Quote from: Katia on June 19, 2007, 07:37:57 PM
...for instance, i said music is sort of a ray that increases its width as it evolves. what are your thoughts on this?
I had never thought about it in those kinds of terms before. Do you mean you think that its focus has broadened accordingly? That it is more diffuse, as a 'force'?
nota
Well, you asked for it:
I am not prepared to offer an overarching conception of the thing at this point, except to say that it seems to be both becoming, as a force, simultaneously more amplified and disintegrating. (What I am prepared to do is offer the History of Western Music lecture, so it's dry, with a real scroll factor, so, watch out.
) (I'm exaggerating, it's barely even a thumbnail sketch.)
We are, right now, talking about Western Music, the tradition of what's thought of as a 'serious music', or 'the classical music' tradition, if I am not wrong. Which is as good a starting point as we probably can get for this discussion.
Let's go back to, say, the music that led to such composers as JS Bach, by which I mean the Renaissance period polyphony, which has its roots in the music of The Holy Roman Catholic Church. This music was derived from what's called plainsong, which is *tunes*. Melodic, straightforward, sung in unison (homophony). Simple intervals, musically, so a whole lot of people can join in, for the Glorification of God. There were clearly defined conventions to keep it simple, and Holy. (Now, all this might suggest to you an integrity with the control systems at work in that society.) And these tunes were sung in a great big reverberant space, in an emulation of the Grandeur of this God.
Because of the Glorification of God aesthetic, you do want to have the best tunes available, instead of your garden variety folksong your peasants are singing in the fields. This is what I mean by an aesthetic, in this context. So you eventually get the idea of Tunes Created by Great Composers.
Now here, you have a tension, of course, beginning to happen between the Unification of the Society, as handed down by the Agents of God, and the individual's own greatness, coming up with the great tunes to sing. (You have a little tiny bit of rule-breaking, but these rules, about how it works, how tunes were made, were extremely strict ones and you could be accused of being in league with THE DEVIL
, so, your control mechanisms were still pretty large.)
These composers' livelihood, at this point, by necessity, came primarily from The Church.
You see this for a long time, JS Bach was a church organist, for example. (Though he did go for other gigs, the Church wasn't necessarily where the Big Bucks were...) So you have more and more individuation as the result of the Composer concept, over time. And more making up your own rules, Within Reason.
Fast-forward to your classical period, proper. Say, WA Mozart. Along with The Church, you, if you wanna be the Great Composer (much less find the local hot action), now have the control mechanism of the King or Queen, and, while you still have the Glory of God thing to work with, you have the individual tastes, read Ego, of the King et al to contend with. Along with the tastes of the masses, more or less. And you must make a living, so you gratify these two other elements as much as humanly possible. IE: you get to be commercial.
There is still the overarching aesthetic of the Great Church in there, and just as in the other Arts, your sacred and profane are more or less mixed, now. There is a little less control coming down from the top. (Which is fair, because you're more and more on your own.) More and more persons are trying this at home, too.
This goes on for a good while. More and more, the Artist gets to glorify his own idea, and we have Romanticism as a result, the individual as Heroic in his struggle with both the Big Picture sort of deal, and with the mundanity in the society. (EG: Beethoven) Now we have entertainment value as an emerging factor.
EVENTUALLY you are selling tickets to the spectacle, so less and less are you particularly gratifying your more powerful individuals and their cliques to make the Big Bucks. (Or the Medium Bucks, even.) There is more or less a sort of democratization happening. Authority is becoming more and more decentralized.
The composer gets to decide more and more what goes down, and even gets to define to some extent, by his own grandeur, reputation, what the audience will accept... you get the fan base having their own ideas, too, as to what's good. What you do not have yet is the so-called unwashed masses participating, not so much. They have their thing, which may or may not reflect what's happening on the stage. (Everything gets more and more mixed up, which is a good thing. You get the 'I might try this at home' thing, all through this process, of course.)
You can have, according to the High Romantic aesthetic, the Rebel Artiste now. You get more and more experimentation with form and with content. You get Debussy going to the 1888-1889 International Exposition (Oriental Music!) and hearing gamelan music, and you get some stuff that is quite radical for its time; you get Igor Stravinsky deciding to break some rules in a big way. You even get fisticuffs in the audience over
is this stuff even music? [Le Sacre du Printemps' 1913 premiere. "Whores of the sixteenth arrondisement!" - biff, bam.]
At about this time you have the Russian Revolution, and the working stiffs fed up with all of the above. You get Stravinsky moving around, having enough privilege to get the F outta dodge, partly due to the old school power base he was born into, partly due to the new thing,
the fan base, and partly, or mainly due to Publishing Rights, from the 'you
can try this at home' base. Politically, you get rabble rousing from both the left and the right. Communism, fascism, what-have-you. You get the Geniuses coming to America to get away from The Wars.
America. The great equalizer. The product of all of the above. Technology, coming from War. Mass Production of the ''I can totally try this at home' thing. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In America of course we have the emancipated African-Americans, more and more trying to do their own thing: Jazz. Popular Music.
Who is the new Church? Who is the new King? Your control mechanisms are become quite contentious.
You get: Capitalism is the New Everything. You get the Record Company. You get Hollywood. You get the Genius working for the Big Bucks in both of these categories. You have their frustration, a lot of them being expatriated and refugees, at the whole damn ballgame, on account of being traditionally heroic and all that jazz. Combine this with all the violence that is the natural product of a great big entropy, and all of the above.
This entropic cycle has had a number of opposing effects and affects, as we can see. You see the audience eventually at odds with the art, and the artist becomes more and more isolated.
Fast forward slightly, to today: what you have is the try-this-at-home thing taken to a wildly new level, due to the technology. (Especially the one called quantum mechanics, which gives us things like the CD player, and The Digital Sequencer, and the 'convert to mp3' option.) You get more and more people, in this vast democratization, deciding they are qualified to mass-produce their own objects, for self-glorification, to make friends and influence people (cf. The Local Hot Action), and for The Big Bucks. These opposing affects/effects, add up to, I think, a dual degradation and expansion of what, for a lack of a better word, we'll call 'quality' happening. [I just realized this simultaneous degradation and expansion is what the Universe does appear to be doing. Isn't that amazing?!]
[You were suggesting a shape. I see fragmentation, particles exploding. Starting from a light that had consistency but wasn't so brilliant, now you see debris from collapsed stars, sending bright light in all directions.]
