I guess one of the big stories in music this week is Bob Dylan's new book: ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’ Review: Bob Dylan Plays DJ
“The Philosophy of Modern Song” is an annotated playlist of other people’s songs, an idiosyncratic jukebox of 66 A-sides. The imposing title is perhaps tongue-in-cheek, for the book doesn’t offer—as Bobcats worth their salt might have predicted—anything close to what its title promises. What it does offer is perhaps even more valuable: It’s a generous book—as forthright as anything Dylan has ever laid before his audience—that manages to stick its landing somewhere between the perfect bathroom read (short sections, handsomely illustrated, coincidentally just in time for Christmas) and “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Robert Burton’s epic, eccentric and encyclopedic compendium of 1621.
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Here is a piece on the nature and function of art: On Not Drinking the Kool-Aid
I recently spoke at a gathering of artists and arts administrators. During the discussion, one of the administrators said, “Art enables us to have difficult conversations with each other.” That struck me as perfectly capturing the going understanding of the role of art these days. Art is now viewed as a pretext for collective discourse, raising “issues” that provide the raw material for op-eds, Twitter threads, college seminars, and conference panels, not to mention (dreaded word) post-performance “talkbacks.”
But not just any kind of collective discourse. For we all know what “difficult conversations” means: what they are about, and on what terms they are meant to proceed. A “difficult conversation” is not a conversation about the tragic nature of choice or the inevitability of death. Nor is it one in which participants debate whether trans women are women or affirmative action is a good idea. When I hear the phrase “difficult conversations,” I think of something David Mamet said: “When people say, ‘we need to have a conversation about race,’ what they really mean is, ‘shut the fuck up.’”
In the age of wokeness, aka political correctness, art must be political and art must be correct. The point is familiar, but a few examples might revivify it...
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This is interesting: What the Suzuki Method Really Taught
Apparently, the emotional content of Western concert or “classical” music—its ability to summon up feelings that literally surpass words, and give us that uniquely musical experience of being overwhelmed—could be as immediately manifest to non-Westerners as it was to those raised in the tradition. The Japanese appetite for the emotional intensity of much so-called classical music coincided with a Western appetite for Eastern art, the japonisme that, through the prints of Hiroshige in particular, swept European painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, wresting it from a blind faith in Renaissance one-point perspective. Van Gogh and Manet, Whistler and Degas—they were as much enthralled by Japanese art as Suzuki’s generation was by European music. And, generally speaking, both sides “got it” just about as well, in each case mastering and repurposing the beautiful surface of the form without necessarily grasping all the local purposes beneath. Suzuki knew Bach but not, it seems, his religious points or passions, in the same way that Whistler knew Hiroshige but not his religious points or passions.
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State sponsorship of music, while seemingly essential, is also hazardous: Contemporary music sliced by Arts Council England’s knife
Delayed for over a week, the release of Arts Council England’s latest funding round landed with a thud on Friday – with the headline announcement of the total reduction in National Portfolio funding to English National Opera.
But a series of serious reductions were also visited on contemporary music organisations, with some losing all of their portfolio funding.
This included a total reduction in funding to the Cambridge-based Britten Sinfonia. The group, founded in 1992, is Associate Ensemble at the Barbican.
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Odanak First Nation's Mali Obomsawin tells Indigenous stories through music
When Mali Obomsawin graduated from Dartmouth College in 2018, she quickly found success as one-third of the acclaimed folk rock band Lula Wiles. But Mali grew frustrated by the limitations of that success. She says fans in the Americana folk scene expected a white folk aesthetic. Mali is a citizen of the Odanak First Nation in Quebec, and she didn't fit that box, so she left. She's now released her first album as a solo artist, "Sweet Tooth." It represents a different kind of folk music. Wabanaki hand drums and jazz arrangements replace banjo twang. Mali calls it the first authentic statement in her creative journey.
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Here are some insights into why the English National Opera was defunded: Defunding ENO is devastating – but the writing was on the wall
When the leadership of an arts organisation gives the impression that it has no faith in the importance of the work it produces, it is hardly surprising that people come to negative conclusions about its identity and value. Thousands of opera lovers had the foresight at the time to recognise the longer-term consequences of the changes and signed a petition to save ENO. Those who took that stand are unlikely to be surprised by the decisions that Arts Council England published last week that meant ENO will lose its £12.6m core annual funding.
The fact that this outcome was predicted doesn’t make the reality of it any less heartbreaking, nor less dangerous for the cultural landscape of the country.
Opera is squeezed by those on the left who think it is elitist and those on the right who do not believe it should be supported by government at all. The notion that it is a glamorous and frivolous entertainment for the social and cultural elite may be a convenient stereotype, but for those who have experienced it, nothing could be further from the truth.
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I suppose this was inevitable: Extinction Rebellion activists halt Verdi Requiem at Concertgebouw, comparing to ‘sinking Titanic’
A performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem came to a halt on Wednesday evening at The Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam when a climate protester interrupted the performance.
In a video shared by the global environmental movement, ‘Extinction Rebellion’, a protester seated in the midst of the auditorium level of the concert hall stood up to shout across the venue, “We are in the middle of a climate crisis and we are like the orchestra on the Titanic that keeps playing quietly while the ship is already sinking.”
The protester, named by the protest group as Sebastian, was one of three who interrupted the performance at 8.30pm on 2 November and used their hijacked platform to call on the Dutch government to do everything they could to reach carbon-neutrality by 2025.
All three of the protesters were dragged out by booing audience members
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Let's listen to some music from the Mali Obomsawin album:
I was listening to some music by American composer Roy Harris this week. Here is his Symphony No. 3 from 1941:
All these hysterical articles about the strict pieties and rigidly enforced social norms around art and artists, as if there was ever a time when that wasn't true. Oh no, you can get ostracized for voicing a politically unpopular or offensive opinion? There has never been a time when that was untrue and there never will be. In my observation, the main difference is that you used to get in trouble for not being racist or sexist or antisemitic, and the current climate is a massive improvement.
ReplyDeleteI really liked Deresiewicz' book on Jane Austen's novels and his book on "the death of the artist" was interesting BUT, at the same time, in his more recent articles he strikes me as the kind of ur-1990s secular liberal who pines for the days of what I'd call "give me the Old-Time Art Religion". :)
ReplyDeleteon another blogging hiatus because of IRL events but I am also reading up a bit and I couldn't resist grabbing a new book by Yoel Greenberg called How Sonata Forms, a kind of counterpoint to Caplin and Hepokoski & Darcy that proposes a "bottom-up" diachronic study of the evolution of sonata norms in contrast to the prevailing "top down" synchronic studies from A B Marx up through Caplin, et. al. Greenberg's proposal looks to be that if there has been no consensus across 2.5 centuries about what sonata forms even are it may make more sense to try out a new approach of bracketing out traits (which may not always work "with" each other) and chart the evolution of the range of sonata-ish forms. Sounds like fun.
ReplyDeleteDavid Yearsley's Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint is immensely dense but worthwhile reading, btw.
Regarding the cuts by ACE, Richard Morrison reveals some interesting things in the Times. Namely, that
ReplyDelete'... if you read on through [Art Council England's] Let’s Create [scheme] you discover that ACE has not so much shifted the goalposts as moved the entire game onto a different pitch, with different rules and an inbuilt bias against previous winners.
'Now artistic excellence is just one of four criteria used to measure whether organisations get state backing. Just as important, perhaps more so, are “inclusivity and relevance”, “dynamism” (basically showing you are down with the kids) and “environmental responsibility”. Of those it’s the “inclusivity and relevance” stuff (meaning, ACE says, that “England’s diversity is fully reflected” in a client’s staffing, work and audience) that has been most used as an excuse to dump organisations.
'Reflect, for example, on this comparison. The Chineke! Orchestra — which markets itself as Europe’s first orchestra of majority black and ethnically diverse players, based in London and racked by acute internal tensions — goes from zero ACE funding to £2.1 million over three years. By contrast, the Britten Sinfonia — which puts on top-class performances and does excellent educational and community projects — has its entire £406,000 annual grant removed, despite being based outside London, in East Anglia.'
It's so dispiriting. The first ever classical concert I went to was by Britten Sinfonia. I have heard them numerous times since; so many, many wonderful hours of music.
Thanks, all for your comments. I wrote a response yesterday, but it has disappeared without a trace, so I will just write a better one. Ethan, I have to push back on your comment. It is a cheap shot to characterize an article that is anything but as "hysterical" just because you are of a different opinion. It tends to prove his point. Did you click through and read the several examples he lists? And as a matter of fact, the enforcement of strict social norms varies enormously at different times. When I was in high school, for example, in the late 1960s, the administration bent over backwards to have as few rules as possible and this carried over into universities in the 70s and 80s. These were also decades of radical experiments in journalism à la Hunter S. Thompson and in music with the Beatles and Frank Zappa. But other times see considerable ideological pressure on the arts. I am about to put up a post on communist influences on musical aesthetics which we see in the music of Aaron Copeland and Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1930s. It will be interesting to see how they responded differently to the situation.
ReplyDeleteWenatchee, are we sure we prefer the new time politically influenced art to the old time art religion?
Thanks, Steven, for fleshing out the picture in England. How is granting funds on the basis of skin color NOT racist in itself?
I'm not saying we should prefer either one because I'm not really a partisan of art religions new or old. Art religion and civic religion and political agendas are not easily extricated, as Taruskin spent his entire career pointing out. The old time art religion was politically influenced, too, after all. Because I'm a hobbyist and an amateur I have not yet (and may never) run into the sumptuary code restrictions that show up in the arts industries these days. I can see how they parallel Zhdanov era socialist realism but the analogy is inexact. In the earlier epoch it was necessary to have a life-affirming materialist message of proletarian revolution; in the newer epoch there's a kind of expectation of demographic compliance before an artist is considered a good fit for presenting material.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I agree with WD because he defines the life and death of the arts in vocational terms whereas there's a robust tradition of regarding the lifeblood of musical culture coming from the amateurs (Hindemith, Sousa, etc).
The post on communist influences sounds like it could be fun. Any plans to compare the 1930s to the earlier 1910s and 20s on things like Russian futurism? There was a pretty robust post-Revolution avant garde before Stalin and Zhdanov did their brutal clamp down. i read in Composing the Party Line a year or two ago that no sooner was Stalin in the dirt Polish intellectuals rallied around opening up Poland to jazz band tours.
I believe Chineke are not exclusively non-white, which perhaps helps them avoid questions about race-based hiring. For what it's worth I've heard recordings of Chineke and thought they were good. I don't necessarily think having one orchestra in Britain that focuses on cultivating black and ethnic minority musicians is a bad thing, or racist. I can see how its presence might be very useful for some communities here. The problem is, as seems to be increasingly the case, when ethnicity-based grants and recruitment process become the rule rather than the exception.
ReplyDeleteThis is part of problem with the Arts Council. Although it supposed to be separate from politics, being a public body it has a 'public sector equality duty' according to the 2010 Equality Act (responsible for so much nonsense). This means various things, including (quoting from the Act itself) a legal duty to 'encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low.' Like so many of these things it sounds good, but when it's put into practice, it's not always so fluffy and lovely... Like when the English Touring Opera felt compelled to fire half its orchestra because it wasn't diverse enough. It's also a useful instrument that the Arts Council can use to pursue its aesthetic beliefs -- e.g. defunding opera and promoting novel art of questionable value.
There is just a bit of trying to have it both ways, isn't there? Chinese advertise themselves as having a lot of people of color and they seem to have won funding on that basis. But, of course, there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is, as you say, with the government enforcing of "equality". It only seems to come into play in areas and professions that are perceived as being valuable: political appointments, the arts, prominent figures in business. As far as I can see no-one is demanding that miners, fishers and workers in other dirty, difficult jobs demonstrate the same demographic equality. At the end of the day I think that the aesthetic judgement of composers, musicians and especially audiences should be the real determination of value.
ReplyDeleteSorry, autocorrect messed up my comment. The second sentence should read "Chineke" not "Chinese."
ReplyDeleteYes I wondered what you meant! Well, quite. But I can see this veering dangerously close to purely political talk, so I will resist temptation to get on this hobby horse and instead go listen to some Liszt...
ReplyDeleteI read the article. I don't doubt that artists and academics are getting pushback for objectionable political opinions! I do doubt that there is anything new or remarkable about it. The only thing that's different is that now people in the majority are facing pushback for the first time. But it's nothing at all like what marginalized groups used to face (and still do in too many contexts.) I'm old enough to remember when artists and academics got canceled for real for being gay. Like, not just criticized. Fired, permanently blacklisted, and sometimes met with physical violence. The theater teacher at my ultra-progressive NYC high school was terrified of coming out of the closet for fear of professional and personal consequences. There is nothing in present-day "cancel culture" that even comes close. So I stand by my characterization of anxiety about present-day "cancel culture" as hysterical.
ReplyDeleteHi Ethan, you might be interested in the case of Daniel Elder, a very fine choral composer who was professionally blacklisted (dropped) by choirs and publishers after he made a social media post against arson and riots in his native Nashville TN. Supposedly (is, according to a Twitter mob) that made him a racist supporter of police brutality.
ReplyDeleteIn the spirit of Daniel Elder, though personally without any career to risk, I condemn the stupidity and confess revulsion for the "climate activists" noted in the blog post above, who disrupted a performance of Verdi's Requim (or, in similar cases, throw paint on precious works of art). It matters not a whit what my opinion is on their professed "cause" (and so here I refrain from stating it), although I feel these sabotaging methods would in general push "undecideds" away from the position of the provocateurs simply by linking mania and arrogance and anti-sociality to their professed cause. It's actually a classic tactic of secret police to pose as militants for a cause and commit terrorist acts precisely to turn public opinion away from a cause. I don't propose that is what's happening in these climate "protests," but the final effect is probably about the same.
ReplyDeleteAnd, to my surprise, I notice just now that my original citing of the Daniel Elder case above (addressed especially to Ethan) is attributed to "Anonymous." Well, that was me, not sure why I wasn't "logged in" last night.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments and the attribution. When I saw the comment originally it said "Unknown" not "Anonymous" but I don't know why you were not credited.
ReplyDelete