I’m far from a modern music fan, so I find Ted Gioia’s analysis of the genre to be hopeful for the future … there’s so much objectively bad music being released these days, but the vast majority of it will sink without a trace:
Handwritten score by Bach
“No stupid literature, art or music lasts.”
That’s a quote from literary critic George Steiner (1929-2020) — in his highly recommended book Real Presences from 1986.
I was shocked when I read that sentence. But pleasantly shocked.
Could it really be true that all the sonic detritus circulating in our culture will just magically disappear? It seems too good to be true.
And Steiner wrote that before the rise of the Internet and AI. If he thought we were drowning in crappy art back in the 1980s, what would he think now?
Around 100,000 songs are uploaded online every day. I can’t listen to more than a fraction of them, but almost every day I check out random new tracks on Bandcamp — and sometimes the process is painful.
Nobody can say that I’ve shirked my responsibilities as a music critic. In recent months, I’ve listened to death metal bands from Croatia who sounded like they were ready to bludgeon the entire population of Zagreb; incoherent Christian drone pop that only delivers the Good News when it’s finally over; entire albums of static, buzzes, burps, or toots; people singing to backup tracks, but apparently unaware that they are in different keys; and various home recordings that should never have left the basement.
It’s an ugly job, but somebody has to do it. I occasionally find that rare gem, a self-produced needle of rare pointedness in the otherwise dismal haystack. That makes it all worthwhile.
But Steiner may be on to something. Most of the bad stuff disappears without anyone worrying about it. In fact, it disappears for that very reason — because nobody worries about it.
And the deeper I peer into the past, the more I see the same Darwinian trend. He called it survival of the fittest.
My considered judgment is that almost every musical work from the 17th and 18th centuries that survives in the standard repertoire possesses some merit. An interesting case is Bach, who is the presiding genius among the known composers from that era. Bach was unfairly forgotten in the years following his death — in fact, his sons got more acclaim than their dad.
Bach had been dead for more than 75 years before his reputation started rising again. The neglect was unfair, almost horrendously so. But with the passage of time, he gained preeminence, almost as if an invisible hand — much like those the economists describe — was setting things right. You could tell similar stories about other composers, from Antonio Vivaldi to Scott Joplin. It’s almost magical the way things work.
I must say that this is a judgment that takes a long time to make. Back at age twenty, I couldn’t have told you if Bach wrote better fugues than other composers, or Joplin composed better rags. Yet after decades seeking lost masterpieces from the past, and picking through the works of secondary and tertiary figures, I’ve concluded that the legendary figures from the past definitely earned their preeminence.
As a result, I worry more about the artists whose work has disappeared completely. Those are wrongs that can’t be rectified.
