Voices About the Hall
Excellent piece, Grim. In architecture, you can see it as well. Most common is the appropriation of the classical form as a symbol of timelessness and power. Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, was really quite a talent, but toward bad ends. He developed the backdrop for the massive rallies that showcased the intoxicating power of Hitlers speeches, that made him seem bigger than life. Yes, art can be powerful, and power can cause one to lose good judgment as readily as drink.
You should expand on this and submit it to some Art oriented publications. Ethics is something that needs more discussion amongst artists.
Curiously, in the West today, rather than art being appropriated for political ends, politics (of the individual) has appropriated art, and much for the worse, I'd say.
Oh dear. I think you missed my point--which in part was yes, that WWI was a sea change, but more importantly, technology changed everything.
Its not that the music is broken. It is changed. And you cannot change it back.
And really, the pioneers that Roosevelt was talking about--actually *when* he was talking about--were not the sort that would have been listening to Wagner in the first place. And he's probably overstating the case to make his point.
If it is a strength that has gone out of the world (and I think you're channeling Tolkien waaaaay to much here), it is the strength of homogenous culture yoked to industrial civilization that still has gate-keepers that essentially tell everyone what's good form and bad.
Grim, you often invoke 'the West' as if its a monolithic bloc which it never was--and has two World Wars (three if you count the Cold War) and 100 million dead to prove it.
Ultimately, you need to be very careful what you ask for here. You posit that this music is power, and can be used for good or ill--and point back to the ways that it was used by those totalitarians. Well, if you want to define and use the music that way, you will eventually advocate tyranny as well.
Let's unpack a few things, here.
First, the Roosevelt quote is provided only to show how a thing can be "powerful for good and evil." That is the nature of power.
Second, your argument that technology/gatekeepers are what is at work misses the point. If the point were only that nobody can tell you what is good, then that's fine. But the point is -- listen to the Tannhauser.
Nobody has to tell you anything about it. Either it has the power, or it does not.
Who makes that now?
Finally, this point:
"You posit that this music is power, and can be used for good or ill--and point back to the ways that it was used by those totalitarians. Well, if you want to define and use the music that way, you will eventually advocate tyranny as well."
Music can be used by tyrants, and has been -- but it was not tyrants who made it. Indeed, gatekeepers such as you mention, including tyrants, have not been able to produce it well on their own. The Russian Red Army Chorus is magnificiently talented, and always was: but none of the Soviet music is like this. The Chinese are deeply willing to use music in this way, but they cannot make it.
It was a free heart that made this music, however it was later used. It was also a fearless heart, linked to a mind that mastered its craft.
We have free hearts now; and we have some minds that master their craft, though not as many as once. What was lost is the fearlessness.
By the way, consider what you say here:
"Ultimately, you need to be very careful what you ask for here."
What I am asking for is for music of this beauty and power to be written again. I assert that it isn't, chiefly because people are afraid of it.
Your response to my wish for such music is, "You need to be very careful what you wish for."
Does that not make the point?
By coincidence, I just performed the Tannhäuser overture (albeit a slightly different version--I forget which is the Paris and which is the Dresden version, but it was the other, longer ending) last weekend, and let me tell you, this magnificent piece is a real workout!
Grim, the fearlessness must come not just from the music's composer, but from the performing musicians as well. Therein lies the other half of the problem.
An ideally effective musical ensemble rests on fearless individual pursuit of competence, coupled with the collective willingness to perform fearlessly. As your Red Army Chorus example illustrates, This was possible even in the Soviet Union, for the craft of performing well, unlike composing out of bounds, was not officially frowned upon (from what little I know).
The quality of the performance is like the cleanliness of the pane of glass that separates the audience from the composer's ideas. A great performance lets you clearly see what is there, even to the point of forgetting the glass is there in the first place. A bad, or worse, indifferent performance of Tannhäuser...
But even as great an ensemble as the Red Army Chorus had difficulty saying something effective with a terrible piece of music, although as many politicians have found the mellifluous sound of that voice will be enough for some. Also, the very existence of great ensembles is due to the depth and breadth of the talent pool inspired by great music, in somewhat of a chicken and egg relationship.
All of that is somewhat of a sidebar to music's capacity to stir and to reveal the passions of human beings, and how that relates to writing great music.
Not long after Wagner, those who wrote 12-tone and other serial music, unfortunately wrenching Western music away from its tonal roots, were trying to make "new" art, defining themselves and their work as "not what has gone before." Now this is a frequent tactic employed by anyone searching for new things, but in this case they were abandoning the fundamental mathematical relationships that produce tonality itself, and the new structure created was insufficiently based in reality to resonate more than academically with human beings.
It is entirely possible, given the horror of WWI, that they were actively fleeing from the emotional leverages exerted by tonal music, perhaps looking to escape the ravages of passion althgether. However, in doing so, they created music that has no staying power outside of academic circles, where passion is also theoretically held at arm's length.
Passion has found its way back into music to some extent, for it is an inescapable part of being human, but its return to music is incomplete. People are often fearless about expressing doom and gloom, and there are some marvellously dark pieces of music that have been written since 12-tone seriality lost its initial appeal. What is still missing is that fearless acknowledgment of the greatness of the human spirit that pervades many of the old masterworks of the craft.
Also still missing is the philosophical wherewithal to remarry the motive power of passion to the sharp analytical tools of intellect, producing an integrated view of human nature that allows us to use both with optimism tempered by respect, instead of by despair. Once the culture begins to teach how to integrate the emotions instead of be used dangerously by them (out of an ignorance generated by fear), the music will return in one form or another.
Love the blog, by the way.
8-)
Well, though it was written in the '30's, there's "power" here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sta...8Szymanowski%
29
And I would argue that a good deal of Catholic church music written in the 1950's/60's (before the iconoclasts took over the temple) was quite powerful, albeit that the stuff was not written for performance halls. See, e.g., Flor Peeters' Mass Ordinaries (St. Joseph, St John the Baptist,) possibly still available from Peters of Holland.
Also see MacMillan's "St John Passion"--written only a year ago--or Britten's "War Requiem," written early 1960's.
"powerful for good and evil,"
One of the current problems with Western civilization, IMNSHO, is that because such power has been used for evil on occasion, a significant fraction wish to forswear it's use altogether rather than determine to use it only for good. Many see the evil as outweighing the good and see the solution as an overall destruction of the West (or Christianity, or other such).
Grim, I would say that the problem is not that we lack fearlessness; as I have said before, fear is a good and useful and even necessary thing. What we lack is courage; the ability to overcome our fear and do what needs to be done anyway. It's often masked by saying, "Well, we really don't need to do that" or "We have no right to do that." In many cases, people lack the courage to even name good and evil, pretending that all cultures are equivalent.
Not long after Wagner, those who wrote 12-tone and other serial music, unfortunately wrenching Western music away from its tonal roots, were trying to make "new" art, defining themselves and their work as "not what has gone before."
There seems to be a philosophy among artists that art is meant to shock; that if it does not shock it is not art, and that if it shocks it is art. The idea that art is meant to raise all manner of emotions and thoughts among the viewers/hearers is no longer popular. Perhaps because to do so is beyond the skills of many of those who would claim the title of "artist". "New" does not mean "better". In fact, it does not even mean "good".
Grim - I have appreciated reading this blog now for a few months, and I would love to jump in on this 'band'wagon as it were.
I love the music and politics angle. Wagner - in particular - is a polarizing figure. He is either loved or hated; hardly anyone hears his music and just...shrugs. It's our century's great loss that Hitler had to appropriate Wagner's music. Even though it's historically documented in Wagner's own writings that he himself was anti-semitic, I highly doubt that he would be as controversial a figure had it not been for Hitler. We might all think he was just .. a rat bastard .. but would perhaps grant him the benefit of the doubt and gloss over that fact because his music is beautiful. So many 'genius' musicians were/are certifiably crazy. Troubled. The Tortured Artists. Love triangles between Brahms, Schumann and Schumann's Wife. Real-life Don Juans (perhaps why Mozart could write Don Giovanni so well in the first place was from experience). It should not matter what the composer's personality is or is not - they are human like the rest of us, and given to imperfections. However, they have the extraordinary gift of being able to transcend those imperfections to create works of beauty.
(NB: I can see the point that for some people listening to Wagner brings up associated memories or feelings of a particularly painful nature.) But then again...here comes the question of power...and with great power comes great responsibility (a la Spiderman...!)
Shostakovich and his fellow Russians were forced to leave home because they were a THREAT to the government. They were seen as being capable of "riling" the masses...inciting them to fight (back) by tapping into those parts of the human spirit only easily reached by art. So, as musicians, they were trying to use their power for good of the people, but were forced - politcally - to leave.
The thing about a great deal of "modern" music (think Schoenberg, Boulez, 12-tone serialism, even Glass to some extent) is that very suddenly emotion and feeling got shoved aside, thus making room for intellectualism for intellectualism's sake. I've sung and studied a lot of these composers...and in a way, they are satisfying. To finally wrap one's brain around an atonal piece of music and attempt to make sense of it is a nice feeling for one's ego, that's for sure. But they are difficult for to connect to emotionally - it's like making poetry out of a medical dictionary. Once in a while you're bound to hit on a gem...but not often. The flip side is being a technically perfect performer but an emotionally dead one, no matter what the vehicle of your emotion is. I have sat through performances of Chopin which bored me to literal tears. Lots of young virtuosi-types have this problem: they have spent hours since the age of 3 perfecting their scales, but don't have a 'musical' bone in their body.
There is a great deal of burden on performing artists today to try and bring life to "modern" music. It's hard enough to bring life to the "classics" when those composers give you so much to work with already!I don't care a great deal for Phillip Glass' freestanding music - it's too repetitive (minimalistic) for me. However, he writes very effective film scores. Maybe because there is something else to pay attention to as opposed to just the music...ha.
All this said, I think there ARE composers of the 20th century which live up to the rank of "genius" composers along with Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, etc. Take Olivier Messiaen...I had the rare pleasure of seeing his opera St. Francois d'Assise performed here in SF about 5 years ago - it was composed in the late 1970s-early 80s, and is truly Wagnerian in scale (4+ hours long). I was brought to tears many times for it's beauty - both musically, and dramatically. Samuel Barber's re-scored "Adagio for strings" for voices on an Agnue Dei text is heartbreaking (the original is wonderful enough!)
Anyway. For background on myself...I'm an opera singer. I went to a Conservatory and well-known liberal arts university and have spent a great deal of time studying and thinking about these very things. It's really exciting to be able to hop back in a debate like this...so thanks!
(I'm sorry if this post is disjointed...but I usually write out my essays and then type them as opposed to through-composing them on the computer, lol.)
Welcome to the discussion. :)
The debate is useful for me as well, both in understanding the problems more thoroughly; and in learning about the remaining hot spots where there are embers that could spring up new flame. Your pointing to Olivier Messiaen is one of those useful things.
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