Jan Jarvlepp writes:

>An important element of this matter, which has not been discussed in enough
>detail, is the fact that pre-twentieth century composers and other artists
>created in the style of the day using their intuition as a guide.

Actually, that's what good serial composers did as well.  You can barely
name two more intuitive artists than Schoenberg and Webern.

>However, with the introduction and acceptance of "progressive" ideology
>in the 20th century, as promoted by the likes of Theodore Adorno, artists
>began denying their own personal nature and intuition.

The problem here is that you equate criticism with actual artistic
practice.  Yeah, I don't like Adorno either - I think of him as a flack
with a vocabulary.  But I strongly doubt very many of those composers who
read Adorno or who were taught by those who had followed his philosophy
actually composed according to the program.  Most composers - even serial
ones - are fairly simple creatures, just like you and me.  They differ in
that they can compose and we can't.  Some of the strongest statements of
the role of intuition and "soul" come from Schoenberg.

>Instead, they strove to outdo each other in modernity, complexity and
>innovation as they went down the road of "progress" to an unstated goal.

How many composers have you actually asked about this? This seems an
extremely unlikely set of motives.  Is it because you don't like the music
and can't imagine anyone sincerely liking it? Or are you simply repeating
what you've read?

>An external ideological goal of "progress" gives very different results
>than being guided by own's most intimate personal internal thoughts.  How
>idiotic that across the USA it became fashionable in academia to write
>German-style 12-tone music.  What kind of legacy has that left besides
>leading so many talented young composers down the garden path to
>ideological conformity and sterile creations? Just compare late Stravinsky,
>the "progressive" idelogy follower, to young Stravinsky, the naive
>intuitive artist.

I find very little difference between the late Stravinsky to the Stravinsky
of 1918.  In fact, it all sounds like Stravinsky to me.  Listen to the
Introitus and then listen to Le Roi des etoiles.  To me, there's no change
at all in the choral writing or in the sound or in the emotional locus.
Compare Agon to the ballets of the Thirties.  Faced with a blind test, I
really couldn't tell the difference.  Besides, Stravinsky didn't change
because he wanted to be "progressive." Or at least that wasn't the main
reason.  He changed because he felt he had worn out the style he was using.
He felt written out.  The adaptation of the serial technique in my opinion
renewed him.  But he didn't stop being Stravinsky or "intuitive."
Stravinsky was a mystic - although an extremely money-hungry one - til the
day he died.

>Where does this situation leave a great artist such as Sibelius who was
>never radical by nature but, nevertheless, very innovative in his use of
>forms and orchestration? He found his own personal solution by earnestly
>trying to be modern in his Symphony No. 4 and then realizing that the path
>of deliberate self-conscious modernity was not for him.  Considering the
>wonderful symphonies that followed, we can be happy that he found his own
>personal solution to his struggle.  That has, however, earned his the
>derision of "progressives" such as Adorno.

So, they were wrong.  For them it was an "either-or," just as for you it's
an either-or - an artistic Manicheism on both sides.  It's just that you
disagree which is black and which is white.

>So what is progress anyway? What is the goal of progress and whose idea
>was it anyway?

The notion has its origins in the 18th century Enlightenment with
John Locke and Leibniz, among others.  This was reinforced by the rapid
increase of scientific and technical knowledge, as well as by Romantic and
Evangelical ideas of the perfectibility of the soul - ideas shared by such
people as Goethe, Shelley, Joseph Smith, and Mahler.  I happen to believe
that art does progress, but not that it progresses toward perfection.  It
progresses like a river.  The mouth of the river is as interesting as the
source or points between.

Steve Schwartz