Things are looking pretty bad. Just listen to Rick Beato:
Well, yes, it sounds pretty bad, but just don't listen to that AI crap. Instead I play Bach every morning. I'm just memorizing the Siciliano from the First Violin Sonata. Gorgeous!
And then there is the Wall Street Journal which I used to rely on. But these days they are just predicting doom like everyone else. Some headlines today: Lumber Prices Are Flashing a Warning Sign for the U.S. Economy, Is the U.K. a Canary in the Coal Mine for a Heavily Indebted World?, Trump’s Risky Game With the Fed. Gosh, you would hardly suspect that the markets are hitting new all-time highs.
Cassandra, by the way, was a princess of Troy, daughter to King Priam and sister to Hector. She made a deal with Apollo to gain the ability to predict the future, promising him her favors. When she went back on the promise he cursed her by ensuring that no-one would believe her prophecies. Ouch!
I just want to point out that while Rick Beato hits the nail on the head, most of what we see and hear every day is crafted to make us fearful, anxious in order to sell us newspapers, magazines, jeans and makeup. We can simply ignore all of it. And no, the oceans aren't rising.
So, really, there is no need to feel anxious or fearful or just glum. Hell, we have the antidote in Vivaldi:
If scruffy protestors invade the shrines of high culture, I guess this counts as asymmetrical culture war: The Usual Grotesques
So there I was, in the middle of the opening night of Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, when the shouting started. “Climate protesters,” or “climate activists”—the usual grotesques—were shouting “No opera on a dead planet,” and other such inanities. They placed themselves around the theater, timing it so that when one was arrested, another started shouting somewhere else. I counted five interruptions, though the first press reports say there were only four; did I get it wrong? The audience was displeased; I heard shouts of shame! and even, briefly from one member of the audience, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! The management finally announced that the program would go on no matter what, keeping the lights on so that security could remove people more quickly; either the thugs were exhausted, or the remainder figured that it wasn’t worth bothering with. So we finished the opera, with too much light, and (at least for me) some nervousness at every loud noise, thinking it might be another interruption.
There have been at least two previous intrusions at operas, in Amsterdam and Milan.
Music performances of this kind are somewhat fragile--it doesn't take much to shatter the necessary atmosphere and ruin the performance. If we think this kind of asymmetrical culture war is illegitimate, how do we combat it? Without actually crippling the exercise of culture by the burden of security measures? I'm not sure there is an easy answer to this.
I finished that book on technical analysis of stocks, thank god. Useful, sure, but oh so dreary. I discovered poetry sometime in my late teens after we moved to Vancouver Island and a slightly better municipal library. The poets I read then included T. S. Eliot because everyone said he was wonderful, Ezra Pound, because Eliot said he was wonderful (he dedicated The Waste Land to him) and Shakespeare because we read him in school. My first year English professor introduced me to Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Theodore Roethke. I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke on my own.
Alas, moving to Mexico meant that most of my library had to stay behind so I haven't actually owned any Eliot for a long time now. But I just got his Collected Poems and re-reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a deeply moving and eerie experience. I first read it fifty years ago but I haven't read it in at least twenty-five years. The lines still echo in my memory.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
And:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
I am so glad I read this when I was young as it resonates so much more now when I read it many years later. It reminds me of the very odd sensation in the two-part finale to season three of Battlestar Galactica when some members of the crew begin hearing (hallucinating) strange musical fragments that elude identification. Finally, at the very end a dead crewmember is resurrected and we hear the song in its entirety: it is All Along the Watchtower written by Bob Dylan with a very famous cover by Jimi Hendrix. The moment when you realize what song it is, and if you are old enough to have heard it when it was released, is very like the sensation of re-encountering a very great poem like Prufrock.
And I have The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Four Quartets to look forward to!
These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture:
A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
Imitation of the conventional is rewarded
Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence
Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
Etc. etc. etc.
Go read the whole thing. He offers a persuasive list of examples. My favorite: "All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds." Oh yeah!
But let's take a step back. Is having a dynamic, influential counterculture normal? I grew up in the sixties so to me it was a norm. In high school there were the dorky guys going to grow up to be accountants and the other guys with long hair smoking marijuana out behind the gym. We sat at the back of the gym and booed every time there was an assembly. This extended to university. At one of the first assemblies in the music department my theory professor (who was a composer), stood at the back with me and booed the dean of the school (also a composer, but of dorky electronic music). It was pretty much common that every established institution and cultural figure was opposed by independent voices. Of course, over time these independent voices ended up AS the cultural leaders, but their experience seems to have given them the yen to suppress all voices that contradict their dictates.
But back to the question: did most historic cultures have countervailing forces? Perhaps not. There are always disputes, but the free-wheeling rebellious culture of the sixties was not, I suspect, typical in human history. Usually the ruling establishment finds it fairly easy to suppress or simply wipe out opposing cultural forces. Example: the Albigensian Crusade.
The Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political aspect, resulting in not only a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, but also a realignment of the County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown, and diminishing both Languedoc's distinct regional culture and the influence of the counts of Barcelona.
Another example comes from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Before the war there were roughly a million members of the Communist Party in Spain. After the war there were zero members.
If we look at cultural history, perhaps the creative ferment associated with the popular and political culture of the sixties was the exception rather than the rule. We don't have much of a sense of the history of popular culture before the 20th century as it suffers from not having been written down, but we can certainly see that the level of creative discovery waxes and wanes through history. The tiny municipality of Athens in the fifth and fourth century BC was responsible for a nearly incredible amount of the cultural capital we are still living off today. From a city of perhaps 100,000 people came tragedy and comedy, the writing of history, poetics, logic, moral philosophy, metaphysics, democracy and a host of other things. Similar, though lesser, flourishings occurred in Florence in the 14th through 16th centuries, London in the 16th and 17th centuries, Paris in the 17th and 18th centuries, Vienna in the 18th and 19th centuries and so on.
But you could argue that the norm in human history is not creative ferment but dull mediocrity.
So what sets off these periods of creative brilliance? I'm not sure anyone really knows. We might keep an eye out. There are some brilliant creators around, even today. What sorts of things are they doing? And what others might come along? If we look at the history of ancient Greece, we can see that the mighty forces that emerged in the fifth and fourth century BC actually had their roots in the two previous centuries...
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
One blogger comments that Allan Bloom was saying something similar back in the 80s. I have a weird perspective on this because I moved to Mexico over 20 years ago so I have only been seeing these trends from afar. Mexico seems on rather a different path, though influenced, of course.
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?
I notice this trend on YouTube where the presenters seem to get more and more ridiculous all the time, mugging for the camera and dumbing down their content. Even a very serious fellow like Samuel Andreyev puts up clips like this:
There are music clips like Sonata Form, explained in ten minutes:
There are music theory courses in ten minutes or, a more expansive one, in sixteen minutes. These are from other authors. It reminds me of guitar courses from decades ago: learn guitar in ten easy lessons! Back then I used to laugh at them. We're not laughing any more.
Samuel Andreyev is a brilliant presenter on music who really knows his stuff, so he must be looking at his traffic and concluding that this is the only way to go.
So it seems that there is a whole trend towards, well, can we call it stupidity like Jonathan Haidt? I don't know. Is it lack of attention span? Is that just a different kind of stupidity? I read a study from a British university years ago that concluded that being in the typical interrupt-driven work environment with various phone lines, text messages, emails and other interruptions knocks about 10 points off your IQ--about the same as if you have smoked marijuana.
Some other things I notice, but I'm not sure of their significance. When I was young it was not uncommon for people to write poetry. It was a fairly normal thing to do to get out your angst or whatever. Also, a lot of people played musical instruments fairly casually. These things seem to have dwindled precipitously. These days it seems that everyone is headed for business school as quick as they can. But as I say, I have no data on this, just a few personal impressions.
Some music to inspire your thoughts. Silvius Leopold Weiss:
A perennial topic here at the Music Salon is the current state of affairs in classical music (and culture generally). There have been some good recent suggestions about how to improve things--that is, if we ever get past this pandemic crisis. But it might be worth while to give a thought to just how we got to this present state of affairs.
I'm not sure if very much research has been done on this, but if you look at music history you get the sense that, as far as written music goes, popular music slowly emerged from the shadows over the period from 1500 to 1800, then took a steeper ascent in the 19th century before positively exploding in the 20th century. And since World War II the climb accelerated. A nice graph of popular music sales from 1800 to 2020 would be really useful right now--it would look something like the climate change "hockey stick" graph:
But while that graph remains controversial, I doubt that, if we had the numbers, the music one would be. According to Forbes the highest-earning musicians in 2019 were Taylor Swift at $185 million and Kanye West at $150 million. The Beatles are still making a lot of money today, but back in the 60s they probably only made a few million a year--amounts are hard to find. Before the Beatles popular musicians earned relatively little.
Popular music has mastered all sorts of techniques for monetizing success and in the process the music has come to resemble an industrial product. We even refer to the music realm as the "music business" or "music industry."
So what does this have to do with the transmission of culture? All cultural traditions and practices need to be transmitted to each new generation or they will be lost. Some cultures seem to be pretty good at this, others not. Reading about music in Java I was struck by how, since Indonesian independence, there have been extensive efforts made to preserve and even spread the unique culture of the Javanese gamelan orchestra. I am at a loss to cite counterexamples, though I'm sure there are many. Cases where the traditions have not been preserved and are lost to us, are, well, lost to us and we may not even be aware they ever existed.
Perhaps the cultural tradition that I am most keenly aware of that has, I suspect, been almost lost to us, is that of poetry. I expect some pushback on this. I certainly don't know the whole story, but it is my strong impression that if we go back a few generations there was a general awareness of poetry among nearly everyone and specific competences among a small percentage. Maybe 10% of the population could recite one or more poems from heart. Perhaps 5% even wrote some poetry. Over the last fifty years or two generations, I think this has all gone away. No-one encourages (or forces!) public school students to memorize poetry and they certainly don't read it or write it to any extent whatsoever.
One of the things that got me thinking about this was the Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society that I watched recently. The message in that film, which takes place in a private school in the 1950s, is that you can kill the passion for literature by approaching it in a too-analytical manner. That was one stage in the internment of poetry in a cold, cold grave. The more recent stage is that educators simply decide that most literature is too difficult or too reactionary or too racist to bother teaching so they will focus on just those works that perfectly fit their progressive narrative. Oh, and analysis, this time called "deconstruction" is back with a vengeance.
The situation in music seems rather different. The higher educational system seems to be functioning at high efficiency. Sure, you may complain that Juilliard keeps cranking out unfeeling virtuosos, but they are doing it very efficiently! The problem is that all the university music departments and conservatories in North America are cranking out more highly-trained musicians than the market can absorb. There are not enough audiences.
That problem, the lack of listeners who really enjoy classical music, is one that lies rather lower on the educational ladder: good listeners are ones that have been exposed early enough and often enough and with some understanding and context to classical music and therefore develop a taste for it. The fact that music programs have largely disappeared from the school system is likely one of the main reasons why the classical audience only comprises 2% or perhaps 3% of the music market.
This is a vicious cycle: music programs are deemed less and less important as fewer and fewer administrators are musically aware themselves.
It doesn't take much to lose a cultural tradition. What may seem like a rock-solid institution today like the Metropolitan Opera or the LA Philharmonic can disappear in a couple of generations if neglected. I think the pandemic is revealing to us the fragility of the performing arts. Will they recover? More importantly, will they flourish and be handed on to future generations?
Wim Winters is making an interesting effort with historical reconstructions of tempi in Beethoven and others. Here he is playing a bunch of Haydn sonatas on clavichord.
I don't have quite the right tag for this--my subtitle might have been "what has happened to our institutions of higher learning?" What got me thinking is the latest kerfuffle over the firing of Matthew Halls as director of the Oregon Bach Festival by the University of Oregon. If you want a quick, nasty take on it, read this over at Slipped Disc. For a longer and more nuanced treatment, there is an article in The Spectator:
Mr Halls insists he has not been told why he has been fired. Sponsors and supporters of the festival are also in the dark. Oregon University, which runs the bash, has said only that it intends to pursue a ‘different direction’ to the one pursued by Mr Halls, and hence he has to go. I would have thought there were a limited number of directions one could pursue with a Bach festival, most of them in the general direction of playing some Bach, but there we are. However, a very close friend of Mr Halls’s thinks he knows why he was fired. Reginald Mobley, a hugely talented counter-tenor, and an African-American, believes it is because a stupid white woman overheard a conversation between himself and Halls and construed one of Halls’s comments as being — yes, yes, we’re there again — racist. And complained to the authorities.
Another theory has it that the festival was experiencing a drop in attendance and this is why Halls was let go, but just a few weeks before his contract had been renewed to 2020, so that seems unlikely.
What I want to talk about is not the merits of this individual case, or related cases such as the debacle at Evergreen State College where out-of-control student protests allegedly created a hostile work environment for a biology professor and his wife or the fraught circumstances suffered by Madison Faupel at the University of Minnesota where she is president of the College Republican chapter. Instead, I want to examine what seems to link these and other cases: a collapse of integrity at institutions of higher learning.
If we go back a few decades, universities and colleges were very prestigious places where distinguished scholars pursued their researches free of political bias and did so with a certain amount of courage on modest salaries. This seems to have changed, though, I am sure, some still remains. But if you look into the instances I cite above and other similar ones, it seems that the best characterization of current institutions is that they are now vehicles for political indoctrination and the administrators seem to be unable to resist pressure from extremists. Indeed, these extremists now seem to be the mainstream.
Instead of courage, what we see is rank cowardice. If you hunt around you can find videos of college administrators being berated by groups of student protestors and all they seem able to do is appease them. This seems to me to be the tail wagging the dog. Undergraduate students have always been susceptible to wacky idealisms, but what we are experiencing now is a level of viciousness that seems so out of proportion that one wonders, is it simply political correctness gone viral or is this a very clever strategy?
What does seem to be revealed is an emptiness at the heart of Western culture that makes it susceptible to a ravaging virus. The idea of preserving, presenting and teaching the quality of Western culture as exemplified in, for example, the music of Bach, used to be its own justification. But now it seems that the whole hierarchy of value is overturned and the mere (false) suspicion of racism overrules anything else. What we need are some serious antibodies to fight off the infection! Oh, yes, and to recognize that this is a cultural war and one that needs to be won.
Well, I hope that wasn't too political! There are not a lot of clips of Matthew Halls on YouTube, but here is the Sinfonia from the Bach Easter Oratorio with him conducting the Retrospect Ensemble:
My anonymous commentor left a brilliant observation on my post On Musical Talent. Here is the basic argument:
Innate musical talent is undeniably a prerequisite for greatness. It's a requirement but one of many. Let's say that in any group of 10,000 people in the world, there is one person with the innate ability of Bach. (The plethora of painting geniuses in Renaissance Florence shows that this number is unlikely to be much bigger.) The likelihood of Bach is less than one in 1 billion (to restrict ourselves to 1000 years of Western music and assuming that Bach is the greatest and that the total population over 1000 years of Western history is over one billion, which must be the case), not one in 10,000. So assuming all these variables are independent (a big if, I know), we need to explain the remaining 1/100,000 likelihood. I think the rest is culture and character.
If talent is evenly distributed by genetics (not sure it is, but just for the sake of argument), then why doesn't every city have the artistic flourishing of Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC? Names to note: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes. Or of 15th century Florence? Names: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Machiavelli, Brunelleschi (who designed the Duomo). Or 16th century London? Names: John Dowland, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, Christopher Marlowe, William Byrd and Thomas Morley. And of course, 18th century Germany and Austria. This flourishing was less concentrated with Bach in Leipzig and Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in Vienna.
There are brief periods of intense flourishing surrounded by dull stretches of mediocrity. Some factors are undoubtedly historic. Wars, revolutions and social unrest undoubtedly drain resources and redirect talent away from the arts and humanities. But the role of culture and character also seems to be important. Some cultures seem to produce more art than others. Some kinds of character seem to produce more arts than others. The role of patronage also seems crucial. The society must be prosperous enough to support artists and must value the arts highly enough to support them. In Athens the whole population went to see the plays just as in Leipzig, the whole congregation heard Bach's cantatas. My commentator's assertion that a faculty of hard work and an intense curiosity both played a role is also correct.
I also think that artists compete with one another and learn from one another, which is why we get communities of artists that because of mutual influence produce more interesting work than they would have if they worked in isolation.
Well, this could go on and on, but I'll close here with this:
