There are many bits of neglected pieces of our culture, which are packed in boxes in the attic. For instance, relatively few people converse in Attic Greek these days, even considering how many students of the humanities spend hours learning beautiful pieces of literature such as Pericles’ Funeral Oration. As with many home attics, our culture has filled its storage space with things of value.

There are other places we store the recently ‘deceased’ parts of our culture. Since out culture has been changing so much in the last century, there are quite a few more artifacts to keep in ‘recent storage’. A good example of these ‘dead languages’ could be seen with regard to popular music. Ragtime and Dixieland Jazz were once the cutting edge of the popular music in this culture…only 100 years ago. Swing Music in the late 30’s and early 40’s are in similar stances these days.

When I use the terms ‘dead languages’, or perhaps more accurately ‘dead music’ I mean styles of expression which are not currently maintained in the forefront of our culture. There are certainly many beautiful Ragtime pieces which many people still love, the same goes for Dixieland and Swing music. They are dead because we as a group have moved on. There are revisionist players who RE-create these pieces, but this is not the same as when they were vital and even a bit scandalous.

In any case, I think that most people in this culture would easily agree to the status of these three formerly great musical genres. There are some styles which are closer to our time which still amaze and sometimes upset some…when told that they are effectively dead. Jazz music, which was originally a form of popular music started to shed its popularity after WWII, and became more and more cerebral, arcane and inwardly focused. I think few would consider ‘free Jazz’ from the early `1960’s as popular music. This was Jazz as it started to become a hybrid with avant-garde classical music (another strange animal in itself… a Frankenstein monster-like attempt to put life into classical music…). Since then, Jazz has slowly sunk into smaller niches, and served primarily as an influence towards other more popular genres of music (Rock, Funk, Latin, etc.). The proof that Jazz is a dead idiom became true when players of repute like Winton Marsalis started (in the late 1980’s) to attempt to recreate classical Jazz in a hushed, reverential manner. This, again, was RE-creation, not creation. Considering how much of the genre of Jazz is based upon improvisation and creation, this is and was an almost unsupportable irony.

The other major case of a dead genre would be that of Rock music. This genre was more focused upon emotional catharsis and darker aspects of drama. Over only a few years, this (once again) vital form of musical expression started to become more and more baroque. There were many acts in the early 1970’s which were based more upon theater, opera and even the British music hall forms that would have been acceptable in the 1960’s. This lead to a strange form of self parody; and any simple reviewing of the comedy ‘rockumentary’ Spinal Tap (presented over a decade later) shows how far this had gone when compared to the ‘real’ guerrilla theater which took place at Woodstock, Altamont, et.al.

There were other ways that you could see the cracks in the plaster. As with Jazz, when pure musicianship starts to be ‘fetishized’, you know the original blood has been exchanged. In Rock music the arrival of Eddie Van Halen as a guitar virtuoso signaled the end of rock in all ways but as a means to showcase increasingly complex guitar histrionics. This is still in effect in some related sub-genres of music.

These styles are still favored by many, and there are literally hundreds of tunes which are cherished for many reasons. There are also people working and creating valid music under the rubric of these genres…right now. It’s just that there are proportionally fewer of them, and the same goes for their listeners.

From the last couple of posts to this blog, you might be able to surmise that I am a guitar player. I’ve recently found another genre (OK, maybe a subgenre…I’m not too sure about the ‘official limits to genres) which is dead, or near dead. I used to like the raw passion of blues-rock guitar players, but now there are many new practitioners of this art form who approach the instrument as if they were Isaac Stern. For a style of music based upon raw, passionate expression, to spend to more time on creating exquisite tone, and perfectly executed classic licks and lines strikes me as (once again!) a bit too baroque for this style of music to withstand.

It’s too bad, since I used to love this style of music, and am partial to a good guitar player, but here I think they missed the whole point. And in doing so, have proven to me that they are very good revisionists and recreators.

I guess we are living in a world of Medieval Latin…

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