Amateur Artistry

When reading Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix Culture”, the early ideas of John Phillip Sousa are what first caught my attention. Sousa says that “infernal machines” would change our culture, there would be fewer tools to create music, and ultimately there would be a decline in amateur’s making music. I definitely agree with Sousa with the fact that technology has changed our culture, but disagree with him when he says that with less participation in amateurs making music.

I think that this has done a complete 180. There was a time in the mid to late 20^th century when this would have been true, but today we have shows like American Idol. I don’t think that just because amateurs are singing professionals songs, make it any less creative—they usually change the professional song so it is more personalized to them anyway. We’ve also got a very controversial issue of mash up songs—where technically “amateurs” are making their own creative music, but using professionals’ songs to do so. Again, they aren’t using their own voices, but they are using their own talents along with technology to start a new breed of music. The argument today is the way in which technology has made it possible for almost anyone or amateurs to make music or in even more general terms the Internet has made it possible for amateur music artists to get their songs heard. The more tools that were developed to create music made it possible for amateurs to produce their own music, get their own music heard, and promoted overall amateur artistry. Isn’t this proving Sousa’s theory wrong?