Why Old Music Is Killing New Music

 

Neo-Victorian Maximalism

It's not necessarily killing it--it's just not nourishing it. By design, anything that wants to be radically new must make a clean break. It just wants to do its own thing. 

 

Typically, old music informs new music because musicians delve into the past just out of curiosity--like I did when I first heard Stravinsky. At least there should be some reverence for older music even if you don't use it. 

A good corollary is Le Corbusier when he railed against Victorianism, or perhaps even better, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose futuristic, low-to-the-ground style still had almost-gaudy Victorian elements in them. Many times his clients wanted them. Today's music listeners want the old-style decoration like Wright's clients wanted their homes to look like a Swiss Tudor.

Artists frequently dip back into the past to be neo-something. In this case we're neo-post-60s--not as radical and psychedelic as the hippie era, but still with a universal sense of cool. There is a break with the past, but there's still a reverence for it. Even pop artists would cite Matisse as an influence, and Abstract Expressionism, deemed almost sacred. It's not a situation where you'd go into a museum and ignore the Old Master works. Seeing it an historical context makes it one integral work, the "long now" of art.

It's interesting that there are teens that are very into the 80s because they feel a lack of a zeitgeist and they see some of it there, while there are people that loved the 50s or 60s and they see the 80s as when the world ended.