Roman Ryabtsev: the day the music died

I was brought here recently by chance to a concert of a band that I had never heard of before (but which, it turns out, has already released several albums and has a certain fan base). I listened to their performance and several times I caught myself trying painfully to figure out: well, who did they steal this song from? And this one? Fir-trees-sticks, and this one looks like something, just some kind of deja vu, honestly! .. But in fact, the guys, of course, did not plagiarize. It’s just that the time has come when the prophetic refrain from Don McLean’s “American Pie” is about to come true: “The day the music died…”

More than thirty years ago, I read a fantastic story that described some terribly distant future. As far as I remember… the year is like 2050 (so, where are the flying cars, taxis to the moon, I didn’t understand something?!). And in this farthest for the author (and already so close for us now) future, an unpleasant situation for musicians occurred: all the music on the planet has ended.

“But how is this possible?!” – ask people who only listen to music and have no idea how it is written. And now I will tell you…

* * *

Even Our Everything in the tragedy about Mozart and Salieri wrote:

I tore apart the music like a corpse. believed

I algebra harmony. Then

Already dared, tempted in science,

Indulge in the bliss of a creative dream.

As a rule, this quote is cited when they want to emphasize a certain mechanical approach to creativity. When a composer writes not under the influence of spiritual impulses, but after carefully planning: what and how to compose in order to make a hit (well, or the work is epic enough to be immediately accepted into the Union of Composers, the genre is unimportant here). This approach to work reminds me of artists who paint portraits, circling a photograph of the customer projected onto the canvas: the picture turns out “as if alive”, but … it still smacks of some kind of elusive and unformulated “dead thing”.

However, in essence, Pushkin’s Salieri was absolutely right. Music and mathematics are inextricably linked, and sometimes in the most unexpected manifestations. I once read that some experimenters put either a geometric progression into notes, or some other abstruse (almost chemical!) formulas … and the result was quite harmonious and pleasant to the ear.

After all, what is music? It is a combination of just a few variables: notes, their pitches, durations of notes and pauses between them, built in a certain harmony, pleasing to the human brain. There are only 12 notes in an octave (in the European musical tradition), so (from the point of view of science) the number of such combinations is quite FINALLY. If some of the mathematicians reading the article get bored, you can get confused, derive a formula and calculate: how many original melodies can be added from these initial components.

Moreover, even the melody that differs, for example, from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” by only ONE note will be considered original (from the point of view of mathematics). People, of course, in such a case will say “plagiarism!” and they will be right, so that the number of possible written (unlike anything!) melodies is reduced by an astronomical amount.

Both by myself and by other colleagues, I know firsthand about the phenomenon, which I dubbed for myself the “Ostap Bender effect”. Remember when the Great Schemer fell in love and got carried away into romance?

“Listen to what I sprinkled last night in the flickering light of an electric lamp: “I remember a wonderful moment, you appeared before me, like a fleeting vision, like a genius of pure beauty.” Really, okay? Talented? And only at dawn, when the last lines were completed, I remembered that this verse had already been written by A. Pushkin. Such a hit from a classic, eh?!”

And for musicians, this happens all the time: insight! flash! sweaty shaft of inspiration! new song! – and in the morning, those to whom you gave a listen (or, even worse, yourself) will recognize someone’s old (or, even worse, new) hit in your freshly baked masterpiece. But you are NOT SPECIAL! It just settled somewhere in the depths, in the subcortex, this successful combination of notes, durations and pauses, and floated out of the abyss of your unstable creative brain as an independent work.

* * *

So, in the fantastic story I mentioned at the beginning, the day “when the music died” just came. In the sense that people could no longer compose something really NEW: computers immediately checked the work against the music database (does not resemble Shazam, no?) and issued a harsh verdict: it was already written in such and such a year in such a way -something the author, so get out of the composers, go voice advertising on television!

In that story, the problem was solved by limiting the term of music copyright to fifty years. And, as soon as the copyright ended, this melody could again be freely composed and bathed in glory!

Then this measure seemed to me rather cruel and inhuman in relation to the authors and their creative heritage. Not fair! So some conditional Vasya Pupkin will “compose” Mozart’s “Little Night Serenade” and will be considered its true author! For the next fifty years…

However, reality is rapidly catching up with fantasy. Already now, the term of copyright protection for musical works is … only seventy years. True, these seventy years are counted from January 1 of the year following the death of the author … But this, I think, is for now. Until all possible combinations have formed into new music and ended. I am sure that after some time the period of protection of rights will be reduced so that composers do not die out, like mammoths, due to lack of demand.

And in the last year, neural networks have also begun to step on the heels of the authors. They already draw pictures better than many artists, so they began to write music. So far, fortunately, the music generated by neural networks draws maximum on the background content of supermarkets and other public spaces, but these robots learn so quickly… And, by the way, they are already taking bread from the musical artisans who wrote music for shopping malls.

Another rider of the impending musical apocalypse is visible to the naked eye even to non-professionals: this is truly a gigantic number of covers of old hits. It seems that many musicians, having despaired of writing their hit, follow the path of least resistance: they rehash time-tested classics. Here he wrote a “classic” – and it became funny to himself, because more and more often I hear cover versions of hits 10-15 years ago; Well, what are they “tested by time”? ..

Musicians, of course, get out of this sad (and even terrible) situation as best they can. I also associate the heyday of rap on a global scale precisely with the “death of music” approaching with the inexorability of a freight train. Indeed, in rap, the melody, as a rule, is simply absent (with the exception of the chorus, and even then rarely). And how exactly the rapper read out his text rhythmically, where he placed accents and stresses in words and phrases, copyright does not apply. Only for text; well, you can write any words you like, and it is not necessary that they sound in a certain harmony that is pleasant to the human brain. Often, it’s even the opposite: the worse, the better for a certain part of the audience.

In the meantime, in order to avoid embarrassing situations and accusations of plagiarism (albeit unintentional), I increasingly give one single advice to novice authors: listen to as many different kinds of music as possible. And not just the one you like. Notes and durations could have formed into a melody similar to yours, for example, in some Texas in 1955, when you were not yet in the project. But if someone finds out that your song is painfully similar to the tunes about the hard part of a milkmaid performed by a country singer unknown in our country … it will be, to put it mildly, uncomfortable – then prove to everyone that you are not a camel. That you didn’t meanly take advantage of the fact that no one remembers this song, and didn’t steal it.

Fortunately, the Internet with all these tens of thousands of new songs a day at our fingertips.