And, come to think of it, where has art gone, or poetry, or philosophy, or architecture? Apart from also getting into a real mess.
The new book, Music Healing the Rift, by Ivan Hewett and as summarised by Michael Church in a recent review in the Independent, describes my own feelings about modern music -- popular or 'art/serious' -- exactly. I didn't discover choral singing until I was in my early 50s, but the first day I attended a rehearsal with an invisible sign saying "Imposter" above my head, and heard the first notes of Mozart's Requiem rising around me from the basses and tenors, tentatively at first and then more firmly, the tears flowed down my cheeks. And the tears flow now as I write, remembering that wonderful occasion. Since that day, I have sung in many choral works, long and short -- though never very competently -- and I've also enjoyed the conviviality and comradeship of being in a choir.
Which brings me immediately to something else that we have lost in the course of the past century. Community. I've experienced brief glimpses of community in my life -- sitting in an air-raid shelter during WWII as the bombs fell around us during the Coventry Blitz, and all the street sitting there, neighbourly animosities put on one side for the moment, singing the latest pop songs. And a few other occasions. But not a great many.
In the last century, the consumer society has torn the family away from the community, has torn the young and the old of the family apart, has torn sex away from love and is even now tearing away at natural partnerships, producing increasingly larger numbers of isolated individuals with all sorts of fetishes. I believe, however, that the instincts of community are still deep and strong within us and must necessarily re-emerge. I think that the new managed communities in America are an early sign of this, even though they are not everybody's cultural cup of tea at present. I think that a necessary cluster of economic and technological factors must yet become more focussed before communities can become widespread again, but I think they'll return. We have lost too much.
I think I might re-read News from Nowhere (William Morris) which I first read 45 years ago but is still a precious book on my shelves. Morris was hopelessly idealistic and unrealistic about human nature, but at least he tapped into something very profound in that book. When the time is ripe and the customer demands it from the multinational CEO and the politician alike (or perhaps invalidates them both) then we could recreate An Epoch of Rest, as Morris subtitled it.
Keith Hudson
<<<< THE WESTERN WORLD MUST LEARN TO SING AGAIN
Micahel Church
Review of: Music Healing the Rift by Ivan Hewett (Continuum, 2003)
Until recent times, says Ivan Hewett, music was everywhere, and always an authentic expression of the social situation that called it forth. The idyll was shattered, in the developed West, by the notion that music could be transportable a mass could be taken out of church and performed in a concert hall. Then music began its long retreat from the public domain. It turned into something made en famille, then something listened to in the privacy of a room, until finally the Walkman reduced its operative space to six inches between the ears.
Hewett's book is fruitfully complex I could have extracted several other narratives which would have summarised music's trajectory just as well. The "rift" in his title denotes nothing so banal as that between classicists and modernists. His big theme is the falling-apart of the laboriously-constructed musical realm of the early 20th century, and the perennial desire, among composers, to make it whole again. As he makes clear, that crisis reflects a falling-apart in our entire culture. Putting it together again - if such a thing is possible - would benefit us all.
His focus is on composers past and present. Deploying the expertise which made him the ideal anchorman for Radio 3's Music Matters, Hewett writes with easy authority. He has interviewed widely, read deeply, listened at length his nine short chapters ripple with provocative insights. Sometimes the writing is too densely philosophical for the argument to be immediately grasped, but that only puts it on a level with its subject-matter.
One of Hewett's many sub-plots follows the rise of the programme note, starting with Berlioz's instructions on how to listen to the Symphonie Fantastique, and culminating in the current situation where it's unthinkable for a new work to be presented without copious verbal explication. Herein lies the misery of the modernist composer obliged to teach the audience a new language, but inevitably doomed to fail.
Hewett writes so illuminatingly about Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage and Carter that one feels impelled to listen again. Though sympathetic, he admits that that their invented private languages don't add up to a reconstituted public realm. He is acerbic about the blind alley of "world music", pleasantly waspish about John Tavener and prophets of the New Naivety, and shows the futility of trying to "remake" tonality. The power of classical tonality in its heyday derived from a perfect reciprocity between form and social function. The genie's out of the bottle.
What now? Hewett offers a brilliant tour d'horizon of music's multifarious new directions -- aided by sampling tricks, fuelled by PC notions -- but concludes that if we want to "heal the rift", we can't delegate the job to composers. We must all start making music again. If we play and sing, we will once more listen actively too. And that way lies musical health.
Independent -- 1 January 2004 >>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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