Changes in Music Accessibility Has Social Implications
Five years ago, the CEO of Tower Records told reporters that the CD industry would never be threatened (WSJ, January 22, 2007).Yet, last month, America's favorite CD department store closed its doors some 46 years after its owner, Russ Solomon first opened its premiere store in California. Tower Records owned stores throughout the country. So much has changed in the music industry since 1960. While music today seems to be more accessible than ever, to many, the actual experience of sharing music has diminished to a point where headphones and ipods seem to isolate and at times keep music listening as a purely private function. It is not uncommon to see teens passing headphones to share music, which keeps the music not quite collaborative. Years ago, there was always a stereo around and more communal listening and playing.
Today, recording live music is mainly a studio activity where in the 60's and 70's recording original music was common place. The tape recorder was an integral part of most music therapy studios. Currently, CDs and computers have replaced audio recorders. I had to search through electronic stores in several cities to find an easy-to-use writable CD player-one that patients could use to record their own live music, which can be an integral part of a music therapy experience.
As technology changes, so too has our music therapy culture. Patients are less likely today than they might have been a decade ago, to record their own music. It is easier to download the song they have in mind, and share the 'exact' version rather than taking the risk of creating their own version, until they could get to Tower Records to purchase the CD.
While it is a wonderful thing to have the resource at our fingertips, and I appreciate this accessibility as much as the next person, I do believe something gets lost in the potential internalization of creativity when "it" is so readily accessible. Of course, one can argue that "it" is the artistry of the music therapist (and musicians and artists in general) that determines how much we play and take risks to make music with one another. Yet, the changes in technology exist and determine aspects of human interaction that may pose risks to the social function of live music-ensembling in subtle ways that we are becoming less and less aware of. As one person in an article on the closing of Tower Records noted: "...nothing really replaces the experience of physically going to a place where you're surrounded by so much music you lose track of time as new worlds open up before you."
As a New Yorker for 10 years, and as a musician and music therapist who works in NYC, the loss of Tower Records and all it represented to music lovers leaves me feeling critical about ready access and protective about the endurance of music as a human and social experience.
I'm glad to see music therapy being covered on this site and I'm glad you brought up this topic. I look forward to reading more of these posts!
As a fellow music therapist, I certainly appreciate the impact of new developments in music accessibility. Also, having grown up in New York, and having lived through the both the rise and fall of Tower Records, I will certainly miss it. (Of course, I do wonder whether this is largely a matter of romanticism and nostalgia for me....)
The new technological accessibility of music certainly has the potential of discouraging the cultural and social cohesion surrounding shared music experiences. But perhaps, as in every point of critical human development, the outcome will be determined by how we choose to use and/or misuse our new technologies. I imagine there was an analogous anxiety when sound recording itself was invented, representing the potential for one to listen to music away from the live music of the concert hall, and its associated sociocultural ceremony and ritual. But is social isolation inevitable? Related concerns have been expressed in Marx's concept of alienation, Durkheim's anomie, and Weber's rationalization, in response to the impending industrialization of the West. Yet, one has to question the extent to which their fears have truly come to pass in post-modernity and beyond (certainly a matter of some debate, to be sure!).
I think the biggest problem here is that our technology tends to get ahead of our consciousness. So, we may need to work hard to "catch up" and raise our awareness to the point where we can find new and creative ways of using our technologies in the interest of deepening (as opposed to degrading) our shared musical lives, while promoting our communal, cultural, and societal health. While I'm not certain how, exactly, we go about doing this, I do consider finding the way(s) one of the important tasks that lies before us.