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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, February 21, 2005
An article I meant to comment on a while back, arguing that modernism was a death knell for classical music:"What is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? ... Shostakovich's first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948... South African scholar Peter Van der Merwe reckons that by 1939, the year of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the flow of music that is both genuinely modern and popular had all but dried up. Van der Merwe nods towards Khachaturian, late Strauss and the Britten of Peter Grimes [but] For the general public, he argues, classical music ceased to exist by 1950."
As is often common for such arguments, he cites Schoenberg's modernism as representing a deliberate trend towards an elitist renunciation of popularity. As I've noted before arguments of this kind are to all intents and purposes political; with art through the ages having relied on patronage (Kreutzer, Maecenas, Medici; in the twentieth century both Woolf and Ives relied on private incomes rather than book sales) rather than popular appeal, the laudable democratic instinct behind denunciations of elitism usually seems irrelevant to me. For example, John Carey argues that The Intellectuals and the Masses, which describes the interrelation of elitism and modernism. Carey's analysis is interesting but equally irrelevant; no-one had taken Lawrence, Eliot and Pound for egalitarians but that is very far from devaluing their literary standing in favour of the likes of Bennett.
A more robust argument was that of Camille Paglia who, like the above author, argued that the popular culture of film and rock music had displaced elite culture. If one considers film composers like Bernard Herrman or rock musicians like John Cale some kind of transition might well appear visible. On the other hand, I tend to be a Marxist in such matters (i.e. I don't believe the question of artistic production can be divorced from the culture in which it occurs); if a culture fails to produce art then it is probably simply because said culture is increasingly unable to do so; from my perspective, popular (AngloAmerican at least) culture seems increasingly anodyne and moribund.
Of course, I should admit to being a contrarian in such matters; the modern composers I would cite as being important all broke with modernism; Tavener, Glass, Adams, Part and Reich as counter-examples (given his ubiquitous use in television adverts Glass can hardly be accused of lacking popular reach).
posted by Richard 9:28 pm
