[oraknabo]

Wouldn't this limit your study to only musicians that influenced current trends?

I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're engaging in study.

[falcor84]

I don't understand how it could be different. There has obviously been way too much music in the past to teach in it's entirety. We have to decide what to teach based on what we currently think is "important". And though we can try to fool ourselves that there is some measure of objective importance, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it always boils down to popularity within some milieu.

[oraknabo]

Of course there have to be criteria for any course of study that leaves out plenty of artists that have to be considered not significant enough to cover.

If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse, niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?

[vidarh]

The your current starting point is exceedingly narrow.

Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common? Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as well.

The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same.

But we don't go strictly backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards again. started with.

I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy, rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about.

To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening interesting?

But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2].

If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much have to cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic music.

As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late 40's.

If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to unravel in between.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo

[hrktb]

wouldn’t there be an issue of diversity, where the pool of studied matter would get smaller and smaller ?

I would contrast this to languages, where we still study ancient languages, as well as preserve “dying” languages for future reference. Teaching music genres that didn’t ‘survive’ would have its benefits.