Bert Bailey wrote:

>John Detwiler wrote inquiring about "thoughts on how to make CM "cool","
>etc.
>
>And Chris Bonds replied, in part, that:
>
>>CM lovers of today (as I suggested in a previous post) MAY not be hearing the
>>music in quite the same way as those who heard it when it was written.  There
>>is such a thing as Zeitgeist and ours is different from theirs.  So in some
>>way the music then was the exponent of the time, which is certainly not the
>>case now.
>
>Why this last bit? Doesn't dissonance express something that's peculiar to
>our century? Better yet, don't Penderecki and Schnittke and Adams and the
>others 'give voice to' the tenor of their/our times?
>
>Am I missing something, or are you saying that the music of our culture
>alone does not connect in some symbiotic way with it? Why "certainly"?

I was referring to the music of the 18th and 19th centuries as not being
the "exponent" of OUR time.  I agree with you that dissonance and atonality
are expressions of the 20th century, and would go further to suggest that
they may represent a self-referential assessment of the meaning and value
of artistic expression in an age that questions the old past values.
Perhaps it's a stretch to say that art is expressing or commenting on its
own death throes (surely that's been suggested by many--Henry Pleasants
comes to mind), but there might be some truth to it.  The funny part is
that art has the power to say "this is the end of art" and still come out
being great art.

The idea of modernism as a self-conscious complete break with the past has
been so often preached and re-preached in college humanities classes that
it's a "cardboard" concept (Stephen Jay Gould's term).  An idea which has
become separated from its conceptual roots or its origins and becomes part
of the more or less remembered intellectual baggage we learn for tests.
Periodically the whole structure of thinking about art has to be dissected
and reexamined.

Chris Bonds