I recall that Richard M. Weaver addresses this sort of issue in “Ideas Have Consequences,” though I think he sees it as a sort of spiritual problem rather than a cultural one.  Somewhere in that book I believe he mentions the fact that things that used to be considered reflective of simple workmanship would now have to be considered museum pieces: a truly startling observation in view of th endlessly commodified spectacle of the postmodern museum.

On a related note, once about a dozen years ago I made a special trek to the Metropolitan to spend some time with the Shaker exhibit, but it was closed for a “People for the American Way” event: the aptness of this would have appealed to Carl Jung, as it does to me in retrospect.

It aint the “contemporary” that makes current music so bad, it’s the damnable noise of popularity that does. I’m quite certain that there were no small number, of twanging thumpers afoot when Haydn was alive.

The difference today is that the “popular” of this nervous and jerky culture is nearly as omnipresent as the air we breathe. Advertising , packaging and Marketing have compounded the tragedy by elevating a kind of sunny dim brute dramatic hyperbole to a national soundtrack..... like bird breeding season in the northeast woods if all birdsong was like the braying of mules.

One must work a bit harder to find it against the full bore backdrop of bellowing stupidity but there is a lot of good music and other art about if you look for it, live and otherwise. If you’re in a city, you don’t actually have to look to hard, just don’t follow what the critics and their newspapers say.

The real question is why popular culture is so bad and how have the elite class allowed themselves to be so breezily bamboozled by it. But then, that would be courting the obvious given the rather reduced circumstances we find our elite class to be in these days, evolutionally speaking.

DWS

Correct: there is good art about and good music but you have to know what
it is you’re seeking. The popular culture of every age was awful. You really
don’t believe that the Sistine was part of “popular culture” do you? Or even
Caravaggio? The elites have been bamboozled because they know as much about
the arts as the man in the street which is to say very, very little.
Besides, they invested in this crap; they’re not about to lose their little
investments. They want to sell it to the next sucker, public or private.
The dumb-downed education hasn’t helped; the constant noise; the visual
assaults are just as bad. I haven’t gotten to wearing headphones that block
out noise but I am done with cable.

It’s a reflection of Antle’s Law: Anything that can suck will eventually suck.

I think the decline in religious faith plays a role.  Both Haydn and Rachmaninoff were serious religious believers.  By contrast, the philosophical materialism so prevalent today is not very inspiring.

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 a fortiori 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 in front of 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 in 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.

I think part of it is that at the time of Haydn,
say from C.P.E. Bach through Schubert, Central European
culture valued music to the extent that their sons
were encouraged to become musicians, or in some way
involved in musical activity.  The society as a whole
valued music.  I think it is telling that during the classical
period there are a large number of second tier composers
who are still popular and worth listening to.  I’m thinking
of people like Bocherini, Dittersdorf, Pleyel, Vanhal, et al.
I do not know of another period in musical history where
the second tier produced such high quality. 

Composing was, in the classical period, primarily a craft.
It wasn’t focussed on self-expression and originality, though
valued, wasn’t the highest value.  Mozart often borrowed
themes from Haydn and other composers; they all did.  Thid
wasn’t considered plaigarism but a complement.  The point
was to produce an uplifting piece for the occasion of the
commission.

But tastes change.  Other activities became more central,
like fiction writing, theater and politics.  I doubt that
the specific cultural and economic conditions that supported
the classical period can be replicated, but it’s still
possible to enjoy the masterpieces from that time.

Jim Wilson

If you want an answer about why contemporary music is so bad read “Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music” by E. Michael Jones.

It is “jar of piss”,not “jaw of piss”.Unless you are speaking of certain modern singers.

Thank you Sid for another excellent post on this subject that keeps coming up with weaying preidctability.

As a member of the under-50 set who digs modern music, I can only applaud it. In my experience it’s the
likes of Ligeti, Xenakis, Adams, and so forth that bring the young people to serious music,
not Schubert or Rachmaninoff!

I’m surprised you didn’t talk about pop music as well. IF classical music has fallen into decadance and dullness combined, it’s even WORSE in the popular muscic category. The Blues well never die, but all the old guys who played it are dead and gone, and all we’ve got left is pretty blue-eyed white suburban kids from North Dakota. Not even close. And Rock and Roll was supposed to never die, but the best of the modern stuff is either whining drival or derivative clunkers, and the old rockers are now playing gigs at public radio fundraisers. Shees, RnR died when the Beatles came out--I’m not sure wwhy all the liberals like the Beatles so much, their stuff sounds contrived, and bland today...mere elevator musici.

@Sid.....
Your comment about the richness of “silence” is right on the mark and it is exactly why the continuous streaming caterwauling of the radio and stunovision are so bereft of quality, the never-ending appetite for relentless sound leading climactically toward something be sold, partially consumed and cast off.

It’s the same with all the arts. There hasn’t been a great work of fiction in decades. Poetry completely died. The theater is finished. Will a painter be remembered after Picasso?

My theory is that when a society appreciates something, such as classical music, to the point that individuals who may not necessarily be pre-disposed to such, are forced to nevertheless undergo at least preliminary training, that pure genius is more likely to be found. Many of the great composers were in fact prodigies, and others no doubt were slow studies who waited for inspiration to come, and when it did they had the necessary tools to put that inspiration into music.  One must also consider that the audience was also that much more discerning and demanding that composers produce quality.  The pure hack was not celebrated as it is today.

Aw comeon Ravis, great works of fiction are produced daily, they’re called Newspapers.

Interestingly enough, the Tragicomedy that is this lapsed Republic, it’s assigns, heirs and sundry pilferers are a classic piece of literature in the making.

Funny enough , the story of it will likely be written on computer and when they go down, our heirs in the dim future will wonder how a powerful culture can destroy itself while leaving no trace at all, aside from landfills and spent cartridges. But I mean this in only the nicest way.

Poetry completely died.

Not quiet.  Ravis, I was bit hard on Celts. In fact, the best poetry in English since 1945 has come out of Ireland.

As bad as contemporary music is, it has never become the con job that is contemporary art. I suppose Schonberg tried to become the musical Picasso, but since you can’t hang his music on the wall and elicit hip praise from onlookers, he had to be content with appealing to an esoteric elite. As far as the Beatles are concerned, well, that is one for the social pathologists.

@ Lester,

Come on...., to blame the current pedestrian level of the popular arts on “capitalism” is more than a little kneejerk. First of all, there is some great art being produced globally, of all forms even if the continuous streaming of the popular media tends to obscure or ignore it. Second, the only real interesting era of art in Communist Russia was the Constructivists and they were stomped by the purges. Chinese and Russian Socialist Art, during their totalitarian years consisted of heroic paintings of musclebound men and woman glorying in war and crusade. There was some technical virtuosity here but it was tightly orchestrated within Party Norms. Their music was frozen in time.

Art always has been tied to power.....it reflects the power that is the patron. The mainstream art of the current power in this country is a kind of locked and loaded prosaic. Fashion, Plastic Surgery, the value, rather than the content of paintings, popular literature, all of it reflects the breezy Functional Illiteracy of the Establishment and while capitalism.... as it has been practiced.... can bear some blame for the detritus that washes up out of the seas of popular culture, it aint solely to blame by any means.

Case in point, the Netherlands, inventors of the Dutch Bulb Crisis Capitalism that we are currently experiencing produced the Dutch Masters and to swim in those paintings is to understand the divinity of man’s artistic impulse. Even there, Rembrandt was accused of creating crude “unfinished” pictures by the folks in charge.

Capitalism aint the culprit, it’s just..... in the form expressed by this current ADD culture, just one of the unindicted co-conspirators. The real problem is we’ve made consuming into an idle popular recreation.

Mr. Sabin:

Your remarks—that the market hardly causes cultural decadence and cultural impoverishment—need no correction.  Shakespeare was commercial.  Wagner was quite commercial.  Florence and Venice, during the Great Ages, were exceedingly commercial.  It’s just that tastes were elevated then: they ain’t now.

Where I differ concerns Russia under the Commies.  What some hate about Socialist Realism in the painting, sculpture, and architecture, they like in its music and literature: Stuck in the 19th Century.  Socialist Realists in painting were just second-rate retreads of Gustave Courbet.  Their architecture was simple the Albert Memorial recycled as Behemoth.  Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff composed 19th Century music. Solzenitzen and Pasternak wrote 19th Century novels. The German Commie Brecht reached back to the Elizabethans for his “Epic Drama” and even to 16th Century Kirchengesang for his poetry. There is no Commie Ludwig Kirchner, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Jørn Utzon, Joyce, Pound, Schönberg, or Bartok—save maybe for the Constructivists whom you mentioned. 

To be fair, to be stuck in a past century isn’t just the fault of Commies.  A leading Paleoconservative intellectual, someone whom I respect, once told me that Cubism is bad art and Sant’Anselmo in Rome, built 1900 in the Historicist style, was a beautiful building.  I replied that he who can paint the back, side, and front of a figure all on a flat surface is doing something approaching mastery.  I held my tongue about the sterile Sant’Anselmo. Yet as they say de gustibus ...

Under the “slippery slope” category, relying upon the reader to rat out fellow readers for their intemperance should be an interesting process here. Has Taki opened up a new Good Taste and Decorum Department to review these skirmishes?

If “Abusive” includes “too windy”, I’m done for.

Hey—Not only did Taki once insult Xenakis but now you are starting in with Stockhausen. Am I still allowed to post here if I admit to owning a large pile of records by each arteest?

The problems with most detractors of contemporary classical music
are:

1) they make sweeping generalizations.

2) when called upon to provide examples of what they’re talking about,
they are usually unable to cite more than a handful of pieces (Stockhausen, Heggie),
and show only very limited experience with the repertoire that
they’re criticizing.

3) they make simple-minded generalizations about pre-20th century
classical music, and try to make up irrelevant rules
to show that contemporary classical music is inferior. It’s
ok to just say “I don’t like it”, you know.