r/startrek • u/DanEosen • 1d ago
Music And Literature In Star Trek
Riker loves jazz, Picard listens to classical music etc. We also have Picard loving 20th century detective stories and in TOS there are references to Shakespeare.
I would understand of all things to predict for the future is music. Yet culture wise with music and literature advances seem to end with the 20th century. I always found it odd how music like Jazz survived all these centuries. While an excellent genre as time passes music tastes would change. Also why so Earth centric music and Western civilization music in particular.
Is there a canon reason why music and literature never really progressed or is predicting and creating futuristic genres that difficult?
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u/TwitchyMcJoe 1d ago
I always thought part of the problem was WWIII destroyed a lot of things, and music in select collections survived while the media for the masses did not.
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u/0w3n1919 1d ago
I like this
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u/TwitchyMcJoe 1d ago
To be fair, this also means someone had a copy of Hotel Royale in their collection, or there were so many copies that it somehow survived the conflagration to be input into the Enterprise D's computers.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 1d ago
Shakespeare makes total sense to me, it's still popular today after centuries so why wouldn't it hold up further?
The other stuff is mostly because of licensing issues, although it makes sense that people who play instruments are also into the classics.
Like playing the trombone and not knowing jazz seems wrong
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u/handsomechuck 1d ago
It's meta-. It has to be something the audience comprehends/can relate to. Same reason Tom Paris would be into cars.
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u/Aezetyr 1d ago
Canon? None that I can think of. I especially liked in the Voyager episode Counterpoint, they used Mahler instead of one of the other more well known counterpoint composers. That was a nice touch. Music and literature didn't seem to progress because for the most part it was used by the writers to add verisimilitude instead of being different for the sake of being different.
There is also licensing costs, so Public Domain music was preferred when it came to well known pieces. Berman famously fired Ron Jones because the music for early TNG was too good, and Jones was entitled to more residuals from Paramount using his work. It was replaced with basic-bitch wallpaper music for the 4th season and beyond. Take Jones' work in Best of Both Worlds, and compare it to the climax of All Good Things. It's a night and day difference in quality and situational context. In BoBW we did not need loads of technobabble and meaningless numbers to deliver the urgency of the situation; the music did that for us.
They primarily used Western/European centric music because the show is made by Western writers, producers and crew and because it is familiar to the largest audience the shows would have. Discovery and Strange New Worlds would use more contemporary sounds and styles further augmented by the context of the show and the sound engineers to fit the scene better.
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u/MadeIndescribable 1d ago
Is there a canon reason why music and literature never really progressed
I'm happy to accept that music peaking with David Bowie is Star Trek canon.
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u/kingwooj 1d ago
I still find it profoundly stupid that Kirk listens to the Beastie Boys in the Kelvinverse. It's not even like him being into Bach or something, because it's pop music. It'd be like a kid today being really into 1800s saloon music.
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u/Glittering-Most-9535 1d ago
Hey, in our reality both Gregorian Chant and Sea Chanties had brief surges in popularity. And neither has nearly the awesome beat of Sabotage.
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u/Express-Day5234 1d ago
You never know. Many things we consider classics today were considered low brow entertainment in their day.
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u/muehsam 1d ago
Also why so Earth centric music and Western civilization music in particular.
Because that's what the show's producers had to work with. They can't just invent completely new styles of music that are actually any good.
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u/DanEosen 1d ago
Here is the thing, music does change and with all the other parts of the Federation different genres would be encountered and incorporated. In the movie The Fifth Element there was an attempt and trying to figure out music for the future and what different humanoid species would have. Star Trek never seems to have done with this movie did.
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u/Booster6 14h ago
They have though, not often, but occasionally. Klingon Opera being the most notable example
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u/Clear_Ad_6316 1d ago
Is there a canon reason why music and literature never really progressed or is predicting and creating futuristic genres that difficult?
This scene from Buck Rogers is seared into my mind, and I think answers the question.
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u/Glittering-Most-9535 1d ago edited 1d ago
We know the Beastie Boys music makes it to at least the 2260s.
Non-canon, I think it's a combination of not wanting to predict what recent pop culture would stand the test of time, as that can make a show feel dated (see Discovery praising Musk as an example), mixed with your note about it being hard to create genres from scratch. So they stick to what's timeless and royalty-free.