New Currencies

My kid's music teacher was very impressed when I mouthed off a few things I knew about the main eras in musical composition. A few days after that she came up to me and asked if I could write something for her that she could use in her class.

Basically, I had mentioned simple stuff like that there was a time when the piano keyboard had fewer keys, and that the Romantic era followed from the end of the Wars with Napoleon and was about people becoming sick of the destruction and misery of war and turning to happier themes.

One interesting thing though is that a lot of musical styles followed particular economic migration: the Baroque proceeded from the economic power of navigation and the enhanced trading that occurred thereby. The Portuguese held navigation maps as secrets of state, and the word 'baroque' is a Portuguese word to do with their excessively lavish embellishments of pearls with gold ornamentation all of which was enabled by the wealth their map-making brought them.

A Portuguese Musician

A further detail is that composers possessed valuable things more than just their music alone – because the paper on which they wrote down the note scores was always very expensive bank ledger stock, and this was valuable in its own right, and could be sold whether it had notes on it or not!

When you look at what might constitute new forms of currency, you must consider that art and the quality of artefact, has almost as much to do with enshrining value in people's minds as anything else. A lot of people make the mistake of continually thinking during a major economic decline that absolutely nobody has money but that is completely incorrect. And then you have to realise that people who do have money in a general decline typically start to really prize preservation of all kinds. And that, for instance, is who buys tiny little, yet historically-important, and also very beautiful, things of extremely dense value such as the 1924 Australian sixpenny coin. Bankers, economic criminal masterminds, retired corrupt bureaucrats – all those kinds of people. The New Age movement often asks 'why do bad things happen to good people?' But I ask things like, 'can good money come from bad people?' Or, 'do bad people know what good and beautiful things are?'

Eighty thousand dollars

I say all of this just as things to think about, as we enter the time when new currencies are indeed developing in the wider marketplace. But they are most unlikely to be the ones which currently appear to have captivated the attention of the media...