Janos asks:
>Can there be really new and "shocking" music (in a good way, as Stravinsky
>used to be) now that the formerly stark, angular, jerky sound is accepted
>and celebrated as commercially desirable? What can be "new music" at a
>time when, at long last, Bartok is a "classic"? This is not a complaint:
>I am overjoyed at the prospect -- the reality -- of the Stravinsky-Bartok
>"mainstream" world, and I have no desire to subject my ears to punishment
>for the sake of something "new." But there is something here I only sense,
>and cannot quite get my head around.
Igor was only really shocking for under a decade - say 1913 to the early
20's. At that point he and the world of listeners converged, for a long
time the rep seemed to end at "Rite of Spring" according to many people.
To stand paraphrase Franklin - shock is a verb that is good in the first
person active, and the third person passive - "They were shocked by this
new piece", but not in the first person passive "I'm shocked by the loss
of modernity" is a complaint.
If by "modern" you mean "dissonant", then yes, that age is over -
dissonance is no longer the sign of what is new, we are no longer greeting
new days with new and stranger clankings from new and stranger machines.
In fact the great environmental movement of the last 30 years has been to
protect us from the noise, fumes and wastes of the industrial. They are
going to turn some old large steel cranes into a historic monument - why
shouldn't music of the same epoch be looked at the same way?
What is new is dealing with dislocation of time, place, genre. What is new
is living in a world where we are increasingly imprisoned by decisions made
in the past. What is new is the separation of society in to a public realm
of art - which is overwhelmingly oriented towards Modernism, and a private
realm of Living which is groping back towards a Traditionalism that has
been forgotten. Move into an old house to restore it and you find out how
trendy it is, try and buy some plaster nails to shore up a sagging ceiling
and one finds out how much has been forgotten...
But opur dear conservative critics and colleges are busy turning out people
ready to be at the vanguard of 1906...
- - -
Art in the Modern was the collision of only three ideas - Post-Romanticism,
Neo-Classicism and Avant-Gardism. Various permutations were argued out in
a Post-Victorian vocabulary. One can't write a piece that will shock the
Victorians or Edwardians, because *all of them are dead* *dead* *dead*. If
you want to write a shocking dissonant piece, your audience is in the
nearest cemetary.
Even the Post-Modern is old men. Chomsky is in his seventies, Warhol is
dead, Glass and Reich are older than Beethoven ever was, Barthes important
books were written when the richest man in the world was in diapers.
Now there is nothing wrong with doing that which is old. Old has its
advantages, and there probably is still some good music left to be written
that still worries about whether it ever establishes even for a moment the
key of C. But it isn't going to be new. It isn't going to over turn
established notions, because it is the established notions. On my book
shelf are half a dozen tomes that take as their point of departure how
things have gone down hill in art since the classic works of Pollock.
As for shcoking and offending people - it is a vastly over-rated
experience. It seems that many critics and artists out there want a
Hollywood version of being a visionary - people kick you and spit on you,
but you are never bruised, your hair is back to blow dried perfection in
the next shot, and you get great acclaim by the end of the day. Everybody
wants to be part of the group that gets there first, just before everyone
else.
Doesn't happen that way. Being shocking is telling intellectual
brownshirts that Schoenberg was wrong in his theory of tonality, being
shocking is telling a bunch of people hucking up quotes from Forte and
Rosen that they haven't got a clue as to what art means, because art isn't
about elite listeners and better people with more refined tastes holding
the fort against the unwashed hoardes. Being shocking is not being allowed
to even apply for jobs - which eventually go to mediocrities who've worked
their way up through the system. Being shocking is listening to wave after
wave of would be hipster talk about how Zappa is the savior of contemporary
classical music listening to them insult you for having the termitity to
question them. Being shocking is being called am insane, incomprehemsible
mind fucker in front of thousands of people on a weekly basis, and having
dozens of others chime in with "amen!" That is, when people bother to read
you at all.
In otherwords - being shocking is a long list of experiences which most
reasonable people go through great lengths to avoid - being shocking has
not one damn thing to do with whether your work has any intrinsic value
or not, and being shocking does not do the smallest bit to disseminate
the contents of that work. It is merley a condition of where you are with
respect to where most other people are. While many great artists have been
called lunatics - so have a great many lunatics.
- - -
What this gets down to is a myth. The myth of every establishment is that
it has codified all of the good things that the people who it worships
fought for, that these good acts will flow forth as naturally as rain from
the clouds. Back in the 19th century they looked back at the expressive
Romantics, and declared that everything that was beautiful and sensible
came out of state funded academies and was shown at state sponsored
galleries or played by state sponsored orchestras. The Victorian and
Albert Museum split over whether to admit that daring act of modernity -
Art Noveau.
We can laugh up our sleeves because we know better - now. But then, the
19th century laughed up their sleeves at the poor stupid aristorcrats of
the "Ancien Regime" who could not see that they were about to have dates
with Madame Guillotine which would leave them breathless and speechless.
It is a great delusion to believe that we are all that much more
intelligent and far sighted than our analogs sitting around in 1899...
- - -
In the end the only way to cultivate what is shocking involves a bit
of self-exploration. It involves supporting works and ideas which shock
*you*. This is the only kind of shock which anyone can know, for a fact,
that the world is a bit different for having happened. It comes from
engaging works which make your skin crawl, for reading writers who you have
difficulting understanding. Picasso and his friends wrote how their heads
hurt after seeing an exhibit by Cezzane. That is how you know that the
world is being stretched - if your world is being stretched. This doesn't
assure that you doing the right thing.
Stirling S Newberry
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