American  Music Legacy: Music Then and Now

Most of us think of music as entertainment that we’re free to choose according to what we like and how we feel. Making this choice is as easy as turning a dial on a radio, or purchasing an album from hundreds of thousands of selections in music stores or online sites, (not to mention libraries and the ever growing number of MP3 downloadable sites.) This type of freedom is currently at a peak unlike any we’ve ever seen before in history. If we look back in time we can see how less sophisticated technology supported fewer resources to choose from, and less access to them.

Imagine you were living in a time before there were any music reproducing machines (I’ll go back to the player piano in 1863.) You wouldn’t have music in your home unless a live person played it. You might be able to enjoy concerts and local jam sessions, or even street performers if you lived in a large enough town. As far back as the early 1800’s you could have experienced some musical variety from performers who toured by train or steamboat, or you might have traveled to other cities to satisfy your need for something different if you could afford it. Sometimes traveling medicine shows  passed through the rural communities featuring musical and comic entertainment to attract a crowd, after which they tried to sell them some product that rarely lived up to its claims.

As you can imagine, prior to the scientific advancements of the last 200 years, music was a very local and personalized event, limited to whoever could make the music (or be in earshot of it) and by whatever styles were available for local musicians to learn from. We find that many communities the world over have had their own pockets of culture where the same group of tunes were passed on from one generation to the next with relatively little change for many years, and in most cases they were never written down.

 Much like spoken language, which often develops its own regional differences (dialects), and generational variations (slang), music has evolved for centuries into something that distinguishes neighboring communities as being different, but gives those within the communities a living tradition which they can identify with.

Technology has had two enormous impacts on the musical cultures of the world. By making the accumulated heritage of distant cultures available to everyone, we can all experience increased freedom of expression, having more choices of what we can play and listen to, something that we can’t imagine living without. However, when you make a distant culture available, it isn’t distant to anyone anymore. In fact, it’s no longer possible to distinguish the differences between regions when the barrier that preserved the music is gone. Music may continue to evolve into something we can’t even begin to imagine, just as I’m sure that 200 years ago they would have never imagined the music of today. My hope is that you’ll continue to enjoy playing and listening to music long enough to hear more changes in your lifetime.

 Mark Tamsula