In the process of building a liquor collection, I noticed that sitting next to each other were Hendrick’s gin and Kraken dark rum – two tasty enough liquors that both seem to be riding the wave of Edwardian chic that can be found in products that wish to identify themselves with some sort of old-time, handcrafted, for-sideburned-and-discerning-gentlemen-only sensibility. Now, as much as this sort of deliberately-constructed, marketer-concocted aesthetic usually irritates me, I can’t get that mad about it for two reasons: one, fuck it, I like the aesthetic; and two, because we live in an era of such design- and aesthetic-awareness and technological savvy that all design choices are, by default, deliberate. We have a huge vocabulary of product appearances, and the ability to reproduce one as easily as any other – calling “prospector chic” any more deliberate and cunning than any other design is pointless, because we don’t live in an age where things are printed a certain way because that’s the only way we know how to print them.

And since this blog is the main outlet I have for longform thoughts such as this, I’m obliged to link it to classical music – which is good for the brain, I imagine. Anyways, much as typography was fairly uniform in its appearance for hundreds of years (as limited by the available technology, theory and imagination), music was about the same. Music (at least western classical music) was very much limited by the instruments available (most of much inferior quality than those made today), the musicians available (again, not nearly as good as today’s superperformers, by and large), the accepted chords and harmonies (far fewer the further back you go – medieval music basically only had about ten notes), and the imagination of its composers (which, frankly, couldn’t reach as far as ours today, if only because we have the benefit of 500 years of culminated imagination to draw further inspiration from).

So when someone (ie: me) says something hilarious like “why don’t they make new classical music?”, the answer is obvious – because by virtue of our hyperawareness of musical history and the complete, unfettered freedom of choice and ability, any musical decision is so deliberate that choosing to write (without limitation) in a style that was defined as much by its limitations can only really be called stereotypic homagery at best and stylistic carpetbagging at worst. A style can’t just be chosen ‘just because’ – it has to be relevant to a piece’s content, or a wry comment on something, at least if it wants to maintain some sort of intellectual soundness (which it likely does, on account of the self-consciousness of today’s tastes). “New” “classical” music does much better for itself by being labelled as film music, because the outsized pomp of the full orchestra is justified in having to match the outsized drama on the screen.

Of course, I wouldn’t mind new classical music – provided it’s good. That’s the catch – purely classical music would be such a novelty that most composers would be unable to resist the urge to check off all the stereotypes of the genre they could think of – Mozart-style descending sixteenth-note scales that land on a quarter note one up in the scale, Wagnerian strings racing through arpeggios in unison, Bach-flavoured harpsichord-and-violin-and-flute interweaving, and so on. Back in the day, composers were asked to produce music – what they made, they made with much less self-consciousness than anything today, because what choices did they have? Hell, nowadays, some ensembles even play with “period instruments” (kinda like playing 60s garage rock with vintage-inspired guitars) in an effort to increase the authenticity, whatever that means.

Hendrick’s and Kraken can get away with it because, let’s face it, we’re not drinking the style (though legions of marketers would love to prove me wrong, and since they fancy that they traffic in subconscious/liminal psychology, I have no way of proving them wrong [short of travelling back in time and not buying their products]). But music is music – we can’t but listen to the style. Hell, the remaining limitations to what we can produce (ie: poor musical ability) are more often than not played off as stylistic choices (ie: three chord songs). We can make melodies and write whole songs, but how they’re ultimately played and expressed and taken from pure music to performed piece is unavoidably deliberate.

It’s interesting to think about the rise of things like the synthesizer, the synclavier and programmable music computers and how they helped composers transcend the limits of manual dexterity that kept music from becoming purely intellectual (and how they made Paganini-esque figures far less impressive than they once were). I say “interesting to think about” because I don’t know nearly enough about these composers, their gadgets and their history to even hazard a guess. But they had their heads in a decent place in realizing that they were free to do pretty much anything they could possibly imagine, and then giving it a shot. They got themselves to the right spot at the right time to use up some of music’s last remaining supplies of self-unconsciousness

On a final note, there still are some limits. Taste is probably the only one that will really last – though I have my doubts. You can make absolutely anything you want, and it will qualify as music – but you still have to make it “sound good”. And despite the endless assaults on the word “good,” the idea that something should sound “good” to a fair number of people’s ears makes sense. That it should do so without requiring excessive intellectual justification makes even more sense. In the end, I reckon our animalian visceral simplicity will save us from musical singularity. You can make a chair that’s just a bunch of rusty nails, but if you can’t sit on it, it’s not going to last.

But then, “progress” often finds a way of getting tangled up in itself.