Humanity has seen countless changes during the last few decades. Culture, technology, medicine, you name it; it is not the same as it was all those years ago. What reflects it is a part of our culture – music. Music is not a static thing, but it is highly dynamic and it echoes the changes of our society. Much of these changes also have to do with technology, in which we have seen immense amount of development. From the pre-80’s, the gramophone records used to rule the world of music for more than sixty years. Then we have seen a change to a more accessible and portable medium – the compact cassette tape, only to be followed by the most game-changing developments – the digital file. Compact discs have become the standard, offering the most truthful recordings, then it did not take long for the creation of the almighty mp3 file to take place. In just a few years, we have gained the ability to listen not only to a single tape of music on your daily commute, but to having millions of songs at the end of our fingertips. From the golden era of Jazz to the digital age of electronic music, we are observers of a crucial advancement in the way music is thought about, written, recorded, heard and transmitted. Before the boom of the internet people used to be limited in the way they thought about music. They were influenced by what they heard, which was usually local, so certain genres and styles belonged to certain places, but today you can hear genre influences from completely different world regions being played anywhere in the whole world. The entire world’s cultures of music blend together, where they combine into a single entity. But that does not limit us, what it gives us is a richer variety of music. As all of this progress creates further extensions of music that reaches beyond its capacities, music becomes influenced by other styles, mixes together and we are under fire of constant innovation. And while there are hundreds of new genres coming out every year, the classics are still unharmed. There is no worry of losing such genres as classical, jazz or pop, because they are an inseparable part of music. Piano, for example, is the ultimate musical instrument with the broadest range. It can serve as an entry point for learning music, but it can be a virtuoso instrument, or it can be used in basically any existing genre. That is also one of the vital reasons of its uncontested popularity among the general population of musicians.
All of these changes in such a short time period have shown us that there is still much to come and expect. Music is and always will be influenced by outer powers, thus it will never become a stationary, unchanged phenomenon, but it will always flow to wherever it needs to be at the time to represent our thoughts and ideas.
