Mark Seeley wrote:

>"Serious television" is an oxymoron.  Television promotes incoherence and
>triviality.  Rather than encourage a literate culture, it actually attacks
>it.  The single most important fact about TV is that people WATCH it.
>What they watch and like to watch is moving pictures or images -- of short
>duration and frequent variety.  That is not conducive to CM.  Consider the
>Yo Yo Ma program on Bach's Cello Suites as an example.

I basically agree, but I thought that Ma's "dramatizations" of the
Cello Suites were a somewhat interesting experiment.  True, they grossly
distorted the "pure" experience of the suites, which one can only get by
encountering them the way Bach wrote them.  (It's fascinating, by the way,
to consider what composers like JSB would have done with TV, if they
bothered to involve themselves with it at all.) But as a kind of commentary
on the music, or a way of leading people who are afraid of such music by
the hand and showing them that it won't eat them up like a fearsome dragon,
they might do some good.

Unfortunately, no one as far as I know has taken a really systematic
experimental approach to this way of presenting CM.  That is, no one works
as a scientist would: actually looking at what effects these programs
have on a random sample of viewers previously unacquainted with the music,
trying another experiment with some features of the programs varied, seeing
whether this has any different effects, etc.  Then we might actually learn
something about how to present such music in ways that are innovative but
fairly respectful to the originals, rather than having to speculate in the
dark, as we must the way things are now.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]