Friday Miscellanea

This piece at the Wall Street Journal by David Gelernter reads like a cry in the wilderness. He identifies a few problems, but I wonder if they are not just symptoms:

Most children learn nothing about serious music in school and don’t expect to learn anything. Outside school, the music world is being upended and shaken vigorously. The ways we choose music and listen to it are being transformed by iTunes and Spotify and other such sites.

For most young people, music is a minor consumable, like toothpaste. Musicians and music majors aside, my students at Yale—and there are no smarter, more eager, more open students anywhere—just barely know who Beethoven is. Beethoven. “He composed music”—that is the general consensus.

To know nothing about Beethoven? That is cultural bankruptcy. That is collapse. It goes far beyond incompetence, deep into betrayal and farce.

Yep.

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You rarely see it stated quite this baldly as we read in the Guardian how "Philosophy has to be about more than white men." This is a representative paragraph:

Critics of the campaign argue that it undermines academic freedom; that all knowledge is of equal worth; that students ought to transcend cultural background in the interest of expanding knowledge; and that there are very good reasons why a philosophy, economics or history curriculum might be full of the works of dead white males. Very good reasons indeed: some of these include the systemic killing of female philosophers, massacres of some of our earliest thinkers such as the Aztec; and the destruction of ancient African cities that illuminate the thinking of old civilisations.

Representative in that it gets tangled up in its own logic, then blurts out some astonishing falsehoods. I doubt very much that critics of the campaign to remove white dominance in philosophy are making the claim that "all knowledge is of equal worth". But I would love to hear the defence of that claim! I am also deeply amused to read what great thinkers the Aztecs were. These same Aztecs who sacrificed a thousand prisoners a day to "consecrate" the Templo Major in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City). We read in the Wikipedia article that:

Each day blood ran like a river onto the pavement of the Great Plaza, and the stairs of the great pyramid were literally bathed in blood.

This is the kind of thinking that we are going to replace Plato with? Count me out. I mention this here because very similar campaigns have been undertaken to dethrone the canonic composers as well: white males such as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

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There is a pretty interesting discussion about the challenges to musicians in today's online environment in the MIT Technology Review: "Survival in the Age of Spotify." Here is a sample of the discussion:

I’ve been frustrated that artists are not allowed to have a nuanced position. We seem to get shoehorned into the extreme camps of “completely pro–free culture” or “completely anti-technology.” When the record labels or publishing houses get together to hammer out deals with intermediaries (be they ISPs, streaming services, or digital storefronts), we are rarely, if ever, invited to the table and have no choice but to react to what’s already been decided. As someone who loves the Internet but hopes for more creative solutions to “free vs. paid” than the binary extremes we seem to be forced to choose between, I am pretty tired of that language. It’s off-putting to have a book that purports to have your best interests at heart open with so much of that language of conflict.

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Does anyone want to take a stab at explaining what is going on here, aesthetically?

Here is where I found the image: "Jeff Koons churns out new factory art." I see the industrial side of it, which is a bit similar to the industrial nature of a lot of current pop music. But in the visual arts world, I suspect that success depends on doing something as new and peculiar as possible, while in music it depends on doing something familiar, but slightly different.

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String instruments made from carbon fibre are getting better and better quality-wise as shown by this one that shared a prize with an instrument made from conventional wood:

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Two days ago was the 90th birthday of one of the great iconoclasts of 20th century music: Pierre Boulez. The Guardian has a collection of some of the more outrageous things he has said over the years:

His incendiary comments, whether directed at his contemporaries (he has described Duchamp as ‘a pompous bore’, Cage as ‘a performing monkey’, and Stockhausen, ‘a hippie’), or more general topics such as culture and history, however, suggest that he enjoys the controversy.

Boulez seems to have some strange obsessions:

“I believe a civilisation that conserves is one that will decay because it is afraid of going forward and attributes more importance to memory than the future. The strongest civilisations are those without memory - those capable of complete forgetfulness. They are strong enough to destroy because they know they can replace what is destroyed. Today our musical civilisation is not strong; it shows clear signs of withering… […] Conducting has forced me to absorb a great deal of history, so much so, in fact, that history seems more than ever to me a great burden. In my opinion we must get rid of it once and for all.”

To which I reply: name one! Name a civilization that is without memory. Better, name a strong civilization that is without memory. This is a strange obsessive fantasy of 20th century radical modernism. It is an echo of the zero hour of the Russian Revolution when the new man was to be created who owed nothing to the past. This is not only an absurd fantasy, it is a dangerous one, because it always seems to lead to Siberia and the death camps for those who don't want to go along.

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I think this gives us our envoi for today. Let's hear something by Pierre Boulez. Dérive I was composed in 1984. It is a six-minute chamber work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone, and piano which was spun out of sketches for a larger work from 1981, entitled Répons.