Distinctive Sounds

Today I was in a place where Spotify was deciding what music I had to hear, and  for a while it was playing Israeli popular music, not what I ordinarily listen to. The songs didn't sound the same, exactly. But the overall sound was distinctively Israeli, making me wonder, how did this culture develop its own idiom in such a short time?

Actually, these things have been happening very fast for a long time. Today my wife and I got together with a flautist friend, and we played two trios, one by the Swedish baroque composer Johann Helmich Roman, and one by the Flemish baroque composer, Jean Baptiste Loiellet. Though they lived at the same time, the first half of the 18th century, the atmosphere in the pieces was totally different. Roman sounded German to me, and Loiellet sounded French - two different musical worlds. Not that they were isolated from each other, and all the baroque composers listened to Italian music.

Classical musical styles evolved rapidly from 1700 on, and even more rapidly from 1800 on, and the same goes for popular music. Streaming stations offer selections from succeeding decades. After a while, this morning, Spotify decided to play American country music, which also has an unmistakable sound (which I don't prefer to the sound of Israeli pop; I never go out of my way to listen to either kind of music). A lot of listeners, myself included, are attracted to certain musical sounds - Broadway musicals, be-bop, classical piano trios, romantic symphonies - as much as we are to individual pieces in those idioms. Why does a Haydn strong quartet sound so different from a Ravel string quartet? Why do I enjoy listening to Indian classical music, even though I don't know much about it? It's the sound: the drone, the tablas, the sitar, the voice.

Composers and performers work within the sound language they are using. The great composers, along with creating individual works, create a sound of their own. But every creative person in every idiom starts within a universe of discourse, with givens, with predecessors and contemporaries, in a cultural context. Today, because so much of everything is so readily available to us, we don't have a specific cultural context anymore. On a given morning, Spotify made me hear Israeli pop, American country music, British and American rock, and I can't remember what else. If I'd been the one who put in the original search, Spotify would have taken us on a difference course. Has an algorithm become my cultural context?