I didn’t have anything really radical in mind. I think it’s pretty clear that there’s a long-term trend toward high-level music-making relying on notation to a decreasing extent. I have a number of friends who are professional composers, and some of them use notation to write for instruments, while others use electronics and largely don’t use notation at all. (The latter group, who compose for video games, movies, etc., are the ones who actually make money at it, so I’m by no means just talking about avant-garde electronic music.) A lot of commercial composers who would have been using paper and pencil 30 years ago are using Logic or Digital Performer today.
The other factor, of course, is that notated genres of music (“classical” music and its descendants, and some others) are increasingly marginal in Western culture. This trend is often way overblown, but is clearly visible at the timescale of decades or longer.
What I certainly don’t mean to suggest is that individuals who use notation in our musical lives, like you or me, will stop using it. It’ll be a cohort replacement effect, and no doubt a very gradual one. Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill. My impression, though I don’t have a reference for this and could be completely wrong, that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century.
All this is very much the framing argument of Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, with its much-criticized focus on what he calls the “literate [his needlessly inflammatory term for ‘notated’] traditions” of music. Within that frame, he casts the present day as essentially an “end-of-history” moment.
Correct me where I’m wrong here! I’m not a specialist in these issues.
Let me add that, like you, I absolutely love music notation, borderline fetishize it, and say all this with more than a trace of a Luddite’s sadness.
Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill
That I find more believable; but specialization is probably the wave of the future in general. I’m much more bothered by the prospect of interesting things dying out completely than that of their being “restricted” to a (possibly vibrant and vigorous) subculture. (These days I tend to think that most of “real” life takes place in subcultures or smallish communities—maybe even cults! -- anyway.)
My impression...that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century
I don’t myself have enough data to confirm or deny this (I’m not a specialist in such topics either), but one should make sure to take into account the rest of the world: I have the impression, for example, that the Western art music tradition is currently in ascendance in China.
(I also suspect in general that people’s impressions of what past populations were like are biased toward reflecting the elites of past populations, about which information tends to be more readily and reliably transmitted, which they then compare to a more general cross-section of the current population visible to them.)
I didn’t have anything really radical in mind. I think it’s pretty clear that there’s a long-term trend toward high-level music-making relying on notation to a decreasing extent. I have a number of friends who are professional composers, and some of them use notation to write for instruments, while others use electronics and largely don’t use notation at all. (The latter group, who compose for video games, movies, etc., are the ones who actually make money at it, so I’m by no means just talking about avant-garde electronic music.) A lot of commercial composers who would have been using paper and pencil 30 years ago are using Logic or Digital Performer today.
The other factor, of course, is that notated genres of music (“classical” music and its descendants, and some others) are increasingly marginal in Western culture. This trend is often way overblown, but is clearly visible at the timescale of decades or longer.
What I certainly don’t mean to suggest is that individuals who use notation in our musical lives, like you or me, will stop using it. It’ll be a cohort replacement effect, and no doubt a very gradual one. Nor do I think that music notation will entirely go away at some foreseeable point in the future. But reading and using it will slowly become a more specialized skill. My impression, though I don’t have a reference for this and could be completely wrong, that the ability of American adults (not pro musicians) to read music notation with some fluency has hugely declined over the last half-century.
All this is very much the framing argument of Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, with its much-criticized focus on what he calls the “literate [his needlessly inflammatory term for ‘notated’] traditions” of music. Within that frame, he casts the present day as essentially an “end-of-history” moment.
Correct me where I’m wrong here! I’m not a specialist in these issues.
Let me add that, like you, I absolutely love music notation, borderline fetishize it, and say all this with more than a trace of a Luddite’s sadness.
That I find more believable; but specialization is probably the wave of the future in general. I’m much more bothered by the prospect of interesting things dying out completely than that of their being “restricted” to a (possibly vibrant and vigorous) subculture. (These days I tend to think that most of “real” life takes place in subcultures or smallish communities—maybe even cults! -- anyway.)
I don’t myself have enough data to confirm or deny this (I’m not a specialist in such topics either), but one should make sure to take into account the rest of the world: I have the impression, for example, that the Western art music tradition is currently in ascendance in China.
(I also suspect in general that people’s impressions of what past populations were like are biased toward reflecting the elites of past populations, about which information tends to be more readily and reliably transmitted, which they then compare to a more general cross-section of the current population visible to them.)
Agreed on all this.