The Wages of Professionalism

I was reading about the minnesinger Neidhardt von Reuenthal (died about 1250) and noticed that he was not only a composer of songs, but also a nobleman and crusader. That gets me thinking. When did ordinary people, that is, non-professionals, stop making music? I think that it must have started sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. A technological event and an historical trend would be my choices for the causes. The technology is recording, of course. As soon as we were able to make relatively accurate recordings, then the outstandingly gifted professional musicians would increase their dominance. As soon as anyone can buy a recording of Caruso, or Heifetz or Horowitz, then the local artists decline in importance and influence. Before, they could only dominate the concert hall they were playing in that night. The other trend was toward complexity and virtuosity. An amateur pianist can negotiate a sonata by Haydn without too much difficulty. Even lots of music by Beethoven. But with Liszt and Paganini, the whole point of their music is to transcend what an amateur can do.

So, inexorably, the role of the amateur musician declined and diminished more and more to the point where now, the making of music is left largely up to full time professionals and the rest of us just play the iPod. Someone like Condileeza Rice, who is reasonably accomplished on the piano, stands out because nowadays it is so unusual. I think recording technology has been even more crucial than the higher technical requirements. Before everyone had access to recordings, people sang and danced as a regular component of life. They worked and sang work songs, they drank and sang drinking songs, they loved and sang love songs, they marched to battle and sang battle songs.

Here is what we do now:

Not bad, actually. But if they weren't in a war zone, they probably wouldn't go to the trouble. The consequence now is that the vast majority of people imbibe music passively, having little in the way of experience in being makers of music themselves.