Uses of Nostalgia (Music/Design)
Sometimes it's useful to revisit things you used to do 30 or 40 years ago. Recently, I pulled out some of my J.S. Bach arrangements for bass written in the 1980s. I began to move away from instrumental skill in the late 1990s and started taking more interdisciplinary approaches to music. The notion is that by simply removing some elements of creative practice, sometimes drastically, we can emerge with a new vision.
I noticed a variation of this while watching some videos about the hypergrowth of cities like Shanghai, Doha, and Dubai, where the new suffocates the old. Shanghai in particular sprouted skyscrapers like weeds within a decade. In the late 1980s, Shanghai had all low-rise buildings, probably no taller than four or five stories, and now many are over 100 stories. Many of the developments have failed either structurally, financially, and aesthetically. The new vision has no connection to older visions.
Nostalgia emerges when we feel something has been wrongfully abandoned. This is how I have felt about some of my musical roots. This is how older generations feel about city roots.
Nostalgia is also not easy: I spent lots of time removing all the “rust” that had built up. I also realized that without re-integrating the restored skills the rust will come back within a short time. I may not want to repeat the process. (Perhaps we have to force ourselves to).
Takeaways on nostalgia (longer than the article!):
Nostalgia at its most benign is an escape; Nostalgia at its worst is a form of imprisonment because you can't escape from it.
If you remove nostalgia, then the future is only a myopic vision.
Eighty years from now people won't be rewatching films from 2019-2020 with warm feelings of nostalgia as one might watching films from the 1940s: "Indeed, feeling nostalgic for a time one didn’t actually live through appears to be a common phenomenon if all the chatrooms, Facebook pages and websites dedicated to it are anything to go by. In fact, a new word has been coined to capture this precise variant of nostalgia – anemoia, defined by the Urban Dictionary and the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known." https://aeon.co/essays/nostalgia-doesnt-need-real-memories-an-imagined-past-works-as-well
"The colours that suddenly flood into the streets of 1910s New York aren’t drawn from the celluloid itself; that information was never captured there. The extra frames added to smooth those New Yorkers’ 60 frame-a-second strolls are brand new too." https://www.wired.co.uk/article/history-colourisation-controversy?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Lots of small downtowns in the U.S. have become veritable food courts of chain restaurants. This is a logical continuation of the idea of the "mallifications" in the 1970s, as a revival of the human-scaled town square with no vehicle traffic. Now the traffic is added back for a melange of nostalgias. Nostalgia disappears the more you mess with it.
Many memories are still in black and white, but not for long. All generations live with a technology that fades or is “colorized” in some way. It is ironic that we still love black and white photography as much as we do, and sometimes even more when color is added back. Nostalgia works in both directions.
There had been a general abandonment of traditional music education in favor of a DIY ethic, beginning in about 1980, when pop supergroups were splintering off into solo acts. It continues to evolve in interesting ways in parallel with technology. In the haste to move on to whatever is new, we are discarding what has been enriching to us thus far. Nostalgia can revive it somewhat in younger generations, but the original essences are lost, as no one has a direct memory of them, and consequently get subsumed into whatever the new technology is.
Nostalgia is a way to "clean" and restore what had been abandoned, then continue to reincorporate the restored methods or typologies.
In the old city example, restore the old to inform the aesthetic vision of the new. (Hutongs are an example) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutong