Saturday Miscellany
Quick–whodunnit?
Classical music; in the twentieth century; with the… twelve-tone row? PhD? Rock music? New York Phil?
(The corpse he’s mistaking for classical music is in fact his idea of what classical music was. I say: Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!)
And go support our pal Jeffrey Phillips tomorrow. His Cadillac Moon Ensemble is making their NYC debut at the Nicholas Roerich Museum. They will be rendering works by Berio, Christian Wolff, and some guy named Jeffrey Phillips. Hmm…
Amis was a populist, and it made perfect sense for him to be against high modernism – the movement which his comment was directed at. I don’t know that he ever weighed in on (or had much knowledge of) minimalism or Fluxus or any other schools, he might have found himself fonder of them. He probably would have admired Cardew, at least philosophically. He actually had a lot of issues with jazz as he grew older – he only liked it up to the point “it began to be studied in universities” – after that, it was ruined. He was angered at the academicization of what had been a “people’s” music, found it to be stripped of soul.
In defense of Amis, the pedophilia quote is a metaphor, not a comparison or a direct value judgement. He was saying that modern music is about as easy to explain to the Average Joe as would be pedophilia – i.e. it is simply so alien, so anti-intuitive, that most normal people simply cannot understand or emotionally “connect” with it. Point is, he wasn’t morally comparing it to pedophilia. Though admittedly, he also thought most high modernist music sucked ass.
Of course, we now live in the era of 15-year old pop stars with boob jobs, American Apparel billboards, and the mainstreaming of Larry Clark. So nowadays the modern music he spoke of may very well be less understandable than pedophilia.
It all depends on how success is defined for classical music. In the big picture it’s dead, 1-2% market share, rivaling jazz at the bottom of the heap.
But as a ‘niche’ music it will continue to flourish. That’s why some people commenting on the linked page can say (apparently with a straight face) ‘Classical music isn’t dead, I saw some youngsters at a concert the other day!’
Classical music is in effect dead, why not just enjoy the quiet? 🙂
Y’know, we on the left are always accused of injecting ideology into everything, and yet everything I’ve ever read (from the late 20th and early 21st century in the USA) that injects ideology into culture (including the charge that the left is making everything ideological) is coming from the so-called culture warriors of the right wing.
One of life’s great ironies.
WF
The pedophilia quote is from British novelist Kingsley Amis. His heyday was in the 50’s-60’s if I’m not mistaken. Anyhow, he was apparently into jazz which I guess left no room for anything else… ?
Re: the “Death of classical” post. Who the f^@& are these people? I mean, you’ve got one guy who quotes from a ‘scholar’ who compares contemporary music to pedophilia. That’s where I stopped reading. Well, I browsed downward. Most of the responses were like “I heard a few measures of a piece from the 1960s once, and hated it. I never want to hear any of post 1911 music ever again.” Some people are more sympathetic. One person made a list of ‘masterpieces written after 1945’, and I think all the pieces (only about 5) were written before 1960. Not bad, actually, if you can think of 5 masterpieces written in a 15-year period.
What’s annoying is that they speak with the tone of authority….