The world is in crisis, and this crisis is one of modernity. This modernity
was born in the West, and has conquered the rest of the globe, either by force
or by persuasion or by example. It is not the concept of modernity in itself
but its narrow-minded and destructive interpretation, turned into an ideology,
which is the problem. The results we see all around us - it is not necessary to
rehearse all of them here.
The version of modernity which is at the roots of the current problems is a
world view, and an image of man, which began to appear a couple of ages
ago.
Classical music as a genre can offer a symbolism and an experience which
may contribute to the healing of the world, beginning by the individual
listener. Its effects may be minor, but it firmly puts classical music in the
context of a new version of modernity.
From 'Postcorona Music; The Relevance of Classical Music in a Troubled World' (to appear
somewhere in the next year):
The first stirrings of the
‘modern world view’ can be detected in the Renaissance, but its dominating
characteristics only developed in the course of the 19th century with the first
wave of industrialization with its ‘wild capitalism’ and the development of the
(limited) scientific worldview, the period when the more subjective and
spiritual forms of the Enlightenment were gradually eroding and materialism and
rationalism took precedence. ‘Modern’ became a slogan, a symbol of a
progressive mindset, the suggestive motor of destruction of anything that stood
in its way, especially anything that could be referred to as ‘traditional’
which became a negative label of conservatism. In his ‘Une Saison en Enfer’
(1873), young French poet Arthur Rimbaud exclaimed: 'Il faut être absolument
moderne!’ (‘One has to be absolutely modern!‘ or: ‘One has to absolutely be
modern!‘) - he was merely echoing a wide-spread consensus that ‘the past’ stood
for stagnation and that ‘progress’ promised ultimate liberation and fulfilment
of humanity’s deepest longings.
The term ‘modern’ is a mere historic one; it means: that which is
contemporary, which is ‘now’. It has no qualitative meaning, and it is only
indicating a fluid position of ‘now’ on the time line, continuously shifting.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers two definitions of ‘modernity’: 1) ‘the
quality or state of being or appearing to be modern’; 2) ‘the modern era or
world and especially the ideas and attitudes associated with the modern world’.
The Cambridge Dictionary gives for ‘modern‘: ‘Designed and made using the most recent ideas and methods; of the present or recent times, especially the period of history since around 1500; existing in the present or a recent time, or using or based on recently developed ideas, methods, or styles.’ So, that does not help us much
further on the point of qualitative meaning. But we can identify a number of
mindsets characteristic of ‘modernity’ which create a mental space, a world
view, dominating all other considerations:
Progress: the belief that the world inevitably moves, or has to
move, towards a better condition, progress not merely as a laudable effort to
improve the quality of life and of societies, but as a prescriptive ideology:
“Thou shalst dedicate thyself to Progress no matter what”…. - progress
understood as an independent force of history pushing humanity forwards, like
time itself. This means: ‘progress‘ without any consideration beforehand what
‘progress’ means in which instance, within which context and with which goal.
It is romanticized, immature thinking, escaping the concerns of the present and
the necessity to learn from the past. The bottomless stupidity of this
‘thinking’ is the idea that there is anything to win by throwing ages of
experience and understanding of the human condition in the dustbin, as if
knowing and understanding more about ourselves would be a hindrance to any
constructive development. It is utopian dreaming in a never-never-land and the
opposite of true progress, which can only be qualitative – something is progressive
if it improves on something that was less good. The notion of ‘progress’
without context means nothing; while we now live in a period at the end of the
ideological ‘Grand Narrative of Progress’ which began with the Enlightenment,
that mindset has become conservative through and through, in the sense of
wanting to freeze something that has become meaningless, for its own sake. When
progress is correctly understood as qualitative, then it becomes clear that
classical music in its authentic form is a qualitative contribution to the
human condition, which means: the more classical music there is around, and the
more people get access to its experience, the better for humanity - that would
be real progress.
Change: the idea that since in
the modern world, things change so often and so fast, change is a sign of
modernity and therefore something good in itself, ‘change‘ as a positive
value indicating progress. As with ‘progress‘, ‘change‘ is a meaningless
concept if not embedded in context: change from or towards something, and
whether it is a change for the better or the worse. Life is development and
change indeed – but never without context. Given the transience of life, it is
insane not to give attention to the aspect which preserves value within the
fleeting flow of time: continuity. Like ‘progress’, the idea of ‘change’ has
for many ‘modern’ people become a vehicle of escape from the reality of life,
and an excuse to no longer reflect on implications and consequences of ideas
and actions – an empty stopgap, to avoid thinking. Since all meaningful values
are timeless and transcend the concrete reality of life, they offer stability
and continuity, as a background of deep structure to the ever shifting
foreground. The performance of classical music illustrates as no other art the
fruitful combination of stability and meaningful change: works, elevated from
their time and place, represent timeless value but interpretation is by people
who live in the present and, with every new birth of the musical work in its performance,
offer a real experience in the ‘now’, an experience which may change from
performer to performer, or over time with the same performer. It is the meaningful
relationship between changeable foreground and stable background which makes
the art form an intensily living one, symbolizing the way man has to
negotiate himself through life.
Freedom: it is hard to find a
concept that is more misunderstood, abused, lied about, perverted, violated,
prostituted, as freedom. Namely, freedom as it has mostly been understood
within the world view of modernity as the absence of limitations and
restrictions, does not exist; as such, it is a meaningless term. The notion of
freedom only obtains meaning in relation to something else: the freedom from
something, or to something; and then it depends upon the context in how
far one can speak of freedom at all. ‘Freedom’ as a slogan, as a symbol of
social, cultural and idealized liberation and renewal, was born in the 18th
century Enlightenment as a philosophical and political exploration of reform of
a feudal class society. In such circumstance, ‘freedom’ obtains a quality that
goes far beyond the practical considerations and becomes an utopian ideal in
itself, an enticing but ever receding horizon. 18th-century French philosopher
Jacques Rousseau thought that man is born free and is only put into chains
later-on by society, while the every-day reality is that we are born entirely
un-free and entirely dependent upon the direct environment of family,
circumstance, location, community, culture, and have to acquire freedom
gradually and in different contexts for different reasons with different
results. But central to modernity’s new world view is the freedom to create
one’s own life according to one’s own values and opinions and wishes; the
freedom to create one’s own identity. But this freedom is also dependent upon
the chances we are offered to find-out about the material from which to create
an identity, and upon our individual talents and self-understanding to discover
the nature of our Self, together with the wisdom to judge the value of this
nature, whether this or that is good for us or not. The freedom of a criminal
to create his own identity on the basis of his inclinations is one, quite
different from the vicar’s self-identification. Identity formation is not an
easy thing and most people seek easy methods to fill the gap of freedom,
resulting from living in a free, individualistic, secular, nihilistic,
egalitarian world, with trivialized simulacra of community-membership: helped
and exploited by commerce, they buy their membership of an imagined cummunity
of ideal people as conjured-up by advertizing. Where we see a rampant egoism
and antisocial behavior, the erosion of community-feeling and family loyalty in
the name of freedom and self-determination, and the existential loneliness of
people left behind because of their different opinions and values, then we know
that the modern sense of freedom is at work. Freedom in any context always
implies responsibilities and obligations, simply because we are dependent upon
other people for the satisfaction of our needs, of which human contact and
loyalties are fundamental; since there are many different levels of life
experience, there are also many levels of different kinds of freedom, which
have to be discovered and acquired with the utmost care; thinking that freedom
is simply the absence of limiting constraints, is immature and destructive. And
then, what remains of freedom where it has turned into an ideology: ‘Thou
shalst be free no matter what’, as so often proclaimed in the last century? It
is like being forced to rejoice, as in the finales of Shostakovich’ symphonies.
This misconception results from the assumption that there are historic forces
which inevitably drive humanity to liberation, resulting into the paradox that
we become free through laws that bind us. Concepts like freedom appear to be
hard to understand when presented as abstract perfect ideals, since this
invites certain types of brains to stop thinking and to surrender to a
beautiful idea without any consequences in the reality of life. The concept of
human rights, related to the concept of freedom and equally developed in the
Enlightenment movement, has comparable problems of adjustment: in the modern
world; the law has to continuously intervene to decide whose rights have to be
balanced against someone else’s rights, because everybody is equal for the law.
Although the concept is a great qualitative advancement if embedded in law, it
is questionable whether it has really been possible to be turned into an
internalized awareness of equality and justice, as we can easily see how
immigrants and fugitives are treated, or people with customs or natural
variations which are treated as ‘deviations’ from some imagined norm – the
minorities question. How really free are minorities in the free Western world?
Also the pressures of economy and class, even within a seemingly egalitarian
society, almost always create severe limitations upon any sense of freedom from
which it is often very hard to escape. So, in the modern world, ‘freedom’ is a
questionable good – but it is, as a sign of modernity, used as a symbol of
profound progress from premodern, traditional society, while there is at most a
gradual and very local improvement discernible. In the name of freedom, the
ideologists of modernity have embarked upon the task to dehumanize the world,
and destroy its beauties and natural balance and resources, and slander ages of
aesthetic development and explorations of the human condition, cutting the
roots of the human being and kicking him into the empty space of modernity’s
utopian and immature imaginings. What has classical music to contribute to the
notion of freedom? The best of its repertoire awakens or reinforces a sense of
Self, which automatically includes a sense of inner freedom which is related to
meaning and thus, responsibility. From a position of inner freedom, one can
intervene in an unfree world and be able to improve conditions for one’s own
and other people’s life.
Materialism: according to this
limited view of modernity, only that which can be measured, weighed, proven,
and tagged with a price label, does exist. Which means: the perfect excuse for
‘wild capitalism’ - the market as the main decisive factor in the world, where
value can only be translated into price, and wealth is a ’value’ in itself,
without the preconditioned need to be invested into something of true value.
Nature seen as a material resource to be exploited and turned into commodities,
without understanding the meaning of Nature and its role for humanity, also
beyond its material offerings; man as disconnected from Nature, and as its
master, unhindered by the fact of the part which binds him to it. Technology
not as a useful tool to improve the quality of life, but the other way around:
life as dedicated to technology which is a value in its own right to which
everything else has to be subjected. Physicality: everything that enhances the
presence of the human body: fashion, sports, sexuality; the human body not as
an expression of and a bridge towards the person, but the other way around: the
person as a vehicle to express the body. The advanced media of today greatly
support this misunderstanding of human bodily presence, with serious psychic problems
as a result, of which the problems of intimacy are the most conspicuous, in
spite of the ‘liberation’ from prudery as celebrated in the last century. Also:
the custom of explaining human behavior by biological processes only, as if the
human psyche is merely the product of such processes, while it has already been
known for half a century how much the psyche influences biological processes.
Classical music makes the listener aware of his immaterial existence: in its
metaphorical life experiences it sheds all references to the cumbersome weight
of matter and ‘makes the soul fly freely’ through inner spaces entirely
unhindered by bodily presence; hence the positive effect of music therapy with
invalidations and psychic ailments, and the inspiration it offers for the
down-trodden, depressed, and desillusioned.
Power: the importance given to
the human ability to subject Nature and other people – the reserve of the poor
of spirit and the empty of heart. The insane waste of the international arm
race with its nuclear capacities to wipe-out complete megacities of innocent
civilians in an instant, and to threaten other nations with military prowess to
acquire assets and influence. The idea that there is no value above what humans
decide to be a value, and that any such ‘value’ is an act of will. This is
Nietzsche’s misunderstood ‘superman’ fantasy having become a perverted reality:
the idea that there is nothing in the world but power, and that the one who
wields it, has the right to wield it. But it is a primitive ‘jungle mentality’,
threatening all life on this planet. We see it in the way politicians, covert
in the West and openly in the East, operate on it, in spite of the enormous
responsibilities in their hands. We have only to thank our current survival to the
collective fear of extinction, which means a moral defeat unequalled by
anything in human history – ‘ecce homo’, ‘behold man’. Classical music is the
opposite voice of such power, it tells of worlds of awareness and experience
far above the primitive drives which are a threatening force in the ‘real’
world. Even in the most evil human characters there is a little spark of
longing to be liberated from such drives, as demonstrated by the interest of
insane dictators in high art and classical music – they did not understand the
message but it was alluring nonetheless, even for them: Hitler, Stalin.
Dehumanizing aesthetics:
instead of the normal human inclination to enrich visual perception with
patterns that relate to our deep-seated sense of mathematical properties,
objects have to look streamlined, flat, abstracted, ‘minimalist’, empty of
‘distracting’ details, and where possible made of slick metallic or plastic
materials, demonstratively produced by factory technology or as if by
artificial intelligence, not by human hands - all of which has to point
towards some utopian technological future where human life will be so much
better, so much more under control, so much more rational, abstract and
efficient, so much distanced from Nature. It is one of the biggest lies of
modernity and deeply harmful, undermining any natural human development towards
discerning aesthetic perception. It is something entirely unnatural, and often
even anti-natural – it is born from the wish to escape the natural world and
human nature with all its entanglements and problems; in that sense it is
juvenile and, surprisingly, primitive. We see it everywhere: in the
‘modern’ city scapes with their glass and steel sky scrapers; in the way cars
look and appartment blocks; in the big shopping malls with their smooth
‘easy-going’ blinking interiors and expensive unnecessary commodities; in
interior decoration styles with their whites, greys and blacks; in railway
stations and the looks of trains, trams, busses, and cars; the way simple domestic
tools are designed as if they were destined for Mars settlements: water
cookers, coffee machines, irons, watches, shoes, cell phones, computers, CD
players, etc. etc. Let it be clear that this narrow approach of aesthetics is
entirely understandable: in premodern times, everything that man used, had a
long tradition of formation behind it, which meant that aesthetics had been
tried-out extensively; with the birth of industrial modernity entirely new
objects came into existence and the utopian approach seemed the easiest and its
message best for marketing. Abstraction has always been a part of aesthetics -
of any art or practical necessity - but as an underlying structure, not as a
demonstrative surface phenomenon with a ‘message‘. Even where abstraction is
all there is, as in much islamic architecture (like the Alhambra in Spain), the
surface is still rich in decorative detail, meant to stimulate the subjective
perceptive sensibilities. As no other art form, classical music reinforces the
natural human inclination to flesh-out the experience of the senses, with its
wealth of details and sensual nuances, with its rich aesthetics saturated with
relationships between details and the whole, with its complexities that render
abstraction into an emotional experience instead of an intellectual exercise,
and its emotionally-rewarding experiences of sheer beauty – telling the
listener about a human world where beauties in their infinite variety and truth
are the same thing.
