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Entry: The Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_music_from_the_spirit_of_government_subsidies#15574 Post contents: I agree that the role of the taxpayer as patron of first resort is not helpful to the creation of great music. How many newly commissioned works are played once to an unsuspecting audience, never to be repeated? Of course they will get a respectful and 'insightful' review in the Broadsheets as a consolation prize. However I believe there are other factors which have an important part to play. Firstly, the concoction of twelve tone technique as a legitimate musical form to replace the tonal musical form. An advantage of this compositional method is that it enables mediocrity as exemplified by Schoenberg to 'compete' in the same game, that of great composer as exemplified by Beethoven. The difficulty with it is that the human brain finds the sound of it incoherent ie not music. At some point people will simply give up pretending that they enjoy this stuff and that will be the end of that. And when I referred to "pretending", of course, we are right in "The Emperor's new clothes" territory, hence the 'performance' of a work called 4'33" which may or may not be atonal, but is about the extraneous sounds which are normally hidden by an orchestra's playing. It's lack of overt cacophony probably explains it's popularity. There is also the myth of the inevitability or even the desirability of progress, not only in music but in the arts generally. Creative people of the arts believe they can and should develop new forms in much the same way that scientists and technologists create new forms rendering prior conceptions obsolete and incomplete. And of course the faster the scientific world advances the more creative artists try to keep up often using the new tools developed through scientific endeavour. But this is not how great art is produced: Beethoven produced many of the greatest of all works of music, not by trying to distance himself from Haydn, but simply by trying to express his personal creative vision. I said "simply" with irony because it leads to the next issue, namely the democratisation of 'genius'. This is the evolution of techniques which enable artistic forms to be taught and practiced by mediocrities thereby not only greatly increasing the participants but also ensuring that great talent goes unrecognised. Such as twelve tone technique, but also even more bizarre methodologies which have 'graced' the latter half of the twentieth century and on. And then again there have been attempts at rapprochement often by use of primitive forms. There are parallels to all this in visual art where Conceptualism achieves the same, so for that matter, with string theory in physics where practitioners no longer need to be able to visualise the increasingly unreal world or worlds that their equations have formulated. The truth is that great creative ability is very rare and unless the fortunate few are provided with a coherent launch platform for their talent instead of being inhibited and sidetracked by inappropriate methodologies they will not produce anything worthwhile and classical music will remain stuck in a rut with the larger audience ignoring 'modern' music, a few enthusiasts trying to extract sustenance from the slight manifestations of coherence and creativity and the rest of the world assuming classical music has died and been replaced by the 'Beetles' and Andrew Lloyd Webber and that would be a shame. (Sorry to be dogmatic on 12-tone, but having listened to some pieces repeatedly until they had become totally familiar, they still did not strike me as coherent or meaningful, but above all they were not enjoyable to listen to). Sent at: 2008 07 24