I am no longer a professional musician, nor am I working on creating music as a composer. But I am still someone deeply involved with music as a listener. So I find aesthetic disputes fascinating. I grew up with, on the one hand, the narrative of modernism and the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. On the other hand, I was completely captured by the music of J. S. Bach, Beethoven and Mozart and later on that of Monteverdi, Couperin, Rameau, Josquin and many others. Ok, so the great thread of Western music has been woven into Western culture for the last thousand years at least. That Stravinsky, Schoenberg and people like Messiaen, Shostakovich and even Steve Reich sound rather different does not mean that they are outside the great river of the art music of Western music. At least, that is how I feel.
But now we are in a kind of transitional time in which there is a movement that is looking at a lot of the current architecture and visual art and saying, sorry, this is simply crap and ideologically corrupt. Looking at some of the art one can see their point. Music that is simply silence or a construction of noises or that gives the impression of a brutal attack on ones senses seems perhaps like a mistake in the same way that displaying a urinal as a work of art or a white canvas or a goat with a spare tire around its abdomen or a skull covered with diamonds seems like, not a mistake, but some kind of aesthetic fraud.
Here are two conservative commentators taking that view (of course, Blogger refuses to embed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9dbnjHx67Q
While sympathetic to their view, I can't quite share it. For one thing, I struggle with the whole idea that Beauty comes from God. Though I certainly share the ancient Greek view of the transcendentals, Truth, Beauty and the Good. The skepticism about some modernist approaches is not a new thing, see the book on architecture by Thomas Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House.
But the situation, especially as regards music, is formidably complex. Why do I want to say the the music of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and others is still great music even though it is not always beautiful? I think that great art is always in some way an encounter with Reality and sometimes it can be a harsh encounter. Great art includes works like the symphonies of Shostakovich, Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, Ulysses by James Joyce, the black paintings by Goya, the tortured canvases by Van Gogh and lots of other examples.
Here is the thing, I'm not citing recent contemporary visual art and sculpture because I don't know it well enough. I am quite sure that, especially in recent decades, there has been a lot of fraudulent art created. Some of it is obvious, all the AI pop music, for example, but a lot will only be obvious after a hundred years. This is why it is perfectly easy to identify the great music from the first quarter century of the 20th century because it was a century ago. Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire are acknowledged as great works by everyone. They confront Reality.
All genuine artistic judgements have to be on a case by case basis as each work of art, great ones at least, is unique. This is why arguments in this area often tend to become sterile and pointless. You can't generalize. And, of course, this is always what ideologues do.
Comments?
2 comments:
I've seen people use the term "fraud" to describe John Cage but I don't think Cage was a fraud. He really believed what he was doing was art. If I had to find a way to describe what doesn't resonate with me about Cage it would be a line Adorno had when he ripped into Cage and Boulez (with other integral serialists), his complaint was they had created compositional techniques that relieved the subject (i.e. the composer) of ever having to make an actual creative decision; Adorno likened it to the mistake of thinking that because you organized all the colors on your pallet the work of painting was done and this, Adorno groused, was all too often what was passed off as making new music.
Ellul summarized Adorno's observations by way of saying that in the last century we've been stuck with art that is either overt propaganda for some dogmatic cause or that is a product of a hermetic technocratic guild that is exploring technique for its own sake. Adorno contended that art had gained liberation from throne and altar at the cost of a crisis of purpose lost that it can never regain. If the arts really have no social uses then of what use are the arts? Alan Jacobs has been blogging recently about how attempts to defend the value and vibrancy of the arts made by academics are, really, merely defenses of continued funding of academic departments and NOT defenses of the arts, which have flourished for the length of human history without much need of the formal field of philosophy called aesthetics.
I love Dostoevsky novels but his novels might be a great case study for asking whether his novels back in their day were considered a lot trashier and pulpier than they would be considered since their became literary canonical works.
My view of John Cage is that we are still fifty or so years away from having the necessary distance to be able to evaluate his work. Yes, he may have believed he was doing something valuable but that doesn't necessarily mean it was. I think that the views of Adorno that you cite are not far from the truth. The way that Cage and Boulez and others constructed their work had not much to do with actual creative decisions.
At the end of the day, the comment of Aaron Copeland still has traction: he said something like "at the end of the day you ought to be able to get some pleasure out of the piece by just listening to it in a dumb sort of way."
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