http://www.slate.com/id/2282989/
This sort of rumination seems to miss the point of whether the "eureka" moment in hunting for consumer goods is something to make the focal point of discussing any "eureka" moment. The "original" moment of "eureka" was a little more truly momentous than simply finding a totally cool consumer good that helped you feel like one of the cool kids. Innovations and discoveries about the natural world and the sciences are surely cooler and a greater benefit to people on the whole than discovering an awesome and heretofore difficult to find minor league baseball cap. Still, it's a nicely built article and I thought enough of it to link to it even while I dissent in part from its observations and points.
Let's not forget that as the internet makes it easier to find things that the level of obscurity to delineate the cool kids from the common rabble simply changes by a matter of degree. Let's just pick one of my own pet interests as an example. These days in classical guitar if you know Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi or Villa-Lobos or Torroba or Ponce, big deal. EVERYONE knows about those people. Even lesser-knowns that nobody knows of outside the world of classical guitar like Koshkin or Brouwer aren't "really" that big a deal. Takemitsu wrote soundtracks for films so he's a little more nerd-cred but for the cool kids, so to speak, the greater cool factor necessitates a greater obscurity. This is easily provided in the internet age. For fans of modernist literature Nicholas Maw or Peter Maxwell Davies or Frank Martin or Elliot Carter get the job done. Even more obscure would be repertoire played by Tillmann Hoppstock (yeah, I have a couple of his CDs and his Bartok transcription is wonderful).
For nerds who want their musical nerdiness to encompass more than just the most avant of the avant garde in classical guitar you can go with Castelnuovo-Tedesco but not necessarily his famous solo works (famous? ;) ) or concerti. You can go for his preludes and fugues for guitar duet or, better yet, Eclogues for flute, English horn and guitar.
But there's nothing like living composers in classical music to affirm the highest level of hip nerdiness. Contemporary classical music is not too much different from indie rock, probably, and has an exponentially greater cool factor. Anyone can google even the most obscure indie rock band without a whole lot of effort. If there is anything the recent flap about Lady Gaga's retread of Madonna's retread of a soul number from before either woman's time has established it's the truth of Led Zeppelin's old claim that the song remains the same. As Ecclesiastes warned us millenia ago, there is nothing new under the sun. Do you believe there is something new? Do you rush to say "See, here? This is new?" It has come before, it is simply something from long ago that has come back. Innovations are generally matters of degree more than kind. Even something as earth-shattering as the development of nuclear weaponry is a revolutionary leap in doing something that people sought to do before.
None of this is to downplay the specialness of discovery. I was stoked to discover Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Eclogues, his preludes and fugues for guitar duet, and his sonatina for flute and guitar. I am still happy I discovered Igor Rekhin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar. It was simultaneously a surprise and a slight disappointment. I was hoping I might be the first composer to have tried tackling 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I should have known a Russian composer would have gotten their first because Russian guitar literature is in several respects much more adventurous than Western approaches to the instrument.
Now I speak with the bias of being a composer by hobby but the greatest moments of discovery and happiness don't seem to ever come from the acquisition of things anyway. I get excited when I discover a piece of music I haven't heard or studied before that I think is brilliant. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. This is not as exciting to me as discovering something new in a creative process, coming up with a melody or a harmony I like that is new for me. Stumbling upon what is, for me, a new insight in conversation with a friend or family member is more exciting than just picking up a new book or movie.
Discoveries that are great can include finding this or that awesome movie but a truly great discovery at a personal level is usually a gift that keeps on giving and is a gift to more than just yourself, a gift you can share with others. We don't have to labor the point too much about good news that is so good we want to share it with others and evangelize them to the cause, do we? Those moments never go away and won't stop happening. The internet may make the more mundane moments of joyful discovery of small-level things seem less important but the really big changes and discoveries in life like a new baby or a new friend or a long-lost family member or a new job (this one is particularly dear to me just now!) .
Today is Valentine's day and even though I haven't dated I don't suppose it requires any great effort to point out that lots of people like to discover a new "love" or something new about the person they already love. We are not wrong to want both the familiar and the new and to discover new things about the familiar we didn't know before. We will only lose our capacity for joyful surprise if we steel ourselves against it or keep changing the goal posts and the threshhold of what surprises us.
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