(Continued) At 11:16 AM 1/31/05 -0800, you wrote: > So that out of that roomfulla chimps all sitting at their MacFinaleK5s
This chimp uses a PC, thanks. :) >-- one of them might accidentally compose the Mahler 2nd all over >again and claim it as his own -- simply because he didn't know Gus >beat him to it? Isn't it somewhat better to have at least a simian >knowledge of what came before in order that he might actually build >upon it? And if you follow my logic, how can those poor damned >apes aurally get to know the Mahler unless someone plays it!? Just to reiterate Part I by responding to the above: My call is for performers and presenters (and composer collaborators) to change their behavior by x-treme tearing down of the museum culture of classical nonpop. >That we must ignore Bach, Shakespeare, da Vinci, Wagner, Ibsen, >Monet, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mozart, Christopher Marlowe...oh heck >with just Chris; one imagines you're advocating dumping even Philip >Marlowe -- and if I were then to continue my hobbling sidestep from the >'fine' arts to the 'not-so-fine' arts: does this mean that in le monde selon >Dennis I would have to give up my beloved Buster Keaton and Max >Linder and (horrors) even the Brothers Marx? Now this question is even more interesting, if somewhat off the track when trying to correct for a museum model run amok (now there's a strange image). So you mention Bach, Shakespeare, da Vinci, Wagner, Ibsen, Monet, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mozart, and the two Marlowes. Assuming we're talking about people with an interest in the arts and literature, how often do they re-read those works? How many actually got through them in the first place? Isn't it one of the supposed 'private shames' that few people actually read Dostoyevsky or Proust, or care to see Ibsen and or more than a very few re-re-re-performed plays of Shakespeare? How many have DaVinci prints hanging? Okay, maybe a pretty Monet or two (or likely Manet) as decoration. And Marlowe the first? What do people, intelligent people, really read? Books in their field, and contemporary fiction. They watch the new plays (unless Ibsen's all they get). Assuming they don't hand big-eyed puppies or Elvis-on-velvet, then chances are it's work of friends, their own work, with the occasional classic prints. The people *in* these fields, however, have (one hopes) a greater scope of reading and performance and art that informs what they do. There is a great deal to be said for scope, whether a novelist or playwright or composer. And for history -- John Ciari talked marvelously about the "ghosts of words" and how a knowledge of etymology and orthographic history (whether studied or intuited) was the sign of a truly remarkable poet. It's not the existence of history that's the problem (at least for me). However -- and I sometimes wish I could hold up a sign in big fat letters -- music is exceptional in its 20th century nearly complete capitulation to the museum model, a model that gives little evidence of change when we run into the 21st century. You need not give up Groucho, Chico, Harpo or Zeppo, nor Moe, Larry and Curly, nor Manny, Moe and Jack because *no cultural shift is required* in comedy, as contemporary comedy is not pounded down in the way new nonpop is cubesteaked into a tiny unpalatable slime stuck to the otherwise luscious musical menus we're presented with at the concert hall door. >That instead I would ONLY have those works created within some shadowy >timeline beginning in the extremely recent past and ending only -- tomorrow? >That if I wanted to see a film comedy I'd have to choose between Adam Sandler >and Jim Carrey? I'd prefer Dave Chappelle, Rita Rudner, and Chris Rock, but I take your point. Remember that I'm proposing a proportional answer -- a mirror of the situation in the early 1990s, *before* the new Golden Age of Music began (and that's what I believe it is, to make a sideways mention to Dean Estabrook, who just posed a related question). >As your original premise stated, the quality of a work is completely, >totally irrelevant; the only importance is its chronology relative to the audience's >own. Remember: your original premise -- which you haven't truly otherwise >refined for us in specifics -- was updated by you to include only those works >created within one's own lifetime, so at least I could throw in the later film works >of Billy Wilder but couldn't keep, for example, any of the classic Preston Sturges. No, no, I really *didn't* update it ... remember I ended with "Nah" (and I changed my mind before I sent that email -- I had said "come of age"). Yeah, yeah, it's not a formula, as much fun as it is to find out who might qualify and who would be banned in some musico-totalitarian state of the avant-garbage. (Thanks, everybody. Damn sad that Richard Strauss didn't die until after I was born.) Consider what such an applied rule might mean, though. Right now, programmers are rooting down through the literature for third- and fourth-string composers to rehabilitate. How is that different from me suggesting that the quality of the work is irrelevant? It *is* irrelevant already! Just because it was written for concerto & ripieno doesn't deify the music. Just because it came from Beethoven's hand doesn't deify it (oh, gawd, Wellington's Victory begone!) -- and that guy could hardly write a tune. A whole religion was built out of Beethoven's overcoming an incredible compositional deficiency through his motivic development. Eroica Symphony, my buttocks! You wanna go around whistling *that*, um, "melody"? Okay, okay, I have a big ol burdock under my saddle over this. But do you really think it's unjustified? With us flooded with scores that run from good to brilliant, we're digging up more Baroque dinner twaddle a la muzacque, finishing pieces the composers didn't care enough to finish themselves, and playing Beethoven like his work really matters in addressing a contemporary musical world? You don't think we're awash in marvelous scores by those who live among us? The American Music Center isn't even taking them anymore! Just look at the first six pictures on this page to see why they gave up trying: http://kalvos.org/amctour1.html So I called for a moratorium on the past to right the course, and, by presenting the new and the exciting *all the time*, cut the anchor buried under a seaslide of historical music, and prevent the ship from being pulled under. But it takes, as the Naussicans might say, some gombah. >What a quandary! Evaluate the good only based upon its age relative to that of the >consumer; Oooo, oooo, oooo, but that's already how it's done in other fields! It's called style. It's why Silent Generation was washed over by Baby Boomers who gave way to Gen X and now are grayingly signing off to Time's ugly eponym, Twixters. Is that any way to work? Of course it is! What it does not do -- and here comes museum culture again -- is evaluate work for the ages. If JS's kids were alive today, they'd be packing him off to a nursing home. Yet, yet, yet... some classical-era doodling is elevated to a masterpiece, so that doesn't work either, and endless papers are written by theoreticians on obscure compositions that are then, of course, played (my own theory teacher said that all theorists were really failed composers, and that theory was the closest they could get to the real thing, and went to bed every night crying; I liked him). And so the waters in which we're sinking are even polluted polluted by rotting musical effluent. You wanna sink the ship in *that*? But my logic collapses there, because there's really no way of evaluation -- even among us there are the purity theorists, the if-it-sounds-good-it-is-good evangelists, and composers with an inflated sense of judgment (uh, that would be me). Though some may invent objective musical evaluations tools (viz. O-list again), in practice it really is all fashion and style. Nobody *really* played that much Mozart before Amadeus, the Baroque was nigh forgotten before Musical Heritage Society and parallel resurgences found it cute (blast that Pachelbel exercise book!), and even Mahler was resurrected in the public musical image by Bernstein. Heck, where's Gossec in all this? >now we're getting a tad existential.... Yuh. So let me end here for now. More to go, but I'm tired, and I have to (as my T-shirt says) "edit for food" (RFID News & Solutions Magazine. Somebody save me.). Maybe I'll wrap up tomorrow. Thanks for everyone's patience and good humor! I love this list! Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
