Composers Forum is a daily web log that allows invited contemporary composers to share their thoughts and ideas on any topic that interests them--from the ethereal, like how new music gets created, music history, theory, performance, other composers, alive or dead, to the mundane, like getting works played and recorded and the joys of teaching. If you're a professional composer and would like to participate, send us an e-mail.
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Monday, February 21, 2005
Seventy-five years later
Rodney Lister’s post (below) is fascinating for many reasons, but there’s one way of summarizing it that I find particularly haunting:
- 1930: no one knew there was any such thing as American Folk music.
- 2005: no one knows there is any such thing as American Art music.
Of course, these are broad generalizations, but they speak to a common blind spot in our cultural self-awareness. Why can’t the most pluralistic society on the planet imagine itself creating great music of every kind?
posted by Lawrence Dillon
8:54 PM
re: Music and Politics
Art and Politics have always existed in a sort of dysfunctional symbiosis. Artists use art to justify or promote political ideologies, and politicians use art for the same purposes. But Artists and the public and politicians also condemn works of art, or aesthetic practices, for exhibiting ideologies that they disapprove of. Shakespeare wrote plays expressly designed to curry favor with royalty, the entire system of artistic patronage by royalty and religions imposed political restrictions on artistic expression, Hitler co-opted Wagner, and the Soviets exerted creative control over the state's artists while in the US the communist artists used art to promote their Socialist viewpoints. And just in the last few years, John Adams got cancelled for being to sympathetic to the terrorists in Klinghoffer, and then Pullitzered and Grammied for writing a tribute to the September 11 victims. It's never going to stop, but even if we think the relationship is dysfunctional and unhealthy, to demand that artists withdraw from the political arena is itself an act of political oppression.
So what do we do about it? We encourage audiences to do their best to separate Aesthetics from Morality. We ask the audience to defuse the problem. Stupid art has been made about great ideas, and great art has been made about terrible ideas; if we can separate the two, we are better equipped to appreciate all art and less vulnerable to manipulation by politicians and artists alike. We can make our political decisions on the practical merits, and our artistic choices on the aesthetic merits.
Now none of this is going to stop me from writing music that advocates a political viewpoint -- but if you ignore my opinion and only listen to the music I promise not to be offended.
posted by Galen H. Brown
4:27 PM
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