There was a huge amount of music produced in centuries passed that has simply been lost to the sands of time. Great composers were writing their works down. Fiddlers and bards singing songs and playing jigs in local taverns were not.
The main difference between today and 30 years ago or 75 years ago or 200 years ago is that everything is recorded and distributed. Until the 21st century, if you wanted to record and distribute your music, in most cases you needed a record label and record labels served a gatekeeping function. Prior to the existence of recorded music, for music to be distributed it had to be carefully transcribed and reproduced by musicians. That serves an even greater gatekeeping function. Now literally anyone with access to a computer and record and distribute music.
That's a double-edged sword - there's more great music being produced now than at any point in history, and there's more garbage being produced now than at any point in history.
It looks like a line from my post went missing - something along the lines of “for the composed music we still have”.
The history of music is complicated. For example, take the extended improvisation “Anonymous II” by the Dutch band Focus. It’s recorded on their album Focus 3, but there’s an earlier version on their first LP, and the band in its current form were still playing it, and the improvised nature means that it keeps changing. The theme? It’s derived from a version of a Renaissance tune written down in various countries under different names, sometimes as just a piece of music, sometimes as a dance tune. But the people who wrote it down didn’t compose it, and the way they wrote it down depended on the instrument they played and tbe purpose they put it to. Before that? It may have been a fragment of a lost Mass, a dance or folk tune brought into a court by professional musicians, maybe taken from one of the annual religious plays. Older music was regularised into verse forms for songs, put to a regular rhythm for dance, changed to fit the notes available and the range on new instruments, improvised on and revised, taken into a particular religion or culture and memorised in a static form for generations, and so on.
Most of the history of music is the mixing of oral tradition, and about adaptation and “improvement”. It’s still how music works today. Now we call it things like jazz, sub-genre, historically informed performance, sampling, folk, world music, or simply interpretation.
That’s how it should be. Those music critics who listened to records and objected that a forte in bar x or a particular note “wasn’t in the score” were utterly wrong and did so much damage to our musical tradition.
