powerful than what he is at the moment. If classical music was the highlight of human musical culture, it seems it is the time for super-humanity.

Consequently, where emotions of classical music were close to human natural motions, and close to our common being, universal music is close to motions of human mind, and to emotionally strange and distant worlds. Through whole tradition saying “man” and “humanity” were high ideals to be preserved; but on the beginning of XXI century, new generations need little convincing in order to see that common humaneness is little more than an animal life. Pop music after all did enough to present man as a quite disgusting being; unlike XIX century man, modern man is not in loved with himself. Common humaneness today is not enough; Nietzsche's “Human, all to human” rings loud. Traditional music can not satisfy these new spiritual needs.

Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

All creatures hithetro have created something beyond themselves. And you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?

What is an ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment”.

We humans, are more than our biological base, our bodies, more than what we are actually aware that we are. New music uses these less obvious parts of us to go beyond what even a best common humanity can do. It is on this Nietzschean path to help us to continue becoming more, instead of being too in loved with our current, “between ape and man” form. It provokes noble, daring feelings of self overcoming. If being a classical composer meant being a speaker in the name of the most enlightened part of humanity, being an universal musician means being a super-human messenger.

One thing that can be noticed is that XX century electronic music was very male-oriented -- not in a sence by being produced by male musicians, but in metaphysical sense of how the music sounded. Many synthesizer hits were championing masculine and masculinity. Jan Hammer produced the famous Crocket's Theme, a theme whose rhythms and chords induce a soothing masculine-excess feeling. The same can be said for JM Jarre's Equinoxe 4, that this time brings a feeling of brutal power of some future cyber-male. It is doubtful that this dominance of masculine will continue in the future of electronic music, whose asthetics is only just being born anyway.

There is an impression that all the current universal music converges towards a certain kind of very broad aesthetics - similarly as wholeness of classical music, despite all the colorfulness and differences between composers and national and other particular traditions, had its own kind of aesthetics. Aesthetics of modern music aims for an air-light, angelic quality; super-natural beauty, of celestial nature, with mystique and atmospheric depth. Rather than exciting in usual sense, the term would be enchanting.

On Immaturity of Universal Music

Universal music theoretically continues where classical music left off, but in practice it is not really new classical music. It is not mature, and probably will not be for a long time.

Classical music has its ground in epochs which were much more stable than the current one, and all rooted in antique. Universal music, for that time, appears in an epoch of constant changes – both in objective and subjective worlds – life substantially being changed decade in decade out. And our time, for the first time, loses some connections with antique. What we call civilization was until now one, and was based on ancient civilizations, of Greece mostly. But this continuity is broken during XX century, whatever that precisely means. Evolved art needs long tradition, long time of unchanged circumstances, so that more complex memories and methods can be used by an artists, where our time is time of sudden changes, so its time of birth of new art forms - music is literary being reborn on new medium and inside of different context. We have business with music of a volatile and rootless epoch, and which will, as it seems, exist as such for a long time.

That is why universal music more deserves to be called experimental than high art. Music based on experiment was where it happened when creativity is concerned during XX century. Universal music will, as it seems, remain mostly a space for exploration. While the mainstream of classical music was music of maturity, 1970s experimental musicians were the musicians of latent childhood, that angelic period when a man is mostly spiritual being, curious and imaginative.

Universal aproach to music is still not a self-sustained world. This is not strange, since what we call modernism is something that wishes to disappear, and that is disappearing more and more with every its success. The ultimate aim of modernism, is not to be modernism at all; but only music, as it always was. Modernism wishes to embrace all, turn everything into itself, and therefore stop being modernism, that is, perceived as a contrast to that which is not modern. Classical tradition, and all other traditions, have to melt down inside of one more transcendent frame, towards which all modernism aims. That transformation does not destroy what it was; it embraces it and perfects it, only becoming more what it was. It gets rid of what was never good, but necessary evil. It is an impulse to embrace musical art from the past with even greater artifice and continue producing new music of our and future times.

This music had to remain outside of musical institutions and maybe will have to for some more time. Even if some pioneers themselves may have academic background, modern music is being born inside a free space of musical exploration. This exciting space, certainly not easy to explore but very inviting, still waits out there.