[The discussion Stirling is referring to can be found at:

    http://www.towerofbabel.com/roundtable/classicalmusic/

 -Dave]

John Bell Young commented in the introduction to the discussion how the air
of the Littleton Massacre hung over public discussion.  He is, exactly,
correct.  More exact than perhaps anyone would like.

If peope look at the discussion of school violence, gun control and culture
in the wake of Littleton one finds a trope, a trope that carries over into
the discussion of many aspects of culture.

To be specific:

Almost every individual who has any consciousness of the culture they live
in will create in their own mind a set of associations, they will associate
visible public aspects of their culture with the more intangible fibres
which bind the functioning of that culture together.  In themselves, these
symbols cause nothing, but the individual when seeing one of them reacts to
it as if he saw the underlying fabric which he has associated with it.

Hence, high school students running around with squirt guns constitute to
some a grave threat to public safety - because for them even enacting the
pattern of a massacre in fantasy or fiction is somehow the first immediate
precursor to enacting the massacre.  For some people the popular culture's
depictions of violence are such a symbol, for others, the possession of
fire arms.

In the thousands of words of discussion, in the hundreds of speeches and
the dozens of hysterical pieces of legislation - the basic and real cause
of what happened has been glossed over.  The simple truth, objectively
verifiable, is that one of the killers was mentally ill.  Sufficently so
that he was normally on medication.  He stopped taking this medication,
and as is often the case with psycho-pharmecutecals, the let down was in
proportion to the prior suppression.  While various patterns of violence
may well have shaped the particular manner of its expression, the simple
truth is that Hollywood, Hitler and Hate were all props in an inner drama.

What this truth lacks is the ability of an individual to argue that a
failure in social fabric is a sufficent pretext for suppressing those
aspects of the culture he resides in which cause him anxiety, which he
holds antipathy for.

- - -

In the realm of art, the same trope applies.  Each person who is involved
in the cultural world of art has certain kinds of art which produce a sense
of well being, which underline to that individual that all is well with
the world - and with himself as a member of it.  There are others which
signify, to that individual, decay, decadence and failure.  The sign is
less predictive of the form of the person's discourse than the anxiety,
and even out right angst, that it produces in him.

I don't mean to take any particular person to task.  The error here is an
easy one to fall into, and it takes a good deal of self-editing to avoid
spiraling down the path of finding a particular aspect that one dislikes,
and associating with it a deeper problem.

In truth the problem with high art in this society is very different now
than it was 10 years ago.  This has escaped many people, simply because
many of the same artworks, divisions and dogmas are in place.

But it is the mechanisms by which people relate to each other - both
through which they express themselves, and those through which they engage
in cognition - which are decisive to the direction of art.

- - -

Let me take one specific example:

   "DESMARTEAU: You also have more than one generation of children that
   has been brought up on what I call the frenetic pace of Sesame Street.
   How can you expect people that were brought up that way and lived
   life at that kind of pace to sit through a work of Mahler? They can't
   even watch a sitcom for 30 minutes without getting up for a commercial
   interruption! "

It sounds like a good idea, it sounds like a theory.  But an examination of
history finds this not to be a reasonable explanation for what is going on
here.  Let me take one counter example out of many:  the Arabian Nights.

The original stories were, clearly, created out of individual parts and
different points in time.  Many of them make clear reference to pre-Islamic
practices in ways which indicate that they predate that practice.  This
should not be surprising, Beowulf has been Christianised, but no one would
miss that the legend is clearly much older than Christian practice.  The
stories of the Arabian Nights were then assembled into a meta-narrative,
one which deals with a curious feature of folk stories from pre-literate
cultures:  many of them completely lack direction and closure.  Many of
them simply *are*.  This pattern is confirmed by various preliterate
stories set down in various other places - the unit that we think of
as a story simply does not exist without a demand for closure.  When
pre-existing material is turned into a form which demans closure - closure
is supplied.  A similar pattern can be noticed in Grimm's fairy tales.

The simple truth is that without the demands for closure - fragementary
is a standard mode of experience for people.  Closure is created, both in
a person's life and in their art.  Closure is not a required virtue.  Only
with the need to create a meta-narrative - a narrative in a particular form
- does fragmentary experience and depiction seem problematical.  It is then
supplied.  The device in the Arabian Nights is the creation of a hierarchy
of stories, short incomplete narratives are then padded by being the
launching point for another story.  In essence terracing the shorter
stories so that the significant, and closed, narratives lie at the core of
the meta-narrative.  It is significant that most of the well-known stories
from the collection are towards the end of the work.

It is not Electric Company, or even Television, which is the root of the
inability of many people to focus on the long narratives of Symphonies.
After all, they seem equally immune to short preludes which last less time
than a commercial spot on the evening news.  Chopin's "Minute Waltz" is no
more comprehensible at this level than is Wagner's Ring.  The simple truth
is that large scale narrative rich with intensity of expression which fits
into a larger design is a virtue which is not present in particular areas
of most cultures.  The Egyptian culture before they began building large
pyramids was largely the same as afterwards, they learned pyramid building
from the Nubians to the south, and originally tried to mimic the angles of
the much smaller pyramids that the Southern Nile culture produced.  But it
is when they begin producing large scale works that we recognise the
complexity.  Complexity pre-exists accomplishment in most cases - in
Periclean Athens, in Augustan Rome, leaders used complexity already
present.  But it is the creation which makes this complexity recognisable.

The truth is that classical music, and almost any form of art, is created
by people who wish to create, out of their lives, a larger structure to
escape the very fragmentary mode which otherwise would surround them.

- - -

The world of art tells itself many stories about its past and its present.
In truth it takes no more concentration to listen to Stockhausen than to
watch a football match, it takes no more intellect to like Johann Strauss
than NegativeLand.  The difference is the activity itself and what is
required to participate in it.

Discussions that center around particular aspects of the result will fail
to reach either truthful self-analysis, or perscription for improvements.
This because they fail to recognise that the reason people are involved in
the world of High Art - in any of its forms - is because the activities
which make up that involvement, in themselves, work for those people.  And
the reason others are not, is because they do not see the point of those
activities.

This has nothing to do with concentrated listening, I doubt I spend as much
concentration as most people onl listening to most classical music, simply
because there are very few pieces which are all that hard to decipher.
What Carter is doing in his quartets is fairly straightforward, as much as
what Dvorak is up to.  What holds the interest is not how difficult the
work is to decipher, but another trait.  Again one which is missing from
our artistic discourse at the very most public levels.

- - -

Recently Teachout, in "Commentary" magazine attempted a bit of canon
formulation.  My workds are carefully chosen.  He listed 50 works that
he felt formed the basis for a tonal canon of 20th century music.
Leaving aside some obvious omissions from the list, quibbles about the
self-consistency of his application of standards which were rather dubious
to begin with, and all of the surface arguments about what is and is not
canonical - two basic facts stood out.

First - his list did not take the works on it as canonical.

Second - his list is not his canon.

To the first point.  A set of works, to be canonical, must have two
features:

1.  They must be intergral to a referential web of works and acts- broadly
put, signs - to the point where it is impossible to understand what those
signs signify without familiarity with the works and the means by which
they are referenced.

One must be able to *speak* in terms of the canon.

2.  They must have, or imply, a set of mental mechanisms without which it
is impossible to interpret or enact other works without having internalised
those mechanisms.

One must be able to *think* in terms of the canon.

For opera, Verdi is canonical not merely because he is popular, not merely
because he is played often, not merely because he is interesting as a
composer and dramatist, but because it is possible to equate ones entire
emotioanl experience through his works, it is possible to communicate tpo
others through this means, and it is possible to extend that emotional
range throught these means.

In short - canon formation consists not in enumeration and apologia, but in
creating referentiality, and by altering the means by which others think
and experience.

If he had been engaged in canon formation, he would have done what someone
like Hoffman did:  write a story which could not be understood without
reference to Mozart's "Swan Song Symphony".  Or what Duka did and write a
very French piece of music after a poem by the most German of poets, and
then declare that it was an example of every mistake one could make in
music.

The second point drives this deeper:

The very form of his discourse, a list with squibs, bears no resemblence
to the thoughts that make up classical music, in either its musical or
literary modes.  It does not resemble in organisation any work of music of
any significance, nor of the kind of attempting to cram the experience of
music into words which we are all familiar with.  It resembles, instead,
the world of writing for media, punditry, notices which we mistakenly call
reviews and the entire panapoly of chattering about acts which one does not
have the ability to discuss.  The Guiness Book of World Records, The Book
of Lists and Canby's Best Films of the Year are all canonical to Teachout's
list.  His list both references, and codifies - the modes of thought
present in those language worlds.  He could have been listing the 50 best
gay bars ever, the fifty best cities to start a bussiness, the 50 best
movies to see while stoned, as much as the 50 most canonical works of the
20th century written by dead guys.

- - -

In otherwords, the forms of discourse that now surround art resemble,
and indeed are derrived from, the forms of discourse of the popular world.
Who is on top, who is the hippest/best/most important, whose number 5 with
a bullet and who is not, which team do you cheer for - are all thought
modes common to the outside world.  That Baseball is better at producing a
pennant race and statistical measures to rank people by should come as no
surprise.  That popular music is better at producing a stream of works to
comment on and thus subordinate act to opinion should be no surprise.  If
High Art chooses to talk about itself in terms which are clearly popular
in their origin, it should come as no surprise that it will be less
interesting than the whole world of the popular.  Simply put:  the
popular's entire raison d'etre is to produce a stream out of which people
select their tastes.  Treat classical music the same way, and you will end
up with a pallid imitation of a kind of discourse which is not really all
that interesting to begin with.

One might take an example in the tragedy of Slate:  people who clearly have
been trained to produce prose for one kind of thinking desparately trying
to immitate more ephemeral Salon Magazine.  And failing.

- - -

Once this is accepted, one can see how there are a host of tropes and
stories which art's inhabitants tell each other as a way of separating
themselves from the outside.  For example, we have all heard the tale of
the riot at Rite of Spring's premiere.  This is often taken as proof of the
advanced state of the music and the inability of the poor stupid audience
to understand it.

On the otherhand, accounts from the time make it clear that it was the
clothes, dance and setting which were as much a cause of the reaction,
and that Diaghlev carefully cultivated this sense of outre.  When Alice
Cooper's manager pulled the stunt of importing paper panties from England
to serve as the record sleeve for the group's next album, and then tipped
the police off so that the resulting raid would generate huge amounts of
free publicity - he was doing the same thing.  Secondly there was also a
riot at the opening of "Madame Butterfly" - but no one uses that as proof
that the music in the opera is advanced and that the audience was stupid.

These sorts of tales would be unnecessary if people were really secure in
the separation of high art from low.  A discussion on the use of harmony
in a Scriabin sonata does not need to set itself off as different from
anything in the popular world:  it is self-evident.  Moreover the outside
public is comfortable with the idea that they don't understand high art.
Again, this is evident.  They are happily willing to buy "Classical Music
for Dummies" and are, to my experience, greatful, when someone takes the
time to explain the differences between the different recordings of Brahms'
Symphonies, and why they should choose one over the others.

Or as CS Lewis remakred, no one who says "I'm as good as you." really
believes it.  If they did, they would not waste the time to even think it.

- - -

The creation of the popular as a profitable and disseminatable thought mode
in the 20th century came as a great shock to the art world.  Previously the
only way to disseminate popular ideas over a wide scale was to filter them
through the world of art.  The Romantic movement, and its successors,
staked their existance on this act of using the folk as a material for the
creation of works of art, works which held the clear form of the folk, but
were organised on completely different principles.

Mass media made it possible to present the folk act itself.  This is
what previously had held it back - the codification of the act and the
codification of the ability to elaborate the act had previously been the
preserve of the artistic world.

The art world needed a new purpose.  That purpose became defined best as
"anti-low".  Both the avant-garde and the conservatives agreed on this if
nothing else.  High was not, could not, be low.  The Romantics had no
such problems, from them there was a clear superiority of art, and even
travelling gypsies would play Beethoven's Septet for their own amusement
after tossing off dances to please the tourists.  (Wagner's *A Pilgrimage
to Beethoven* for those who care for the source).  The premise of what
was the source of the superiority of high art over low differed:  the
conservatives prefered the idea of tradition, the avant-garde prefered the
idea of hermeneusis through complexity (Downes and Adorno respectively in
case anyone wants to catch up on their reading).  But in the end there
was the idea of a particular morality or strength of character that came
through art.  This may be true, but again, people who are apart from
society have no need to reinforce this.  It is those who enact society in
their own terms who have need of reinforcement.

By and large this purpose served high art well, and society as well.  Art
served as a means to prtest the larger motions of the world.  Art served as
a place both to enact and to resist the technisization of life.  It could
comment on political and social movements.  It could be a temple where
people escaped into a legendary simpler past.  A simpler past which a
cursory examination of newspapers will tell us never existed.  The common
observation was that art of the 20th century was in the mode of Commentary.
Debussy made this observation in 1916, and it has been noticed repeatedly
since.

However, let us be clear:  just as popular culture is no longer the
amplification of the folk act, but instead a formalised system of signs
meant to hold together a media driven culture - so too high art has an
increasingly difficult shell game to play trying to claim that it is
anti-low as the inheritor of some older tradition, or that its acts are
any more "of its time" than the latest rap single.

One movement of high art has been to abandon this dichotmy and merely turn
itself to commentary on the popular - to be merely one more thread in the
embeded cultural matrix.  I don't think I'm stretching anyones concept of
the world by pointing out Steve Reich, Phillip Glass and Andy Warhol as
three examples of this.  All three have made extremely cogent comments on
the popular world they were a part of, and all three are very intelligent
social observers.  But this is clearly not an adequate social program, if
simply because so many involved in high art find the actual works produced
out of their commentary as overly/overtly shallow and uninteresting.

Another wing of art ahs merely retreated into work.  After all, if onejust
does ones work, then there is a kind of insulation which occurs.  However,
the public is not interested in funding artists to merely do what ever
artist likes.  After all, this is a priveledge that many of them would, and
do, kill to reach for.  It causes dissent among artists as well, since
their are many artists who do not feel that work is self justifying - that
is, work does not excuse poor result.

These movements are responses which exist in the context of the
Post-Modern.  The first takes art to be merely another means of cobbling
together fragments, the second treats art as a hobby akin to gardening.

- - -

But there is another future for art, one which, by its substance and
tradition it is well equipped to handle.  That future is art as organisor.
The popular organises only in the most trivial of ways, it aggregates.  By
this I mean its concern is piling as many bodies in one place as it can,
and then giving those bodies the illusion that some how it is the event,
rather than the pile of bodies, which is responsible for that contact high
of herd poisoning that they attain.  It piles them in front of ticket
agents and cash registers.  It piles them in front of pornography web pages
and glamor magazines.  Bodies piled high.  Plow them under and let me work
sayeth the grass...

The world of high art is not merely associating with different objects or
surfaces.  It is a different kind of way of life.  Only by presenting the
differences between this kind of life and that of the popular does high art
have a chance.  High Art weaves a kind of magic.  It makes converts when it
demonstrates the power of that magic, and then has the magician shrug and
say "This is what we do, every day." Those that need art will then reach
for the ability to make the magic of their own.

This is important, one of the cardinal powers of the popular is that it
tells its adherents to dream of being able to weave the magic that it
produces, but tells them simultaneously that they cannot.  They cannot be
stars, they cannot make movies or hit records.  It sells them video cameras
and karaoke machines so they can pretend at it.  The world of high art
offers perhaps the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world, a power so
precious that the powers that be of the popular will do anything to prevent
it escaping - the ability to hit that transcendant mark reserved for
greatness.

- - -

This is all very far from style wars, it is even very far from commentary
on what is wrong with the popular.  The popular is as it is because it must
be that way to serve the function that it does.  High Art must establish a
new purpose for itself, and then, as it has in the past, accept that it
must make a new kind of art to enact that purpose.

Stirling S Newberry
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http://home.earthlink.net/~allegro314