David Byrne: Architecture in Music

Often the grand narratives of art—this is how we got from Bach to the blues in ten easy steps—are told as these inevitable, even natural, progressions of styles and interests. But in Byrne's talk we get another story, one that says that the acoustic group sessions of West African music played in the village, or the soaring, ethereal tones you'll hear in a Gothic cathedral, are as much products of where we hear them as what was rattling around in the composer's brain.

I won't steal too much of Byrne's thunder by recapitulating it here, but suffice it to say that he offers a more nuanced view of musical history than the baroque-to-classical-to-romantic-to-modernist-to-jazz-to-rock-and-roll that holds sway. Have a look and you'll not only take a different view of how performance spaces have changed, but how what we hear when we go there has shifted as well.