musical snark

[calimac]

Everybody has to get a word in on this subject:

"In a rare display of social awareness, the American Musicological Society has publicly denounced the use of music in physical and psychological torture. ... American students now have a precedent to decry 20th-century music surveys — with their compulsory exposure to headache-inducing cacophony and traumatic collisions of sonic debris — as academic torture."

Comments

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

What a load of hyperbole.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not hyperbole. Snark.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

(Rolling eyes. I thought rock fans like headache-inducing cacophony.)

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

No, no, you misunderstand! It's the serious music students who are required to listen to the works of ... gee, I don't know, Philip Glass. "Modern" discordants, in any case -- the ones that claim they are writing music. Now they have a basis for skipping such "subjects of study".

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Philip Glass? Discordant?? oh, no, no, no ... Not discordant enough to be worthy of respect by the cacophony-mongers. Modernists disdaining Glass is rather the equivalent of modernists in literature disdaining Tolkien: he's too popular, too easily enjoyed ... they can't stand him.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Heh. I bow to your greater knowledge. I'm not overly familiar with the works of Glass, and have been underwealmed by those I have heard.

(My strongest attachments are for Prokofiev and the other Russians, and then the usual Bach, Mozart, etc.)

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really know where to start with this.

I guess I should make it crystal-clear that I deplore the military use of torture; but also that I find it frivolous to conflate that definition of torture with vulgar usage (where "torture" is anything we don't like to do).

Yes, in fact rock fans (and fans of other forms of 20th century music) do like "headache-producing cacophony." That's exactly the point: one person's musical "torture" (he said frivolously) is another person's exact musical preference. I would far rather listen to Xenakis or Frank Zappa (but not Elliott Carter!) than Prokofiev or Philip Glass.

(Once again, as a committed Modernist, I find myself caught between the Scylla of hidebound conservatism and the Charybdis of desperate up-to-datedness.)

My ultimate musical "torture"? Muzak.

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I find it frivolous to conflate that definition of torture with vulgar usage

That's why I called it musical snark. It is frivolous.

But there is a serious point behind this, which is that much of the cacophony of High Modernist, and even some Postmodernist, music is justified on the grounds that the world is a cruel, capricious place full of torture and pain, and that art must reflect this.

But this is nonsense, some "Sacher-Masoch Theory of Art," as Bernard Levin pointed out years ago, and as I'll keep on quoting until the world notices it:

"Do you suppose that Shakespeare didn't know that the world could fly apart at any moment, and that the Wars of the Roses had ended only eighty years before he was born? Do you imagine that Rembrandt, because he lived in Holland, had never heard of the Massacre of St Bartholomew, only thirty-four years before he was born? Do you think that Bach would have enjoyed himself if Charles XII had come to tea? Do you believe that Dostoievsky thought life was a bowl of cherries? Art is centripetal, and the artist's duty to keep it so."

[(Anonymous)]

Fine; that's the conservative position in a nutshell, and there is some wisdom in it.

But. If all art is always centripetal, doesn't that imply that it has no impulse to change?

The Modernist position (which does not necessarily eschew all tradition) is that there should at least be a balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces (as there is in nature). Which means in practice that any parameter of any art is eligible to be tested to destruction.

But. Again. This does not justify (or exempt from criticism) any experiment: as in proper science, the failed experiments ought to be discarded.

(The problem being that the Modernist enterprise, as a whole, has been relegated to the dustbin of history as a failed experiment by the ongoing culture, which I think throws out the baby with the bathwater.)

This is a rather large subject for a short comment. But I hope you catch my drift.

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If all art is always centripetal, doesn't that imply that it has no impulse to change?

Of course not. The assumption that it is comes from the Modernist presumption that all change is inimical to continuing values, and that's simply not the case. It wasn't until the nihilist/Bauhaus/serialist movements of the early 20C that there arose the pernicious notion that the past must be torn down to build the future. Many of the most centripetal artists were radical innovators: to name two in different arts and different periods cited by Levin, Beethoven and Tom Stoppard.

The Modernist experiment has been "relegated to the dustbin" (actually, it still lives and breathes in many quarters) because it itself invited that reaction, by indulging in extremism (total serialism, for one example, was just insane) and insisting that it alone was true art (see the collected polemics of P. Boulez).