Musical diversity produces musical "freshness"

Musical diversity produces musical “freshness”

A recently-published interview with frontman/bassist Sting (Gordon Sumner) of The Police caught my attention. In short, he stated that today’s music is growing stale due to a lack of fresh inputs.

In a textbook example of “wisdom is wherever you find it”, the interview in People magazine offers Sting the opportunity to highlight this problem – and point to its solution, really – with jarring clarity. Below are some short excerpts from the interview:

“I was fortunate growing up in the ’60s because in England we only had one radio station. We had classical music, we had pop music, we had everything in between,” he says of the station’s rotation. “So I grew up thinking that music was this one thing. I mean, I appreciated the difference between classical music and pop music, but it’s the same building blocks and it still has the same feeling to it. It’s a common language.”

[Sting and wife, Trudie Styler] also spoke of their appreciation for classical music and Sting emphasized the need to look back at the roots of music, especially in today’s crowded industry.

“When I listen to composers, like, say, Bach, it’s almost as though they’ve discovered a new continent and everything of their focus was brand new,” he said. “Now everything has been discovered and covered with roads and railroads and airplanes, and you probably can’t find a piece of territory that hasn’t been touched before.”

Sting’s primary point, if I may paraphrase, is that we often lock ourselves into one particular genre of music and play it to death…and music as a whole suffers for it. While musical styles and interpretations of those styles vary widely, much is shared; and just as cross-pollination can produce stronger plants, exposing yourself to a variety of musical influences makes you better musically, whether you are a performer, a composer, or “just” an appreciative listener!

For more information on this topic, check out the Sting interview…and for more information about Sting himself and the topic of musical cross-pollination, here are a couple of useful references:

Sting (Gordon Sumner)
Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, influenced by Native American and African-American music

More great examples exist, of course…but that’s a topic for another day. Now, do yourself and your music a favor and broaden your horizons! You’ll be glad you did.