Ship (Trunk) of Theseus
Yesterday on my walk I was thinking about music history and I saw it as a trunk that gets sent around the world over many hundreds of years. The trunk arrives in various locations and people go through it and they take what they want to use--books, photographs, weavings, little artifacts, and instructions like recipes. People take what they want and then it's pushed off into the sea and it floats to another location. When it arrives, people pick through it, and in every country that it arrives at, there's something else missing from it, or people put something back that is not like the original. We don't have a complete record of what people are using and not replacing, or placing something new in it without saying that it's new, so as the trunk arrives in New York, say, in the 1930s, American culture picks through it and we have things like Big Band and Blues that get taken out of the trunk and things that are put back in, and then it gets put on a train and rides th...
