At 09:01 PM 4/11/06 +0200, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >Depends on whether you count popular music. And if you are comparing to >film (and literature to an extend), the equivalent in music would be >popular music.
Johannes, I don't agree with that -- and I'm not including pop in this, though Albinoni and Vivaldi might be poppy enough. :) Film has a shorter history, but even so, there's not much clamoring for reshowings of Potemkin or The Great Dictator or Birth of a Nation or Metropolis or even Nosferatu in preference to recent independent films. And in English-language literature, excellent authors Annie Proulx or Salman Rushdie or Robertson Davies or T.C. Boyle, for example, are hardly pop, and are far better known among the arts-oriented general public than even the greatest living concert composers. That public can talk about contemporary literature or art film, but rarely about new nonpop. Just look at your average artsy magazine (such as the New Yorker), even a virtual one like Salon. It covers many topics in depth in the arts, but new nonpop has appeared in but one discussion over the past several years. Re-mounting or exhuming old works contributes to an atmosphere of ignorance of present-day compositional genius that eats away at the creative foundation of the very artform that gives music its life and renewal. By default, more Albinoni = less Anderson (any of them!). That's a problem, and every nonpop musician knows it's there -- that great contemporary elephant in the room. It's a conscious choice to ignore it, not an accident of circumstance. I think that's what I'm trying to underscore -- that disinterring Albinoni is a considered decision to say "yes" to the past and "no" to the present. As I wrote previously, my reaction was amplified by the release of Julius Eastman's surviving work a few months ago. This fine composer (whom we all probably know only as the vocalist in Maxwell-Davies's "Eight Songs for a Mad King") had fallen into poverty, was evicted, and had his scores and recordings dumped onto the street, where they were carted away to the landfill. At age 50, he died in 1990 -- without even an obituary. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
