(Continued) At 11:16 AM 1/31/05 -0800, you wrote: >Sibelius, whom you related to us died before you were >born. I was seven months old when Sibelius died.
It wasn't Sibelius. I just wanted it that way, I think. :) It was Bartok and Webern who died a few years before, and sadly, Richard Strauss actually overlapped my birth by six months. I'm apparently not as young as I feel. Am I getting redundant? My point is simple and you give it too much credit in your details. But onward ... maybe I can liven it up a bit... >So he's >not verboten to me, but is completely useless to you. Am I >interpreting you correctly? Or were you then and still now >being facetious merely for the sake of speciousness? No, not facetious, but it's not gonna happen anyway. Too many interests are involved, not least of which are organizations like major orchestras and opera companies and public radio for whom adventure might also mean economic collapse. But if in some hermetically sealed state, if it were possible, or at least if there were such positions advanced, what would it sound like? Or if there were analysis done of that culture, what would it say? Now it gets hard. Two posts ago, I recounted my continental-shift idea -- that composers kept moving along in their self-absorbed creative state in making new music, while marketers sought to maximize return, and their audiences unknowingly became part of a psych-cash investment recovery pattern unusual to the musical arts. I suggested why it happened, but in an information-rich culture, why hasn't it changed? Music is problematic because only one piece can be heard at a time (unless you are Data), limiting by waking hours the maximum possible choices. If a museum culture is adopted by the purveyors of any serial artform, then the past (well known and cheap to replicate) crowds out the present. The physical constraints are not unique to music nor even the performance arts (reading is serial), but in those arts where the language is not shared (i.e., where the consumer is no longer literate), it increases the perceived value of easy consumption. This is arguably the case in all creative endeavors (or even hamburgers), but if we have a look at education, we find a real distinction. Children and older students are taught to read, write, look, speak, draw, cipher, dance, sing, play, build, cook... but in music, what we call "reading" is dominated by eye-to-hand mapping rather than the cognitive process of sight reading (as if one were taught to read words only by sounding them out aloud -- and never silently to oneself -- and listening to one's own voice for meaning, as some aphasia sufferers must do), and worst of all, there is almost no writing of any kind. This is compounded by the advanced education of professionals, where the closest activity to writing might be arranging -- still largely one of the re-productive arts -- rather than composition. Writing is exceptional rather than quotidian. When the musical culture (amateur and professional) is one of received information, and when the culture at large is afflicted with high-consumption behavior, then it is almost inevitable that the psych-cash investment cycle will be rewarded by more of the same material drawn from a body of familiar, exchangeable, inexpensive and field-tested components. You talked about distinguishing Mozart from Vivaldi (or maybe it was two other composers; they're all the same to me). Was this an artistic distinction, or just an ear-training guessing game, a Wheel of Fortune for notes? If the educated, intelligent audience has no way to replicate this knowledge (as it might be drawing or writing or singing or sculpting) and then expand upon it (through the addition of ideas and experiments) and no encouragement to do so, then a resistance to new material becomes a psychologically self-protective mechanism. (Challenge in general might become alien in a society where artificially induced self-esteem is a requisite component of education ... but that's substance for a different discussion.) Look what's going on, then: exposure is limited and adaptive tools are withheld, leading to new music being felt as culturally toxic, an invader of the cultural body. To many listeners and even musicians who have been culturally abused in education, the reaction is exactly that -- as if their body were producing antibodies in response to these invasive sonic antigens (against which there are no earflaps). If you watched audience reaction during the worst years of new nonpop's rejection, you could see it was almost biological reaction, an induced physical illness. This museum culture of music that we have fashioned is almost as fragile as the Martians in "War of the Worlds". So now the new nonpop problem is intertwined up in history, economics, culture and biology. But fortunately, musicians like yourself have begun an allergy desensitization program. That's one step. Who will begin the programs of economic change (taking the marketing risk)? How about Richard Branson? But I already asked him (http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sc-brans.html) in 1998, and after working through the corporate bureaucracy, received a rejection. A brave, visionary, enthusiastic mogul could increase visibility. I still pursue that goal with regular letters to the incomprehensibly wealthy. My personal note to Bill Gates (whom I knew in the early computer days) a few months ago was intercepted by Microsoft Corporate, which said it was not a program of interest. But I continue, knowing that a well-funded marketing campaign can sell (or elect) anything. Next component, then: Who will begin the educational change? Ouch, ouch, this is very tough. We've lost one generation of educators, now unfamiliar with nonpop (whether new or old, classical or electroacoustic or performance-art based or any other kind, or even jazz, which has collapsed toward history and commerce, save for artists like David Ware). Even those who were and are conversant with it have not enabled students with the bundle of tools for writing, for making their own mark on musical history, and for inventing their own ideas. Personal diversion: In the latter regard I was lucky, having had a high school band director who encouraged my composition (for I started to compose within months of learning notation by applying for my first instrument in the school band, a bass clarinet) by treating it as a *normal behavior*, and giving me opportunities to conduct snippets in rehearsal during band time (he taught me the basics of conducting during those bass clarinet lessons, too). The very normalcy of writing that he presented -- for as a child who moved from school to school, I could not know that composing was abnormal -- encouraged me to continue until I hit college, where the department chairman (forever curse your memory, Henry Kaufmann!) said to me "Our undergraduates do not compose" and shut down any opportunity for me to show my work to anyone. At that point, my desire was almost killed, for as a poor boy working full time, I could not afford to transfer elsewhere from this state school. Fortunately, my SQ (stubbornness quotient) has always exceeded my IQ, and so I continued with my work. But in the subsequent years, I learned that creating music is one of the most suppressed endeavors in the entire spectrum of general liberal arts education. It is too time-consuming to encourage, the teachers are not given the tools to teach it (and I earned a parallel music education certification and minored in psychology, so learned that first hand), and composition is thus left to specialists who work with specialists in a culture that -- you got it -- does not value their specialty. I have no idea how to solve the educational problem other than re-introducing music as if it were an entirely new process. But with the dominance of performance-based high-sales-value programs like Orff, Kodaly, Suzuki, etc., I have little hope that such re-introduction can be done directly. Institutional education has a symbiotic relationship with its suppliers, and professional education of educators remains staggeringly conservative -- even moreso as the classroom teacher is drafted into teaching political codes regarding drugs, sex, politics, and science. The music teacher with the rolling cart of pitiful musical trinkets, or the band or choral director coping with a frills-based budgetary psychology is not going to be adding to the daily workload by teaching writing. There's no support -- not from administrators, nor educational suppliers, nor parents, nor those who believe the first duty of music is to create little annual stage spectacles or jack up the football team's testosterone level (how well I remember being a stupid spoke in the Rutgers' Marching 100's "1812 Overture" set during a rainstorm that had up clomping through a sea of mud!). So that takes care of biology, culture and economics, and leaves only the topic at hand, history. (I didn't forget!) Premise: History is easy. That doesn't mean it's correct history, but anybody can plumb history because either (1) they're historically minded and it challenges their interest -- hence the treatises and reconstructions and restorations and orchestrations and notational modernizations -- or (2) somebody else did it and it's there for the using. Musical historians are the microscopic minority, so it's received musical material that is at the heart of my complaint. Because the received repertoire is available, it is familiar, we re-use it, inventing along the way a "crawl before you walk" (CraBYoW) theory to support our behavior. If CraBYoW were true, though, we'd be starting off our concerts with monody, working through organum, motets, and tropes, through virelais and ars nova counterpoint, training theorboists, setting up antiphonal goodies, and coursing through that bizarre-ass early baroque kibble long before we hit our classical boy-toy and his tragically hip pneumococcus. But the crawling has never really been done, and the process -- whatever it really is -- has utterly failed, hardly resulting in any walking at all. In truth, CraBYoW is classical nonpop's Official Urban Legend, a kind of accidental classical-music eugenics theory that eliminates diverse contemporary culture from the concert hall. To this, cutoff dates are a solution (see? you knew I'd get there!), but require a cooperative rethinking among professionals, and taking a lesson from out-of-work family farmers and how their imagination can teach us a great deal. Still a hard row to hoe. >Please >let me know because if I have you right, I'm going to have to do >some serious culling of my wine cellar.... How much will you charge for shipping? :) (Damn, mistah, why'd you reawaken my slumbering evil twin?) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
