A Special Comment On Music History:
This morning's Overgrown Path took us to one of our favorite (and certainly the prevalent) view of music history.
Pliable always has the best junk, doesn't he? This is grade-A quality smack to get your morning started off right:
Rather than being indebted to Donald Rumsfeld, this is the type of historical narrative one would expect Pollyanna to churn out. Nevertheless, it is such an overwhelmingly accepted view that it almost seems similarly naive to argue against it.
However, as another obnoxiously self-obsessed bloviator with a fondness for pointlessly elaborate sentence structure would put it, "Events insist". We'll happily continue to pop off against this historical perspective whenever we encounter it and poke a little fun at ourselves along the way.
Pliable always has the best junk, doesn't he? This is grade-A quality smack to get your morning started off right:
"music is a major contributor in building societies. It creates a direction in societies...With all due respect to the oboist who spouted this stuff and other estimable minds like Alex Ross and Herman Hesse who buy into this narrative, this is an absolutely nonsensical view of music history.
...music has lost its way since the nineteenth century. It has changed from earlier eras—the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic epochs (1600-1900)—to trends starting in early 1900's. These earlier eras spanning 300 years represent the pinnacle of classical music in the West and are based on higher principles and values. Composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen composed music from a listener's perspective as if experimenting with noise.
When this chaotic music appeared, atomic bombs, communism and cold war also surfaced. He believes this chaotic music in no small way contributes to the chaos in modern times. Destructive political movements, such as communism, thrived by killing people in its own society.
Europe boasted excellent philosophers and scholars when classical principles were followed. When music lost its classical values, chaos developed in societies and so for 100 years, music has been struggling to find direction.
Rather than being indebted to Donald Rumsfeld, this is the type of historical narrative one would expect Pollyanna to churn out. Nevertheless, it is such an overwhelmingly accepted view that it almost seems similarly naive to argue against it.
However, as another obnoxiously self-obsessed bloviator with a fondness for pointlessly elaborate sentence structure would put it, "Events insist". We'll happily continue to pop off against this historical perspective whenever we encounter it and poke a little fun at ourselves along the way.
posted by jodru at 16:51
2 Comments:
Whenever I encounter this argument, I simply ask, "Do these old, supposedly superior musical forms adequately describe a society in which these chaotic events have taken place?" I find it hard to believe that sonata form can adequately describe a world which saw two world wars and the creation of the atomic bomb, all within a few decades.
The following is a comment I posted yesterday on OAOP blog, and that hasn’t been published yet:
___
Chaotic music and Communism?
If we go backward through the genealogy, from Stockhausen, to Schönberg (Stravinsky chaotic? um) we get to Mahler, and then going still backward we find... Wagner! Who in fact, having revolutionized music and opera, has started the whole chaos... And yet his music gave place (according to many) to nothing less than the Holocaust!
If we otherwise look to the communist regimes as accomplices of chaotic music, we should define as “chaotic” Prokofiev and Shostakovitch!
(musicians had better play music)
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