Music is more ubiquitous than ever, but humanizes us less than ever

Craig Havighurst at Cuepoint has a supremely important essay today on music's diminishing role in our lives. That seems like a weird thing to say, given that music is everywhere, but when you read this, you will see that that is his point.
 Most such essays focus on how dauntingly hard it is for musicians to make a living these days, and he touches on that:

In their many (justified) laments about the trajectory of their profession in the digital age, songwriters and musicians regularly assert that music has been “devalued.” Over the years they’ve pointed at two outstanding culprits. First, it was music piracy and the futility of “competing with free.” More recently the focus has been on the seemingly miniscule payments songs generate when they’re streamed on services such as Spotify or Apple Music.

These are serious issues, and many agree that the industry and lawmakers have a lot of work to do. But at least there is dialogue and progress being made toward new models for rights and royalties in the new music economy.

He then touches on a subject I've had ample opportunity to consider, given that, in the past decade-plus, most of my musical associations have been with jazz players:

When I hear songwriters of radio hits decry their tiny checks from Spotify, I think of today’s jazz prodigies who won’t have a shot at even a fraction of the old guard’s popular success. They can’t even imagine working in a music environment that might lead them to household name status of the Miles Davis or John Coltrane variety. They are struggling against forces at the very nexus of commerce, culture and education that have conspired to make music less meaningful to the public at large. Here are some of the most problematic issues musicians are facing in the industry’s current landscape.

This has come up in my conversations a lot. The days of the nightclub bandstand and the recording studio being the main environments in which a jazz musician earned his wherewithal have been replaced with an era where the classroom and the workshop are the main sources of bread and butter. And those places churn out hundreds of excellent players who in turn have to find teaching gigs to churn out yet more.

Then he gets to his list of factors creating the current situation:

• the death of context
• commercial radio
• the media
• conflation
• anti-intellectualism
• movies & games
• the 'makes-kids-smarter' approach to music in schools

The whole thing is a must-read, but I'll share here a couple of particular observations of his that merit note. Here's what he means by conflation:

A little noticed but corrosive quirk of the digital age is the way our interfaces conflate music with all other media and entertainment choices. iTunes started it by taking software ostensibly for collecting and playing music and morphing it into a platform for TV, film, podcasts, games, apps and so on. This is both a symbol and a cause of the dwindling meaning and import of music in the multi-media onslaught that is our culture. The shiny displays distracting people away from “just” music are already ubiquitous. So why impose them on a music player? I believe that one reason vinyl and phonographs are hot again is that musically oriented people crave something of a shrine for their music — a device that is for music only.

The anti-intellectualism  element touches on something I've discussed at LITD a few times: this notion that music's value comes from the feelings it evokes in us. And I would add that feeling is, as time goes on, less about noble emotions and more about more basic nervous-system responses to repeated rhythmic points and short - very short - melodic phrases:

Music has for decades been promoted and explained to us almost exclusively as a talisman of emotion. The overwhelming issue is how it makes you feel. Whereas the art music of the West transcended because of its dazzling dance of emotion and intellect. Art music relates to mathematics, architecture, symbolism and philosophy. And as such topics have been belittled in the general press or cable television, our collective ability to relate to music through a humanities lens has atrophied. Those of us who had music explained and demonstrated to us as a game for the brain as well as the heart had it really lucky. Why so many are satisfied to engage with music at only the level of feeling is a vast, impoverishing mystery.

I still play music professionally a fair amount, but at this point in my life, I can see that it's worked out well for me to mainly be a writer.

The irony is that's a shame. Music ought to have a sublime place in human life, but since it no longer does, and I have bills to pay, I settle for an arrangement that allows me to be a positive force without putting everything on the line for it.