Greil Marcus on Why I Write:
I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called sanctified culture, and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but ought to be called everyday culture—the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music that we listen to, the movies that we see, the museum objects we pass by or are fixed by, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so moving—are false. Nearly everything I’ve written is based on that conviction, and on the learned belief that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelations, in blues, rock ’n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else.
I think I believe this too, but it cries out for a balancing. There are indeed depths and satisfactions and revelations in popular culture, music, movies and television that can be truly profound. Just as there is fraudulent crap and pompous pretension in high culture. But you know, if you are a critic worth your salt, then you have to point out the dreary, mechanical, pseudo posturing in a lot of popular culture. Because, you know, it is easier to do that and make a buck than to transcend it and do something great.
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I've applied to attend the Igor Levit concert at Salzburg in August so I was curious to read this review: Igor Levit review – this was a recital where everything was just right
Levit does brooding well, his sombre frame drooping over the coffin-black piano in a self-effacing act of concentrated communion. He also does variety. His commanding technique, muscular yet flexible, suited the mood swings of the E-flat Rhapsody that concludes the Four Klavierstücke Op 119, or the hurly-burly of the capriccios that flank the Seven Fantasien Op 116. Mostly though, this was a supremely poetic performance, Levit moving body and soul to convey the spirit of these deeply personal utterances.
At Wigmore Hall, of course.
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You might have recently heard that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—via SoftBank Kabushiki Gaisha, via its wholly-owned subsidiary Gannett, which owns USA Today alongside a sad little clutch of failing syndicated local newspapers—has hired the world’s first full-time Taylor Swift reporter. His name is Bryan, and I’m deeply upset. Not because I don’t think Taylor Swift is worth writing about. Taylor Swift is, by any sensible measure, the most famous person in the world. The actual leaders of actual countries beg her to visit their dying lands, put on a show, make their miserable people spend some of their miserable money, maybe nudge the whole economy just a few points out of recession. When a war breaks out in Asia, both sides immediately try to argue that they’re fighting on the side of Taylor Swift. She is bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles, bigger than God. She has blasted herself on a jet of pure sugary Americana into every quiet crevice of global culture. She provides the texture of daily life for thirteen year old Indonesian girls with hijabs and hard scraping eyes. There are swathes of rebel bushland in central Africa where children tear the guts out the earth at gunpoint and the central government has no power at all—but Taylor Swift does. In my travels across China, the only Western music you’d ever hear playing anywhere belonged to Taylor Swift. She’s not a solitary human being; she’s Coca-Cola. She has fundamentally changed the inner workings of the record industry, show ticketing, intellectual property—why not? Let’s say music theory too. She invented tone. She invented pitch. Taylor Swift seems destined to be remembered by our drooling, mud-eating descendants as a kind of culture hero, the mythical source of everything left for them to inherit. First was she who plucked strings and made pleasant sounds. Who taught man to spin thread and mark the hours of the sun. She who scattered the stars in the sky. She’s kind of a big deal.
Very little of that has any relationship with truth, but it is fun to read.
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On an Overgrown Path tells us There is no mass market for classical music. I'm pretty sure of two things regarding that: first, I have known this ever since I got into classical music, so it ain't news and two, that is a big part of the appeal. Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music.
Classical industry executives should make it their New Year's resolution to finally understand that there is no mass market for classical music. For two decades classical music has been chasing a non-existent mass market. The latest manifestation of this misguided thinking is the reinvention in the UK of BBC Radio 3 as a clone of Classic FM by the network's new Controller Sam Jackson, who worked for Classic FM for five years culminating in the post of 'Senior Managing Editor, Classic FM, Smooth and Gold'. Forget whether you love the new BBC Radio Classic 3 FM, or like me you loathe it with a vengeance. Let's instead look at the facts.
Can't we just ignore the facts and listen to some Bach instead?
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The phrase "the Commodification of Passive Listening" is one that fills me with a kind of bored distress akin to that of any number of science fiction dystopias. Follow the link for the story.
Endel, a German company founded in 2018, has been described as “the first-ever algorithm to sign a deal with a major label.” Unlike music companies that use generative AI to write new songs, Endel is a standalone subscription service (currently 14.99 USD/month) that uses AI to create ever-shifting “wellness soundscapes” that dynamically adapt to information such as the weather, time of day, and listener’s heart rate.
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Now for some music. Here is Igor Levit at Royal Albert Hall:
Yuja Wang with the Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand written for Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Paul who lost his right arm in the First World War.
Now let's have a paean to active listening! A Kyrie by Jacob Obrecht:
My impression is that what you may find troublesome about Marcus' claim that the distinctions are false is that it's both an overstatement and a kind of category mistake. I have contended for years that the boundaries between high and low arts are both permeable and negotiable and both negotiation and demonstrating the permeability of the conceptual boundaries brought to bear in arts history, theory and practice is something academic study of the arts and practical work in the arts can continue to be the project of people in every art and every artistic discipline.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Marcus is saying that the distinction between what he calls everyday culture and sanctified culture are is a false one--he does see the distinction, he just wants to rename it so as to remove the idea that there is a value hierarchy in reality. He thinks that everyday culture with its depths and revelations is just as good as sanctified culture. I think this is just based on his personal taste and not on any overarching aesthetic principles.
ReplyDeleteMind you, he SAYS they are false, but he seems to act as if they really exist, as of course they do.
ReplyDeleteI take him to actually mean "is false". But the role Scruton plays in the piece warrants more consideration because I think that is the linchpin for understand WHO Marcus believes insist upon the divisions. Or as Richard Taruskin would have put it, bringing in the human agents who make decisions is what music historians need to do. We need to avoid the scholastic default that surmises that the divisions in genre and style and form and practice in music have simply existed independent of any flesh and blood human beings who decided those divisions had to exist. I think THAT is what Marcus was really trying to get at. I think that the coherency is observable in his work but it's not reducible to what you might call an aesthetic principle because that's kind of his real polemical point, he wants criticism to preserve the person-to-person element as distinct from the learned master of distinctions (and it would be virtually impossible in the last forty years to find someone who more embodies the "learned master of distinctions" person in English language writing than Roger Scruton!).
ReplyDeleteThe tricky part is that because he seems like he's not steeped in the anthropology of religion or religious studies Greil Marcus may not be as clear as, say, Ted Gioia has been about the value he places on "trance". I think Ted Gioia is wildly wrong about various things related to music history in classical music BUT he is very clear about his pro-Orphic/shamanistic trance position. He advocates for arts that give us an altered state of consciousness, that let us perceive ourselves and the world in new ways. Religious observants would say that this means to be spirit-filled or to be of one spirit. Some anthropologists of religion would say group spirit possession is the most relevant term. Marcus wants to share what it feels like to be seized, as it were, by an artistic experience and to convey the spirit of what that spiritual state us, whether he be religious or not. That is what he describes as the responsibility, opportunity and goal of arts criticism. A more secular(ist) way to convey this idea is to write so that enthusiasm can be experienced and shared but right there we see the debt such language has to older traditions in which music was used to catalyze mantic states for divinatory practices.
Johannes Quasten wrote that Greek philosophers and early Church Fathers were in agreement that in light of the use of music to catalyze spirit possession rituals listening to or performing the wrong kinds of music made you susceptible to the wrong kinds of spiritual influences and malformed your character.
It's easy in the 21st century to scoff at that idea but then when I think of what I've heard and read people say here in the Puget Sound about fans of Kid Rock and Nickleback ... heh heh heh ...
We live in intellectually feeble times in which the ability to make clear distinctions and to observe aesthetic principles is rather degraded. But I don't think that different cultural divisions are handed down from on high either, though they may be expressed or described by those in academia or critical circles. What they should be doing is just noticing distinctions that are already present. Of course, for decades there have been various projects designed to overturn or blur these kinds of distinctions out of a kind of inchoate egalitarianism.
ReplyDeleteThat music can have and often does have a kind of trance-like spiritual effect is undeniable, though it seems to not be restricted to any particular genre or cultural division. Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Peter Gabriel and many others use these techniques.