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Entry: Why is contemporary music so bad? Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/why_is_contemporary_music_so_bad#22091 Post contents: Because on this site I have publicly defended the music of Messiaen, Steve Reich, John Adams, and Pärt (try his Te Deum), I’m not sure I can agree with a thesis that ALL contemporary classical music is bad (though this is not the Mr. Spenser’s thesis). This website discusses openly politics and putatively conservatism, so a few cultural reasons, drawn from these wells, for a meager age in music might be worthwhile. Consider these causes, off the top of my head. : 1. Cultural Marxism, which considers Jacqueline Susann as good as Homer and thus <i>a fortiori</i> Heavy Metal as good as the “Heiliger Dankgesang”. (To be fair, and to rescript Disraeli on “Liberalism”: Any 13 year old boy who doesn’t like Heavy Metal has something wrong with his heart; any 14 year old boy who still likes Heavy Metal has something wrong with his head; and any adult who still adores it is doubtless now deaf.) To be fairer, Cultural fascism didn’t do much better, unless one wants to call Respighi a cultural Fascist (I don’t). And we suffer from Fascist architecture in every big city. 2. Real Conservatives know all about the strength and duration of tradition, including musical tradition. Ours in Gringoland offers slim pickin’s. “The libido for the ugly”, as Mencken called it, afflicts visual sensibilities the Anglo-Saxon-Celt. Why should the auditory be any better? (I am aware that many Celts and Celtic wannabes will assault me for the previous statement. I await still the Celtic Frescobaldi.) Alas, while the Italians have very fine aesthetic feeling for the visual – the appalling Ara Pacis Museum notwithstanding –, their current auditory taste is wanting. Fortunately the Central Europeans hold their own. 3. Men with shallow souls with the depth of a pizza pie pan – hollow men in the waste land of a botched civilization amid the lonely crowd sitting on park benches waiting for Godot – aren’t much for the arts. I’ll not venture into the deep water of the connect between secularization and the decline of the arts. By my intuition, I judge Mr Piatak quite correct about the connection. 4. To build upon what teachem2think has said: let’s blame Shoddy skuels. In my day the socialist schools (aka “public schools”) weren’t much to boast about. And yet, at least in terms of literature, however wanting “Idylls of the King” was in 10th grade, Washington Irving in the 11th, and the Gentile Tradition in general, still those teachers instilled a love of good literature that abides. Today’s young’uns ain’t so lucky. 5. To depart from political considerations, I add that if the New Criterion’s music section be any guide, some folk have a very limited view of just what Classical Music is (or was, or ought to be): i.e. something between Bach’s Brandenburgs and Mahler’s 9th. The “Early” Music revival would seem to be largely unknown to our cultural elites. That Josquin, Tomas Luis de Victoria, and Montiverdi are superior composers to most of the Brandenburg to Mahler crowd ought at least be argued. Truth be told, some musical traditions become exhausted. One can’t write Baroque music – and maybe polyphonic music in general – better than Bach. The “Art of the Fugue” closed a 550 period in music. Harmonic music (as opposed to polyphonic) now might be exhausted also – at least in its Mozartian, Romantic, and Schönbergian forms – and thus it might be foolish to expect more harmonic composers doing something new. Moreover, from Bach to the present, we keep using the same 12 notes. Why not some more? More generally, the history of the arts in the West is the history of a new style commencing, and then after a century or two what can be done with it is done, done well, and not worth repeating. 6 In the same vein, most music in the last 3 centuries is performed <i>in front of</i> an audience, be it in a concert hall, be it on a stage or orchestra pit, be it from two stereo speakers. But this is hardly true of much “earlier” music. Gregorian Chant is/was performed with the listener <b>in</b> the music. So is a soldier’s march. So also Tallis’ 40(forty!) part “Spem in Alium”. So the entire Venetian School, what with San Marco’s 360 degree balconies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_school So is a real Catholic Mass in real Catholic churches, with the choir behind and the priest, deacon and subdeacon up front. I have a very fine recording of Monteverdi’s “Vespers”, recorded in San Marco; the tenor echo can be imaged and sound-staged by my speakers, but it only sounds and looks farther away. I’d think that with surround sound we could remedy this, and we’ll finally get the Venetian School well mediated. 7. Finally, serious music needs silence. Gregorian Chant emerges out of an imposed silence, yet we forget today how silent the pre-petroleum, pre-electronic ages were. Many of my students, in contrast, had to be surrounded by sound all the time. They couldn’t even sleep with silence. They feel, when in silence, that things are closing in upon them with malicious intents. But noise isn’t music, and the pause in Beethoven’s 9th 4th mvt and Adams’ “Fearful Symmetries” is the axis upon which the whole music turns. Sent at: 2009 01 09