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You need to start over and stop dealing with me
from the stereotypes in your head. I'm certainly capable of
comparing my peasant credentials with anyone and I had a hip-hop star on the
charts in the UK last year. I enjoy vulgarity as much as the next
person. You are talking to me as if I were a dilettante.
I'm not. I've made a decent living and done a lot in this field for
48 years. I also work off of a model that I believe is far superior
to the old failed model that has strangled us for 75 years and has now crushed
our orchestras. But first you should go back and read what you
wrote. Ives earned his money and he was a great
composer. You should become familiar with his songs if
you want to understand Emerson or America.
The people you describe with family money are a
different case completely. As for elite. You are still
stuck in the aristocracy. That is a strawman. It
was the Italians who supported the Renaissance and it is the Americans and
English who get their complex art for nothing. That makes them
pikers and thieves or maybe hunter gatherers. In the arts like in
language, you can either speak the language or you can't. It is an issue
of competence or not. Even today the tailors of Bologna
know more opera than most opera singers. That is why they
pay. They know and can explain greatness when they hear
it. Anything else is just hedonism. The desires of the
ignorant are limited. So stop the world in your mind and read
what I said again.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 12:40
PM
Subject: I like (some) pop music (was:
Classical Music in Enlgand)
At 10:20 01/06/2003 -0400, you
wrote:
<<<<
Keith,
You deny the experience of one of the
greatest entrepreneurs of his day Charles Ives. Ives was a superlative
businessman who earned millions and set the stage for the modern business of
Insurance in the US. At the same time he was the most advanced composer of his
day as well.He finally came to the conclusion that no composer worth his salt
COULD write for money. He said that the audiences had lace on their underwear
and couldn't take a good chord on the chin. That the only option for a serious
musician who knew his craft was to choose to write garbage or to make a living
some other way and write what the muse dictated.
>>>>
I
don't know Charles Ives' work, so I can't give you my personal opinion of it.
However, I would characterise his views as written above as that of an elitist
and it doesn't incline me to him.
<<<<
What we we
may be dealing with here Keith is the issue of the truths of one art being
transfired to another and you coming up with a lie. However serious poets
don't make a living selling their poems either for the very educational
reasons you decry. I think the blockhead was Dr. Johnson in your statement.
Too much Newtonian science and too little metaphysics that gave Newton balance
to understand that he didn't know everything on the
planet.
>>>>
Sorry, but I don't know what you mean by
the "truths" of an art or my "coming up with a lie". You're talking here
of Platonic notions that I don't have any idea of.
<<<<
Is Dr. Johnson Samuel Johnson? If so,
he did a good thing in developing the dictionary but his provenciality
is one of the root causes in the problems that we have with English today. He
began but many of the ways he began have turned out to be blind alleys or even
negative.However should he not have begun since English does not fit Latin?
His Dictionary was useful in an immediate way but it also was limiting of the
language in a ultimate sense. But that's a different
post.
>>>>
That sounds a bit elitist to me! I shouldn't
say any of this in front of someone from Chesterfield (a provincial city
famous for its twisted church spire).
<<<<
English
composers have had a terrible time making money with their music and have had
to make their living in other ways just as have
we.
>>>>
When are you talking about? Some of the early
composers such as Byrd or Purcell or Handel became millionaires. Several of
the 'greatest' English composers of the last century had plenty of family
money behind them, and were very comfortable without any earnings from their
music. Composing was really a hobby for them, as it was, apparently, for
Charles Ives (and there's nothing wrong with that).
<<<<
On the other hand the Italian people have a strong
sense of what their lives are about aesthetically and such a feeling is always
a shock to people like my daughter who just came home from a visit to Umbria.
She wanted to move there immediately. She couldn't believe the beauty
and the wonderful people inspite of the fact that they don't like Americans
much at this time. So in Italy you could make a living composing, writing,
sculpting and painting once. Whether that is still true today is another
issue.
>>>>
I would suggest that Italian artists of the
Rennaissance (Michaelangelo, Cellini, Brunelseschi) were very conscious of the
importance of the rates they were paid for their work by their patrons. Later,
the Italian composers (Verdi, Puccini, etc) were also very aware of the
takings at the opera box office.
<<<<
It isn't because
Art is dead but because people live more in the past as the past is written
down. Living in the past creates a problem for the present and the education
of the present. In that sense, the whole of Art can be used as the
English you describe are using TV. Especially old comfortable Art
no matter how wonderful it is. Remember the guys who slashed the
Guernica and broke both the Pieta and the David, were poor out of work
artists. Too much old Art can drown the
present.
>>>>
I don't understand this, I'm afraid.
<<<<
The other problem is
Entertainment. The traditional solution of Augustus to create the
public killing field and drown the public's woes in entertainment is still
carried on in the West in the Television. But Entertainment
is the vulgar form of art and art at its most banal although murderous at
times. Everyone dies but everyone is not capable of
creating greatness. The audience can be an audience of
dummies or an audience of masterful people conscious because they too can do
the art and know its language. The game of art is producing
the winner who can MAKE an audience out of the other artists whether
professional or amateur through sheer greatness. Actors still do
that in Greenwich Village in the bars where they perform scenes for each other
for rounds of drinks.
Economics as an indicator of
art is such a collosal failure that I find it bizarre that you still hang to
such an out of date failed idea. It makes all of your
observations suspect in my mind. But of course that is too easy a
way out for me. But it does make you a
challenge. Its good I like you. Perhaps we
could use that as a metaphor for the significance of "like" in all
interactions including the observation of the three forms of contemporary
Art. Vulgar, common and
complex.
>>>>
I'm sorry if my comments on art make you
suspicious of all my observations. As you say, it certainly is an easy way out
for you. Incidentally, I dislike most pop music, but there's a lot that that I
like quite as much as classical music. Perhaps that observation really throws
me into outer darkness!
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson,
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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