It’s good to finally be reading a good book… The Black Swan, that is. Go buy it.
I was thinking you could easily apply (and I already have, somewhat, after reading Fooled by Randomness) the Black Swan idea to the “modern music” discussion I blogged about weeks ago. Some music scholars, theorists, and historians probably like to think that they can be certain of why certain composers and certain pieces became and/or remain popular. They then predict what music will be like in the future, and try to compose such music, while most of them will probably remain utterly obscure, while the real composers who stay famous from our time will be film composers and pop artists, who those scholars loathe for their simplicity and success.
What really makes a composer or a piece of music remembered for a long time? Like what makes a bestselling novel, the ingredients are not definite and easy to reproduce. They’re Black Swans. They emerge from a system far too complex for anyone to understand or predict. What makes something matter in a single human brain is far too complex to predict accurately; what makes people think they can know what makes fame emerge from the interaction of all these human minds? Yet that doesn’t stop people from buying a book on how to write a bestseller, or studying with a snobby music historian hoping to collect secrets on how to become the next Beethoven by being “innovative”, as if that was the prime ingredient.
What can I be certain of? That (insert a Black Swan here) will change music forever.
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