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A Milennium of Music - Where to next?
Terry Clinton
Published in Articulation Volume 1, no.2: November 1998.
The end of a century is always a cue for a review of the events of the preceding decades as if the turning over of the calendar can actually neatly segment the progress of human affairs into 'before' and 'after' a particular date.
For those of us who follow the European system for marking out the years, the approaching signpost is even more imposing than the one that loomed for our immediate forebears - the change to a new millennium.
And, as it apparently was for the people who pondered the significance of the previous thousand-year mark, the latest big anniversary has inspired both expectation and a good deal of dread (consider the predications of technological apocalypse surrounding the so-called 'millennium bug' and it doesn't seem such a giant psychological jump back to the period that was later rather dismissively labelled the Dark Ages).
For those of us interested in studying the music being made now, and the records of music made during the past thousand years, it is no less tempting to review what has been and suggest what might be to come. Along with the inevitable five-minutes-to-midnight listings of the best movies and books of the century, what are likely to be nominated as the most significant achievements in music and will the selections be reviewed with knowing amusement in another hundred years? Will such ruminations mean much to people outside the Western tradition, or has the electronic communications-driven expansion of Western culture really proceeded so far?
With millennium consciousness focusing on all levels of human endeavour (at least in the Western world), it seemed fitting that the upcoming Sydney Music Research Symposium should invite contributions from music scholars under the very broad thematic umbrella of a 'fin de siècle' experience that can draw on the achievements of one thousand years.
The symposium, Predictions and Inaccuracies: Collisions of Musical Histories and Futures Approaching the Millennium will be held on the weekend of 20–21 February 1999, at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean.