Haven't we all felt like screaming at an art show? Or at Yoko Ono. Or one of Yoko Ono's art shows?
This reminds me of something I realized at some point in my musical training, we ran out of good ideas and have now resorted to just screaming into microphones and calling it "music".
The beginning of my realization started when I took piano lessons. I had a very engaging instructor that would take numerous asides from teaching me how to play piano to explain the history of music, the mechanical construction of the piano, and some theoretical aspects of music. I also realized at some point that these asides were impacting my actual lessons but he didn't seem to care too much, that his specialty was effectively teaching music teachers how to teach music, and that I was not going to be any kind of piano virtuoso. But anyway, back to the point.
I picked up here and there that before about the year 1700 music was quite primitive. There was no standardization in how musical instruments were tuned, built, or played. There was no standard in how music was written, not that it mattered much because few people could even read or write. Every musician was basically starting over with only what they could learn from a mentor, and anything they developed would be lost unless it found it's way into the mind of another student of theirs with equal or greater talent.
With the Renaissance we saw the development of the clockwork metronome, stringed instruments started to become standardized and kind-of/sort-of mass produced, the piano was developed, among other technological advances. What was, in my mind at least, the greatest means for music to advance was a standard means to write down music. Up until this point there was very little concept of a musical "note", just higher and lower in pitch and some very haphazard ways of marking this on paper to help musicians remember what was once only passed by oral tradition. While the printing press had existed for some time at this point the number of people that could actually read increased rapidly. This improved musical talent happening at a time technology improved was not merely coincidental, fewer talented musicians died from starvation or freezing to death and had enough of an education to write things down in a way that someone else could read.
Another side note is that at about this time in history we saw the first of what would be called a bass instrument. Anything bigger than a cello didn't really exist up until about 1700 because few had the technology to create something that could be so large, hold a string, and not collapse under the tension. Given that few people grew to be taller than five feet before 1700, from widespread malnutrition, was likely a factor too.
Once we had some standard instruments, a standard means to note music, people able to read, and people having enough food that they could devote some time to education, music developed rather quickly. Each generation could experiment and pass this down to the next. Music became more melodic, complex, and generally "musical". We saw the "classical" periods of music in this time with Baroque from the late 1600s, Classical in the 1700s, Romantic in the 1800s. Each period building on the one before.
And then "modern" music happened in the early 1900s.
Once musicians discovered most every means by which our brains found beauty in music there was not much left to discover. Modern music was trying to find something "new" but merely ended up being "novel" to the listener. By that I mean this was music that was likely already tried before, and rightfully discarded before being written down, as much of this had an ability to induce pain upon the listeners. Music started to become noted for its randomness, distressing chords, and going outside the now long established 12 note chromatic scale.
I'm not saying all music created beyond 1920 was "bad". What was bad was the music that deviated from the discoveries and theories made up to about 1900. There's a lot of ways to make good music if it stayed within those bounds that had been established up to about 1920. But this musical decline could not stop there.
Then "postmodern" music happened.
This is what brings us back to Yoko Ono. Postmodern music peaked in about 1920 to 1970 and took the bad ideas created in the modern period and brought it to another level, and Yoko Ono was a student of this school of thought. Improvisation was embraced in some of the late pre-modern (if that makes sense) musical era of the early 1900s but there were always limits from what was learned through history. Modern music pushed those limits, and postmodern music just balled them up and tossed them in the round can.
From postmodern music we get such "music" as Yoko Ono screaming in a microphone in what is supposed to be a building that houses pieces of artistic value.
Not all of the above is misinformation.
