David W. Fenton wrote:
On 27 Mar 2008 at 12:53, Chuck Israels wrote:
This was an unusual period
of sophisticated "common practice" in the world of American popular
music and jazz, and I believe that there was a considerably higher
percentage of good quality, durable music than Sturgeon's Law would
predict. Of course, only time will tell. A personal opinion but, I
believe, an educated one.
I wonder the completeness of your 100% sample. I know an awful lot of
complete dreck from the period, and it occurs to me that if you're
only looking at Gershwin and Berlin and so forth that you're really
not seeing the whole picture.
Given the huge number of touring musicians in the time period under
discussion, along with the enormous number of recordings which were
issued, usually with one song on each side, I think that a closer
examination will show that Sturgeon's Law is just as accurate about that
period as well.
What has happened is just what happened to all preceding historical
periods -- public taste and performers' selections have already edited
out much of the garbage. The same thing happens if a person investigates
recordings of music from the Baroque or the Classical or Romantic
periods at Borders or Barnes&Noble they will find only masterworks of
high quality and thus think that those periods only turned out masterful
composers and compositions.
History is a great sifter of quality, but not perfect. Just as spam
filters on our e-mail programs sometimes put valid e-mails in the trash
and sometimes let spam get through, I'm sure that some very good music
made it into the dustbins of history and I know that some totally
forgettable works continue to be available. On the other hand, in the
rush to supply an ever increasing appetite for Baroque music, libraries
and monasteries and castle archives were raided and the music was
published with the thinking that simply because it survived it was
worthwhile.
But I agree with David's point that we may well not be seeing the whole
picture -- those songs which survived into the "Great American Songbook"
may still only represent 10% of the output of the era, leaving the 90%
which was "crap" (I realize that's a very subjective term and not all
will agree with labelling something as crap).
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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