offending trash
Jan. 28th, 2019 09:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacMy strongly negative comments about Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto on last week's San Francisco Symphony program were quoted by Lisa Irontongue in a post contrasting them with the favorable review in the Chronicle. (He's not a very good reviewer; most of us on my journal's staff roll their eyes when his name is mentioned.)
But the post, after one commenter who heard the ugly noise that I did, has attracted a slew of responses from Lutoslawski fans. Well, of course it did; those are the kind of people who read Lisa's posts. It's hardly a neutral polling result.
And, in fact, I'm such a person myself. I like a lot of difficult and tendentious modern music, which I think gives me the right to speak out firmly when, in my judgment, a work or a performance is trash. I'm not dumping on the genre wholesale, but using trained and experienced discrimination.
Which is not to say that others can't disagree; tastes do vary; but sometimes I wonder ...
Look, I've had problems with reactions to my own tastes. I'll never forget the time I remarked that the vast majority of jazz does nothing for me, and was accused of lying about my own musical tastes. Aesthetic disputes don't get weirder than that.
But that doesn't mean nobody ever puts on a show. If someone responds to a review that complains of "a soapy, unresonant, and frankly unpleasant tone" by writing, "it makes me really regret missing this piece," that's just playing a game of épater le bourgeois. It's not a serious contribution to discourse.
But the post, after one commenter who heard the ugly noise that I did, has attracted a slew of responses from Lutoslawski fans. Well, of course it did; those are the kind of people who read Lisa's posts. It's hardly a neutral polling result.
And, in fact, I'm such a person myself. I like a lot of difficult and tendentious modern music, which I think gives me the right to speak out firmly when, in my judgment, a work or a performance is trash. I'm not dumping on the genre wholesale, but using trained and experienced discrimination.
Which is not to say that others can't disagree; tastes do vary; but sometimes I wonder ...
Look, I've had problems with reactions to my own tastes. I'll never forget the time I remarked that the vast majority of jazz does nothing for me, and was accused of lying about my own musical tastes. Aesthetic disputes don't get weirder than that.
But that doesn't mean nobody ever puts on a show. If someone responds to a review that complains of "a soapy, unresonant, and frankly unpleasant tone" by writing, "it makes me really regret missing this piece," that's just playing a game of épater le bourgeois. It's not a serious contribution to discourse.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-29 05:14 pm (UTC)I later described this stuff as sounding variously like cars honking, bees buzzing in jars, or people moving furniture around.
Later I learned that good music - not retrograde imitation 19C stuff, but following in its tradition as the 19C followed the 18C and so on - was still being written, it was just being ignored by the high modernist establishment. As time passed it came out from underneath and returned to respect. Even Lutoslawski and his equally hideous compatriot Penderecki modified their style in later years, and while their later work is still not very appealing, what they wrote in the 1980s and 1990s is a lot different from what they were writing in the 1960s.