{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "Ragtime and the Tin Pan Alley era were closer to the invention of the upright piano than to today. The Old West saloon pianist...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/45726099326/", "html": "

Ragtime and the Tin Pan Alley era were closer to the invention of the upright piano than to today. The Old West saloon pianist (which was sorta a backwards projection anyway) even closer.

The piano was a one-person instrument; before that large orchestral music relied on court patronage and the concert house culture of urbanized merchant societies in Italy and Northern Europe.

The brass band was encouraged by the post-Napoleonic army and spread of universal schooling (who learns the trombone to play trombone songs for their friends?).

Small jazz groups worked great for nightclubs, which were great for cities of the early corporate era where a good chunk of the population had disposable income but needed to court mates.

The two crossed streams into a big band style that worked great with the new radio and recording industries.

All the while there’d been a one-man portable instrument tradition in the guitar, and then the electric guitar was developed to maturity.

Musical history has more material factors to it than are commonly cited. One thing that most distinguishes early Beatles from later Beatles was the number of layered tracks. It’s not for nothing that George Martin was called the fifth Beatle, he did a lot of his work by daisy-chaining 4-tracks. He got 8-tracks by the White Album.

Shoegaze and dream pop couldn’t have existed without effects pedals. If you read ‘80s cyberpunk, the future listens to dub reggae, which got lots of its aesthetics (looping, flanging, degeneration) from having two tape decks for a recording studio and being clever.

Early rap relied on the fact that secondhand soul records were affordable, neither it nor early rave could’ve existed without the direct-drive turntable (1969) or the crossfader. Later rap and electronic music relied on the fact that samplers, sequencers, and synthesizers (or especially software equivalents) were affordable.

The steel guitar was adapted under Hawaiian influences, the 5-string banjo African. The music of rural American particularism necessitated America first being and then having transoceanic colonies.

There are, depending on how you put it, between 2 or 5 (usually 3) ways of playing the banjo based on how you use your hand to pick. (It’s a violin or a fiddle based on how you use the bow.) The most popular one is named after a man who was alive this time last year. I thought I was teaching myself that one but I didn’t have fingerpicks, so what felt natural was for my thumb to stay on one string and the first two fingers to move, which is apparently the exact opposite of Scruggs.

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