The STS in Music ~ A Reaction Paper on "Science and Music"

Music serves as a reflection of the era it was composed. It has the ability to show the type of people, the culture, ideologies and beliefs, as well as their way of life. To put things short, it basically mirrors the history of the different civilizations. Aside from a “storage” of all sorts, it can and was used as a medium to describe the things that people see, just like what Camille St. Saens did on his musical pieces.

The first set of pieces that we heard were orchestral music inspired by science. These were Herschel’s symphony number 8, Gustav Holst’s Mars the bringer of war, and Camille St. Saens’ Aquarium and Fossil. It is important to note that most of these musical pieces were written during the industrial revolution and some years after it wherein science was really dominant and a lot of discoveries were being made. Due to this, the pieces mentioned above were literally inspired by science, i.e. astronomy.

The latter pieces on the other hand were already mostly rock and what they contain now are the ideologies and pop culture of the people living during the 1980s and early 1990s. Some examples of the pop culture existent back then were the glamorous rock culture, obsession with robotics, and space travelling. Since this is also the time of US and Russia’s cold war, the songs contain message about peace, possible event that might occur if they go to war, etc.

As an avid music listener, I know for a fact that it really portrays the dominant culture ongoing on those times. In the case of the music that we heard on class, I believe that this fact also holds to be true given the examples above. Now, can you identify the inspirations of the music circulating nowadays?

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