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Why bad things happen to good Music

Posted by gd (A) on June 11, 2007 at 07:22:33

In Reply to: Agreed. But, in my OP I was referring specifically to Classical music... posted by SE on June 11, 2007 at 05:01:06:

Hi SE,

The simple answer is, yes, anything or any one can be eliminated and nothing matters. New Orleans was eviscerated and no one seems to care?

You are right in many ways, Art does rise and fall. It's inevitable. But that does not mean the loss is not a profound one for human culture or more locally for our edification and emotional fulfillment. I’d argue that it’s more than a petal on a flower.

Unfortunately, other answers are ephemeral, and rambling, like culture.

It’s difficult to restrict the discussion to classical music,
1) Other Art music forms seem to copy musical modernism – look at avant-garde manifestations of Jazz and Rock.
2) We got our tonal art music for a reason, it’s not going away, but it can still die.

I'll give you an example (in a field I know next to nothing about) we have only a fraction of the great ancient (classical!) Greek plays ever written, particularly only a few of the plays written by the three major Greek playwrights. These plays were unknown to Shakespeare, and other Elizabethan playwrights. Their idea of what tragedy was based on Roman plays. Those plays were a form of violent dumbed-down badly imported Greek drama.

So the violent pseudo tragedy of many Elizabethan plays come out of a debased original. Imagine if Shakespeare had some of the great Greek models to work from. There is an example of repercussions of cultural loss.

Maybe not the biggest deal, but imagine how long it took us to get the commercial and cultural world in alignment to produce a robust drama/entertainment culture - that could give us a Shakespeare - and then imagine that creative people have to borough models around them to form their aesthetic models and their art.

Culture does not progress in a straight line it coalesces with accidents and random influences – or misses the chance altogether. It took centuries for Europe to "evolve" a Bach and then a Beethoven. Then we have Wagner and soon all the movie music we can stand... so I have to think that it is impossible to get rid of classical music, but it is possible to debase it into meaninglessness.

That in fact is what's happening to emotional content in general. We live in a time where poetry has been made irrelevant - yet we have pop/rock lyrics. Abstract "pure" music has become irrelevant - yet we have pop/rock music. The Hallmark card is now our standard for beauty and authenticity of feeling. Or rather the anti-Hallmark card, it shows all the same traits, but it’s edgy and seems to make us feel we are different than the mass of boring humanity.

We have a lot of educated people around the country who know that they should be getting something more out of their music, they went to college and they know that in heroic (Romantic!) periods in the recent past people created great art – generally based on a counter-cultural maxim. That's a cool way to have satisfying content. So in the same bourgeois consumerist fashion people have always followed, they invest content into what they feel comfortable consuming, so we have Rock studies and the intellectual pretensions of Rock. Not dissimilar to the bibulous over-inflated (totally different) bourgeois aesthetics of the 19th century. Only now more bulletproof because it’s based on a modernist pseudo-anti-bourgeoisie stance.

Also, Modernism may have run its course. Take Modern visual art, its current success is to a large extant based on the power of the commercial marketplace, fueled (originally) by the prices of 50s and 60s art. The art world is now as much about fashion and money as aesthetics. If Modern art should loose it’s investment potential (not likely, but one can hope) and be terminated in a tulip craze downturn, then we can add modern art to modern music and we can finally kiss modernism good-bye. A cultural loss, but maybe an evolution.


OK, back to your question…..

The point being that yes, bad things happen to good Art, but there is also consequences for future development, and creative people.

Great music could be forgotten; we could easily be entering a musical Dark Ages. Classical music is irrelevant – except as a target for our downwardly mobile anti-elitist culture. It does not meet today’s needs, but more importantly, in our media saturated society – unarguable different from any time in the past – we have tailored our culture consumption to just be different enough, but comfortable enough to keep the boundaries secure. the high is too "snooty" and the low, well that's always been a well of inspiration that's never run dry.

OK, so it's a long way of saying that the progress of culture has consequences. The elimination of classical music is a consequence of changing taste – except for its outer covering preserved as movie music, so your question of net effect? For us slow diminutions, a cultural Alzheimer’s, as with technical advances, and losses, one just shrugs ones shoulders, can build that anymore, how did they design those old tubes?

When a cultural edifice falls, what’s left? Folk idioms for easy consumption, maybe fodder for future centuries art musicians? Does the diminution and fall have meaning? Ask the Greeks.


Gregg

www.classicaldomain.org

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