From Wikipedia:
An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist.
The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.
I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.
In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.
So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.
Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.
What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.
A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.
I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.
Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers: