French tragedy

Some time ago, I had an interesting exchange with a french modernist composer, whose work had impressed me by its orchestral sonic brilliance, but which in the same time I found quite repulsive because of its aggression and aural ugliness, as if someone had tried his very best to find the most pulverizing sounds an orchestra could produce and then, organized it in a quasi narrative. I had met him once, before having heard any of his work, and his personality had struck me as sympathetic, mild, sophisticated, civilized and well-mannered, apparently an introvert, serious artist. All the more the surprise when I heard what he had wrought. I sent him a message asking him about his intentions, because I felt he was a gifted man but locked-up in some claustrophobic view of what music is, or had to be, and I wanted to know what kind of serious intention could be behind such self-refuting, intense efforts to bring something into the world which was so negative. I had expressed my doubts whether anybody with a musical sense would be interested to get to know such sonic art, and that such intentional ugliness did not particularly contribute to the world.

His last message was a strong defence of his aesthetics and intentions, which I reproduce here, together with my comments which were my answer. I find this particularly interesting because the man's explanations reflect so clearly a postwar modernist consensus, while he was much too young to have lived through the fifties and sixties, and was born in a non-European country which had not suffered through the Second World War. One would expect that someone like that would not quickly be sucked-in into postwar fashionable misery, but his education having taken place in Paris, he apparently had embraced the modernist gospel wholeheartedly. He was not a fool, and he is a well-known and respected composing member of the french new music establishment. It will be understandable that I won't mention his name, out of respect - he obviously is a genuine, and very talented man.

In France, modernism is still the established, heavily-subsidized form of 'new music', and the alternatives (Bacri, Connesson, Escaich, Beffa) are looked upon with horror.

My italics underneath were inserted in his last message and sent-back as a whole. And of course the exchange was in french.

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Que vous n’appréciez pas mon travail, je le comprends et l’accepte cela ne me pose aucun problème. Il y a des personnes qui aiment et d’autre disent que c’est de la musique de fous. Mais je ne peux accepter que vous disiez que  ma musique ajoute à l’inhumanité du monde. Elle est profondément humaine et sincere. C’est je crois le plus important pour un compositeur, conscience et sincérité.

Agréé. Mais la sincerité du ‘message’ de la musique est, dans votre musique, la chose qui est  préoccupante: la voix d’une vision entièrement négative et nihiliste.

J’écris par une nécessité profonde…..

C’est pour cela que j’ai réagit, clairement vous êtes très doué et sérieux.

….. ma musique est violent, oui mais pas agressive, je n’attaque personne. C’est votre problème si vous la voyez comme ça.

Non, ce violence est une attaque au public. Qui voulait acheter une billet pour une concert qui ne présente qu’une réflection des choses violantes qui nous entourent dans le monde?

Ma musique n’est pas la pour vous apaiser, vous divertir , vous distraire ou vous soulager, ou vous donner une image idyllique du monde, je me fiche de cela  … je crois que le véritable   art, est celui qui dérange, vous éveille, qui vous fait vous questionner, qui vous emmerde aussi, …  je crois qu’en se posant des question on s’eleve.

Tout cela est dans les limites de l’idéologie moderniste après-guerre (Adorno etc.) et, après 70 années après cette catastrophe, une catégorie historique comme toutes les categories historiques. Et c’est une insulte aux tous les mélomanes qui expériencent, disons, les oeuvres de Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy pas comme distraction mais comme des expériences profondes….. pas comme image idyllique etc. etc. C’est très naif de penser que la seule alternative du ‘commercial entertainment’ est: le son du nihilisme et catastrophe. C’est comme dire: ‘Si vous trouvez quelque chose de beau et de valeur dans une musique, c’est parce-que vous ne comprenez pas qu’en effet vous n’êtes que des monstres vides et catatrophiques, et c’est moi qui vous l’informerai’. C’est un peu bizar, ne pensez-vous pas?

Ma musique n’est pas la pour repondre a une demande du public, a une attente…  elle conduit le public vers des plaisirs différés, des connaissances complexes et variées. sans concessions. Je ne negocie rien.

Ce n’est pas héroique mais suicidale. Normalement, le compositeur veut partager sa vision individuelle – sans concession - avec le public, qui forme un part normal de la culture musicale: trois parties – compositeur, musicien, public. Si toutes les 3 parties sont du même culture, il y a un rapport, et si la vision du compositeur est ‘trop individuelle’ on peut s’attendre à une période de accoutumance. Mais ça ne veut pas dire qu’une musique qui est reçu par le public chaleureusement, n’est qu’une concession etc. etc. …. n’est qu’une tentative à apaiser, avertir etc.…. ça n’est que le cliché moderniste. Comme cette vision, presque TOUT le repertoire qui existe soit sans valeur.

Ma musique a une pulsion fondamentale à transmettre, elle travaille aux racines, au plus profond de l’être humain, elle est imprévisible….

Alors, les racines de l’homme ne sont que nihilistes, confuses, laides? Quelle vision négative des racines de l’homme. Encore, ce n’est qu’une convention du modernisme.  

…. foudroyante….

Voilà l’agression et le nihilisme, comme les fous qui ne savent que de se battre dans le monde.

Je vous l’avez deja dit , ma musique touche l’intuition ( j’essaye) et chaque fois que l’on veut fixer l’intuition on touche à la violence. c’est inevitable. Essayez d’ecrire en ayant en tête cette idee d’intuition de fulgurance … vous verrez la violence.

Mais si ça est vrai et pas simplement suivre le conformisme moderniste, ce n’est qu’une signe d’un problème psychologique qui demande thérapie. Je ne me moque pas, je suis sérieux: tout ça porte à croire qu’il y a un sentiment de la vie très malheureux, et c’est ça que j’entends dans votre musique et je le regrets, considérant votre talent. Tout ce que vous dites ici n’est pas héroique et indépendent, mais tragique et une prison émotionelle.

Ma musique est la mienne et celle de personen d’autre… je ne rentre pas dans le moule  je ne viens pas de la lignée de ceux qui ont tout appris dans les conservatoires… Murail disait de moi : "Son expérience diffère de celle de ses collègues. Son parcours in-orthodoxe donne à sa musique une force très personnelle ». Oui je n’ai pas suivi le parcours traditionnel et je n’ai surtout pas suivi le developpement historique musical… J’ai devcouvert la musique contemporaine avant la musique classique, romantique ou baroque… j’ai fait le parcours inverse de la plus part d’entre vous.… je suis comme ça… tous vos modèles de compositions, vos systèmes, vos trucs, vos développements historiques de la musique … je m’en moque … ce n’est pas cela qui m’intéresse…

C’est seulement se barrer d’une richesse et d’une libération. Le repertoire n’existe pas des formulations academiques - c’est quelque chose vivant - tous les compositeurs qui ont écrit le mieux du repertoire n’ont jamais aimé l’académisme.

Je voudrais vous recommender à lire le petit livre de Nicolas Bacri, qui était un compositeur très moderniste mais qui a découvert la libération offert par la tonalité, le sentiment constructive, l’expression de quelque chose plus précieuse que le nihilisme et la violence, et qui n’écrit pas ‘des images fausses du monde’:

http://www.editions-seguier.fr/livre/21788

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And the rest was silence, regrettably.

Brainwashing the young

At the 'New Musix Box', an American website showing material from some circles of young composers and students, a telling example was published which demonstrates what happens when young people, entirely unaware of music history and the indoctrination that postwar modernism has established in the educational circuit, sincerely try to exercise their intelligence on theorising the untheorisingable. The author of the article is obviously a sweet young woman, but also a victim of misdirected education.

Hannah Schiller is a senior in the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. Her research interests center around the current musical moment; she is particularly drawn to post-genre concepts and music emerging from classically trained musicians that is difficult to categorize.

(How could she know what 'the current moment' is?)  

www.newmusicbox.org/articles/thinking-about-language-in-a-post-genre-context/ 

This article shows both endearing commitment to musical creativity and an astonishing degree of muddled thinking:

Post-genre thinking seeks to move away from objective judgment of music towards a subjective reality, where the emphasis is no longer on whether a certain piece fits/does not fit a pre-conceptualized genre “bin.” Instead, the emphasis is on the individual intent of the composer.

Translated, this reads: "Post-genre thinking liberates the mind from any critical faculty, and restricts perception to the intentional fallacy" - the latter being what the composer wants, without any consideration of the result. It is very attractive: anything you compose, is OK. It further opens the door to incompetence and nonsense.

It is worthwhile to stand still, for a moment, at the term 'post-genre'. It implies something that is left behind, is no longer 'relevant'. It is thus a useful term in a perspective defined by progressiveness: things develop to something else, and presumably into something better, so that we can leave the misunderstandings of an outdated past behind. To define something as 'post-', a value judgement is implied, which is again an implication of arriving at something better - why else would people bother to get at some post-position? If something is left behind it must be for something better, so: the very fact that something is newer, more recent, is already an indication of intrinsic quality. Where does this thinking come from? Clearly from science where it may have intrinsic value, but in the arts, such thinking is entirely useless since there is no progress in the arts. It is an ideal tool to cover-up nonsense and incompetence and ignorance - because 'it is new'.

The concept of 'genre' is a tool to be used within a value framework: we listen with different expectations to a piece of pop entertainment than to a Beethoven symphony or an Arab maqam or Chinese opera, all these types of music require different things to write and to perform and to understand as a listener. These things are reception and value frameworks, results of long, carefully honed traditions. Such framework is not something that restricts creativity either on the side of the composer or the listener, but is the normal perception field upon which the input is projected and then, processed. Removing such framework and then trying to find 'a concrete theoretical framework' for material from which frameworks have been removed, is nonsensical and will merely remove any opportunity of quality assessment - however subjective that may be. It destroys the meaning of choice, both on the side of the composer as on the side of the performer and listener. The sound sample of Mazzoli in the article says it all: to material stemming from traditional choral genres, quickly a rhythm box from the pop sphere is added, as if this would enhance the listening experience. But it takes away any goodwill to take the piece seriously: pop = entertainment from which we don't expect serious expression, and such treatment merely works as inverted commas: 'I don't mean it, really'.

Behind such thinking lies the wider context of 20C modernism, where meaning and intention of the production of new music is measured along a line of development which holds articulation points where the music breaks-away from established notions, transgressing boundaries all the time, in the pursuit of freedom from conventions. But at every new stage of a vision of new music, there is some notion of 'what is', which afterwards is considered a 'convention' and which thus has to be transgressed again, and so forth ad infinitum. With creation this has nothing to do because it merely deals with the outward wrapping paper, not with content and meaning. It is the inheritance of romanticism which says that a work of art can only be good if it breaks with a context. But all great works of art in the past were merely very personal interpretations of existing contexts, a result of an attempt to create something of value by the artist, and they never violated the basic frameworks of genre. So it is with music, but the ghost of modernism has now entered education, and - as this article amply shows - liberates young minds from the requirements of understanding of what creativity means.

From the perspective of such muddled, eroding romanticising, the Darmstadt 'work' which tried to transgress conventions in a rather drastic way, is entirely acceptable: 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwlCD2y2tB

Names

From Roger Scruton's essay: "How I discovered my name":

“[Many English names] are equally historic, but fatally distorted by their heathen roots. One such name is Scruton—Scrofa’s Tun —named from a Viking chieftain whose distinguishing feature was not red hair but dandruff. The sound can be rectified by no efforts of elocution. In whatever tone of voice, Scruton sounds mean and censorious. Scourge, Scrooge, Scrotum, and Scrutiny all tumble like black scarabs from the mouth that utters it. I am convinced that the hostile reception encountered by even my most forgiving works has been due, not to the conservative voice that speaks through them …, but to the scraping steel of this scalpel-like surname. … And I am sure that its subliminal effect is one cause of the enormous surprise that people feel, on meeting me, to discover that I am approximately human.”   

The boundaries of matter

Is matter all there is in the universe? And, for that matter, what is matter? I found these two quotes by scientists who have thought deeply about the laws and forces which shape our physical reality:

'All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.' Max Planck

'Anyone who becomes seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that there is a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe, a spirit vastly superior to that of man.' Albert Einstein

Since science has meanwhile revealed ever more unlikely properties of matter, the boundary between 'matter' and - ? something other? something beyond physical reality, another wave length? - has become rather blurred and ambiguous, as in the discovery that different particles (the smallest entities of matter) react to each other, appear to be somehow connected while this is physically, according to the law of causality, impossible:

'It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair "knows" what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.'

There seems to be a relationship between such findings and C.G. Jung's proposal of synchronicity:

'Jung coined the word "synchronicity" to describe "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." In his book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung wrote:

How are we to recognize acausal combinations of events, since it is obviously impossible to examine all chance happenings for their causality? The answer to this is that acausal events may be expected most readily where, on closer reflection, a causal connection appears to be inconceivable.'

Also one thinks of the hypothesis of 'morphic resonance' by Rupert Sheldrake, like Jung's a  controversial and contested idea, but possibly these theories are some intelligent attempts to come to terms with aspects of reality which cannot be convincingly 'explained' by science exclusively informed and defined by material laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

Emancipatory destruction

Anybody interested in the causes of present-day cultural erosion, should take notice of what happened in academia in the last century, where the generations were formed who would enter society's cultural institutions and produced a climate of superficial, light-hearted contempt for the achievements of the past which were created with such great efforts and faith in the value of civilization. In the departments of 'cultural studies', a vague but intense smell of cynicism and incompetence drew numerous feeble minds towards 'culture', comparable with the enthusiasm with which flies are attracted to the dunghill.

A good example is the career of literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, analysed in this interesting article:

www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017/9/the-case-of-stephen-greenblatt-8753

Now, the 'New Criterion' has the odium of being 'conservative', but the premisses which are at the basis of the approach of the author, are not 'conservative' at all: that there is value and meaning in cultural products of the past which are still valuable in the present and will be so in the future, that there are distinctions between excellent, mediocre and flawed works, that critical assessment in the cultural sphere is functional because it helps understanding and clarification, and supports preservation of what is of crucial importance for our civilization and for humanity in general. All this is mere common sense and has no political or ideological meaning, it is too basic for that. But the many emancipation movements of the last century, which were rightly motivated by indignation about injustice, created - next to appropriate corrections in society - also a climate in which every cultural deed became suspect and every exploration of works an ideologically-charged undertaking, breaking-down the receptive framework of meaning, quality and context. In short, a misunderstood emancipatory movement wrought havock in the cultural field. Given the intellectual feebleness of the methods, it attracted many more students than ever before to the cultural studies departments, because the human pyramid of endowment gives more weight to the greater numbers at the bottom and thus, the financial advantages which play such a crucial role in a liberal, capitalist, egalitarian society could not easily be ignored by the educational system.

Sir Roger Scruton has already refuted this trend in a hilarious way in his 'Modern Culture' (Continuum, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2007; in chapter 12: 'The Devil's Work'). The above-mentioned article reflects a similar sharp and common-sense mind. If these authors are 'conservative', are they conservative because of preserving a common sense and analytical mind? Why would such characteristics be conservative? In times of erosion, preserving things which are of value is the most progressive attitude possible if progress means improvement. If anything deserves to be preserved, it is an analytical mind and common sense, increasingly rare goods in the context of rising tides of populism.