Of the many lessons I walked away with from my first music theory class, the one that's stuck with me the longest is my teacher's warning to take care and put just the right amount of salt and pepper in my compositions. To season them with a strategic amount of dissonant chords amidst the consonant ones, so as to keep things interesting while still pleasing the ear. A sharp here, a natural there; if one could place them just right, it would add a pleasant twist to the tune.
The issue I've come across since then with such compositions is that hardly anyone, spare music nerds like myself, takes music theory anymore. Whereas in the days of Bach and Beethoven, learning about the structure and content of classical music was the hot center of social life, nowadays most people don't know nor care what they're listening to. They just know when something sounds good, when the beat is easy enough to fist pump to and when they can roll down car windows and belt out the chorus after only hearing it two or three times.
During the classical time period of music, everyone had a wide music theory background, and thus their ears had a greater predictability capacity. Composers could afford to sprinkle in a little extra salt and pepper because listeners would understand the value in a unique chord progression or a correctly followed structure of a sonata, and they’d appreciate it. It was the glory days for music, because although much of it was still formulaic, there was a massive amount of room for creativity.
However, people can’t predict classical music anymore, and so this extra salt and pepper suddenly becomes bitter, poisonous even, to the piece. Whereas crowds used to hear a beautiful arpeggiation leading to a dissonant suspension that is later resolved, they now hear confusing, unsettling tones. It’s more noise than anything else. Modern listeners want to hear the same four to five chords that they’ve heard a million times before, just in a different key with a different vocalist and a different drumbeat. But don't change up the instrumentation too much; that won't work for their ears either. Composers used to be able to scoop salt onto a piece, but nowadays, put more than two grains of salt and it’s no longer enjoyable for the listener.
Now, I do not intend to discredit the success of modern day mainstream musicians and songwriters. They have effectively worked the system in their favor to produce that will sell, and in the end, that’s the main goal, isn’t it? With the threat of becoming a starving artist is so high, it’s all they can do but please the masses. At some point, however, we will have exhausted this I-V-VI-IV progression to its very end. Though the crowds may still take it, musicians may just explode.
It’s time to start re-implementing variety back into popular music, with or without letting listeners know things are changing. If we hope to save the future of an art form that influences nearly every aspect of our lives, one that we interact with every single day, we are going to have to collectively fight for it. Music isn’t dead (yet). We’ve just lost the ability to hear it in all of its glory, as we are instead hypnotized by its ghostly shadow that projects out from the radio. It’s about time we brought it back to its full potential.
