Museum of Music: Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I described and criticized the sorry state of public collections of music as compared to other prominent arts. Continuing with that thought below, I outline ideas for the creation of a modern multimedia driven Museum of Music (MoM).


Unlike paintings or sculpture, presenting music en mass is hard. If you walk into a good-sized room of an art gallery, you might see as many as a dozen paintings in close proximity, perhaps with a few statues filling the void between walls. Tourists can dart through the room, taking only passing glances at the modest and masterful alike; and art aficionados can dissect little known works, brush stroke by brush stroke. Part of the fun of art museums is that you can experience the art at the speed and level of depth that you want.


Music needs a solution to the same problem. Average listeners can't stay awake through an entire symphony, and even if they could, without modest training, they wouldn't appreciate what they were hearing. On the other hand, a former cellist who has season tickets to the Philharmonic, wouldn't enjoy being told that Beethoven's 9th symphony can be summed up by a snippet of the Ode to Joy melody.

Space! The final frontier...

Let's say humanity discovers the technology to travel between stars and colonize other planets. Soon after that point we'd probably send out our first colonizing ship (for the sake of the narrative, let's call it NewEarthOne), but due to the immense distance between stars, the journey could take several lifetimes. Science-fiction tells us that, in order to cut down on supplies needed for the journey, the colonists and crew would be kept in a state of suspended animation, only awaking from this deep sleep when the autopilot calculates that they have arrived.


Back on earth, technological advances are still being made and in another 20 years or so, we develop substantially faster technology. Once the technology is perfected, they send out another colonizing ship. However, due to the scientific advances, this one will arrive before the first ship. When NewEarthOne arrives many years later, they awaken to find a thriving and futuristic NewEarth colony already established on the virgin soil they were seeking.

This concept could be taken even further because if the first trip takes hundreds of years, then there is time for many technological leaps. Perhaps the fifth group to set out is actually the first to arrive and every few decades a ship full of people shows up from further in the past.


It would be a cruel fate to be a pioneer, leaving your old world behind and setting out to create a new one from scratch, only to find that the old one beat you there.