You can hear the 20th century "avantgarde" in the horror, action, thriller, mystery and similar movies... ("The Matrix" trilogy had one of the most "original" soundtracks, but the music was a mashup based on various 20th century composers, some of them are even alive.)
The remark about the influence is also wrong. You can always check the works of the late Beethoven.
Do you think that people in the past didn't have folk music? If you think that classical music was the most popular genre... well, you are wrong.

 

The Matrix was scored by Don Davis who as well as claiming to be avantgarde, is more of a neo-classical composer, meaning he believes in tonality. Pretty much all film music rejects the atonal ideology that their more traditional "classical" music peers gravitate towards. Frankly the general public's sense of music is so ingrained in the sense of tonality that listening to many atonal works will sound like noise to them. I attend a lot of classical concerts at my university and the kind of "modern" classical music I am thinking of is likely not what you are.​

I play many of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas personally and in them I don't really see a sudden break from the classical style but instead more of an expansion on the classical style; a bridge of sorts between the Classical and Romantic period. He didn't spearhead this shift all by himself either as many would give him credit for; he would attend recitals of his peers and be influenced by changes in their music as they would be by his. That is how transitions like this happens, he was just lucky to be born when he was to be able to take part in that transition.

I use to almost idolize Johann Sebastian Bach, and for the longest time thought he was this genius that single handedly revolutionized music. Then I attended this eye-opening recital by an organ professor who played many of Bach's and his predecessors works and illustrated how they influenced Bach and many of his most famous works.​

Folk music is probably even more so ingrained in the past and tradition than classical music is. And until around the mid-20th century classical music was probably more popular than folk music. There was a period not too long ago where almost everyone owned a piano, everyone had their children take piano lessons, and virtuoso pianist's were treated like movie stars.​

 

I'm still waiting for a dream to midi converter in my xmas stocking.
One year.... eventually... it will be there!

 

Indeed it is. I totally forgot about it. After posting this song here I listened to the whole album again and thought what a treasure it is.

I'm with you!

 

But it is not up to us to decide what innovation is good or bad. Innovation itself doesn't include a "good or bad"-decision. It is just innovation, without any judging. Just remember nuclear fission. It's applications were mostly bad, but the discovery of it? Just innovation.

 

Since you love Bass and innovation is what you are searching for the maybe this will up your ante.And yes ...they are Indians.Here you go FFF

 

As for whether you or anyone else might be able to create anything innovative, that depends on what constitutes "nnovation." A new harmonic system? Rhythms which have never been used before? An unprecedented way of arranging sounds? Something entirely non-derivative of anything which its creator and audience has heard before? How much derivation or predication is permitted within the idea of "innovation?" For example, "progressive rock" was performed with identifiably "rock" instrumentation, and its musical style was derived from classical conventions (when not from classical compositions) – but it was considered stylistically "innovative."

The thing with music is that there are so many different musics – indigenous/ethnic forms from all over the world; genres of modern classical music; electronic-music styles varying with the technologies and methods of composition; instruments particular to musical forms or styles, or instruments grafted from one culture onto the performance of another culture's music; techniques of vocal performance, developed and sustained over centuries, which sound shockingly novel to anyone unfamiliar with them . . . YouTube is a great place to start for startling one's sensibilities with such novelty.

I am asked, "Hey, did you watch the Grammys?" I reply: "No. Do you not know me?" "No. Do I look like an idiot?" "No. I feel so much happier and think more clearly without a television in my domicile, and mainstream mediated culture is for people who need their imaginations supplied to them." It's those who look past or around what's constantly in front of them, who feed on something besides what's being slurped-up by the Masses at the feeding trough, who will find or come up with anything new and interesting. There are imitators, and there are innovators.

 

Well, Davis is directly ripping off Penderecki, Varese, Lutoslawski and John Adams in the trilogy. I have yet to hear his opera,

Beethoven's sonatas? My impression is that people can't get into his late quartets at all. The sonatas are like pop music.


Something funny:

 

Stop using shitty modern nexus presets and unleash that analog beast.
Juice boy, its all about juice ,mojo and balls which modern production lacks.

 

Agreed to some extent. The longer you're occupied with music -either as a consumer or creator-your frame of reference grows and "new" stuff slides more easily in familiair grooves. Also I feel we're not living in the most exciting times whereas musical novelties arise in what genre whatsoever (but it could just as easily be my own experienced cynical frame of reference at display here). Nowadays I do feel it's more about having an own "sound" or combining certain elements from genres, largely induced by production but now and then I do get surprised so I take on the challenge. Some personal oddities from all over the musical spectrum from jazz to EDM to classical. Hope some resonate with you:

 

go back to like 1967 -1975 and listen to all underground music on YT. Forget anything laters.
you never forget the first girl u had sex with,
today u have a FREE FLATRATE in the biggest Whorehouse ever with 150000 hoes ... and u end up ?

 

Whoa, you mean to say that you don't think that Titanic is like the greatest movie ever? Get outta here!

 

I have a cure.

Do not listen to music. For like 1 week. One months fuckin crazy.
The first thing your going to listen to will be holy.

 

dear me, that is a woefully wrong statement.
shakespeare invented a lot of language ( the largest vocabulary of any writer according to martin amis). whether that is true i cannot say, but there is no doubt he was responsible for a swathe of neoligisms)
he is also responsible for introducing psychological realism. there was no one like this before he turned up. no one had written the contents of a person's inner thought before shakespeare
so to say he 'isn't any longer' is funny considering he died 400 years ago, give or take...
he may not be innovative ( or indeed alive) any longer but his influence on literature and culture in general is inestimable...

 

Sort of agree. sort of.
You have to realize that music in general has been severely downgraded to a level that the mainstream pop music now tries to please mostly 10 year olds.
The height of music was reached in the 70s and lasted till the mid/late 80s.
Technology can not replace quality song writing and arrangements.
Musicianship is what is all about.Computers can not replicate that process, you can not jump over the learning curve, hence the modern tv talent shows, that give people the illusion they can jump over that process and become great artists.
But you can learn faster today because of internet but you still need to put in serious, serious time.
Remember when Magix came out in the 90s?When average joe thought he can now become an instant producer.

 

I agree with you. I certainly didn't mean to imply Shakey didn't innovate.

I meant Shakespeare wasn't original in a narrative and story sense, his magic being not the invention of new tales to tell but rather the re-telling of old ones.

The fact Shakespeare is half a millennium away, yet is what it is, suggests novelty and innovation are lauded by modernity to excess. It's inhibiting, as a cultural demand. I think my point was about a modern culture over-valuing originality, where we can demand and expect constant revolution.

I'll indulge my point:

New things? Well, things don't need to be *all* new. The tendency to believe so is part of the cult of modernity, imo. "New" is only a fleeting temporal quality, by definition. On the shoulder of giants is good enough, you simply can't re-invent the wheel.

So, I am thinking, in my earlier post I was trying to crudely help someone/anyone escape the tyranny of the new. Or any other tyranny.

Thank you for bringing me back to those thoughts, Filtersweep.

I can read a page of Shakespeare, seemingly understanding little of it, and the text gets to a full stop, and a break.....and suddenly I feel all these different rhythms and music magically resolve, right at the full stop. How the fuck did he do that across a whole page? And then I go back and try to understand it, work out what it means, and it takes an age and it makes me think so much. I just can't believe a single human can express so much, so well. Again and again....

His confident power to invent seemingly endless new words (and metaphors and phrases?) is astonishing. I can't believe Shakey was all human.

 

By definition......folk's music is folk music?

Deciding the definition is an expression of power? As with languages - the more said in one language, the less is said in others. How many musics have we lost, I wonder.

 

What the original poster has wrote i seem to have identified with it for a period of my life. Later on, it was proven i suffered from depression. That lasted a good two+ years. What led me to snap out of it was a series of events in my personal life that shook me and turned my world upside down, so i had to re-define my existence from the start. But to get to the point.
I remember all we knew as 11 year olds was rock and disco. I loved both like crazy, but later on of course i discovered jazz and classical although i was never really fond of it, it was always there to start with and i started listening and playing that too. See, when you give a person 2-3 choices and he is a "ready made sponge" to digest them, he will always come back for more. Give a person 5-6 choices and you will keep them occupied for some time. Smarter persons may want 10 choices because they can handle 'em all simultaneously. Experienced listeners may gather thousands of records and that is also a number of choices they made among hundreds of thousands. But give a person billions of choices with no apparent definition of the who is who and what and they will never be able to make the absolute correct call, and even if they do, they can never be sure about it, at least mathematically it is impossible. Whereas in the past the limitation of choices dictated that people could be happy with their preference selection, right now the absolutely overwhelming number of people exposed as musicians and artists has led the people -who in the past would be the music lovers/buyers/listeners target group- to almost stop caring about music as a recorded and marketed media, because of the crazy abundance of choices they have to make, they simply are bored or don't care to make any. Add to this the crazy consumerism that after the western world, now is taking the eastern world by storm too and globalization in most aspects of everyday life. I strongly believe, this unprecedented phenomenon of the last years has had a big impact to the more sensitive people who have come of a certain age and grew up without all this. Many of us ( i'm 51) simply refuse to digest the new order of things, the digital world, the e-commerce, e-singles and albums etc. Hell, i know too many musicians of my or even younger generations, that if they knew how much money Steve Aoki and the likes make they would shoot themselves or shoot Aoki lol, because they would never accept that guys like him can call themselves artists. In a way its better they 're left to what they know, but the world around them keeps spinning and they remain immovable. So time passes by, they get older and de-touched ,with no physical or spiritual connection to what is going around them. New trends have been rejected by a purist status quo in the past as well. But what is happening now is everywhere. You could ignore the rockers,the hippies,the punks,the posers etc but you can't ignore the internet. Well, you can but you will be alone in millions. And while the internet is sort of free what do you pick to listen through all this? Do you stick with what you know or do you search for new inspiration?

I found my way back to happiness through my younger friends and wife. Their joy of life and lust for new adventure has once again become mine and in return they 're happy with me sharing my more "experienced" views. Needless to say my newly formed band's members are at least 15 years younger than me . So , for me it is not about if all has been played and creation is obsolete. It is about whether making a simple happy song for instance can move your heart or not. If you can't be moved as a listener you will certainly not be moved to get creative. Finding your key to happiness is the key, and excuse me, but fuck if everything has been done before. You cannot define your existence through the sole purpose of redefining music. It is unhealthy bro. Do what you do best and from the heart and its "cosmic energy" shall be received lol. With that said, time for a big spliff and some Tanqueray
Love and peace

 

small innovations, maybe, but "really innovative" no it's impossible at this point.

unlike in the past any possible sound has been used, sampled, processed, and played in any form and shape.
any musical scale has been tried and done.
any combination of tempo and rhythm has been done to death.

so what's left ? not much i guess, with Dubstep we reached the bottom of the barrel, i can't even think about music going even lower, it would mean the public reached total brainwashing.

research and avantguarde will keep going on for the usual bunch of audiophiles but if we talk about pop and commercial stuff nothing is gonna change much for the next 20-30 years, it's gotta be Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga over and over, and more crap in hiphop, pop-rock, etc as if the actual pop stuff wasnt cloning the 80/90s pop since 20 years ?

many artists will be replaced by DJs as they have millions of followers and they dont need to waste years studying music, they're fashionable and make people dance and this is the only requirement today, so ... i mean not totally different from the old star system with mediocre singers who couldnt sing and with boy-bands and all, really what's new about it ? nothing new ... the music industry has always been a scam from the beginning .. innovation is the last of their problems, they think innovation is stuff like Daft Punk or Dubstep which says it all.

so, yes, we definitely reached the point of non return.
ask yourself, even now with tools as powerful as Reaktor why nobody is coming up with something radically NEW ? because they can't.
a 100 VCO oscillator synth sound will still sound like a weird synth sound, nothing you can do about it .. and same with a guitar with 100 rack FX, weird but still a guitar and still a string instrument ...

sound travels over air and it's made of waveforms, any possible waveforms has been used already, no way you can "invent" a new waveform and even if you could it would just sound half synth and half acoustic so again nothing radically impressive.

i mean look around, rock is dead, metal is going nowhere, film music and new age and library music is stuck in the same perimeter since 40 years, hiphop is stale, EDM and dance music in general havent' evolved much in 20 years, pop music is the same since the 80s but with modern sounds, old farts like the Stones are still playing despite being 100 years old ...

we must accept this and move on with our music.
if you think we're having it bad today imagine 20 years from now !

 

as for the damn DJs : governments should impose a DJ tax to foster innovation and live music, actually i would go as far as implementing a total ban on DJs and recorded music, only live music shoudl be played on stage and on radios and TVs, people like Steve Aoki would go back grilling burgers at McDonalds where he belongs.

this would rock a bit the industry, and secondly another ban on foreign music so to keep it 50-60% local, as they do in France to protect french music.