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Hello, Ray and Keith:
I am enjoying your exchanges on musical aesthetics
and musicology.
In terms of the elitism of Charles Ives, I have to
be sympathetic to the perspective of Keith. Ives was a solid member of the
American business class [corporate elite] and a graduate of Yale, at a time when
postsecondary education was rarely a component in the dreams of the American
working class. Musical traditions within his family, furthermore,
encouraged and shaped the unique music voice contained in his
compositions.
I am familiar with the music of Charles Ives.
Interestingly, he did not gain much recognition [like many artists] until the
twilight of his career.
Personally, I am not enamoured of Ives'
compositions. I like my Americana more in the vein of Aaron Copland,
rather than the bitonality of Ives' reading of American popular melodies.
I suspect Copland and Ives were ideological opposites in their reading of the
'people's music.' This in no way is intended to detract from his
uniqueness. After all, he did win a Pulitzer Prize for his Third
Symphony - but I still like Copland's 3rd, better. That glorious, full
reading of his 'Fanfare for the Common Man.' Ecstasy!
As I said, I am enjoying your
dialogue.
Bob Bowd
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2003 1:00 PM
Subject: [Futurework] Re: I like (some)
pop music (was: Classical Music in Enlgand)
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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