https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/editorial-the-arts-have-failed-us/
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-silence-of-the-arts/
...
Too much can be expected of art. The cliché that art has become a substitute — or even actual — religion for too many civilised people is a commonplace for a reason: they have mistaken what art is there to do. Which, more often than not, is to decorate life, not fulfil it. Art serves purposes, it doesn’t provide them.
...
On the one hand, such a claim is the ultimate bullet to the head of "autonomous music" anyone could have written, for popular magazine standards. On the other hand ... there's Lebrecht's reaction to suggestions that Beethoven represents a racist and elitist standard ... .
If art decorates life rather than fulfills it then who can afford and would also find suitable to buy the "decoration" of another Beethoven box set? I love Beethoven's last piano sonata. Just because I generally hate Beethoven's choral music and think he had a penchant for being a bloviating blowhard in some of his works doesn't mean I don't admire Beethoven! Mozart and Haydn wrote better choral music because they sang in choirs and anyone who has sung and sung choral literature can feel that two of the Big Three had actually bothered to sing in vocal ensembles! All the same, since the folks at The Critic made a point of saying art decorates life ...
If that's the case then why do people want to "decorate life"? I am probably not as earnest as George Rochberg was about art as a surrogate for religious belief as he seems to have been according to a recent biography. On the other hand, having read George Rochberg's writings his argument that art ornaments life could be seen as a "decorates life" but with something more important than mere decoration. Rochberg saw the arts as a form of individual and collective memory. Although Rochberg was not observantly Jewish for the majority of his life it's not exactly a stretch that memory and shared history are important. I've picked up Jacob L Wright's latest book on the Hebrew Bible, about which I hope to do some writing in 2021 because Wright's book David, King of Israel and Caleb in Biblical Memory was a pretty dense read but a very worthy read! For folks who find the price tag of the physical book daunting the Kindle edition is out and cheaper. So War, Memory and National Identity in the Hebrew Bible has to wait until probably 2021 (I hope) before I blog about it. I have to finish the book first. I think art is more than something that "decorates" life, it can play a role in individual and cultural memory.
So art that is around to "decorate" life might plausibly have a crisis of purpose in a pandemic. If art can do other things, like commemorate life, there's a reason for it. But I admit to skepticism about the arts and their role in Western societies as having moved from a consumer good to what some lament is a subscription service. Lebrecht has been concerned that there is a culture war and that it has been waged by progressives. I don't think I buy that because there's a case to be made that tensions in the arts as industries have been around for ... a while.
That the arts has workers and that the workers who aren't at the top of the celebrity heap aren't paid as well is not hard to go dig up. Having never actually earned a living even as a journalist, let alone as any kind of arts worker, I am doubtful that "we" in the United States should approach the arts as something that can or should be monetized for regular citizens. It's not so much that I think that arts workers are part of a financial elite but they could be construed as part of a cognitive elite, a cognitive elite that is more and more able to grasp the chasm between one form of elite status and another (the finance sector, etc).
If the arts decorate life rather than give it purpose then maybe Lebrecht can articulate why anyone should be worried that opera as it has been in the U.S. may vanish in the wake of the Metropolitan Opera season closure.
https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/breaking-the-met-stays-shut-for-a-year/
https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/now-the-met-faces-pay-cuts-and-staff-losses/
https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/is-this-the-end-of-opera-in-america/
Yes, yes, the arts make up a significant part of local economies but what this reminds me of is that while concert life has taken a hit all kinds of music-making are in a rough spot in the U.S. when choral performances can turn out to be vectors of covid-19 choral music is in a bad way.
As a hobbyist I look at the scene in the era of covid-19 and I can't help but remember Hindemith's scathing remark about how U.S. music education was good at making music teachers who made more music teachers rather than at making musicians who took music with them where ever they went even if they weren't going to be music professionals. I am, to be clear, in favor of people getting musical educations, but I suspect that music education should be re-centered around inviting and encouraging people to make their own music more than it should be geared toward vocationally working as a professional musician in a job market where the arts are seeing a lot of bad things going on in the U.S. If the United States keeps botching pandemic conditions the way it has been then, to be deliberately provocative about this point, the future of American music may be better preserved through a sea of amateurs than it will be through professionals or tomorrow's would-be professionals who may find the jobs are drying up.
It may be that like a century ago back around the Roaring Twenties or so there could be "rent parties" in which local musicians play concerts in homes where collections could be taken so that the tenants could pay their rent. That's a tradition known among African American communities and Thomas A. Dorsey played the house part scene as a blues musician before he had his conversion experiences and switched entirely to Gospel music but that's by way of a tangent, as I often take those.
To invoke a more, ahem, European precedent of music made in homes, the era of covid-19 might give us a chance to revisit music-making in an era that can often be sniffed at in music history, that old Beidermeier ethos. Was the music "light" and "trivial" compared to big symphonic works by important and long-since canonized composers? Sure, you can say that but the flute, horn and guitar trios of Christian Dickhut (aka Charles Dickhut) are not "bad" music. Here's a sample. Conservative? Yeah, but in a the time of a pandemic scaling things down might not be a bad idea. I'd sooner write a bunch of chamber music that just a couple of musicians could play together in the time of covid-19 than try to write yet another symphony that, as an American, would likely get maybe one performance and never get heard again.
When the Thirty Years War was raging in Europe Heinrich Schutz stripped down the scope of his musical art to the barest of bones. His Kleine geistliche Konzerte Parts 1 and 2 were stripped down works. If you read through the opening pieces you'll see the barest of bare figured bass in the score and a single vocal line. You better be comfortable reading every movable form of the C clef!
I'm admitting my bias straightforwardly, I'm a guitarist and I think in the United States that guitarists can potentially pick up where more "traditional" forms of music-making in the classical musical scenes may be faltering. It may be alarmism on Lebrecht's part to ask whether or not American opera will survive the closure of the Met. Whether or not any top-tier opera company will commit to recording the complete Troubled Island by William Grant Still is probably moot. Adorno warned half a century ago that opera as a whole was basically an obsolete form and I don't mention that to invite a debate on whether Adorno was right so much as to highlight that Adorno made that case in an English language work from within the United States. In other words, to give Adorno a semi-charitable reading in his remarks on opera, the American context within which he implied opera was a non-starter because opera was passing away doesn't mean he was right so much as that if there has been an American operatic canon even the majority of Americans probably don't know those operas. I mean, how many people listen to The Tender Land (which I honestly don't like because I'm not a Copland fan) or Sussanah (which I kinda do)?
As pliable has written at On An Overgrown Path, the endless supply of box sets of the Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies don't exactly leave room for other work to get heard. Pliable has also written about biases in contemporary classical journalism against any kind of electronic anything, for instance, EDM. I don't know if I'm personally going to learn a ton from a trance DJ as Pliable suggests classical music could learn, but, hey, I don't object in principle to conversations in which music-makers across styles encourage a synergistic exchange across styles and forms. Go for it. The over-arching proposal that classical music (as a nexus of industries) has not learned how to connect to an audience that has been re-wired by the last century and a half of technological changes and associated shifts in cognition is not a point I think we should ignore. Instead of complaining about the shortened attention spans of prospective (or actual) audiences (if you have them!) consider that inattentive listeners were a norm in the eighteenth century, too. If Rachmaninoff could tell a friend he'd stop playing one of his large-scale variation sets after he heard cough and round the set to a close; if Haydn could attentively observe what effects audiences liked and do more of that while attentively noting what things they didn't seem to like and do less of that; then something comparable could be tried now.
Except .... of course, who even gets to play live music these days?
We don't have to play that dumb. Scaling musical moments down to the four or five minute span and making more of those could work. If Lebrecht frets that grandiloquence on the scale of Mahler or Shostakovich and company is getting lost it may have to be lost. Heinrich Schutz had to strip his art down to the bone during his lifetime. We might also have to consider that a music educational regime that, as Hindemith angrily put it, cranks out only music teachers who teach music teachers rather than making people who love music and make it whether they're paid professionals or not, needs to be reconsidered.
I admit that as an amateur guitarist and composer I'm disposed to side with Hindemith about problems in American music education on that front. Teach people how to make their own music in whatever style they want. If the jobs aren't out there and lay-offs are rampant and people are stuck in a miserable gig economy and the winner-take-all market has become what it seems to be, Lebrecht and company can lament that art hasn't said anything but that seems doubtful in the extreme. If art "decorates" life rather than giving it a purpose then the decorations we can afford may mean that some kinds of "decoration" may stop being economically viable in the form it's taken up until now.
I'm a bit too pragmatic to think things are "over". Even Taruskin, who wrote his Oxford History thinking that classical music was dying, concluded by the time he finished his project that classical music isn't dying, it's changing, and what it changes into remains to be seen. If the way the pandemic has played out in the United States keeps on as it has, I can kind of see why Lebrecht might wonder if the big operatic or symphonic scenes in the United States will survive the era of covid-19.
I hope they do but, writing as a guitarist, I think we guitarists should keep doing our thing. If more and more orchestral musicians can't play in the pit chamber music is still available and as Matanya Ophee told all classical guitarists decades ago, if we want some kind of future with a steady audience outside the insular niche of guitar societies chamber music should be where we look. Taruskin wrote in a mere sentence in Oxford that the guitar was basically not a part of the Western literate music tradition. That's not true, of course, even if a concert full of etudes by Sor and Villa-Lobos and Albeniz transcriptions will be likely to please classical guitarists as listeners only.
As Ethan Hein shared in a recent video, the moment where a kid wants to do a wind band arrangement of a hip hop song is absolutely coming our way. We might both balk at that prospect for possibly different reasons (wind bands are really loud! Even with a microphone balancing issues would be weird) but I'm still ultimately in favor of music traditions interacting. I've been soapboxing at this blog for years that we need a restored synergistic exchange across styles, that the ruts that popular musical styles and classical music have gotten into in the post-World War 2 era of United States musical activity has been a mixture of market constraints (both the niches of marketing and, per Karl Hagstrom Miller's Segregating Sound, racist patterns of musical segregation within the nascent recording industry), and the previously noted Hindemithian complaint about pedagogical myopia, roughly the teachers-making-teachers rather than teaching students to make music for fun-but-not-necessarily-monetary-profit.
Lebrecht's fears are about music as industry. As a complete bystander to those industries who, obviously, likes reading about them, I can't help but think (and feel) that music-making is going to continue and that people will keep on "decorating" life without seeing it as their purpose in life.
If the arts decorate life rather than give it purpose, we're living in era in which decorating life, if that's the best that can be said for what the arts can do, arts that are monetized and have a commercial reception history, then maybe the crisis of the arts in the covid-19 era in the Anglo-American West is that they have been revealed to be a lucrative but ultimately trivial pursuit. These are the times when I am reminded that American composers like Sousa and even Hindemith (for a time) staked out an ideal that the lifeblood of a culture's music would be found in the music-making of its amateurs before professional paid players and writers emerged to crystallize what that musical culture was doing.
Some thoughts for a weekend.
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