innerspaceboy

This thread will feature highlights from The Innerspace Connection - my foundation's music blog. The blog showcases LPs from our Special Collections Library and music news from around the world.

I thought I'd kick things off with an article I wrote on contemporary music culture.

What will be generation Z's musical, artistic, and cultural movement/identity?

Generation Z includes children born 1995-2009 (though these dates are not universally accepted as of yet.) With what movement in art, theater, dance, and music do they identify? What cultural value set inspires its growth and evolution? I am speaking of the "Belieber" generation. (For perspective, Justin Bieber was born in 1994 and released his first album in 2010 at age 16.)


With my general understanding of the development of Western and world culture, I have a basic awareness the socio-musical climates which inspired the blues, big band, the birth of jazz, its many changes, the punk scene, art music, the renaissance of classical influence in progressive rock, the musical impact of the 7” single, the LP, the shift to FM radio, and the academic New Music movement in New York in the 1960s.

I understand the blurring and vanishing of the difference between so-called “high” and “low” art as the democratization of recording technology facilitated independent production and a cultural move away from the dependence on record labels and producers to record, market, and distribute one’s work in the digital age.

Why pay Universal for a studio when you've got ProTools at home?


I have fundamental knowledge of music and the arts up until and including the end of the rock era and the paradigm shift in the way listeners discover and consume music at the end of the 20th century from Napster-forward. FM and television have plummeted in popularity and neither bares any relevance to the generation who experience music through streaming networks and social media.

The last movements I encountered directly were the Icelandic-influenced popularization of post-rock and its inspirations lifted from neo-classical sound. I remember the rise of the indie-rock scene as a cultural reaction to the corporatization of music at the end of the rock era and the dominance of top 40 pop. Programs like American Idol and the interminable NOW! That’s What I Call Music! series worked to re-enforce the prevailing position of Clear Channel / Warner Music’s stranglehold on the emerging youth culture, effectively raising a generation to consume their product.


And so I posed the question to Quora.com - a forum of user-generated question-and-answer content.

I feared that an entire culture was being bred with no concept of the centuries of great works from which they can build upon, reshape and re-purpose to serve the values and needs of their own generation. What is next?


The first answer I received was not promising. In jest, a user offered:


But the next answer I received completely shattered my preconceived notion that Gen-Z-ers were nothing more than "Belieber" simpletons. (And shame on me for oversimplifying the demographic.)

The response was offered by Quora user and future rockstar, Will Tuckwell. Will studied Music at University of Birmingham and offered a great deal of insight into the promise of his generation. He said:



As you can imagine, this response was entirely unexpected and has really given me hope about the future of the arts and music.

I pressed on, looking for other sources of Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha inspiration. This lead me to an article on 21st century composers (because apparently, THAT IS A THING.) A Wikipedia entry for 21st century classical offered a list of composers I could arrange by birth date. At the end of the list I found a name - Alma Deutscher, who was born in 2005.


I had to look her up. Youtube thankfully offered a video of her appearance on Ellen from October of last year. The eight-year-old has composed operas in her sleep, arisen and written the notation for each instrument entirely from memory.

And here is her own Quartet Movement in A Major, composed in 2012.