We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press. There is new content, of course, so much content, and there are new themes; there are new methods of production and distribution, more diverse creators and more global audiences; there is more singing in hip-hop and more sampling on pop tracks; there are TV detectives with smartphones and lovers facing rising seas. Twenty-three years in, though, shockingly few works of art in any medium — some albums, a handful of novels and artworks and barely any plays or poems — have been created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999. To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around. The suspicion gnaws at me (does it gnaw at you?) that we live in a time and place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten.
And if we want the context: From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun.
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A simple setting of Psalm 120:
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For everyone who has longed to hear the Quartet, op. 131 by Beethoven played at 1/7 speed.
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This is the kind of wild performance story I love: AUDIENCE MEMBER GETS CALLED UP TO PLAY PROKOFIEV
My wife and I were at the Indianapolis Symphony enjoying the opening of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture when my (on silent) cell phone buzzed me. It was a message from the manager of the ISO asking if I would be willing to play in the second half, which would be Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony.
Clara and I were to be dining with ISO timpanist Jack Brennan and his wife after the concert, so they knew I was in the audience. A percussionist had been involved in a car accident on his way to the concert, and they needed somebody to fill in. I told them that while I play a lot of music, I never played Prokofiev 5, and the last time I played under a conductor was 17 years ago.
Yes, of course he's a percussionist, why do you ask?
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Someone else obsessed with Bach: ‘An encyclopedia of how to think and dream on the piano’: Víkingur Ólafsson on Bach’s Goldberg Variations
The Goldberg Variations are like an encyclopedia of how to think and dream on the piano. When they were written, they were probably almost unplayable for the majority of musicians. One could argue that they remain quite unplayable today. Once those deceptively facile opening notes have been struck, there really is no place to hide – you must carry on to the end, through 75 minutes of the most wildly virtuosic keyboard music ever written. And not just that – you must somehow bring to life some of the most astonishingly brilliant uses of counterpoint in the repertoire as well as countless instances of exalted poetry, abstract contemplation and deep pathos. How could this seem anything but impossible?
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I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but it makes a lot of interesting claims: Five Variations on Music’s Ineffability
Unthinkability. Travel back in time to the early 1970s: you are sitting on a living room couch, and you take out a record, Alice Coltrane’s Universal Consciousness (1971), and put it on the turntable.
It is an aesthetic scenario, like being at a museum and looking at a painting. While listening to Coltrane’s record, you open up its colorful, psychedelic gatefold, and read this about the title track:
UNIVERSAL CONSCIOUSNESS literally means Cosmic Consciousness; Self-realization and Illumination. This music tells of some of the various diverse avenues and channels through which the soul must pass before it finally reaches that exalted state of absolute consciousness. Once achieved, the soul becomes reunited with God and basks in the Sun of blissful union. At this point, the Creator bestows on the soul many of his Attributes and names one, a New Name. This experience and this music involve the totality concept which embraces cosmic thought as an emblem of Universal Sound.
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We need some fine and positive music this week. I think we could stand to hear some more Lea Desandre:
Many years ago I used to play this in E minor: the Lute Sonata No. 34 by Weiss.
A little arrangement by Tarrega:
You have a picture of Duke Ellington, and then right below that a screed about how the century that included his career is the least artistically innovative in 500 years? Which of those is meant to be ironic?
ReplyDeleteHistory is complicated, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe NYT piece reminds me that Leonard Meyer made the same point more cogently more than half a century ago across the pieces in his book Music, the Arts and IDeas. He pointed out that modernism was predicated on a teleological conception of history within which the arts (in European and American contexts only) was construed to develop. These teleological conceptions of history derived both from the Renaissance summons to "progress" and Christian conceptions of history (not necessarily always millennarian or chialist so much as derived from ancient near eastern after-effects of apocalyptic interpretations of history but I'm trying hard to not just wade into that element here). Meyer proposed that as avant gardists in the West drew more upon non-Western conceptions of time and history (he didn't consider it bad) the teleological impetus that was thought to be behind the need for "progress" in the arts vanished. The paradoxical result was the avant garde had rendered itself superfluous to the very idea of "progress" it formerly championed but this was not all bad, it permitted a polystylistic steady state to become the new norm.
ReplyDeleteMeyer also contended that the European concept of "pluralism" hit a crisis when exposed to musics and art styles from Africa, Asia and elsewhere in the world that could not be accounted for from within European (we could also say Eurocentric) concepts of the arts. When the real-world pluralism of human practice was discovered some Europeans and Americans realized it forced a recalibration of what had been meant by "pluralism" to either include all of those newly discovered things circa 1840 to 1950 to shut the door, so to speak. That could be read as the difference between European and American embraces of "not West" on the one hand and taking a hardline "West is the best" approach. This is more implicit than overt in Meyer's observation. He took the stance that democracy does not require everyone like the same thing but that everyone is free to like what they like and that this should be the new norm in the arts and scholarship should catch up to this reality.
So, overall, the article at the NY comes off as as a bait and switch with an idea that was put better by Leonard Meyer. Richard Taruskin had good reason to regard Meyer as one of his role models in music scholarship. I could nitpick some things about Meyer but anyone who anticipated polystylistic stead-state as the new norm and say so in the middle of the 1950s through the 1960s and also point out why non-tonal music consigned itself to oblivion but not catering to what seemed to be the default cognitive norms of listeners WITHOUT saying you couldn't like ALban Berg (the way a ton of cultural conservatives were saying over the years), was more right than wrong. :)
That animated films exist at all more or less belies the assertion that art has made no progress. It's made a lot of progress, more progress via moving pictures than earlier ears of art, but mainstream arts criticism consigned the entire genre of animation ("cartoons") to "kid stuff". It's more possible today to go catch the new Hayao Miyazaki film than it was back in the early 1990s. Farago's point that celebrating the lack of "progress" is something we can do is agreeable enough but, as I've been saying, Meyer made that point better more than half a century ago. :)
Erb, eh? I think I saw his name pop up in a back and forth at the Theopolis Institute discussion on the role of lay musicians in church music.
ReplyDeletehttps://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/lay-musicians-and-the-church/
Refraining from further comment at this point about my caution regarding some Christian movements in Moscow, Idaho (I'm in the Reformed Anglican/Presbyterian wing but I've got some issues, to put it delicately, with some of the American Redoubt stuff).
It has been many years since I have read anything by Leonard Meyer, but you have provoked me into ordering a book!
ReplyDeleteHaven't gotten much beyond skimming the Miscellanea or the email this morning but I notice that Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford have a new album titled Idylle released today; TD is playing the theorbo. From Reynaldo Hahn and Satie to three pieces of divus Charpentier.
ReplyDeleteYes, she and Dunford have really been burning up the tracks with new releases. Plus she sang in a Mozart opera at Salzburg last summer.
ReplyDeleteEthan, sorry I gave such a brief response. The thing is that while it is obvious that certain times and places have been nexi of inordinate amounts of creative activity: Athens, 5th and 4th centuries BC, Northern Italy, 15th and 16th centuries, England, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Vienna 18th and 19th centuries and so on, the corollary is that other times and places are comparatively impoverished. But, even in these times, there are individuals who stand out, such as Boethius in the otherwise dark Dark Ages.
I guess it depends it which creative activities you value. If you think that the sequence of developments from the blues through jazz and R&B and into hip-hop is the most valuable thing that Western civilization has ever produced, which I do, then the past century has been a fairly wonderful one, at least in some subcultures in the US.
ReplyDelete(T)he sequence of developments from the blues through jazz and R&B and into hip-hop is the most valuable thing that Western civilization has ever produced...
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to address the substance of that proposition of EH, but only note that not too long ago someone on Facebook asserted a similar notion before asking me how many hip-hop albums I own i.e. it is not an entirely rare proposition, I gather.
Yes, Ethan, I am happy for you that you are living in the best of all possible worlds!
ReplyDeleteI know it's in the realm of self-promotion but I've got a little 2 minute study in D flat major in open G Tuning to share.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/m8Z7QWxNlIQ
I pretty much never get tired of working with the difficult keys regardless of the tuning I use.
Reading Ethan's post on "Don't You Worry About a Thing" got me thinking, Bryan, about your aversion to Piazzolla and his two moods. I can take AP in small doses but reading Ethan discuss line progressions turned on a lightbulb for me, as fun as PIazzola is in small doses hearing a ton of him reveals what I regard as his severe over-reliance on line progressions. Stevie Wonder might use line progressions in a song but then he'll offset those with something like a chain of fourths or a chromatically embellished Andalusian cadence. Piazzolla leans hard into the line progression and it has the effect of what Frank Zappa once said was the bane of blues guitarists who find their favorite note and go "squirm, squirm, squirm". :D
Thanks Wenatchee. This reminds me that I haven't checked out Ethan's blog in a while.
ReplyDelete(T)he sequence of developments from the blues through jazz and R&B and into hip-hop is the most valuable thing that Western civilization has ever produced...
ReplyDeleteEthan, I'd like to see you explain that statement in words ... up front, I don't think you can. Bald assertion can be fun, but, really ...