----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 1:19
AM
Subject: [Futurework] Re: The Arts and
Keynes (was Share slumps *are* harmful)
Fake issue Keith,
Keynes says that you shouldn't do it unless the
consumer "wants it" first. While J.B. Say states that
the consumer will not imagine wanting it without having first had enough
to stimulate their desire. You praised Say but in the past,
and in your statement about the "tax" on the poor cab driver, spoke
of the Driver's "desire" motivating whether his government
should provide it or not. That is Keynes is
it not?
The Arts develops the mind of all of the people
and not just the wealthy. Not just the elite class who
has captured them in our two Anglophilias. The poor development of
the mind that you decry in the schools is a direct result of a breakdown of
pedagogy. But the holistic approach to pedagogy i.e. public
education, requires complex culture, as a part of its curriculum,
in order to develop. Remember that the "talented"
achieve no matter how poor the education may be.
Education is a "success" based upon how it succeeds with the less
endowed, the average, and the less
imaginative.
Public Education requires a holistic approach to
pedagogy that brings in the integrity of the student's internal systems in
order to encourage and even stimulate opening the door to their
potential. A door that has been closed through "life" and
abuse in early childhood. This is not "brain surgery"
but is the root of simple psycho-therapy which helps millions of
individuals across the United States. In the Public Schools
it is the State's responsibility to restore the
initial genius of the child through a total pedagogical approach based
upon success and pleasure not drudgery and punishment.
That integrative approach is best achieved through the foundation of the
Arts as a basis for all other instruction.
To turn your question about your English Cab Driver
around:
Why should the wealthy teach the children
of the middle and lower classes to be dissatisfied with their plight in life
and realize, (through a good public education), that the wealthy are
no more deserving of the entitled accident of their birth then the poor and
middle class children are deserving of a fourth class education that
doesn't allow them to participate fully in a free
society?
Take my statement about Harry's "American
History." Like that statement about Harry's need for further
study in our history, I believe that your theory on the purpose
of the complex arts in pedagogy, and elsewhere, is
deficient. Do you really believe that the purpose of
the complex arts is as a form of entertainment?
Is that not like the
belief that brushing your hair and taking a bath is only about
looking and smelling good? That is probably a part of
it, but I suspect the whole idea of a "nice appearance" has more basis in
trying to get you to do the things that are good for your health and
sustainence than simple beauty. Beauty has a pragmatic
purpose in all of nature, as pointed out endlessly in National
Geographic Magazine when discussing bird's mating rituals and
songs. Due to the fact that we too are a part of
nature, I believe it is simple pride that makes us "misunderstand"
the purpose of our songs in our survival as a species as well as a people.
Though the complex
arts are at times entertaining they are not, at their root,
about entertainment. For those of
us who went to University and Conservatory we each had a professor who
admonished us that, "if we liked something it probably was derivitive
and garbage." That what brought ultimate satisfaction
and fulfillment artistically was often difficult and annoying at first,
unless of course, it was "old" art.
Old Art was understandable because the
complexity had been solved by our education and those who went before
us. It is a true story that Leopold Auer claimed that
Tschaikovki's Violin Concerto was "unplayable." It is
also true that many high school students in the US play the Tschaikovski
Violin Concerto today. "Serious" or complex art that springs from
the truth and the search for the exceptional values of the present
are....well... complicated.
But nothing is complicated if you know how to do
it and nothing that you know how to do is complicated to
you. Typing is not complicated to me. The
limitations are clear and the practice is constant.
Complexity of typing for me is about zero. On the other
hand, typing in Cherokee is about "ten" on the one to ten complexity scale
since the Cherokee syllabury uses the same keyboard but with different
symbols. Eventually it will become, like the Tschaikovski
Violin Concerto for my neighbor upstairs, zero complexity through
personal Mastery.
Contemporary Art is a complex
artistic product. It is the song and voice of today's
values and highest ideals. At first it is admittedly
confusing and always has been so.e.g. Mozart has always been simple to
play but hard to interpret. In Mozart the art was not in the
same place as Liszt's Transcendal Etudes. The question is
asked for the purpose of product quality: "Who was
better?" Who is more "True", more "Beautiful", well that
depends on "how" you were listening to the art.
Today, we have the same problem
with Philip Glass and the Minimalists. We haven't begun to
answer the issues about interpreting him. We can barely
sustain the mental focus that he asks of us. Some call him
"Wallpaper Music" because of his slow changes, but it is the same
problem as with Mozart's endless repetition of slow thirds in his second
sonata and concerto movements. It all depends on "how
you are choosing to listen as to whether you 'get' the art or
not". The complaint is a shebboleth in that it
defines the one who is unable to pass beyond the "Gate" of complex
art.
The perspective of the
classically oriented Minimalists is not a new one. If
you look at every single orchestral page of Rimsky Korsakov's
Scherazade you will find the primary theme... on every
page! The same is true of the great Poulenc solo opera
"La Voix Humane" where the constant repeated phrase has a
different purpose than in Philip Glass or Steve Reich.
I've seen well known composers weep guiltily as they felt that they
should not be moved by such simplicity of a single idea endlessly repeated for
an hour of music. And then there is Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony.
So one man's "wallpaper" is
another man's "ecstasy." But that doesn't mean that
quality is subjective, only that perception and interpretation of quality
is.
In order to judge, you must first
be capable of reducing the complexity to zero and living within the
environment of the art without confusion. Only then, can you
decide whether the work has "integrity" (as in 1. The state or
quality of being entire or complete; wholeness; entireness; unbroken state;
as, the integrity of an empire or territory.) or
not. We might also decide whether the
art creates a complete unique universe that has its own rules and is
strong enough to allow us to step out of ourselves for a moment to look
back upon our own identity in order to judge our own "integration" as a
whole person.
One further note on "Old
Art."
If the questions posed by the "performance
problems" of the Art have been forgotten, as happened with the music of
the "Musica Ficta" era, then we can't travel on the backs of our
ancestors. We also have the added disadvantage in that the dead
composer can't tell us whether we are getting it right or not.
So a form of old art like Leonin and Perotin at Notre Dame becomes a kind
of guess as to whether it can exist at all today or not. We
can fake it (and read their words) but the music is a guess since at one point
the performance of their work stopped and was forgotten.
Included in the problem are the "reforms" of the
various Church Councils, Their meddling
should serve as examples of what happens when
"extra-artistic" values are given to Complex Art.
Complex Art has its own worth and values that spread out across a
personality and culture in beneficial ways without it being controlled
for external purposes. Purposes beyond the
development and preservation of identity in a "perceptual"
envelope. Even for someone close like J.S. Bach: If we
told the truth about Bach, we would have similar problems (with Affektenlehre)
but he is closer to us and the musical notation is more well
known. But the performance problems are the same.
In summing up, I would say when
traditions of a consistant complexity are slowly reduced to
zero and amazingly complex performance melds into the public
consciousness, even the man on the street begins to be able to not only
comprehend it but perform it as well. For example,
Wagner and the varismo vocal tradition that flowed out of his
chromaticism and orchestral volumes destroyed the early Bel Canto voices that
attempted to sustain careers in this "New Music."
Within fifty years you could hear the carpenters on the roofs of Milan singing
Puccini and Verdi in magnificent vocal tones that were destroying physical
instruments one generation earlier. I've heard it in the
Russian chemists who immigrated here from Russia and who never had a voice
lesson. Such sounds are NOT natural. But they do
evolve over time in cultures and through families.
On the other hand when a complex artistic
tradition is broken, complexity once more rises and if the
authority is lost then it becomes very difficult to recover the product for
anyone other than the expert or scholar. (It's happening
today in the Synagogues as the old music is becoming unsingable to the new
fashion in Cantorial tradition) Tradition is important
as a preserver of personal mastery for those who are not expert professionals
and may even be lost to the "professional experts" if the line of
authority is broken. (No more on this.)
In America, the manner in which
complex tradition was passed on up through the end of the 19th
century was that the complex arts were mixed with
entertainment. In the 1880s the "capitalization" of the
Arts into the hands of the wealthy was originally seen by all as a reformation
and upgrading of the quality of all programming. Such Art
was seen as "Holy" and the secular hall was compared to the sacredness of
the Church. They even banned applause at one point and threw
the "poor" out, who protested, as being uncultured and unappreciative of great
art. This was the time of "sonic booms" based upon Horn
Fifths and the acoustical resonance of the overtone system.
Other scales and modes were considered "out of tune" and
ugly. Only the nobility of the plagel cadence and its
evolution in chromaticism and Shenckarian Analysis of such was considered
cultured. I happen to love these things but like Country
Western music, they are artifacts of a time and place in cultural history and
not a rule for the future of time. Even Heinrich Schencker
admitted as much when he worked out his system.
In the American past, when the average
person, attending an opera or concert, was cheated out of a section
of that opera, or a movement from a symphony, there are ample records of
the middle and lower classes (including slaves in the southern US), tearing up
the seats of the auditorium and throwing their lunch at the stage.
The same is a part of the history of the evolution of the theater in
Europe with the peasant gallery, (the Orchestra or Pit seats under the
dripping candles), where the peasants sat and also threw their lunches
if they were cheated out of a serious performance of complex
art.
This was the best in their lives
and the identity of their children when that was about all of
the hope that they had for advancement. Today
in Milan, the audiences are still that way. If some performer
doesn't know the inner voices of an orchestral work as well as the communist
tailors do (who fix their coats), the response is
withering.
From the 1880s to the present America has been sold an
entertainment that is so simple that even our commedians on Television's
Saturday Night Live Show can endlessly improvise versions of
it. Today the technology is on the boards that would tailor make
advertising sent into individual homes via the Television that would
match the class and buying ability of the audience.
Gradually the cost of Complex Arts has risen to the point that it is
impossible for me to go to many of the events if I'm not working in
them. The wealthy economic class has worn down
the public with drivel until now the public expects and pays for the
same simple-minded widget bi-valve commercialism mentality that is found
on 99 % of the public radio and TV stations in America.
Such stations, as well as the movies admit only to a taste in sex and violence
as the meaning of entertainment. It is mindless, stupid and
deadening. Just as the elite "cultured folk"
would prefir the work force to be.
Complex Arts have to be taught but when they are taught
in school the general masses expect more than the wealthy are willing to give
up. That is the root of your educational failure and not
poor science education. Brains that are withered in the areas of
perception are not open to professions that require clarity and analysis
of those same perceptions. Stephen Hawking is an
exception as there are always exceptions. I know a few
myself.
I asked you a question about John Baptiste Say and you
gave me the statement about the taste of the cab driver being
inferior to the taste of the rich man in complex arts. I
will not take the cheap shot and claim a closer relationship to the poor than
you since I don't know whether that is true or not. But
poverty was not what stopped our people from learning, it was pollution and
lack of educational availability. The Cab Driver you
spoke of probably had less availibility to the complex arts than your
wealthy unless the Milanese and Berliner Cab Drivers are more cultivated than
the English. In the case of the French, German and Italian I
know that the audience understands and demands their national complex
culture's availability to the masses.
What is it about good composers like the late Romantic
English Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughn Williams that their melodies sound like
quotes of celtic folk music much of the time? The very thing
that made Gustav Mahler have such problems with his
generation. Today when we have forgotten the folk music of
Germany, that the average German peasant knew and improvised regularly, Mahler
seems fresher than he did to the New York critics and the musicians
of Austria and Germany who loved Mahler as a great conductor.
That we don't care today, is a change in our
ignorance not a change in the quality of Mahler's melodies. We are
more ignorant of imaginative melodic writing and bold harmonies than the
peasants and the Gypsies of Mahler's era who improvised beyond such
simplicities and who led composers like Schoenberg and Bartok into the world
of pure sound that had been left when the Roman Catholic church banned
polophony because of the French at Notre Dame.
Today even Mahler's melodies seem profound inspite of
the resemblance to the sweet, cloying melodies of Applachian Mountain
folks. I am related to those people and find their
expression both moving and artistic in a performing and integrated sense
but I would never mix up what they do with the intent, purpose and
aesthetic of complex art. What is emotionally complex is not the
same as what is architecturally so in the abstractions of complex
art.
Not long ago an English Opera Director came through
looking at Chamber Opera in America and was amazed at the desert he
encountered. He was polite but appalled. I was
embarrassed but caught between the twin boulders of Keynes and Say with no
place to move or grow. I talk to you and to the
group but most artists here are too depressed, enraged and cynical
to even enter this conversation. They consider my attendence
on such things as this list as an indication of my lead poisoning.
The Brain patterns that continually repeats a motion long after it has
been proven to be a useless waste of time.
Keith, I must comment that from you, a man in the music
business who hopes to make a living off of such things, it seems not to
make sense to me either. As a test to the workability
of what you are saying you should try limiting yourself to England and the
market that your economic beliefs leave you. Don't go
to the Continent where they still fund complex artistic productions through
their societal governments or to the Orient where they believe that they will
have our economic success if they imitate our cultural patterns.
That would be too easy. The first is already there and the
second doesn't know any better. Without the internet
and the ability to escape the society where your belief in "the cab
driver funding the rich in the 'upper class' arts that are
only for the rich" you would be limited to those folks in
selling your product. What kind of market would you
have? Why would a man who is in your business prefer the
argument of the artistically illiterate even if they are Nobel
Economists? The truth is in the product and they are
artistically, culturally and socially barren.
I apologize if my words be rude and
tough but is it not the way of business that one must speak from
reality and not from political correctness? The proof is in
success. Thus far, culturally here in America, the
only songs that are sung in the English language in complex artistic
products is an occasional academic product by a professional teacher or in the
one or two composers (in the third largest population and geography in the
world) like Ned Rorem who we will celebrate in our First Biennial American
Masters Arts Festival in New York. The problem is not to do
something once but to keep it up. Who will be the composer
honored for the Second Biennial American Masters Arts Festival in
2005? They have to have a broad enough repertory to be
performed in solo & choral concerts, operas, symphonies, chamber music
etc. for an entire month. Only Rorem can hold up his end on
this. Everyone else has spent their time teaching, earning a
living, putting bread in their children's mouths and treating English as if it
were an accursed language that has no voice or melody.
The only writers in English are the commercial 32 bar
song form endless ditties done from jazz to Hip-Hop with differing
performance techniques but the same tired architecture endlessly
repeated until the song is beaten out of the impending adult.
Adults who are either mute or mute with money to go hear someone sing in
a language they don't understand but who makes them feel good for being "not
as other men." That's quite an identity you're selling
Keith but it seems contradictory with the goals of your
business. Enlighten me.
Best,
Ray Evans Harrell
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 2:54
PM
Subject: The Arts and Keynes (was Share slumps
*are* harmful)
> Ray,
>
> I'm sorry but I don't understand why I'm "a
Keynesian in the serious arts".
> I certainly don't agree with
Keynes that ordinary taxpayers should be
> obliged to help pay for
English middle class tastes in opera, ballet,
> theatre and the like.
However, I suppose it gives additional relish to the
> enjoyment of
those who attend concerts at the Royal Opera House that the
> taxi
driver who drove them there was helping to pay for their tickets out
>
of his earnings.
>
> KSH
>
> At 11:44 09/02/03
-0500, you wrote:
> >I have a question Keith. Why
are you a Keynesian in the serious arts but
> >a follower of Jean
Baptiste Say when it comes to everything else? That is
>
>why I've never understood the difference between Henry George and Keynes
in
> >the ultimate scheme things since conversations long ago with
Harry centered
> >around a "lack of demand" for the serious Arts as
justification for the
> >current state of Arts economics affairs
here. But your statement was well
>
>put. It is an argument that I have made more than once
on this list and
> >never gotten a response so I wish you
better luck.
> >
> >REH
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
------------
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music,
http://www.handlo.com
> 6
Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622;
Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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