Certainly not the last thirty ..musically speaking

Impossible question to answer.

I would possibly say that when music was first typeset - the 30 years that included that - could be considered the most important. Music could then be shared.

I could say it was the 30 years that included when Les Paul practically invented the electric guitar AND multi-track recording.

I could say it was the 30 years that included the launch of the Macintosh and the IBM-PC.

I could say it was the most recent 30 years - as it democratized the distribution of music, at least to the part of the world with access to the Internet. I've been able to 'play' my music for those of you here - some in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Deutschland, England, Finland, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, etc. And I have had listens by folks from all of those places. The Internet made it possible for me.

Those are just technology reasons for answering the question.

Stylistically - I think that this is up to the listener. I could pick any 30 year period of music that I listen to or has heritage from, and make up reasons for why it's the most important - including the most recent 30 years.

-Scott

Everybody thinks the music they grew up with is best.

Of course, everybody except me, is wrong.

To 1958? What happened after 1958 to make you say the best period ended then? Two quick examples for 1959: the introduction of Bossa Nova in this country, and the release of 'Kind of Blue' by Miles Davis. I would not have wanted to miss those. My 30-year period starts in 1959.

Matt:

Whoops, I should have put a few winking, laughing, smirking icons in my post.

If your 30 year period starts in 1959, then you're just too young to know anything (wink, chuckle).

BN was certainly a great development (started by a Brazilian pianist I believe - Antonio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida something). Great compositions - the harmonies are different but great. One of my favourites is Dindi. I remember where I was when I heard the news of his death - listening to CBC radio while driving down Sahali Drive just past the school, in Kamloops, BC on the way to work - sad news.

I really don't think there is a definitive time period - in reality it's a continuum. But we can have fun BS-ing each other.

G

I wouldn't want to miss Vivaldi, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, Robert Johnson, Jango Reinhard, ...

The timeperiod between these musicians is quite a bit longer than 30 years. I think every period in time has it's own good music and it's own evergreens. Even in the '90's and now there's some very fine music being made. You just have to look harder to find it because all of the sh** the business wants you to like and to buy; the easy-to-listen-to, no-highs-and-lows, just-add-water-to-eat, as-long-as-it-has-a-beat simpleton noise most people call music nowadays. But there is still music made by real musicians.

The most important 40 years ever was between 1964 and 2004 because those were the years I was giging

How could anyone suggest that the most important period of music could only fall into a 30 year period. The last 100 years has brought great change in the styles, production, reproduction, and form of music. In the early 1900s, much of the music that a family enjoyed was the simple piano in the parlor, often played by the mother or daughters of the household. While recordings existed, they were scarce and not to be had by many.

Almost 40 years later, the great swing bands filled our concert halls, rode the airwaves into our homes over radio waves and lifted the spirit of an entire country, or even the world.

Twenty years after that what was streaming into our homes was television, with images of our favorite artists as well as their music. Stereophonic sound was being reproduced on our radios, phonographs and tape recordings.

A further 20 years from there, we entered the 'Digital Audio Age' with the release of Compact Disc, giving us reproduction levels no one had ever been able to imagine before that.

The computer revolution gave musicians the ability to take that lone piano from the 1900s and gave us multitudes of sounds that could be played at the same time.

Today, we can record nearly at a studio quality in our homes, can take our high fidelity music with us, carry thousands of songs that have been recorded over the years and play them at will.

Yet, where would this be without the primal beatings of a log or a stone in a rhythmic pattern from thousands of years ago? The song of the heart given to voice?

No, there is no such thing as the most important 30 years of music, it ALL has been important.

Gary

It’s hard for us in 2009 to put this into any kind or historical perspective.
While some musical movements can seem important, or even major watersheds at the time (punk, grunge, hip-hop, whatever….), when you look at the big picture you realise they are not all that radical after all.

However, it is likely that the advent of music essentially made by powered instruments, notably the electric guitar, will be of significance.

1900-1930, if I was forced to pick just a 30-year time slot. In the USA...

The birth of Blues and Jazz...all follows from those forms.

Having said that, music is just too universal to be confined into any particular era. There is probably something profound happening in music every moment.

Sadly, music was once a participatory event, one of joy, elation, or sadness, depending on the occasion. As John Kenneth Galbraith stated in a lecture in at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, "we have gone from a generation of singers of music to a generation of listeners." (a paraphrase from memory...in the quotes.) The fact is stark, you no longer have school choirs in many places, no one sits around the parlour and sings. It survived for a while, but radio, tv, ipods, even record players, although important, have changed the landscape and robbed us of the emotional links our ancestors had to music.

I have purchased and donated many old music books that predate recorded music. They tell a story of a time and an era when music was much different from today. In places it lives on, remote areas of Canada still have family bands, sing a-longs, and ceilidhs. For a while after TV came out, you had sing a-longs, follow the bouncing ball, hymn sing programs, but they too have faded away.

My wife's family being French Canadian still have 8 or 10 occasions a year, rent a hall, and pull out fiddles, guitars, mouth organs, and a caller for the square dances. But that's dying. Everyone is plugged into headphones, oblivious to the world, and lost in some never never land of boom boom.

Music went from the era before print when it was shared, chants were learned, and songs were passed down. It's interesting that many generations of Eskimos on the east side of Hudson's Bay all play fiddle, the old scottish way, learned by rote from the Scots that ran the trading posts. They were filmed and to everyone's surprise the tunes had morphed in Scotland, but were the same in the isolation of Northern Canada.

As the print media evolved so did music. You can trace it's evolution through the dark ages, old songs like When Johnny Comes Marching Home, the older version was far more graphic. Then as the age of enlightenment allowed musicians to be the equal of others rather than virtual slaves eating in the kitchen with the maids and popping out to perform sonatas or new compositions for the 'Lords and Ladies' to the period where Mozart made a stab at music as a business.

As musicians rose in stature, and opera houses and concert halls were built, even the common person could attend the opera. The Victorian era almost killed music, pushed away the ribald songs of the previous era, and pushed very proper hymns into churches. Prohibition had an effect, pushing music and drinking underground. And then as we moved into the age of tv it became about watching someone else, not participating. I've been to clubs with outstanding performers, and the patrons are all watching a football game, wanting the owner to shut down the music and turn up the sports.

Ok, so those are the highlights of observations without the footnotes, my basis of a thesis that is partly written, and of course my viewpoints thrown like autumn leaves on a fall stream, ready to freeze for the winter before going the rest of the way to someplace in the sparkle of clear spring waters....as another year dawns and I try and preserve my families musical heritage....

As the schools are ripping up old songbooks to rid us of Steven Foster, and burning copies of To Kill a Mockingbird in order to ensure political correctness...I wonder who is going to bring back the music.

Mike, I love your description for the current music being produced today. May I borrow it?

And you are right in that every era had its contributors. It is virtually impossible, setting aside sentimentalism of course, to say there was a specific time when music was at its peak.

I would like to contribute this thought, where would John Mayer be without Stevie Ray Vaughn? And where would SRV be without Albert King? And we go on so forth and so forth. Just by the fact that each of us are offsprings of what influences us proves that music has always had great contributors throughout time.

It's a great art in that we can choose to replicate or innovate using it.

Gary, I love your walk down memory lane! When you think about how exponential our times have become by looking at the strides from where we came from it still confounds me.

But, I do want to add this. Thousands of years ago they may not have just been hitting logs or stones. When you have a chance dig into ancient Mesopotamia. You will discover a broad scope of instruments that were well sophisticated. People were playing harps that you can trace to the guitar up to a 1,000 BC.

RickeG

John, I can relate to your thoughts of a bygone era. However, it is my thinking that people are sheep. They respond to what is given them. If we are given two philosphies one being the reminscence of the good old days and the other being, well read Mike's quote of today's music for a great description, we are in turn setting up a generation for failure.

Even in the good old days we were not doing things as our forefathers deemed "good ole days." So, change has always been a natural process. As for what we change into depends in my opinion on what we do to positiviely affect change. For example, in my home town where there are iPods galore, we have been working on a music institute where students not only come in to learn music theory and the history of music, but they are also learning technology such as audio recording and even going to introduce BIAB to them once I can get a handle of this "crazy horse" that is an awesome learning tool as well.

To me, I think there was a huge mistake made when those of the past refused to adapt their contributions with what was currently being created. Hence, we now have a form of music that is void of any talent. It is essentially the blind leading the blind. Instead, we can affect change by becoming more involved in engaging the new musicians not in the stoic attitude of "this is how it is to be done." But, if we approach it on a level where they can take what we show them to the next level then we will be onto something. Hence, the reason why I am trying to make our school a more dynamic environment where the students from age 5 and up are engaged in using the computer while writing music.

Just an encouragement to you, that you have breath in your lungs. Use it to take what you have learned and integrate it with what is out there and perhaps turn the tide. Thankfully, with internet, we do not need to rely upon the hose head record companies to feed the fat radio stations their pre-digested junk. We can open the net and hear awesome stuff today!

The thing that changed everything was when Edison invented the phonograph.

We're lucky the old masters wrote down the scores or it would all be gone. That must have been quite job. I wonder if they had students hand-copy them or was there a printing machine. I think the Gutenberg press was probably around but don't know if it could print music.

My books printed around 1800 were done with a particular process. My band conductor having a PHd and knowing such things explained it to me 2 weeks ago, but we were in a bar and I was watching hockey and having an adult beverage. The notes end up with weird tails or some such thing.

None the less, some are hilarious, The Tidy Wife, Damaged Jack, and 2 versions of the American National Anthem with other words, along side hymns, canons, rounds, and lots of other stuff. Parlour music. Pub songs, and some more serious stuff. All great fun. I buy these books here and there, and then donate them to collections or Masonic Libraries, if they fit that usage.

I still think people should be gathering and singing.

I spent the first 2 years in high school in the 60's at a Business / Tech high school. Lots of Italians, Scots, etc. Then | changed to another school, in a rougher area, but full of descendants of British Tradesmen. They had a singing assembly every Friday. This was the ducktail pointy boots and leather jacket era, and I thought NO WAY. But even the tough guys went, and we sang Lily Marlene, Stout Hearted Men, Rule Britannia, 76 Trombones etc. One hour a week, a tradition at that school that lasted 100 years until it closed. I sang bass, we had parts, 500 kids in the auditorium, and it remains one of my favorite memories of high school, except perhaps for Karen who was 6'2 and sat beside me in a micro-mini...stop no no....lol

Time accelereates progression. Or does it, ultimatley slow things down?

In 10 years, the answer to this thread may well equivalate to the (until then) life history of PG Music software