An anonymous reader appends a very incisive comment to my post yesterday on Decline and Rebirth:
Thank you for this post, Bryan. I have not much to add, only I am interested to know whence your enthusiasm for a cultural rebirth stems from, and what we can expect in the near future?
I am tempted to adopt Socrates' position and say that all that I really know is that I don't know! You can't go wrong there. But perhaps we can see just a few glimmers of possibility. One is tempted to quote Erasmus:
Immortal God! What a century do I see beginning! If only it were possible to be young again!
--Erasmus to Guillaume Budé (1517)
The remarkable span of Western culture from 1500 to 2000 was heralded by two different events. The last decade of the 15th century was not terribly promising: Europe was threatened on the East by Islam, all worlds had been conquered, science and learning had fallen into the topor of scholasticism. But then, in 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Castile from having discovered the lands of the Western Hemisphere (not the first to do so, of course, but the most consequential). Then a few years later the unity of Christendom was torn apart by Martin Luther when he nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517. Suddenly all the foundations of the world were in doubt and everything again became possible.
Times of decadence and decline seem to need great upheaval to find new possibilities. All I really have to offer here is that I see this as a time of great upheaval when so many false idols are being cast down. I don't see a creative path for myself, but there will likely be one for the young. Remember, artists have for the last several decades been undergoing a kind of multiphase inquisition. They have been told that they are evil elitists, white supremacists, systemic racists, vile misogynists. And, if you were an artist in Canada, as I was, it was even worse as you were colonialist swine and largely ignored. UPDATE: If we just stopped treating our artists like abused children, that in itself would be a huge improvement.
If we could suffer enough upheaval to wipe away this encrusted viciousness towards creative activity, who knows what marvelous worlds we might discover. Let's have a listen to some music from the earlier phase of rebirth. Guillaume DuFay is a bit ahead of our time window, but creative people do often arrive before one thinks. This is his Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae:
4 comments:
Interestingly enough, the very, very slow-moving and conservative world of Eastern Orthodox liturgical music has seen something new over the last few years: the rise of a bluegrass-influenced Applachian Orthodox chant. I'm not sure whether it will become a more broadly-used style outside its titular region or not, but it's kind of fascinating to see an ancient music tradition slowly engage with the scales and techniques of American folk music the way it's done with other cultural music traditions over the last two millennia.
Pardon me, Appalachian*.
and some of the farthest out figures in the avant garde of classical music in the last century were Orthodox.
I've only heard a bit of the Appalachian Orthodox chants over the years (mainly through Orthocuban over at his blog and I discovered him through Internet Monk back when iMonk was still alive).
Kwame Bediako contended that when it comes to music global Christianity has defaulted to regional adaptation and contextualization despite the insistence of Roman Catholic partisans on the claim that their chant traditions are the actually universal ones. Right ... this Protestant knows too many Orthodox to take that polemical claim at face value. Not that Catholics don't have spectacular liturgical music (William Byrd fan here) but sometimes people overstate the universality of their favorite musics. Of course it's not just in religious traditions. Beethoven's Ninth is alright but it's never been my favorite symphonic work (B's choral music has always seemed remarkably subpar IMO (especially compared to Mozart or Haydn, who actually sang in choirs), despite his instrumental music being impressive).
Thanks for some very interesting perspectives. Yes, there is an interesting energy coming from Eastern European sources such as Arvo Pärt.
Heartily agree that Beethoven's choral writing is yes, not very satisfying.
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