35 years ago today, MTV was born. The first music video played was, of course, “Video Killed the Radio Star.” It’s a good song, and the video is a great collage of old footage. If you don’t know it, it’s worth the 3 minutes it takes to watch:

It’s fun, and typical of 80’s New Wave rock; I like it with or without the accompanying video. Looking (er, listening?) only to the music (IE ignoring the words), it’s upbeat and catchy, repetitive and shallow. Add the words, and there’s more to latch onto – it’s your standard critique of technology, the pros and cons that come with any new innovation. “Video killed the radio star, pictures came and broke your heart.” Is it about how beautiful the music sounds, or how sexy the artist looks?

Art Music has struggled to deal with the recent rapid changes in technology (and I’m talking about since the late 19th century here). The invention of recorded music and radio revolutionized the musical landscape – before, you either had to play music yourself or go to where someone else was making music. Then came video …

But I’ll venture to say that NO, video didn’t kill the radio star. Maybe the radio star had to change to adapt to a video world, but there was no murder here. The Art Music world is no different. With cameras and video technology, we can now see a LIVE opera performance thousands of miles away from the opera house, and see intimately close images of the singers’ faces. It’s quite moving, actually, and a different but equally enjoyable experience from actually sitting in the opera house, seeing the action from afar. It’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing.

Art Music recordings and publicity images have also recently adapted in a somewhat desperate attempt to win the attention of Gen-X and Millenials. Formal photos have been replaced by eye-catching shots that give us a taste of the performers’ personalities.

Here’s a video of Charles Gounod‘s Romeo and Juliet; the composer probably never imagined his audiences would ever experience opera in this way – on a computer, sitting by ourselves, looking at the singer from better-than-a-front-row-seat. Video didn’t kill the radio star – it is making worthy things to become immortal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rywOPSlNWLc

In one episode of the Britcom “Red Dwarf“, a robot suggests that the traditional 7-pitch musical scales should be changed into a 10-pitch scale, making it work with the metric system. In this show, this is suggested as a joke, and is accompanied by that truly horrific laugh-track that accompanies any Britcom. But it’s really an interesting idea, if you think about it.

It’s nothing new, though. People have been messing around with scales for ages. For example, most people are familiar with the sound of a pentatonic scale, which is used in every culture in the world (but western children will usually say that it sounds “Asian”.) And then there’s the octatonic scale, a favorite among jazz musicians and late romantic composers. Claude Debussy continued this tradition of scale-play by stretching standard tonality to its limits. In his piano composition, Voiles (meaning “veils), he uses a 6-pitch scale called “whole tone.”

The effect is marvelous – it feels like we are floating! On one hand, we have a sense of a tonal center (a “home key”) thanks to the pulsing bass, and simple melodic figures. But on the other hand, a couple more pitches in the scale, and we begin to question where we really are.

Ah, the sounds of the sea …

Many people are familiar with the visual art of the Impressionist movement – the Monets and Manets. Impressionist Music retains a strong place in the history of Art Music – so much so, that it is now considered a linking era between the romantic and modern eras. As I spend a week’s vacation near the seaside, I continue my oceanic thoughts with one of the most famous Impressionist pieces of all time – Claue Debussy‘s La Mer. The third movement is titled “Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea.”