By
It is safe to assume that in the year 2034, we will be listening to all music that has been and will be preserved (in whatever form). Our super-technological age has made listening a boundless activity that transcends time and space: At the touch of a few buttons, we can access music written five centuries, or five minutes, ago—from any place on Earth. For many, music is omnipresent, waking us in the morning, accompanying us in our cars or on walks, in stores and places of business, and in most modes of entertainment and relaxation. At no time in history has so much music been accessible to so many people: truly a golden age of listening.
We have no reason to think there will be any interruption to this golden age. Instead, we can expect further expansion. As the world gets smaller, there will be more extensive cross-cultural fertilization of musical styles and genres. As a professor, I have often marveled at the ease with which my students absorb and assimilate a tremendous variety of music. Classifications seem to mean less and less to them as they accommodate an ever more diverse musical experience. While they clearly have their personal preferences and strong opinions about what appeals to them at any given time, I find them marvelously open to new musical encounters. Since they are the future, I can only believe that musical eclecticism will flourish. The appellation "crossover artist" will become an anachronism.
In the West, what we commonly call classical music will be as alive and well as ever, despite all the dire predictions of its diminishing influence or demise. I have no worries for Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, or any of the other great composers; they will always have their ardent advocates and admirers. (Needless to say, I hope to be among them at age seventy-eight.) There are more orchestras (professional, community, and youth), opera companies, and chamber ensembles than ever before, and, while some may have trouble in the economic climate that is sure to be with us for a good portion of these next twenty-five years, most will survive and transform themselves with the times.
In my own lifetime, I have witnessed huge changes in the way people listen. Even so, live performance has been the constant because there is no replacement for the simultaneous communal and individual experience of perceiving music that way. It can be said that music, by its very nature as a temporal art form, helps teach us to live in and experience the present. Vinyl LP records and cassette tapes, even though still collected, are no longer the standard, and even CDs are on their way out. Today, the computer and the MP3 player are the reigning music purveyors—that is, until something else comes along.
None of these media will completely disappear, but, naturally, the most recent digital formats will dominate. My Duke composer colleague, Anthony Kelley '87, A.M. '90, however, suggests that "we are already on the way to the elimination of hard media; thus the trend will continue until the databases of music will be accessible, wirelessly, with the touch of a button, or maybe in some cases from a neural impulse." Wow! Composers and conductors can hear music in their heads, but for any listener to be able to do so—I can't wait!
Musical notation has evolved quite a bit since Guido d'Arezzo invented the staff, sometime around the year 1000. The composition process today is as likely to involve a computer, keyboard synthesizer, and printer as a piano, lined paper, and a pencil with a large eraser. Hence, it seems reasonable, as Kelley suggests, that the mingling of acoustic and electronic sound sources, as well as written text with improvisation, will continue to expand the tone colors and forms that music presents to performers and listeners. Our time has also placed a great premium on "seeing" music in addition to "hearing" it (witness websites like MySpace). Narrative seems crucially important today, and while this will continue to be true, I sense something of a subtle, gradual, increased awareness of the more abstract potential of the art.
Putting aside all of this aural augury, my view and hope on the subject of future music listening is best summed up by the great twentieth-century American composer Aaron Copland in his book What to Listen for in Music, published seventy years ago: "Since it is our combined reaction as listeners that most profoundly influences both the art of composition and interpretation, it may truthfully be said that the future of music is in our hands."
