Charles Ives was a great Master Composer in America who advocated all Classical Composers as amateurs. This was his Killer Assumption:
1. GREAT MUSICAL ART CAN ONLY COME FROM COMPLETE FREEDOM THEREFORE ARTISTS SHOULD NOT BE PAID FOR THEIR WORK. Charles Ives was a multi-millionaire Insurance Executive who wrote the books on insurance for his day. He worked all day and stayed up all night writing music. At the age of 43 he had a nervous breakdown and basically wrote about music for the rest of his life into his eighties. As his music began to be played he would refuse to go to the concerts because the moment it began he got a ringing in his ears which precluded his hearing or even tolerating what he had created. He could, however, write about it and he did. Ives composed some generic music in his younger years as he explored what that meant and especially the issues of what constituted good performance. The thrust of his work was never vulgar and he assigned chauvinistic terms to the people that he considered vulgar. [people who wear lace panties] He was angry about the treatment of genuine Classical American music and not the vulgar derivative type that he called unable to take a good dissonance in the jaw. Ives is too complicated for a blog post. I got my knowledge from reading what he said and performing his music in places where people did have vulgar tastes, [as defined by him] and convincing them that Ives was one of the holders of the keys to something better. Perhaps the problem lies in the assumptions about Classical, Common and Vulgar categories for music. Classical, is the pursuit of the abstract values of the aural medium and the systems that arise from it. It is "formal" and the Per-form-ance of Classical music is about as Erwin Stein said "the making of [aural] forms clear to an audience." All three forms of Music and Art are found worldwide in all societies although they have different terms for them. Some just say music that has power or healing or music that is for singing together and music that is for the dark purposes. We say Classical, Common or Generic and Vulgar. I personally dont ascribe to the metaphysical concept for vulgar although I do believe that vulgar anything has a toxic or viral side to it that must be dealt with. II. Evolution made mastery, personal power and the discoveries in Classical Music pleasurable and so we do it in spite of the difficulty, unpaid hours, hunger and lousy family lives. The "perks" to abstract classical music are so powerful that the current society believes they are more important than being compensated for all of that practice, analysis and the productivity lag built into the current economic system in all of the Classical Arts and especially music.. Classical music is the pursuit of the ideals and the most abstract values of the sound medium for the purpose of knowing and owning the knowledge [mastery]. Common music is generic, predictable and like common language. Its purpose is recreation, entertainment. Old Classical music becomes generic music through the elements of learning. Audiences get smarter as the soundscape gets older and more pervasive. The complexities of Medieval European music have shown us that audiences can grow less sophisticated and old music can lose its generic qualities and become unscrutable. It became less common. Entertainment is commercial, formulaic, generic [common] Art. It must be generic in order to have the capacity for scale. Generic predictability can make music become boring and stale even when it requires a high level of competence to perform. Improvisation and live performance re-invigorates old forms and stirs the individual's awareness of what the form meant in the first place hundreds of years ago to people like Bach. Most commercial art is essentially performing art. If you take the swing out of Sidney Bechet as harpsichordist Elaine Comparone did in the nineties, what you have left is the music of 1750. Bechet's art was improvisational and transformative of an old form. Almost all Commercial is generic put through the medium of a sophisticated and creative performer. That is the meaning of productivity in economics and economie of scale. [singular interpreter, big audience or multiple recordings] Generic music can be downsized classical music cannot because the medium is a large part of the meaning. Productivity lag in Classical music is the reason it isnt commercial. The recognition and predictability of Common [generic] music is what makes that music useful as a language. Languages move on clichés. So does Common, commercial music. III. So what is Vulgar Music? Most Americans equate vulgar with sexual. Art is always a mirror of its time and place. It can be creative art as a mirror OR the translator performer, stage director, conductor etc. can construct a reality that makes the old forms come alive again. [Odysseus dancing with his ancestors above the Well that contained their bones] Did you ever notice that the greatest performers often make garbage into gold better than they do the Masterpieces? [TV sitcoms for example] We say those performances are more Guilt than Gold. Vulgar music has a purpose. It is the deliberate smashing of something together with a revered idea for the purpose of releasing cultural toxicity and fertilizing new forms [court jester]. Classical Artists often begin with the vulgar to start a new form. Ives with his reverence for church, camp meeting and the American Ideals, wasnt very good at vulgar. Neither was Frank Lloyd Wright. Europeans and their groups are usually very good at vulgar. (Boulez for example, my favorite conductor. Europeans think and talk more about it. ) Could it have to do with their domestic animal quarters being above their barns for so long? Being vulgar means you have to be able to tolerate high levels of toxicity. Just a few Spaniards floating down the Amazon killed millions with their domestic animal achieved vulgarity. (Native American Humor) Vulgar is the negative of Classical Art. Dantes "Inferno" was vulgar. Boccaccio and Bosch were vulgar. Vulgarity makes wars OK. Michelangelos Naked God on the Sistine Chapel has had his vulgarity challenged regularly by the generics in the Roman Catholic church with their brushes and fig leaves. The most vulgar aspect was not his penis but his human form with took away his omnipresence and gave humanity something the church had previously denied them. Form and Image became one in that moment in heart of the Vatican. Its easier to see in Kazantzakis who gave Odysseus these words to explore that parallel pattern between vulgarity and God as Odysseus prepared to destroy the city he saw before him with children playing: Were you afraid . that I would pity the small child, That your wretched belly would not fill with corpses? I remember that little girl (on TV) at her computer in Tehran the night before Shock and Awe and George Bushs ignorant imitation of a cultural pattern that should have been solved by Artistically sophisticated people long ago. IV. One more thing and I'm through. How many performances will you hear on Sunday, July Fourth, of Ives great orchestral Masterpiece: "The Fourth of July?" Compared to the Russian 1812 Festival Overture with the cannons? The cannons were vulgar even in Tchaikovskys day. Ives had trouble with vulgarity. That trouble turned in on him and made him bitter. Eventually it blew away his mind for everything but music that he couldnt tolerate hearing. The NYPhilharmonic of Ives day was low grade generic when they conducted a reading of that great Ives work. [July Fourth] At the end of each page, the only performer still reading and playing was the flute player. Ives wasn't vulgar he was just pursuing the values of those melodies and what they represented in sound. His imagination made that too hard for the average philharmonic member. Everyone else but the flute player couldn't take a good dissonance on the jaw. When the reading was over, the conductor walked over to this great American Master and said: "This work should never have been written." Now who was the vulgar one here? Ives or.......... my old conservatory music teacher's father? Ives constantly challenged the generic but he wasn't very good at marketing which is what the vulgar requires when you turn the manure. Ray Evans Harrell, July 3rd, 2010
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