The End of Music History

Via Michael Druzinsky, a fascinating lecture on the end of music: So long, and thanks for all the noise: 2010 and the end of musical history, by Tom Service.

And after decades of new musicology and new history, we all realise, if we didn't know it already, that all of those grand teleological ideas of how music progressed from Palestrina to Bach to Beethoven to Brahms to Bruckner to Schoenberg to the Beatles – something like that anyway – are all bunk. What I'm not saying, so it's there for the record, is that music is over in 2010. Just the opposite, even if it'll take a few minutes to get to how that could be true.