Thanks for your comments and encouragement, Joe.
I wasn't so much commenting about art music per se as about music education in general even failing the younger generation who might be interested in popular rather than art music. I will get to that in a later blog.
"No Child Left Behind" needs to take its place besides the many other empty slogins and gestures of the Bush administration.
All the best,
Ed
posted by Ed @ 11:30 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Since I have only set up this account today (June 23rd, 2008), I've not decided what to put here yet.
I would suggest that you post comments about classical music, computer music or my website to begin with.
http://www.egoldmidincd.com
And let's keep it all polite!
Thanks,
Ed Gold
This blog is a very worthwhile endeavor, Ed. I can only agree with you that art music is in a very sorry state, largely because of the equally sorry state of music education in the public schools. Of course, this can be understood in the broader context of the economic and cultural decline of the United States. Here in Florida, budgets for the arts have been slashed, and music has been cut back drastically: here in Gainesville, those schools still offering music can do so for only half a year! Our state colleges and universities have also been targeted for severe budget cuts, with highly capable tenure-track professors in the humanities being dismissed without warning.
Yes, there is a political dimension to this as well: "No Child Left Behind" has diverted attention away from the arts, and terribly inept and unconscionable foreign and economic policies have drained resources that might have sustained and shored up cultural programs, social services, and infrastructure. We've fallen on very hard times, indeed, but I doubt any change of administration can undo the damage, some of which is directly attributable to a "free-market" in which what sells isn't necessarily what's demonstrably good, but merely what appeals to increasingly debased popular tastes.
Some may call the above take "elitist," but I see it, rather, as an appeal for positive change, even given the terrible odds against our turning things around in our lifetimes.
Best,
Joseph D. Ford
I think most Americans--including many Republicans--now agree the "W" years have been a bust on virtually every count. But America's problems are even more deeply engrained, and manifest in its musical culture. I certainly have no objection to popular entertainment, but it's painfully evident that even in that domain there has been a marked coarsening of lyrics and decline in memorable melodic quality since the days of Gershwin, Kern, and Porter. The personality of the individual performer seems to trump aesthetic substance now more than ever before. There's just no way Justin Timberlake, the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, or Madonna can be equated with the likes of Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, or even the early Beatles. Mediocrity seems to have triumphed, in the arts as well as in the political sphere, and I doubt that most Americans would even know what "art music" even means.
Best,
Joe
I think Madonna is a one-woman publicity mill.
But I think also the Beatles were at least partially classically-based and Paul McCartney even wrote several works in classical-style in his later career. Yes, collaborations and maybe not so wonderful!
There are also Bruce Springsteen and the late John Denver who I think are a cut above the rest.
And maybe even the early Michael before he totally lost his mind!
Best,
Ed
I listen to all kinds of music, and I can say there are some pop tunes over the past few decades whose intrinsic musicality recommends them to anyone who isn't vulnerable to confusing the mere personality of the performer with artistic quality. A few examples that come to mind are "Hello" (sung by Lionel Ritchie); "The Crying Game" (sung by Boy George); and "If" (sung by Bread). All these tunes are melodically and harmonically distinctive and consequently memorable in a way that Britney's and Jason's ululations will never be.
I have no objection to physically attractive or eccentric-looking young singers who know how to strut their stuff and hold the stage. but we've gotten far too much of that at the expense of musical substance. And I do object on ethical grounds to the grossly inflated earnings of a Madonna (worth an estimated $600,000,000) when there are hundreds of excellent composers who don't make enough in their careers to rub two coins together.
This is the fault of widespread public ignorance about what actually constitutes music talent and a commercial music industry that shamelessly exploits that ignorance for obscene profits. If people were well educated about music in the public schools, I'm persuaded that such aberrations would disappear and the demand for high-quality art music would soar. However, serious music education is the last thing on the minds of most politicians and school administrators, who evidently are more interested in turning out mindless robots to staff corporate cubicles than free-thinking, aesthetically sophisticated human beings who might press for genuine quality and transformative social change.
All the best,
Joe
I've thought a great deal about the emergence of atonality, and it seems to me that, whereas its development may have been an inevitable outgrowth of the highly chromatic idioms of late romanticism (e.g., Wagnerian opera), it dominance at the expense of tonality in certain quarters was more a matter of the political will and the privileged status of certain members of the intelligentsia (most notably academics) than one of aesthetic necessity. Atonality certainly never had any broad public appeal, but since institutional composers (and tenured academics) were in a position of not having to respond to popular tastes, a culture of non-tonal experimentalism arose and in many places thrived in the postwar period up until the time that the academic job market sank into a depression after baby boomers graduated and left the halls of ivy in significant numbers by the mid to late 1960s.
It's from the same period that we can date the gradual appearance of postmodernism in the arts and a resurgence of interest in tonal forms and styles, as composers no longer felt they could rely on academic employment and realized that their very survival depended on creating work to which "the people"--as opposed to the professoriat and their acolytes--could once more relate. It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the tonal renaissance entirely to demographic and economic changes. The alleged death of tonality was, after all, fallacious propaganda: many excellent composers persisted throughout the entire period of modernist experimentalism in their allegiance to major and minor keys, even if they were roundly condemned by their institutional colleagues. Tonality--the most effective idiom of musical communication ever devised by Homo sapiens--never lost its relevance throughout the world, both in the popular and art-music domains, and its return to preeminence in the twenty-first century is virtually assured.
Joe said:
This is the fault of widespread public ignorance about what actually constitutes music talent and a commercial music industry that shamelessly exploits that ignorance for obscene profits. If people were well educated about music in the public schools, I'm persuaded that such aberrations would disappear and the demand for high-quality art music would soar. However, serious music education is the last thing on the minds of most politicians and school administrators, who evidently are more interested in turning out mindless robots to staff corporate cubicles than free-thinking, aesthetically sophisticated human beings who might press for genuine quality and transformative social change.
All the best,
Joe
Ed replies:
The appreciation of art music, I think, has always been limited to a relatively small group of people and, though I think decent musical education would increase its audience quite a bit, I would have to say that with pop artists, the main idea would be to improve their musical understanding in general.
Yes, Paul's deservedly famous song "Yesterday" seems to derive some of its style from J.S. Bach, at least superficially, but it's on an entirely different level. I think it would not have been written if McCartney had not been familiar with some art music or it would have been in an entirely different style.
Among other examples of pop composers under the strong influence of "classical music" I could mention Elton John (I have always maintained that his Broadway show "Aida" shows that "if it ain't broke don't fix it",) Billy Joel (who worked with him.) and Rufus Wainwright of the younger generation who has a strong liking for opera, especially.
Best,
Ed
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