Ennio Morricone by alessandro De Rosa

Author:alessandro De Rosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Dilated Present

Let us deal with the present, then.

While the music originating from the tonal tradition was “dying”—or so it seemed—and the “highbrow” musical idioms multiplied and became “sound sculptures” for a restricted niche of individuals, many people got in touch with new genres that developed in close relation with the spreading of recording and reproduction technologies. In the span of a few years we went from mechanical formats (the disc, the cassette) to digital formats (the CD, the MP3), and the role of mass media (radio, cinema, television, the Internet) has dramatically increased.

This revolution in theory allows us to access much more music and information today than in any past historical epoch, all with a simple click; from listening to a symphony performed by a thousand people while we sit in our car to seeing images of the Second World War while we comfortably lie on our sofa, in the same way we can watch a football game. The here and the now of information is decontextualized and decentralized; sounds and images are redirected to a timeless technological non-place, replicated in millions of copies by every loudspeaker or screen on the planet, simultaneously or in displaced moments. Walter Benjamin had already focused on similar thoughts in 1936, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

These are epoch-making transformations that have, in theory, enabled us to experience much more music than has ever before been possible. These changes have created outstanding possibilities, though sometimes they have promoted aberrant models and ephemeral trends. I had already foreshadowed the ambivalence of such a phenomenon back in my days as an arranger at RCA, and I have continued to throughout my entire career, tormented by personal conflicts as anybody who produces or listens to music in our times is. Moreover, this revolution brought music from the past to us, as well as from the most varied geographical origins.

This goes to say that the very concept of contemporaneousness should be revised, to say the least.

We could then speak of an increasingly dilated present, in which several traces of mankind are stored and stratified. For the first time in human history, centuries of culture are made to coexist thanks to technology. Does that mean we could say, in other words, that Vivaldi is as contemporary as a piece composed earlier this morning?

Paradoxically, yes. For too long “contemporary” music has been identified just with “highbrow,” art music, pure and disconnected from the demands of the present. For some time now, however, we tend to identify every type of music produced nowadays as “contemporary”—rock, pop, jazz, blues, folk, . . . crossover and hybrids of all kinds, which altogether make up a cultural phenomenon that demands to be taken into account (if anything, to be able to ask ourselves where we are headed today, musically and beyond).

Particularly since the post–World War II era, the record industry and cinema have undergone a lightning-fast expansion affecting more and more people and nurturing these phenomena, for better or for worse.

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