Did Wagner Start 20th Century Music?
Karl Wee
Century atonality? Could most 20th Century composers not have been
able to get away with their boldness had Wagner not written something
similar? I believe Wagner was an unassailable demigod when this
revolution was being brewed, and if he wrote this kind of music,
well...
I'm still impressed by Wilhelm Furtwangler's remark to the effect that
Wagner may have opened the world to atonality with Tristan, but he
didn't pursue it. His next work was Meistersinger.
To me Tristan has many undeniably lovely moments, but overall I prefer
his other operas.
Karl
Ralph
> This just crossed my mind. Did Tristan & Isolde open the door to 20th
> Century atonality? Could most 20th Century composers not have been
> able to get away with their boldness had Wagner not written something
> similar? I believe Wagner was an unassailable demigod when this
> revolution was being brewed, and if he wrote this kind of music,
> well...
>
> I'm still impressed by Wilhelm Furtwangler's remark to the effect that
> Wagner may have opened the world to atonality with Tristan, but he
> didn't pursue it. His next work was Meistersinger.
I have heard it said about both Tristan & Isolde, and Verdi's
Falstaff, that each of them invented 20th century opera.
Ralph
michael
> This just crossed my mind. Did Tristan & Isolde open the door to 20th
> Century atonality? Could most 20th Century composers not have been
> able to get away with their boldness had Wagner not written something
> similar? I believe Wagner was an unassailable demigod when this
> revolution was being brewed, and if he wrote this kind of music,
> well...
I don't know. I kind of think that after Wagner, there was not a whole
lot left to be done, traditionally speaking. Post Wagner, the ideas for
such grand works were exhausted, so to speak. I want to speak of
Bruckner, who attempted grand works, but in the shadow of Wagner it is
as if his music really didn't know where to go. Grand ideas without the
overriding purpose and direction.
Who, really, could live up to the standards set by Wagner? Certainly
there are later examples of beautiful and even exalted tonal music.
Here, I am thinking of Sibelius. But these works are somehow less
grand, to my way of thinking.
In Wagner's shadow maybe it was best to abandon the entire project?
There is an aesthetic theory based on perception that intrigues me. It
was put forth the by the Canadian professor of English literature,
Marshall McLuhan. His idea was that our way of communicating dictated
the "form" of the communication.
In literate societies communication was based upon the printed word.
Everything was logical, and had a beginning and an end which could be
visually mapped. They eye was the main instrument of communication.
With the advent of electronic communication things became less linear.
The ear actually became the mode of communication. We (at least in the
west) became post-literate.
With the ear, all things are sudden. With the eye, all things take
their place in a logical order, in space and in time. This was his insight.
I am also thinking of the American composer, Ives. His 4th symphony is
a good example (but almost anything he wrote is a good example). It is
less a "visual" piece, but more of a mosaic of sounds. It is a good
example of cubism in music.
Some composers abandoned the idea of tonality altogether. Think of Varese.
Wagner was a composer at the beginning of the electronic age. At the
same time he was, in my mind, the last great composer. At least the
last great composer in the grand sense. I rate him up there with Bach,
Mozart, and Beethoven.
But you are correct to my thinking. He was definitely a transitional
composer.
micahel
Mike Scott Rohan
from michael <mpre...@earthlink.net> contains these words:
{snip}
> I don't know. I kind of think that after Wagner, there was not a whole
> lot left to be done, traditionally speaking. Post Wagner, the ideas for
> such grand works were exhausted, so to speak. I want to speak of
> Bruckner, who attempted grand works, but in the shadow of Wagner it is
> as if his music really didn't know where to go. Grand ideas without the
> overriding purpose and direction.
Not everyone would agree with that estimate of Bruckner. He was, for one
thing, intensely religious, and that gave his music a totally different
direction from Wagner's. He was also a naturally symphonic composer, so
the direction is naturally less apparent than in a dramatic composer;
but by the same token it's more universal.
> Who, really, could live up to the standards set by Wagner? Certainly
> there are later examples of beautiful and even exalted tonal music.
> Here, I am thinking of Sibelius. But these works are somehow less
> grand, to my way of thinking.
> In Wagner's shadow maybe it was best to abandon the entire project?
"Grandeur" is a very vague concept, and I think that if you tried to
define that "somehow" you would find it even more so. It's nothing that
can be quantified; the nearest I might come is that in Wagner it's
created by motivation plus quality plus resources. The 19th century as a
whole was in love with the concept of "lofty" or "elevated" thought --
the metaphor speaks for itself -- and Wagner more than most. Hence his
head is permanently in the clouds. A vast oversimplification, but I
think valid. That translated itself into the quality of his music,
namely treating high-minded themes in a high-minded way, full of the
concept and ideal of nobility, expressed in both inward and outward
attitudes. And Wagner being inspired by Beethoven's way of expressing
such things, and of a musically talented, brilliantly complex and
unconventional turn of mind, developed Beethoven's musical mechanisms to
a still higher and more grandiose level. Hence Wagner's grandeur, though
genuine, is entirely self-conscious, an attitude assumed much as an
actor strikes a pose -- not for its own sake, but as a mechanism of
communication. And it struck a chord in audiences with the same
concerns, as it does today. He convinces us that "nobilitas" is, if not
attainable, at least a discernible direction to aim for.
But even in his own time doubts about that were growing, and a cynical
reaction to such earnestness was setting in (it has been pointed out
that "earnest", with its equivalents in other languages, was the
watchword of that era as much as "hip" was of the 60s, or more so.).
Perhaps the contrast between the ideal and the man in Wagner's case
helped to strengthen such doubts, but more likely it was an overall
social reaction, not least to the failures of former idealism. Even in
Wagner himself the process is discernible, his revolutionary zeal fading
into sub-Schopenhauer pessimism and Buddhist withdrawal, moving from
revolution in this world to the transcendental -- a movement which
anticipates the trend in European culture which was defined as
fin-de-siecle. With the decay and fossilization of what had once been
great, so people tended to distrust "nobilitas", and find it empty and
hypocritical. This was one of the commonest charges levelled against the
manifestation of it in Elgar's music.
There were, then, many composers who tried to follow or imitate Wagner
in the years after his death, but it generally ended in bombast
precisely because they were imitators, not originals; few if any had
anything like his talent, but almost as significantly they did not have
his ideals, in their burning power. So composers of any quality
naturally tended to aim away from that particular kind of grandiosity.
It was not so much that Wagner was unsurpassed; it was more that he
generated a reaction. A sufficiently great and original composer could
nevertheless still create something just as massive, or even more so;
but the inner need to do so was fading. Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is
intensely Wagnerian in inspiration, yet operates on a scale beyond
anything Wagner himself attempted -- in its choral writing, in
particular. But it's also indicative that the composer who came closer
than most to Wagner was also the spearhead of the reaction against all
he represented, and made a similarly single-handed attempt to create a
very different "music of the future" of his own.
You mention Sibelius, but he was one of the nationalist composers, and
they had entirely different motivations for the "grandeur" they sought
to create. It was not a grandeur of ideals, or indeed individuality; it
was a shared grandeur of common identity, creating a "voice of the
people", something they were almost all called at some point. It was
much more externalized than Wagner's, and often took its musical roots
not in the higher tradition but in the simpler themes of folk-music,
whatever was made of them. All the same, I'd question your point here.
To me, Finlandia -- more accurately known by its original title "Finland
Awakes" -- has a granitic grandeur comparable in every quality except
length to what Wagner achieved, especially with its added choral
content. The Kullervo Symphony, though a young man's work, has much of
the same.
There are other works of great grandeur in that era, some nationalistic,
some not -- the great Russian composers such as Mussorgsky and Rimsky
created grandeur of a comparable but wholly different kind, and in
England there were Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (and, in a cruder way, The
Saga of King Olaf) and Holst's Planets, for example. But the motivation
was slipping, and being replaced by other, more mundane ideals. It's
also indicative that Holst, the most recent of all these, had previously
written some superbly Wagnerian stuff, including an operatic cycle based
on the Ramayana, which has the same musical quality as The Planets; the
fragments I've heard of this are quite stunning. But this and much like
it was abandoned; the musical world wasn't interested, the composer
himself ceased to be. WWI was the climax of a process already in motion.
Music shrank, because our world-view shrank.*
> Some composers abandoned the idea of tonality altogether. Think of Varese.
Think of the entire dodecaphonic movement, that was such a strangling
effect on composition throughout the 20th century. Grandeur, though, did
not vanish; it just went to the movies. Film scores took over the
concepts of scale, colour, natural expression etc that had characterized
Wagner; which is why so many people hearing him for the first time say
"He sounds like film music"!
> Wagner was a composer at the beginning of the electronic age. At the
> same time he was, in my mind, the last great composer. At least the
> last great composer in the grand sense. I rate him up there with Bach,
> Mozart, and Beethoven.
But Bach would not have seen himself as "great" or "grand" in that
sense, and neither would Mozart. In a very real way that attitude, that
way of defining a composer belongs to Wagner's own era, and to the man
himself.
> But you are correct to my thinking. He was definitely a transitional
> composer.
Aren't they all?
Cheers,
Mike
*The Short Blonde Person leaning over my shoulder has just pointed out
that in the 20th century, for the first time, man ceased to be the
centre of the universe, as he was still considered even in Wagner's
time. She's right, too. Mixed in with the decline of religion and much
else, but it had an effect in all the arts.
michael
> "Grandeur" is a very vague concept, and I think that if you tried to
> define that "somehow" you would find it even more so.
I will not argue your point. It *is* difficult to define, but easy to
recognize. I do not know why, but it is nevertheless the case.
> You mention Sibelius, but he was one of the nationalist composers, and
> they had entirely different motivations for the "grandeur" they sought
> to create. It was not a grandeur of ideals, or indeed individuality; it
> was a shared grandeur of common identity, creating a "voice of the
> people", something they were almost all called at some point. It was
> much more externalized than Wagner's, and often took its musical roots
> not in the higher tradition but in the simpler themes of folk-music,
> whatever was made of them. All the same, I'd question your point here.
> To me, Finlandia -- more accurately known by its original title "Finland
> Awakes" -- has a granitic grandeur comparable in every quality except
> length to what Wagner achieved, especially with its added choral
> content. The Kullervo Symphony, though a young man's work, has much of
> the same.
Actually, I was simply speaking about my own emotional response to the
music. Not so much the "content" or even the intent of the music. For
me, Sibelius is one of the greatest post Wagner composers. His
"grandeur" may approach Wagner. But his music is of a different scale.
On the other hand, most music is on a different scale than Wagner.
Yet I include Beethoven, Mozart and Bach on the same scale
(aesthetically speaking, to be sure). The four, in my mind, rose to the
highest artistic level.
> There are other works of great grandeur in that era, some nationalistic,
> some not -- the great Russian composers such as Mussorgsky and Rimsky
> created grandeur of a comparable but wholly different kind, and in
> England there were Elgar's Dream of Gerontius...
Again, I can appreciate some of these, but I just don't think they had
the aesthetic ability of Wagner and the others I mentioned. Why this
is, or how it can be argued and proved, I cannot say definitely. It is
just an aesthetic judgment on my part.
> Think of the entire dodecaphonic movement, that was such a strangling
> effect on composition throughout the 20th century. Grandeur, though, did
> not vanish; it just went to the movies. Film scores took over the
> concepts of scale, colour, natural expression etc that had characterized
> Wagner; which is why so many people hearing him for the first time say
> "He sounds like film music"!
As someone once said, that is the fault of the films and not the fault
of Wagner! :-)
> But Bach would not have seen himself as "great" or "grand" in that
> sense, and neither would Mozart. In a very real way that attitude, that
> way of defining a composer belongs to Wagner's own era, and to the man
> himself.
You are most likely correct. But for me, listening to Bach is like
listening to a musical representation of the very atomic structure of
the universe unfolding in mathematical precision. These are things I
cannot explain, but can only "feel" and "understand" non-discursively.
I am reminded of a passage in Wittgenstein's Tractatus where he states
that some things can be "shown" but not "said".
michael
Karl Wee
and sentiments. But I had a rather narrower scope in mind (very
un-Wagnerian I admit.) To me the only musical system proven, over
millenia, to elicit a profoundly intellectual and pleasurable reaction
in the listener is the major/minor system. Did 20th Century composers
hope to find another system(including an abandonment of scale
altogether) just as good?
To me, musical pleasure comes from the precise comprehension of the
notes and phrases and their relationships (though not always in a way
that I can articulate with my limited formal training -- but this
doesn't make the comprehension less precise). This comprehension is
intimately tied to the major/minor system. Take away the system, and
musical pleasure has to be totally re-defined from the ground up.
Thus it's possible to hear pleasurable sounds in modern music, but the
comprehension really goes through different perceptive channels (to the
extent that the music has abandoned from traditional tonality.)
I don't know how many later composers may have had Wagner's talent.
But whether one has it or not, one has a choice between doing one's
best to give pleasure under the existing system, and doing something
totally new to try to achieve a grander stature. There're potential
rewards and punishments in each choice, and I'm wondering if Tristan
and Wagner's exhortation to "do something new" have somehow changed
these equations. After all, if people didn't like a new Schoenberg
piece, they only had to be reminded of Wagner to set their minds
straight. (Sorry, a little sarcasm here.)
Personally I'm glad that Wagner wrote Tristan, in and of the opera
itself. It seems to somehow complete his range. But the probably
unintended consequences of that work are a different matter.
Karl
REP
news:200509222...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
> but the inner need to do so was fading. Schoenberg's Gurrelieder is
> intensely Wagnerian in inspiration, yet operates on a scale beyond
> anything Wagner himself attempted -- in its choral writing, in
> particular. But it's also indicative that the composer who came closer
> than most to Wagner was also the spearhead of the reaction against all
> he represented, and made a similarly single-handed attempt to create a
> very different "music of the future" of his own.
Scriabin usually gets short shrift over Schoenberg despite having an
arguably greater place in the progress of both romanticism and atonality.
Gurrelieder does have Wagnerian qualities, but I'd say Scriabin came closer
to Wagnerian ideals with his second, third, and fourth symphonies -- the
fourth, for example, (actually a single-movement "Poem of Ecstasy") is a
sort of sibling to the Tristan und Isolde prelude, with all its eroticism
and tension, in addition to an insanely neurotic and oft-repeated trumpet
call. One hell of a ride. Like Wagner, he had a giant ego and a
philosophical nature that infused everything he wrote.
As for Bruckner (in response to michael), he was more of a contemporary to
Wagner than anything else. And I'd rather call him the romantic period's
answer to Bach than a Wagnerian composer. Unfortunately, his musical genius
and intellect is greatly underrated, probably because his music doesn't suit
everybody's tastes.
REP
Karl Wee
REP wrote:
> Scriabin usually gets short shrift over Schoenberg despite having an
> arguably greater place in the progress of both romanticism and atonality.
> Gurrelieder does have Wagnerian qualities, but I'd say Scriabin came closer
> to Wagnerian ideals with his second, third, and fourth symphonies -- the
> fourth, for example, (actually a single-movement "Poem of Ecstasy") is a
> sort of sibling to the Tristan und Isolde prelude, with all its eroticism
> and tension, in addition to an insanely neurotic and oft-repeated trumpet
> call. One hell of a ride. Like Wagner, he had a giant ego and a
> philosophical nature that infused everything he wrote.
>
> As for Bruckner (in response to michael), he was more of a contemporary to
> Wagner than anything else. And I'd rather call him the romantic period's
> answer to Bach than a Wagnerian composer. Unfortunately, his musical genius
> and intellect is greatly underrated, probably because his music doesn't suit
> everybody's tastes.
>
> REP
I remember hearing one passage by Scriabin (need to look up what it is
-- probably one of the more popular ones) and it struck me pretty
hard. In retrospect it is rather Tristan-ish and had what seemed to be
Wagnerian tonal progressions. Bruckner's harmonic writing is
wonderful. Agreed that both are probably very underrated.
Karl
Charles
A number of things opened the door to 20th C. music, some alluded to by
Mike but perhaps not all explicitly stated. A great action in art often
produces a reaction in the next generation. Stravinsky is on record as
longing for a small-scale music akin to that of Bach. The horrors of
World War I caused a profound spiritual weariness and great skepticism
about the grand notions of the Romantic era. To the young, civilization
itself seemed to have hroken down. And the primacy of the rational mind
seemed undermined by the newly realized strength of the subconscious.
Also, radical developments in the other arts, expecially poetry and
painting, could not fail to influence composers. T.S. Eliot was only
the best of many poets who sang of the shattered ethos of the time,
also reflected in Cubism and in the jagged nature of Mahler's music
alike. Simultaneously, the newly discovered power of primitive art had
influenced Gauguin and was influencing Picasso and Matisse while also
influencing Stravinsky. All these things would have changed music
without Tristan. But Tristan no doubt accelerated and strengthened the
process.
Charles
including my own in the previous post. Bach not thinking he was a
composer of grandeur: it's hard to accept this when thinking of the
tragic grandeur (no other term will do) of the Chaconne from Violin
Partita No. 2 or some of the choruses from the B Minor Mass, likewise
the sheer joyful power of some other choruses in the Mass and say,
Cantata No. 50, a single movement wonder that blows one away with its
dynamism. These examples show also that while much of Bach's work is
aptly de scribed as atomistic and mathematical, a ggood deal of his
church music is so fervently grand and emotional as to seem to belong
in the 19th century.
Hans Christian Hoff
continually with no regard whatsoever to such formalities as centuries
or decades, and the turning points in history (also in the history of
music) are totally independent of calendar.
If the question is if Wagner was a main source of inspiration for
composers who was active into the 20th century the answer is obviously
postitive. On the other hand there seem to be scant reason to point him
out as a main inspirator of the twelve-tone (or atonal) techniques.
Schoenberg (i.e. in Gurre-lieder) started out as a late Romantic
composer very much in the Wagnerian vein, but I believe that was as far
as the Wagnerian influence went. Wagner was(at least in my view)first
and foremost a master of harmony and melody, and the Tristan ouverture
is as I hear it a rather atypical composition, may be intended to depict
the distorted and chaotic (and poisoned) minds of the tragic pair. I
cannot find that he reverted to similar(dis)harmonies in any work later on.
I think that Debussy and the French impressionists was much more
instrumental in paving the way for the 12 - tone technique than Wagner was.
Regards
Hans
REP
news:1127516920.8...@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I think of Bach as being more elevating than he is grand, but he could be
grand at times, too. As for him not considering himself a composer of
grandeur -- Did he really say that? -- it might just be his workmanlike
modesty at play. I imagine that at the time, self-professed grandeur would
have been a little too un-Christian.
REP
Charles
interesting in my own view than the love duet in Act II, whose
overpowering beauty shows that a loosening and expansion of harmony can
still produce overwhelming beauty, albeit in a new language.
As for Debussy, his professed fascination with Wagner's harmonic
innovations transcended what he saw as dramatic and other shortcomings
in several of the operas.
Charles
hard as he did could achieve the same ends. This may be a good piece of
motivational advice for a teacher, as Bach was, to give to his pupils,
but is surely the biggest underrating any artist ever gave himself. And
I agree that in Bach's time it was not customary for a composer to
claim grandeur for himself.
But it WAS habitual for a composer to dedicate his works to the
grandeur of a prince or emperor, which Bach did a number of times. And
I persist in thinking that when he wrote works such as the ones I
mentioned above, he would had to be functionally retarded to not know
he was acheiving grandeur, his few statements on himself to the
contrary.
Derrick Everett
>
> If the question is if Wagner was a main source of inspiration for
> composers who was active into the 20th century the answer is obviously
> postitive. On the other hand there seem to be scant reason to point him
> out as a main inspirator of the twelve-tone (or atonal) techniques.
> Schoenberg (i.e. in Gurre-lieder) started out as a late Romantic
> composer very much in the Wagnerian vein, but I believe that was as far
> as the Wagnerian influence went.
I expect you know that there is a quotation from 'Tristan' in Schoenberg's
'Gurrelieder'. I don't remember exactly where it is, perhaps in the song
of the Wood-dove. The opening of 'Gurrelieder' always reminds me of the
Forest Murmurs.
--
Derrick Everett
====== Writing from 59°54'N 10°37'E =======
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/index.htm
http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/wagnerfaq.htm
Dogbert Dilbert
Hear hear - I don't believe that Tristan is atonal in any way (I'm not
saying there aren't discords, but that's something else). As you say,
people confuse the advances in line, tone and colour found in later
Wagnerian opera (particularly Tristan and Parsifal) with atonality. I
believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was not
responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
Dogbertd
REP
news:57afj1dq5a1uaq7n2...@4ax.com...
> I believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was not
> responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
>
> Dogbertd
I'd say Wagner paved the way tonally, but not dramatically. No composer,
Schoenberg included, seems to have incorporated Wagner's ideals into their
own music; monothematicism, leit motives, lofty expression, long lyrical
lines, and grand scale are all absent from Schoenberg and his ilk's music.
While they built upon Wagner's progression of the musical science of keys
and tonality, they abandoned everything else, making for themselves a bed of
either expressionism or non-expression that produced brain-farts of micro-
dramas and operas that amounted to little more than diddlysquat. And that's
why they're neither much respected nor particularly liked today.
Wagner and his camp, Liszt in particular, might be necessary stepping stones
to atonality -- and I think they are penultimate steps to the very fact. But
they can't be held responsible for music's failure or diversion on every
other front, not when they explicitly laid the groundworks for their music
of the future, which was not just harmonically based, in their writing
musical and otherwise. Wagner was smart enough to know that while music
changed over time, drama stayed the same, and had stayed the same since the
time of the ancient Greeks. That's why he wrote on such an abstract level
rather than on the technical specifics of harmony. His remarks are
timelessly relevant -- his music is not. While composers should necessarily
continue advancing the science of music, they should also hold on to what
remains constant in their field. Instead, Schoenberg and his ilk alienated
the world.
REP
Derrick Everett
> "Dogbert Dilbert" <dogb...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:57afj1dq5a1uaq7n2...@4ax.com...
>> I believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was
>> not responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
>>
>> Dogbertd
>
> I'd say Wagner paved the way tonally, but not dramatically. No composer,
> Schoenberg included, seems to have incorporated Wagner's ideals into
> their own music; monothematicism, leit motives, lofty expression, long
> lyrical lines, and grand scale are all absent from Schoenberg and his
> ilk's music.
Perhaps you are confusing Schoenberg with Webern. At least in his early
works, those "ideals" that you find lacking can be heard, by those that
have ears to hear. Try: 'Verklärte Nacht', 'Pelléas und Mélisande',
the First String Quartet, the First Chamber Symphony, and of course the
large-scale 'Gurrelieder'. These works show the influences of Brahms,
Reger and Strauss, but also that of Wagner -- didn't someone once describe
'Verklärte Nacht' as like the score of 'Tristan', smudged while the ink
was still wet?
Mike Scott Rohan
from Dogbert Dilbert <dogb...@hotmail.com> contains these words:
{snip}
> Hear hear - I don't believe that Tristan is atonal in any way (I'm not
> saying there aren't discords, but that's something else). As you say,
> people confuse the advances in line, tone and colour found in later
> Wagnerian opera (particularly Tristan and Parsifal) with atonality. I
> believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was not
> responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
This sounds a little odd to me. No offence, but are you perhaps
confusing atonal with twelve-tone? The one, in a sense, paved the way
for the other, but they're not at all the same thing.
Atonality is not a rigid thing, but a tendency. No doubt a more academic
musician could put this better, but basically atonality is simply the
lack of a dominant key, and that applies to all kinds of music; early
modal music you could call atonal because it doesn't depend on pitch as
such but simply characteristic ranges of note intervals. In the 19th
century the more adventurous composers began testing the borders of
tonality, pushing them back for new effects such as chromatic modulation
-- essentially sliding directly from a chord in one key into a chord in
another -- so that an awful lot of basically tonal music *sometimes*
becomes atonal. Tristan, though, didn't just push the borders back but
burst them, with harmonies etc that are hard to resolve in any way --
people still argue over the Tristan chord -- yet are undeniably
effective. It isn't atonal throughout, but it pays remarkably little
heed to conventional tonality. The effect is immensely liberating,
breaking the rules continually but in such a way that it's impossible to
argue with, or dismiss as amateurish. It opened the way for others to do
such unusual and tonally unconventional things, in search of new and
expressive effects -- Debussy's use of the whole-tone scale, for
example, or the use of folk-tunes with unconventional structures that
would formerly have been smoothed out. The result is that almost all
20th century music, whether it be Bartok or Vaughan Williams, is to some
extent atonal -- often surprisingly so.
The twelve-tone or serial system was a product of this liberation, but
also almost a reaction to it, a self-conscious and artificial attempt to
reimpose an intellectual order upon music, after all that Romantic
emotional shapelessness. It uses a tonal scale, but one assembled,
generally arbitrarily, a "tone-row" of twelve pitches. This scale can be
used forwards, backwards or inverted; chords are formed using any notes
from the row. Music therefore becomes a sort of mathematical framework,
preserving the skeletal structure and relationships of conventional
music, but theoretically without any emotive content. Schoenberg
developed this system out of his dissatisfaction with what music had
become since Tristan; you can just about trace the progression of it
through his works, the massively Tristanish Gurrelieder to the
predominantly atonal, smaller-scale (but even more Tristanish) Verklarte
Nacht and the utter stylized austerity of, say, Moses und Aaron -- which
remains nevertheless a very Wagnerian work. It was an intellectually
imposed discipline, very much like Cubism in the plastic arts -- both
effectively, although their proponents didn't see them that way --a
confession of exhaustion, and a search for a new stylization, a new set
of rules wholly free from the tethers of the old ones, shattered, in the
case of art, by photography, and in music by the adventurousness of
Wagner.
A vast oversimplification, but the best I can do in ten minutes! That is
why the Tristan chord is called "the birth of modern music", and why
your belief sounded rather odd. Wagner did more than point the way to
Debussy; he made Debussy possible in a way no other composer had, and
his influence haunted Debussy constantly, in his earlier days
especially, as the composer himself wryly acknowledged. Likewise he
haunted Schoenberg; but where Debussy saluted the ghost and moved to one
side, musically, Schoenberg attempted an exorcism. Without Wagner,
though, Schoenberg could never have started along that intellectual
road, or taken it in the way he did. So Wagner *is* responsible for him;
whereas for Nazism he neither created the ground nor any discernible
doctrinal or ideological influence -- he was just another prestigious
and long-dead nationalist and anti-Semite they could latch on to.
Cheers,
Mike
REP
news:pan.2005.09.26....@yahoo.com...
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005 09:09:02 +0000, REP wrote:
>
> > "Dogbert Dilbert" <dogb...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> > news:57afj1dq5a1uaq7n2...@4ax.com...
> >> I believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was
> >> not responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
> >>
> >> Dogbertd
> >
> > I'd say Wagner paved the way tonally, but not dramatically. No composer,
> > Schoenberg included, seems to have incorporated Wagner's ideals into
> > their own music; monothematicism, leit motives, lofty expression, long
> > lyrical lines, and grand scale are all absent from Schoenberg and his
> > ilk's music.
>
> Perhaps you are confusing Schoenberg with Webern. At least in his early
> works, those "ideals" that you find lacking can be heard, by those that
> have ears to hear. Try: 'Verklärte Nacht', 'Pelléas und Mélisande',
> the First String Quartet, the First Chamber Symphony, and of course the
> large-scale 'Gurrelieder'. These works show the influences of Brahms,
> Reger and Strauss, but also that of Wagner -- didn't someone once describe
> 'Verklärte Nacht' as like the score of 'Tristan', smudged while the ink
> was still wet?
I don't believe I've heard Verklarte Nacht out of the works you mention, but
I consider Pelleas and Melisande and the first string quartet to be early
works. When I say Schoenberg (and his ilk), I mean what he represents
through his mature output, just as when speaking generally of Wagner, I mean
only to include his mature operas, and not Das Liebesverbot or Die Feen.
Similarly, when I speak of Strauss, I tend not to include Guntram and
Feuersnot unless I'm speaking specifically about those operas or "the young
Strauss". The only difference, I suppose, is that Schoenberg's early works
are in the repertoire, whereas Wagner's and Strauss's are not.
You're right, though, that there's much to be respected in early Schoenberg
musically, and I said as much. But even Gurre-lieder -- and when I wrote the
above, I was thinking of it specifically -- is a dramatic failing. To me,
it's just a half-assed compensation for the inability to write an opera,
much in the same way that Brahms, Mahler, and Elgar all failed in the same
way. To make up for it, each fuddled with compromises, either by
incorporating voice and micro-drama into symphonies (Mahler is the worst
offender) or by writing orchestral songs and oratorios, and each composer
lost something necessarily Wagnerian in the process.
REP
Dogbert Dilbert
<mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote:
>The message <57afj1dq5a1uaq7n2...@4ax.com>
>from Dogbert Dilbert <dogb...@hotmail.com> contains these words:
>
>{snip}
>
>> Hear hear - I don't believe that Tristan is atonal in any way (I'm not
>> saying there aren't discords, but that's something else). As you say,
>> people confuse the advances in line, tone and colour found in later
>> Wagnerian opera (particularly Tristan and Parsifal) with atonality. I
>> believe that Wagner pointed the way to Debussy but, just as he was not
>> responsible for Nazism, he also wasn't responsible for Schoenberg.
>
>This sounds a little odd to me. No offence, but are you perhaps
>confusing atonal with twelve-tone? The one, in a sense, paved the way
>for the other, but they're not at all the same thing.
>
<big snip>
>
>A vast oversimplification, but the best I can do in ten minutes! That is
>why the Tristan chord is called "the birth of modern music", and why
>your belief sounded rather odd. Wagner did more than point the way to
>Debussy; he made Debussy possible in a way no other composer had, and
>his influence haunted Debussy constantly, in his earlier days
>especially, as the composer himself wryly acknowledged. Likewise he
>haunted Schoenberg; but where Debussy saluted the ghost and moved to one
>side, musically, Schoenberg attempted an exorcism. Without Wagner,
>though, Schoenberg could never have started along that intellectual
>road, or taken it in the way he did. So Wagner *is* responsible for him;
>whereas for Nazism he neither created the ground nor any discernible
>doctrinal or ideological influence -- he was just another prestigious
>and long-dead nationalist and anti-Semite they could latch on to.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Mike
Mike,
I'm always confused!
But you are correct: I should have been more specific - I was
referring to 12-tone "music" and in particular the later Schoenberg
works (like the one I had to sit through at the Edinburgh Festival a
few weeks back - neither the audience or the orchestra really seemed
to enjoy it).
As I'm not a musician my terminology is chronically inexact. As you
point out, atonality is present in many music forms well before
Wagner. I guess my objection is really this lazy thinking that the
Tristan chord is somehow revolutionary and can be considered the
progenitor of 12-note music. As you point out, the response of
Schoenberg to Wagner was ultimately to give up trying to compete and
to invent a new musical language. One that, possibly to my loss, I
don't really appreciate (having said that, I still think Lulu is a
fabulous opera - but Berg almost has some tunes in it).
Dogbertd
Mike Scott Rohan
from Dogbert Dilbert <dogb...@hotmail.com> contains these words:
{snip}
> I'm always confused!
I often think I am; but then I'm not sure....
> But you are correct: I should have been more specific - I was
> referring to 12-tone "music" and in particular the later Schoenberg
> works (like the one I had to sit through at the Edinburgh Festival a
> few weeks back - neither the audience or the orchestra really seemed
> to enjoy it).
Somebody did a survey and found that in instrumental ensembles playing
predominantly "new music", stress levels and attendant complaints were
always higher. Admittedly that was a while back, and attitudes may have
adjusted somewhat, but like you I still wonder whether people actually
enjoy most of the dodecaphonic stuff they sit through. It can, I
suppose, be more interesting for players than listeners; it's no
accident it was the creation of an academic musician never too much
concerned with public taste. There are those who will enjoy that sort of
intellectual isolationism. Me, I just get numb at both ends.
> As I'm not a musician my terminology is chronically inexact. As you
> point out, atonality is present in many music forms well before
> Wagner. I guess my objection is really this lazy thinking that the
> Tristan chord is somehow revolutionary and can be considered the
> progenitor of 12-note music. As you point out, the response of
> Schoenberg to Wagner was ultimately to give up trying to compete and
> to invent a new musical language. One that, possibly to my loss, I
> don't really appreciate (having said that, I still think Lulu is a
> fabulous opera - but Berg almost has some tunes in it).
(Mime voice) Did I say that?
I do most certainly think that the Tristan chord is revolutionary, and I
believe I said as much. It did trigger off the process that led to
Schoenberg's concepts. It does directly prefigure his early music, and
that leads directly, if a little unexpectedly to his abandonment of
conventional musical language. That it is not in itself a legitimization
of the serial system -- that I would agree, and it is indeed sloppy
thinking to claim that. But it did liberate musical thinking in a way
that found a natural, if not exclusive, development in serialism. The
trouble is that from being one possible route, serialism became claimed
as the only one. But that was by the descendants of Beckmesser rather
than Wagner.
I don't like his later music, for the most part, but I would never
underestimate Schoenberg. He was a brilliant composer of wide
sensibilities and appreciation; he was a master of orchestration, and an
admirer of Johann Strauss II, whom he often used as a teaching example.
He was capable of more than twelve-tone music, but it happened to be his
answer to the new direction that he like many others felt music needed.
He was not a musical snob, but when he began his musical reconstruction
jazz was not so widely known; had he been a decade or two later, he
might well have found the revitalization he needed in that direction, as
many others did. One of his best pupils, interestingly, became the guy
who wrote the music for "Tom & Jerry", and if you listen, as Simon
Rattle pointed out, you will hear something very like the ridiculous
chase music at the end of the "Klaus-Narr" episode in Gurrelieder.
Schoenberg could and did write comic music, if he so wished, and
dramatic music as well -- witness Moses and Aaron, and it's no accident
that the best recording of it is by Solti, not Boulez; it's a very
Wagnerian work. But even with his genius the twelve-tone system was
recherche, and after him only Berg illuminated it -- and that, as you
say, by reverting to the margins of tonality. Wozzeck is extreme atonal,
rather than twelve-tone, but even Lulu has, as you say, some hints of
melody -- poor old Geschwitz gets some, possibly because she recalled
Berg's beloved lesbian sister. And the Violin Concerto is really
impressive. But these are all sombre subjects, to which music of
alienation and expressionism is uniquely suited. Try it on something
more varied, like Werner Egk's Peer Gynt, and it deadens the thing to
the merest show of gesture. That continuing failure in itself testifies
to the genius of Schoenberg and Berg, in doing what their followers
universally could not.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Scott Rohan
from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
{snip}
> You're right, though, that there's much to be respected in early Schoenberg
> musically, and I said as much. But even Gurre-lieder -- and when I wrote the
> above, I was thinking of it specifically -- is a dramatic failing. To me,
> it's just a half-assed compensation for the inability to write an opera,
> much in the same way that Brahms, Mahler, and Elgar all failed in the same
> way. To make up for it, each fuddled with compromises, either by
> incorporating voice and micro-drama into symphonies (Mahler is the worst
> offender) or by writing orchestral songs and oratorios, and each composer
> lost something necessarily Wagnerian in the process.
> REP
I seriously disagree. These people didn't "fail" to write operas; opera
was simply not large on their creative horizon. You might as well claim
Beethoven failed because he only wrote Fidelio. Brahms considered
writing an opera -- about gold-mining in the Yukon! -- but never
followed it through because he knew that his genius was not for dramatic
music. Mahler, working directly in the shadow of Wagner, did much to
revive and revise forgotten operas, preparing new editions of Weber's
Die Drei Pintos and others; he had the ability to write an opera if one
interested him. But again, his prime interest was symphonic, and that is
entirely legitimate. If he failed, so did Wagner, whose symphonies are
pretty half-arsed.
Elgar is a slightly different case. When he was beginning to write,
opera in Britain was largely moribund. Even the all-conquering Sir
Arthur Sullivan, whose music dominated the scene at the time, had to
struggle to get his grand opera Ivanhoe performed; and Mendelssohn, the
country's most popular composer, never even managed that much. Dvorak,
who inherited that mantle, had the same problem. Only a few people went
to opera; the real audiences were for oratorios. Handel had had
precisely the same problem some two hundred years earlier; the British
then jumped at light opera, like The Beggar's Opera, but disliked staged
opera, except for a small London audience which chiefly supported the
imported variety. By the end of the 19th century the situation hadn't
changed; except that a major choral tradition had grown up across the
country, so that even quite small towns could produce a good oratorio
chorus, often of a higher musical standard than German local opera
houses. Elgar was already handicapped enough; he knew he would not have
a cat in hell's chance of getting an opera performed, or even looked at.
So he wrote popular and highly dramatic oratorios -- The Black Knight,
The Saga of King Olaf, Caractacus -- which could be performed all over
the country, and were, with enormous gusto. They were what made his
name. He wrote very good music for plays; he had plenty of dramatic
sense. Probably he could have written an opera, had he found a good
libretto; again, the Brits then didn't write them. But in the end he
found the oratorio a more natural form of expression -- in no way a
compromise or an inferior one, in his eyes.
There were a few cases of great composers who did write operas, and
shouldn't have -- one of the most major being Sibelius. His early idea
Veen Luominen, The Building of the Boat, inspired by Siegfried, might
have been fun; it became the semi-symphonic "Four Legends" suite. But
the one he did write, The Maiden in the Tower, is bloody awful, stiff
and stilted. He continued to unite voice and music in all kinds of ways,
not least because Finland also had a huge choral tradition, and with a
masterly effect that is wholly absent in The Maiden, which could fairly
be called half-arsed. His genius demonstrably lay elsewhere. Yet a
genius he indisputably is. If he'd never written his opera, though, you
would be dismissing his choral work also as "half-arsed compensation".
And of course Schoenberg did not need any such compensation. He could
write operas perfectly well, and did. Erwartung is a monodrama, but an
opera nonetheless, and so is Die Gluckliche Hand; and then he went on to
write in twelve-tone the satirical Von Heute bis Morgen and Moses und
Aaron -- which is a masterpiece, and, as I said elsewhere, it's no
accident the best recording is Solti's, not Boulez's.
Wagner's achievement is vast, but all the more reason you must not make
him the measure of all things. I wouldn't say these composers lost
Wagner; I'd say they found themselves.
Cheers,
Mike
REP
news:200509271...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
Wagner did fail as a symphonist, and in so doing, he failed to carry on
Beethoven's legacy -- Brahms somewhat unwillingly took up that mantle
instead. And maybe in a Beethoven-centrist's view, that makes Wagner a
general failure. In my aesthetic, however, Wagner is the pinnacle of music,
and his operas, and opera in general, embody the absolute apotheosis of both
musical and dramatic art. But Mahler didn't fail as a composer because he
decided to write symphonies instead of operas. He failed because he decided
to write symphonies that weren't really symphonies, symphonies that combined
aspects of opera and drama (the second and eighth especially) with aspects
of a legitimate art. If he were a painter, he would have painted a blue sky
with brown, earthy stripes because he was thinking of mountains, and I'd say
he ruined both as a result. You might call it following his own path, but I
call it Dadaism -- something I think Mahler already represents with his
grotesque orchestrations.
As for opera not being large on their creative horizons, I have to disagree.
Self-conscious Brahms was certainly aware of what his contemporaries were
doing and professing, and he probably thought Wagner's camp as right as
anybody else -- he was far too good a man to seriously call either side
right or wrong. Given the responsibility he felt to write in the same vein
as Beethoven, I imagine he felt a tinge -- just a tinge, mind you -- of envy
for Wagner's creative autonomy. I think opera, as the only medium Beethoven
genuinely failed at, represented to him a sort of escape or untapped mine.
Unfortunately, that mine was being excavated, even exploited, by his rivals,
and he put off writing operas his entire life. Mahler joked about this,
suggesting he had inherited his own opera-writing dearth from Brahms,
something he wouldn't have said unless they had both wanted to write operas.
> Elgar is a slightly different case. When he was beginning to write,
> opera in Britain was largely moribund. Even the all-conquering Sir
> Arthur Sullivan, whose music dominated the scene at the time, had to
> struggle to get his grand opera Ivanhoe performed; and Mendelssohn, the
> country's most popular composer, never even managed that much. Dvorak,
> who inherited that mantle, had the same problem. Only a few people went
> to opera; the real audiences were for oratorios. Handel had had
> precisely the same problem some two hundred years earlier; the British
> then jumped at light opera, like The Beggar's Opera, but disliked staged
> opera, except for a small London audience which chiefly supported the
> imported variety. By the end of the 19th century the situation hadn't
> changed; except that a major choral tradition had grown up across the
> country, so that even quite small towns could produce a good oratorio
> chorus, often of a higher musical standard than German local opera
> houses. Elgar was already handicapped enough; he knew he would not have
> a cat in hell's chance of getting an opera performed, or even looked at.
> So he wrote popular and highly dramatic oratorios -- The Black Knight,
> The Saga of King Olaf, Caractacus -- which could be performed all over
> the country, and were, with enormous gusto. They were what made his
> name. He wrote very good music for plays; he had plenty of dramatic
> sense. Probably he could have written an opera, had he found a good
> libretto; again, the Brits then didn't write them. But in the end he
> found the oratorio a more natural form of expression -- in no way a
> compromise or an inferior one, in his eyes.
Oratorio is by nature half-assed opera. I'm a little more forgiving toward
Elgar, though, since oratorio is an English tradition, and I don't believe
there's been a time in English history, except perhaps very recently, when
opera was more popular than oratorio. There's a certain elegance and charm
to Dream of Gerontius, for example; thinking of it, one has the image of the
same sorts of audiences in attendance as those who attended Handel's
oratorios two hundred years earlier. But opera certainly wasn't out of Elgar
's reach. He had wanted to compose one for a long time, and G.B. Shaw, who
offered to write the libretto, encouraged him to do so; if anything, opera
was knocking at Elgar's door. But he, like Johannes "Wagner's biggest fan"
Brahms, took his time -- out of fear more than anything else, I think, as
each man knew his limits. Unlike Brahms, though, Elgar finally found a
libretto in his last years, and granted he died while writing it (The
Spanish Lady), the music just wasn't very good. If writing oratorios was not
a compromise, he probably would not have ever cared to write an opera, but
he certainly did care to.
> There were a few cases of great composers who did write operas, and
> shouldn't have -- one of the most major being Sibelius. His early idea
> Veen Luominen, The Building of the Boat, inspired by Siegfried, might
> have been fun; it became the semi-symphonic "Four Legends" suite. But
> the one he did write, The Maiden in the Tower, is bloody awful, stiff
> and stilted. He continued to unite voice and music in all kinds of ways,
> not least because Finland also had a huge choral tradition, and with a
> masterly effect that is wholly absent in The Maiden, which could fairly
> be called half-arsed. His genius demonstrably lay elsewhere. Yet a
> genius he indisputably is. If he'd never written his opera, though, you
> would be dismissing his choral work also as "half-arsed compensation".
Choral works are legitimate, just like symphonies. A "half assed attempt at
an opera" would be an oratorio (or whatever you want to call Gurre-lieder
and the like); basically anything for solo voices and orchestra, combined
with some element of a story or drama. I included songs in my first post,
but I really meant only dramatic songs and scenes. I wouldn't call Gorecki's
third symphony a half assed anything, for example.
> And of course Schoenberg did not need any such compensation. He could
> write operas perfectly well, and did. Erwartung is a monodrama, but an
> opera nonetheless, and so is Die Gluckliche Hand; and then he went on to
> write in twelve-tone the satirical Von Heute bis Morgen and Moses und
> Aaron -- which is a masterpiece, and, as I said elsewhere, it's no
> accident the best recording is Solti's, not Boulez's.
Even if it were a masterpiece, it would only be so in the same way that
Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson both wrote masterpieces. But how you can
call an opera without a third act anything other than, at best, a broken
masterpiece or a specifically musical masterpiece is beyond me. By that same
token a director could stage Gotterdammerung without a third act and that'd
be all hunky dory -- apparently last acts are now optional and unnecessary
parts of opera -- take 'em or leave 'em and don't look a gift horse in the
mouth if you're lucky enough to get one. Or you could call Die Sieger a
masterpiece, despite the fact that Wagner never wrote it, just as Schoenberg
never wrote Moses und Aron -- he wrote two thirds of it. But that an opera
does not make. Good music, maybe; good libretto, sure; but not an opera.
> Wagner's achievement is vast, but all the more reason you must not make
> him the measure of all things. I wouldn't say these composers lost
> Wagner; I'd say they found themselves.
>
> Cheers,
> Mike
It's just too bad that their selves' weren't as rarefied as Wagner's was.
The only reason I hold it against Schoenberg is because he teased the world
with half assed attempts. Gurre-lieder specifically sounds like an exercise
to me, one that could have been followed by a full-blown, extended
post-Romantic opera. It walks like an opera, talks like an opera, but it
just isn't quite an opera, and because of that, I've never taken it too
seriously.
REP
Karl Wee
for "20th Century music" assuming that one doesn't like it. It's
possible to be part of the chain of events that lead to something and
not be morally responsible for it. E.g. the doctor who saved young
Hitler's life. (BTW any comparison between 20th Century music and
Hitler is purely subconscious!)
I would agree that Tristan is unique in Wagner's repertoire, but it
only takes one, doesn't it? People today often forget what a powerful
force Wagner was on the musical and intellectual scene before the War,
and if you're about write something that you think might be rejected
off hand, you'd better have an unassailable composer's work as
"precedence."
Karl
Charles
musician never too much concerned with public taste..."
I assume you mean Schoenberg. Then how and why did he wind up in
Hollywood?
Derrick Everett
Of course he meant Adrian Leverkühn.
Chernobog
"REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
news:1Pk_e.4559$211.1079@trnddc08...
>
> Wagner did fail as a symphonist, and in so doing, he failed to carry on
> Beethoven's legacy -- Brahms somewhat unwillingly took up that mantle
> instead. And maybe in a Beethoven-centrist's view, that makes Wagner a
> general failure. In my aesthetic, however, Wagner is the pinnacle of
> music,
> and his operas, and opera in general, embody the absolute apotheosis of
> both
> musical and dramatic art. But Mahler didn't fail as a composer because he
> decided to write symphonies instead of operas. He failed because he
> decided
> to write symphonies that weren't really symphonies, symphonies that
> combined
> aspects of opera and drama (the second and eighth especially) with aspects
> of a legitimate art.
That Mahler failed as a composer is news to me. I can't think of many to
equal his genius. IMO, his 9th symphony is the pinnacle of the Romantic
symphonic tradition, and in terms of thematic associations and complexity of
thought, his late symphonies are equal to, say, the third act prelude to
Parsifal. They're just harder to decipher, as in the case of his 5th, 6th,
7th and 9th where there's no narrative or program notes.
>If he were a painter, he would have painted a blue sky
> with brown, earthy stripes because he was thinking of mountains, and I'd
> say
> he ruined both as a result.
If he were a painter, I see him displaying equal traits of impressionism and
expressionism. He expressed the horror of nature as much as its beauty. And
all the time filtered it through a kaleidoscopic view of conflicting
emotional states -sometimes hazy and nebulous in outline, other times
shockingly stark and vivid.
>You might call it following his own path, but I
> call it Dadaism -- something I think Mahler already represents with his
> grotesque orchestrations.
The grotesquerie in his orchestration can be traced back to Berlioz and, I
hasten to add, Wagner. And don't forget, many contemporaries considered
Beethoven's orchestration to be outrageously grotesque, probably in much the
same way as Stravinsky's 'Rite' was by his contemporaries. In fact, most
composers that have made advancements in orchestration have at some point
had there music and/or orchestration labeled ugly and grotesque.
"Recently there was given the overture to Beethoven's opera Fidelio, and all
impartial musicians and music lovers were in perfect agreement that never
was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic and ear-splitting produced in
music."
(August von Kotzebue, Der Freimutige, Vienna, September 11, 1806)
Does that make Beethoven the first Dadaist in music?
--
Chernobog
Hans Christian Hoff
Regards
Hans
REP
news:n4y_e.2566$9l4...@newsfe4-win.ntli.net...
> The grotesquerie in his orchestration can be traced back to Berlioz and, I
> hasten to add, Wagner. And don't forget, many contemporaries considered
> Beethoven's orchestration to be outrageously grotesque, probably in much
the
> same way as Stravinsky's 'Rite' was by his contemporaries. In fact, most
> composers that have made advancements in orchestration have at some point
> had there music and/or orchestration labeled ugly and grotesque.
>
> "Recently there was given the overture to Beethoven's opera Fidelio, and
all
> impartial musicians and music lovers were in perfect agreement that never
> was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic and ear-splitting produced in
> music."
>
> (August von Kotzebue, Der Freimutige, Vienna, September 11, 1806)
>
> Does that make Beethoven the first Dadaist in music?
>
> --
> Chernobog
Except that this is one hundred years later and Mahler's music is nothing
new -- we can judge it objectively, apart from, and a part of, the
continuous stream of music history. That no one has since approached Mahler,
except perhaps Ligeti, in their level of orchestral grotesqueness is
evidence, I think, that Mahler wasn't a progressive, but a wrong turn.
Beethoven, on the other hand, progressed the art, and his music rings true,
and certainly rang true a hundred years after his death when everyone
recognized that he had redefined the orchestra. But after Mahler, even the
most atonal deconstructionists tended to spare us the sounds of cat-yowling
orchestras.
Mahler believed that the symphony should encompass the entire world; as you
say, both the good and the bad, orchestrally and musically; but that's just
another way of saying, "Dada!"
REP
Mike Scott Rohan
from Derrick Everett <sparafu...@yahoo.com> contains these words:
> On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:15:03 -0700, Charles wrote:
> > "...it's no accident it (12-tone music) was the creation of an academic
> > musician never too much concerned with public taste..."
> >
> > I assume you mean Schoenberg. Then how and why did he wind up in
> > Hollywood?
> Of course he meant Adrian Leverkühn.
No -- Aschenbach.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Scott Rohan
from "Charles" <cha...@optonline.net> contains these words:
Leaving aside the little matter of Nazism, he was, if I remember
correctly, lured there by friends who thought that like other
distinguished Viennese composers such as Korngold and Max Steiner, he
could make his fortune and his name, and be freed to experiment as he
wished. He was by then, though, too uncompromising; he wrote only one
score, I think, and that was rejected, though largely, I believe,
because he hadn't understood, or bothered to learn, the nature and
technique of film.
Hollywood at that time attracted an awful lot of remarkably un-Hollywood
people; it was seen, in those pre-McCarthy days, as a haven of liberal
attitudes combined with high living -- always an attractive mix.
Schoenberg never fitted in, but Brecht took to the place like duck to
water, and practically had to be physically removed by his adoring
disciples.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Scott Rohan
> > Cheers,
> > Mike
I'm afraid these are too personal viewpoints to be open to much more
discussion. Wagner the pinnacle of music? Is music a mountain, that it
has to have pinnacles? Pinnacles are always narrower than the base, and
impossible to build on; yet there have been giants since Wagner, and
there may one day be a still greater one. Musical history didn't end
with him. There are giants in every age, of different types and talents;
Wagner was just one of them.
Nor is opera the be-all and end-all of music; it's just one of many
forms, and Wagnerian opera is just one branch of that form -- a major
one, certainly, but not the only one. And oratorio is oratorio, not
half-assed anything else. The inclusion of dramatic content does not in
any way make it a failed opera. There are some things you can express in
oratorio which opera would simply be too limited and limiting to embody
-- imagine trying to stage, literally, the action of Gerontius!
Narrative need not always be acted; look at the number of great songs
that involve narrative and dramatic form -- Erlkonig, for example. Yet
staging that would be ludicrous. If we take your standards to their
logical conclusion there should be no novels, only dramatizations; yet
in many ways the novel is the stronger and more flexible form.
Wagner tested the bounds of opera, and in some cases this led him very
close to oratorio indeed, with long expository passages involving little
actual dramatic development. In many ways Tristan should have been an
oratorio, as many modern performances demonstrate -- not that it doesn't
gain from some dramatic staging, but unless this is exceptionally good,
which we rarely see these days, this is usually overpowered. Parsifal
achieves the balance much better, but it is still, considered as drama,
immensely static. Likewise oratorio often moves close to opera -- A
Child of Our Time has recently been staged quite successfully, and
Berlioz' Damnation of Faust many times.
And your description of Gerontius as having "elegance and charm" makes
me wonder how much you've listened to it; how about passion and mystical
fervour, surely? Elgar did not need literal drama to convey these; as
you say, his only operatic essay was one of the toys of his last years,
when he had practically abandoned all serious creative activity and was
busy re-orchestrating Bach and Handel for fun. In his highest creative
period he created oratorios that could never be operas, and The Spanish
Lady, from the fragments I have heard, would never have equalled these.
He had the potential, but it was never necessary for him, as it was for
Wagner. His gifts took other and wider forms. Whereas Wagner's ability
to write rubbish when he wasn't concerned with opera is quite remarkable
in such a master.
As to your dismissal of Moses und Aaron as "not an opera" and not a
masterpiece, because it was never finished, that's -- not well thought
out, and your equation of it with the wholly unwritten Die Sieger is
plain rubbish. What about Schubert's Unfinished? The Mozart Requiem?
Turandot? If you choose not to describe these as masterpieces, you're
welcome to your opinion, but it will be a very lonely one. If the Ring
had never gone further than Siegfried Act II, where it lay for twelve
years, it would still have been a towering achievement.
And most of Sibelius's major "choral works" have strong dramatic content
-- the Kullervo Symphony, for example, and The Origin of Fire. Very few
people would try to draw a line between such things and oratorio, or
confidently announce that one was "legitimate" and the other wasn't.
With views such as these I wouldn't argue, but not because I remotely
agree with them.
Chernobog
"REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
>>
> Except that this is one hundred years later and Mahler's music is nothing
> new -- we can judge it objectively, apart from, and a part of, the
> continuous stream of music history. That no one has since approached
> Mahler,
> except perhaps Ligeti, in their level of orchestral grotesqueness is
> evidence, I think, that Mahler wasn't a progressive, but a wrong turn.
Very few, if any, have approached Mahler's subtlety in orchestration.
Singling out the grotesque aspect of Mahler's orchestration is to make much
the same mistake as those who harp on about how loud and overblown Wagner's
is. Both composers could orchestrate with the utmost delicacy, and their
compositions generally feature more chamber music-like sonorities than they
do the grotesque or overwhelmingly loud. IMO, Mahler was the greatest
orchestrator of both the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence upon
composers such as
Webern, Berg, Shostakovich and Britten is undeniable.
> Beethoven, on the other hand, progressed the art, and his music rings
> true,
> and certainly rang true a hundred years after his death when everyone
> recognized that he had redefined the orchestra. But after Mahler, even the
> most atonal deconstructionists tended to spare us the sounds of
> cat-yowling
> orchestras.
>
> Mahler believed that the symphony should encompass the entire world; as
> you
> say, both the good and the bad, orchestrally and musically; but that's
> just
> another way of saying, "Dada!"
>
Maybe Dada is another way of Saying "Mahler!". It's no more absurd a
proposition than yours.
Doesn't the Ring Cycle encompass the entire world, too - good and bad?
--
Chernobog
Ralph
vital bridge between the romantic and the modern era, just as Beethoven
was between the classical and romantic era. Mahler's music is compelling
and life enhancing, some have called it prophetic. You are entitled to
your personal taste in composers, such as Brahms, Schoenberg and Mahler,
just as others are entitled to say that your reasoning is without merit,
and somewhat caustic.
Ralph
REP
> And most of Sibelius's major "choral works" have strong dramatic content
> -- the Kullervo Symphony, for example, and The Origin of Fire. Very few
> people would try to draw a line between such things and oratorio, or
> confidently announce that one was "legitimate" and the other wasn't.
> With views such as these I wouldn't argue, but not because I remotely
> agree with them.
We'll have to agree to disagree then, as I disagree with just about
everything you wrote on the basis of aesthetic principle -- including the
part about novels not being an inferior art, because to me they obviously
are. And off the top of my head, I believe everywhere you wrote, "if you are
to believe that, then you must also believe..." -- I do. As far as I'm
concerned, Wagner's genius created the acme of art -- or at least the best
yet seen -- and that's as self-evident to me as a mathematical equation.
Regardless of that, I tend to separate what I like from what I think is
aesthetically superior. For example, I listen to a lot more Elgar, Bruckner,
and Strauss than I do Wagner these days, and the same goes for Ockeghem over
Palestrina, Telemann over Bach, Schubert over Beethoven, and Atterberg over
Sibelius, despite knowing who the greater composer is of each pair.
REP
Mike Scott Rohan
from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
> "Mike Scott Rohan" <mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:200509281...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
> > And most of Sibelius's major "choral works" have strong dramatic content
> > -- the Kullervo Symphony, for example, and The Origin of Fire. Very few
> > people would try to draw a line between such things and oratorio, or
> > confidently announce that one was "legitimate" and the other wasn't.
> > With views such as these I wouldn't argue, but not because I remotely
> > agree with them.
> We'll have to agree to disagree then, as I disagree with just about
> everything you wrote on the basis of aesthetic principle -- including the
> part about novels not being an inferior art, because to me they obviously
> are.
Well, I made what passes for my fortune as a novelist of sorts....but
modesty aside, I'd suggest that you are likely to be rather lonely in
that assessment, as with your others. The novel, good or bad, is
probably the purest form of communication between creator and audience;
music, though it can speak more directly, depends to a very large extent
upon the conventions of the age and personal taste, among many other
variables. Novels can be explained, adapted or translated as other
artistic forms cannot. One can, with help, appreciate a
thousand-year-old Chinese novel far more directly than one can
appreciate a Pushkin poem or a Patagonian song (all on one note...the
same note).
And off the top of my head, I believe everywhere you wrote, "if you are
> to believe that, then you must also believe..." -- I do. As far as I'm
> concerned, Wagner's genius created the acme of art -- or at least the best
> yet seen -- and that's as self-evident to me as a mathematical equation.
Art by definition has no acme, and I think you are insisting yourself
into a false position here. I would suggest that, as with any artist, if
you cannot recognise Wagner's weaknesses and inadequacies as well and as
thoroughly as you do his virtues, then you cannot fully appreciate his
art, and that in turn precludes you making any valid assessment of his
worth. To say that he moves you more than any other artist is something
very different and more reasonable.
> Regardless of that, I tend to separate what I like from what I think is
> aesthetically superior. For example, I listen to a lot more Elgar, Bruckner,
> and Strauss than I do Wagner these days, and the same goes for Ockeghem over
> Palestrina, Telemann over Bach, Schubert over Beethoven, and Atterberg over
> Sibelius, despite knowing who the greater composer is of each pair.
The definition of "greater" is full of pitfalls, as in any sort of
attempt at quantifying the unquantifiable. With Sibelius vis-a-vis
Atterberg or Alven, say, it's relatively easy. But Sibelius as compared
to Telemann? Do you assemble a sort of temporal league table -- is
Beethoven "greater than" Palaestrina? Chalk and cheese. Which is one
reason I find the idea of comparison rather artificial; I'll stick to a
broad definition of some composers as exceptionally, unarguably great.
Which certainly includes Wagner.
And it's natural that you wouldn't want to listen to the very greatest
all the time, because even they have their limits; even they cannot
exist in isolation, and their very intensity can be self-defeating.
"Aesthetic superiority" does not mean they fill every need, or say all
there is to be said; and that I think testifies to the fallacy in the
idea of art as a mountain with a pinnacle. There are things in Nielsen
or Marschner or Telemann I don't find in Wagner or Beethoven, yet are
equally necessary to me, and are to that extent tinged with the same
degree of genius. If one must assess greatness, I'd suggest the truest
definition may be that the great composers simply achieve such genius
more often.
But, as James Joyce said when an over-excited aesthetical young fellow
begged to "kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses", "No, it did other things
as well."
Cheers,
Mike
Charles
call it Dadaism -- something I think Mahler already represents with his
grotesque orchestrations."
There are a number of posters who, subsequent to this message, accepted
your description of Mahler as a Dadaist, which I believe is erroneous.
There are many subjective opinions in this thread, but the definition
of Dadaism is and should be objective. Dadaism was a movement in visual
art first, announced and named itself, mocked traditional art, and
insisted that anything could be art if the artist said it was, even if
it had no emotional, formal or intellectual content such as was
habitually associated with art. It was also sarcastic and satiric in
its rejection of received notions of what art is. Some of the most
typical Dadaist works were Duchamps' repainting of the Mona Lisa with
a mustache, his exhibiting of a men's room urinal as a work of art,
and his teacup covered in fur. These are satirically cutting examples
of an anti-art or any-object-is-art idea.
Mahler by contrast is really an expressionist, using extremely tortured
harmonies and twisted formal constructs to express pain and sorrow. If
he is compared to visual art, it should be to the Expressionists
Soutine and Kokoschka, and the German Expressonists, who all like him
used extreme means (in their cases twisted human figures and faces,
subject matter like dead animals, very impassioned brushwork and broken
forms) to convey angst, grief and sadness. In none of these artists
including Mahler is there a declaration of art as ridiculous as in
Dadaism; they are very dedicated and serious about art's value,
revere their predecessors (Wagner, Van Gogh) and seek to extend
"real" art's boundaries. This is very different from Dadism.
In this respect I think that Schoenberg, Carter, Babbitt and Boulez
could be described as expressionist, formalist, serialist, atonal, or
what have you, some as more than one of these terms, but not as
dadaists. But John Cage is aptly described as a dadaist in his
characteristic rejection and implicit smarmy criticism of constructed
music wholesale. Likewise the Abstract Expressionist painters were not
dadaists, but were convinced high-art artists, seeking to express
strong feelings and states of mind, and sometimes succeeding, while
extending painting's reach. But the Pop and post-Pop conceptual
artists of our own day, who may typically exhibit an enlarged comic
strip panel, a picture of a Campbell's soup can, a box full of their
own feces, a dead cow, or spend a week living in a cage in a gallery,
are really the heirs of anti-art dadaism. The two tendencies may seem
alike sometimes on the surface, but are very different and should not
be confused. It is too tempting to throw much "difficult" modern
art, music and architecture into the dadaist basket, when the non-dada
part of it is really a lot more serious in intent. Just as the six
shocking diminished chords in the first movement of Beethoven's
Eroica, or Wagner's Tristan Prelude, are not dadaist in any way.
REP
> The definition of "greater" is full of pitfalls, as in any sort of
> attempt at quantifying the unquantifiable. With Sibelius vis-a-vis
> Atterberg or Alven, say, it's relatively easy. But Sibelius as compared
> to Telemann? Do you assemble a sort of temporal league table -- is
> Beethoven "greater than" Palaestrina? Chalk and cheese. Which is one
> reason I find the idea of comparison rather artificial; I'll stick to a
> broad definition of some composers as exceptionally, unarguably great.
> Which certainly includes Wagner.
I find your sentiments naïve. Should someone invent an art out of throwing
bricks into the Danube, I wouldn't hesitate to dismiss him and call
Beethoven the greater artist and music the greater art. Art and greatness,
like anything else, I can define and quantify as I please. You, as well as
the world, have done the same, and it serves you well in the field of
criticism -- you use it to dismiss shit-for-brains producers who destroy
legitimate works of arts, for example. But you stopped comparing at a
certain point -- between artists of different media -- presumably because
the differences became too miniscule to you, or perhaps because it was just
easier to gloss over the hard stuff, mellow out, and adopt a cherub-cheeked
and inoffensive aesthetic. That would certainly win you lots of friends; and
considering you've already pointed out a number of times that I am alone in
my opinions, I have to wonder if that's your real priority.
Recognizing Wagner as the greatest anything doesn't preclude seeing his
faults. As I recall, I was the only one who criticized him in a recent
thread on Gotterdammerung, and I'd wager I'm the only regular poster here in
recent years, besides AC Douglas, to consistently cite Wagner's specific
dramatic failings. To position yourself as the voice of reason because I am
fanatical, or in any way blind to Wagner's failings, is contradicted by the
group's records. As to whether Tristan und Isolde would have worked better
as an oratorio -- that is irrelevant. A thing can be the best of its kind
without being perfect. Your bloviation on that and other subjects, though
interesting in its own right, only detracts from the argument.
REP
Chernobog
"Charles" <cha...@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:1127880902.9...@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Can't get more tasteless than Hollywood.
--
Chernobog
Chernobog
--
Chernobog
"Charles" <cha...@optonline.net> wrote in message
news:1128054377.7...@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Mike Scott Rohan
from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
{snip}
> I find your sentiments naīve.
I find it naive to so confidently define something so elusive -- not
only to me, but to every worthwhile artistic commentator I've ever read.
Should someone invent an art out of throwing
> bricks into the Danube, I wouldn't hesitate to dismiss him and call
> Beethoven the greater artist and music the greater art. Art and greatness,
> like anything else, I can define and quantify as I please. You, as well as
> the world, have done the same, and it serves you well in the field of
> criticism -- you use it to dismiss shit-for-brains producers who destroy
> legitimate works of arts, for example. But you stopped comparing at a
> certain point -- between artists of different media -- presumably because
> the differences became too miniscule to you, or perhaps because it was just
> easier to gloss over the hard stuff, mellow out, and adopt a cherub-cheeked
> and inoffensive aesthetic. That would certainly win you lots of friends; and
> considering you've already pointed out a number of times that I am alone in
> my opinions, I have to wonder if that's your real priority.
My real priority? Getting a bit nettled here, aren't we? This has
overtones of abuse rather than discussion. What I've said was a genuine
comment on your views, no more -- nothing to do with this nonsense. And
if you had read it properly, you would not interpret it as in the least
validating the "self-appointed genius" school -- or "critic-appointed
genius", which is much the same. On the contrary, I believe in the
possibility of abstract greatness most decidedly, and said so. What I
don't believe is that you can legitimately rank the great in some sort
of artistic pyramid, as you do. I have my own opinions about the
relative greatness of various composers -- but they *are* only my own
opinions. I do not, as you do, elevate them to the status of an absolute
judgement and base arguments upon that. And the more I know and
understand about those composers, the more difficult I find it to define
their relative genius, if only because genius seems to necessitate both
an equal capacity for monumental misjudgements and weaknesses, and above
all a massive originality which renders comparisons petty and foolish.
It is not that the distinctions are too difficult for me -- it is simply
that I don't happen to share your sense of utter rightness in defining
them. Sibelius is "great", but in ways Wagner is not, and vice versa. I
content myself with including them in the class of the truly great, and
regarding that as a realm with blurred borders, into which people merge
gradually -- Weber, for example -- rather than being on one side or
other of a solid wall. I don't see the need to do otherwise.
But that, of course, is just my opinion, and I'm not offended by that
idea. When I remark that your opinions are distinctly personal, I mean
just that -- that very few people in or outside this group appear to
share them. If you're content with them in yourself, that shouldn't
matter -- though it might lead you to reconsider the grounds on which
you arrived at them, because there's often a reason for being out of
step. But if you base an entire argument only upon those singular
opinions, it makes the argument, as I said, impossible.
> Recognizing Wagner as the greatest anything doesn't preclude seeing his
> faults. As I recall, I was the only one who criticized him in a recent
> thread on Gotterdammerung, and I'd wager I'm the only regular poster here in
> recent years, besides AC Douglas, to consistently cite Wagner's specific
> dramatic failings. To position yourself as the voice of reason because I am
> fanatical, or in any way blind to Wagner's failings, is contradicted by the
> group's records. As to whether Tristan und Isolde would have worked better
> as an oratorio -- that is irrelevant. A thing can be the best of its kind
> without being perfect. Your bloviation on that and other subjects, though
> interesting in its own right, only detracts from the argument.
Not irrelevant at all, in the context of your blanket definition of all
oratorios as second-rate, essentially inadequate substitutes for operas.
I was pointing out that there are things oratorio can express very well
in its own right, as a valid and independent art form, and that Tristan
is an example of an opera that -- as is traceable from the development
of Wagner's ideas -- outgrew its original dramatic roots and became much
more like an oratorio. That was not the result of any inadequacy of
Wagner's -- it was that his genius for that time traced that particular
path to expression, which is as valid as the purely dramatic path of
Meistersinger. Gurrelieder took a very similar path, and not
unsuccessfully.
In that case the path was to some extent dictated by the original Danish
poem-cycle which Schoenberg admired. If he had turned it into a drama --
and the Gurre legend has been dramatized, more than once -- he would
have been abandoning the essence of the poems for the subject alone. But
in fact Jesperson's poetic treatment of the legend is in many ways
superior to a purely dramatic treatment, just as Wagner's is of Tristan,
more poetic and philosophical. The oratorio form, as Wagner found, is
particularly well adapted to that. So both he and Schoenberg took very
similar paths. For other subjects they both took very different ones;
Moses and Aaron is as dramatically structured as Parsifal. So it's
horses for courses; one form cannot reasonably be called an inadequate
substitute for the other.
But all this is just reiterating what's already been said.
REP
> The message <2n5%e.29181$y64.14924@trnddc06>
> from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
>
> {snip}
>
>
> I find it naive to so confidently define something so elusive -- not
> only to me, but to every worthwhile artistic commentator I've ever read.
Yet you have the audacity, in contradiction to your own philosophy, to
define art for everyone else. You've already said in no uncertain terms that
art has no acme, which is the same as defining it: it is now, by definition,
"something without an acme". Not true, I say.
> Should someone invent an art out of throwing
> > bricks into the Danube, I wouldn't hesitate to dismiss him and call
> > Beethoven the greater artist and music the greater art. Art and
greatness,
> > like anything else, I can define and quantify as I please. You, as well
as
> > the world, have done the same, and it serves you well in the field of
> > criticism -- you use it to dismiss shit-for-brains producers who destroy
> > legitimate works of arts, for example. But you stopped comparing at a
> > certain point -- between artists of different media -- presumably
because
> > the differences became too miniscule to you, or perhaps because it was
just
> > easier to gloss over the hard stuff, mellow out, and adopt a
cherub-cheeked
> > and inoffensive aesthetic. That would certainly win you lots of friends;
and
> > considering you've already pointed out a number of times that I am alone
in
> > my opinions, I have to wonder if that's your real priority.
>
> My real priority? Getting a bit nettled here, aren't we? This has
> overtones of abuse rather than discussion.
Your reaction is a bit of high-grounded posturing, especially considering
you've already invited any criticism with your underhanded insults. There's
no reason to call someone's opinion -- and one as complex, variegated, and,
by nature, already unique as an entire aesthetic theory -- unpopular except
to fallaciously invalidate it, and that's neither polite nor honest, neither
here nor there. Considering you've made such unfair remarks, introduced
popularity into a logical argument, and expounded a self-effacing
philosophy, it would seem appropriate to question your priorities, methods,
and ideology, all of which seem Mickey Mouse and misdirected to me.
It's of no consequence, in any case.
What I've said was a genuine
> comment on your views, no more -- nothing to do with this nonsense. And
> if you had read it properly, you would not interpret it as in the least
> validating the "self-appointed genius" school -- or "critic-appointed
> genius", which is much the same. On the contrary, I believe in the
> possibility of abstract greatness most decidedly, and said so. What I
> don't believe is that you can legitimately rank the great in some sort
> of artistic pyramid, as you do.
My aesthetic does involve pyramids, but one for each epoch and each medium,
rather than a single cross-media one. Romantic music, baroque music,
post-modern writing, Romantic writing, twentieth century serialism, Greek
tragedy, Elizabethan poetry, and folk music all have their own pyramids.
Some rise higher than others do -- with height denoting quality -- such as
the Romantic music pyramid, which rises highest and is capped by Wagner. The
pyramid capped by Shakespeare is the second tallest. Bach follows, then
Beethoven, then the lower levels of the Romantic music pyramid, then
Leonardo, Lucretius, and so on.
My ordering isn't important, but the methodology is. As time goes on, new
pyramids will arise to accommodate the arrival of new trends and movements.
On the other hand, the world can only reasonably contain and preserve so
much information. To make room for new additions, the lowest levels of
existing pyramids are removed. This represents the least popular and
forgotten of artists fading from world consciousness, which makes perfect
sense in evolutionary terms: lesser art is allowed to slip through the
cracks when greater art is created to replace it. This capacity for art is
like a basket, and humanity's basket is always full of eggs, or works of
art. Bad eggs are culled in favor of good ones whenever they present
themselves and, over time, more pristine eggs will appear to raise the
standard..
It is worth mentioning that the basket analogy is not an actual analogy for
static art, but a reality. Considering there is only so much space on earth,
we can't afford to turn every piece of land into an Easter Island or every
city block into a museum. We'd run out of room eventually, and lesser works
would have to be destroyed to make room for the greater ones.
Since a pyramid faces destruction through having its every layer removed,
the earliest pyramids, from the beginning of history, are consolidated into
a single pyramid whenever they face destruction. For example, if history
continues unabated without another dark age, it seems likely that in a
thousand years, critics will have reduced the first few millennia of our
history, from ancient times to the twenty-first century, to just a handful
of representative artists in a single cross-media pyramid -- I'd guess
Wagner, Leonardo, and possibly Shakespeare, though Shakespeare's value
diminishes with the evolution of the English language. My reasons for
thinking this are many, but it's likely that over a fertile thousand years,
so much new art of revolutionary standards will have been created that
humanity would have no choice but to reduce their earliest history to an
abstract amalgamation of the best artists of all media. Keeping with the
basket analogy, society would have replaced all but one of its eggs during
the course of the next thousand years. Why would I think this, especially
when we have not done the same in current history? In other words, why haven
't we reduced ancient history and the first millennia A.D. to just a handful
of representatives? Because we have produced and maintained much less art
over the first few thousand years of our history than we will have over the
next thousand years, if they are to be fertile. There are two important
reasons for this.
First, we did not have a fertile history. Population was low, literacy was
low, art was often censored or condemned for religious reasons, and
civilizations, along with much of their art, waned in and out of existence;
almost no Western art was produced during the Dark Age, and we have almost
no record of any sort of music until well past this period, eliminating an
entire medium for preservation. Second, we had material conflicts. Methods
for recording art were far from perfect; there were no printing presses,
parchment was easily destroyed and it usually was, and static art --
sculptures, paintings, and tapestries -- eroded over time.
You can witness this phenomenon in popular music, where it is accelerated to
the point that decades take the place of centuries or even millennia. The
radio stations I listened to as a child, all '60s mixes, started halving
their time between the best of the '60s and the '70s after a few years. That
eliminated half their library of '60s songs, and someone had to make the
call of which to cut -- in this case, usually a fiscal decision based on
which songs performed best. A decade later, the stations switched to a
handful of '60s music, predominately played '70s music, and added a
smattering of hits from the '80s. Just as how the output of the '30s and
'40s has been reduced to a handful of representative singers, and continues
to narrow with each passing generation, so do the late '50s to late '60s
continue to be reduced to Elvis, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the
Shirelles, etc. Two decades ago, it was them, plus the Four Seasons, the
Chiffons, Chad and Jeremy, the Crystals, Herman's Hermits, the Turtles, Dave
Clark Five, Sam Cooke, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Tommy James and the
Shondells, the Animals, Dusty Springfield, Donovan, etc. But every few
years, more music is added to the play-list, and that means less popular
pieces have to be culled, and over time, the public forgets. You might think
that Dave Clark Five is just as good as the Beatles, or that they did some
things better than the Beatles, and because of that you might refuse to make
an "absolute judgment" on their respective worth, but while you're leading
both on like a coy little hussy, the world has already made a decision out
of necessity and shed one for the other, because their town isn't big enough
for everybody, and what's more, it's rapidly shrinking, forcing every music
act into a survival-of-the-fittest battle for posterity. Just because
classical history moves slower than popular history doesn't mean it isn't
acting in much the same way. And if you don't want to take part in the
selective process beyond filtering out the most obvious candidates for
removal, then that's your choice, I suppose, though I think you have a
responsibility as a critic to do otherwise; there will come a time when the
world will have to choose between artists as seemingly unrelated as
Schoenberg and Verdi. Nevertheless, to deny the most obvious fact of art,
that not all of it survives, is awfully brazen, just as it's brazen to chide
me or anyone else for caring enough to definitively choose the best art
across various media in order to assure that the best definitely survives.
You might not want to face the decision of having to permanently choose
between, say, Schubert and Weber, but that is exactly what society will
eventually do. The question won't be put directly, as there isn't likely to
be one obvious or crucial decision that decides a composer's or work's fate.
A composer simply slips out of the world's eye over time, sometimes
irretrievably, because conductors don't champion him, as Beecham championed
Delius, Bernstein championed Mahler, and Mendelssohn championed Bach;
because his contemporaries are given priority; or because publishers stop
printing his music. Most art is lost eventually, and if no one stands up for
their own aesthetic and discriminates between good and bad, then history --
what's lost and what's retained -- will be decided with a coin flip. You
might not have an opinion on Schubert and Weber, but others do, and they
have the right to voice it strongly and absolutely, just as they have the
right to compare two giants of different media, say Hemingway and Dali,
because it might come down to choosing between the two of them someday.
The same applies to apples and oranges, so don't tell me about chalk and
cheese as though it means anything. The world has lost species before --
animals through extinction -- and we can easily lose species of fruits, too,
if we don't protect them. As population rises, farming lands shrink, and
crops disappear as foods become increasingly synthetic and modified, a fruit
might be phased out of production in favor of another. That would force
people to compare two things that are "as different as chalk and cheese" and
make an "absolute judgment" about which is better than the other, or at
least about which they'd rather have. Phrases like "you can't compare apples
and oranges" and "as different as chalk and cheese" have been repeated
enough for people to mistake them for truth -- few people, after all, are
free-thinking enough to doubt an idiom that's been said to them since their
childhood. Too bad both proverbs are just plain wrong and only serve as a
constipation to legitimate arguments.
That's really what my aesthetic is based on, preserving works for as long as
they're relevant to the evolution of art at large, because I operate under
the assumption that not every artist will survive the ravages of time, and
that the artists who critics, performers, and audiences gravitate toward
have a greater chance of survival. Because of that, I judge and compare
artists between various media and epochs, and can easily and
unapologetically tell you that Mozart is greater than Pynchon, Proust
greater than Margaret Mitchell, Woody Guthrie greater than Herodotus, Frank
Capra greater than Maeterlinck, and Aeschylus greater than Julius Bittner --
however incomprehensible that is to you, who lives in a world that doubles
as an everlasting encyclopedia. Frankly, you need a wakeup call.
The Taliban destroyed millennia-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001,
including a towering one of 50 meters, which was the tallest Buddha in the
world at that time. Plenty of people like them would love to destroy
irreplaceable art. Pretending there isn't a possibility, even a threat, of
having art destroyed, perhaps systematically, is naïve to the extreme. You
take for granted that mankind will freely accumulate art and grow unabated,
as it has generally done for the past few centuries, but civilizations in
the past have had to choose, whether consciously or not, their greatest art
for preservation, and lost everything else.
The most loved and protected works will have a better chance of surviving a
catastrophe, be it the catastrophe of time, or something more immediate and
tangible, like the Dresden bombings that destroyed parts of Rienzi, or the
Alexandria library fire. In the case of the last, many great and
historically important works could have been saved had someone designated
them as such, and wrapped them in thicker covers and stocked them in
accessible areas with a plan for their removal in the event of an accident.
But maybe some bumpkin came along and said, "It's all the same! You can't
hardly say which books are better than others!" and organized everything in
a slipshod manner, so that the works of greater genius could be destroyed
just as easily as the works of lesser genius. The same thing could happen
again, on a much larger scale, and I sure wouldn't want my fingerprints all
over the crime scene.
Would you really continue this charade of great/not-great dichotomy and
modesty in the face of such a tragic decision? If you were asked to save a
work from destruction, or safeguard a particular work, would you really stop
to consider whether perhaps, just maybe, Weber's Oberon belongs in the same
class as Beethoven's ninth symphony? I hope not, and I would hope that while
you're waffling, some plenipotentiary person would make an assertive call to
prevent the loss of the greater masterpiece.
In a word, I find your thoughtless ideology unsympathetic at best,
destructive to art at worst. You and I both, as practically professional
music-listeners, have a responsibility to use our knowledge and expertise
for the betterment of art and music. That means making calls on the value of
certain works and composers at times, based on our own opinions. If we don'
t, then other less-educated people will, and maybe tomorrow, Joyce's,
Kurosawa's, and Spike Milligan's works will all be a memory because of it,
and we'll wake up to Faulkner, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Benny Hill instead.
REP
Charles
put the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, and the late
self-portraits of Rembrandt, neither of which you even mention, at the
very top of any pyramid they may happen to belong to. What does this do
to your theory of heirarchy - does it leave place for differences of
opinion among educated people?
If it doesn't, it is tantamount to saying your personal opinion is more
accurate than that of any other individual - a fallacy we have sadly
often seen before.
If it does, then it admits the relativism you scorn, and moves toward
the
looser values of those whom you dispute.
REP
> After a lifetime of reaction, thought and consideration like yours, I
> put the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, and the late
> self-portraits of Rembrandt, neither of which you even mention, at the
> very top of any pyramid they may happen to belong to. What does this do
> to your theory of heirarchy - does it leave place for differences of
> opinion among educated people?
Of course. But if it ever came down to it, I would know which works I
consider to be great -- greatness not necessarily being the same as what I
enjoy -- and I would not hesitate to preserve or champion them at the
expense of lesser works, which does mean saying on occasion that maybe
Gurre-lieder does not belong in the same league as Parsifal. Speaking as
someone who might someday have a say in what works are presented to the
public, it's my duty to have a fair and thought-out aesthetic that dictates
which works deserve recognition and posterity. Museums face the same
decision when they display and physically secure works, because not every
work can have a room all to itself and a hundred-thousand dollar alarm
system. Of course, most static art is valued in dollars, and a museum's
decision is usually based on that evaluation, but that's just another
example of art being mathematically leagued and meticulously ranked -- in
this case, usually down to millionths of a point, which is far more exact
than my abstract pyramids.
> If it doesn't, it is tantamount to saying your personal opinion is more
> accurate than that of any other individual
Well, it could be. Since quality and survival are usually related in my
aesthetic, if in a thousand years, Wagner is still remembered and respected
as Virgil and Sophocles are today, then that would be vindicative,
especially if he's the lone survivor of his epoch. Part of being great is
being relevant, and since Wagner composed timeless music dramas, he will
remain relevant to society and loved by audiences and scholars for centuries
to come. I can't say the same for Elgar's and Schoenberg's oratorios, Bax's
and Arnold's symphonies, Sibelius's tone poems, or Ligeti's atmospheres, but
that doesn't mean they won't survive; I just find it unlikely that they'll
survive as long as Wagner.
How much popular music prior to the '20s and '30s is still a part of the
world's repertoire? The field has existed as long as classical music, but
the 19th century has shrunk to a handful of representative works: Stephen
Foster's music, Joplin's rags (though he crossed into the twentieth
century), and an assorted handful of random shanties, anthems, rags, and
popular ballads. Now go to the Library of Congress website, or the Library
itself, and do a search for popular music. You'll find thousands of books by
composers you've never heard of, filled with songs that have rightly fallen
out of fashion and been forgotten. Wagner's music, on the other hand, wasn't
composed in a fashion. It was a product of its time, but it will never fall
out of fashion -- it is timeless. Most classical music strives for
timelessness and strives to be less fashionable than popular music, but it
can only forestall its decline, and only a select few deserve tenure (in my
opinion, the composers Wagner, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart). Despite however
much loved a classical work might be, it can always fall out of fashion, as
in the case of Meyerbeer's operas, Strauss's operettas, and Weber's lesser
works (and I personally enjoy each).
The same question can be asked of novels, which have another accelerated
history: how many books were first published between 1900 and 1970, and how
many of those are still in print today? The world has immense libraries,
such as the British Library, to retain the dead, physical shells of
discarded works, but the overwhelming majority, even those that might have
initially been widely and popularly read, do not exist to the world today.
REP
A.C. Douglas
> [snipped - original post is below]
Apropos the recent turn of this discussion (all participants), I some time
ago wrote a small piece addressing matters addressed here. Not entirely on
point in specific details, perhaps, but well on point in the matter of core
concerns.
It may be read at URL http://snipurl.com/i3v2
--
ACD
http://www.soundsandfury.com
------------[original post]------------
"REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
news:wtY%e.4167$097.3225@trnddc01...
Chernobog
"REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
> "Mike Scott Rohan" <mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:200510011...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
>> The message <2n5%e.29181$y64.14924@trnddc06>
>> from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
>>
> medium,
> rather than a single cross-media one. Romantic music, baroque music,
> post-modern writing, Romantic writing, twentieth century serialism, Greek
> tragedy, Elizabethan poetry, and folk music all have their own pyramids.
> Some rise higher than others do -- with height denoting quality -- such as
> the Romantic music pyramid, which rises highest and is capped by Wagner.
> The
> pyramid capped by Shakespeare is the second tallest. Bach follows, then
> Beethoven, then the lower levels of the Romantic music pyramid, then
> Leonardo, Lucretius, and so on.
That's a pretty ugly aesthetic - you can't see the pyramids for the bricks.
. .or is it the other way around? Either way it's a pile of bricks.
> If we don' t, then other less-educated people will, and maybe tomorrow,
> Joyce's,
> Kurosawa's, and Spike Milligan's works will all be a memory because of it,
What if people better-educated than you decide Joyce was nothing more than a
"wrong turn"? Who are you, then, to say they're wrong?
> and we'll wake up to Faulkner, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Benny Hill instead.
Ooh! Hills Angels! Ooh!
Just to keep things firmly on the topic of unwanted erections. Who remembers
Hill Angels? Go on, admit it. Isn't it strange to think that Hills Angels
were banned from prime time TV and could only be shown after 10.30pm.
Whereas nowadays one can see simulated sex masquerading as "dance" at
10.30am on any Saturday morning Kids show.
--
Chernobog
REP
> "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
> news:pDM%e.3395$097.22@trnddc01...
> > Joyce's,
> > Kurosawa's, and Spike Milligan's works will all be a memory because of
it,
>
> What if people better-educated than you decide Joyce was nothing more than
a
> "wrong turn"?
If someone were to decide that Joyce was nothing more than a wrong turn, I
would probably react in much the same way that you reacted when I called
Mahler a wrong turn: I would defend him. And I'll remind you that in your
defense, you praised Mahler unequivocally, which makes your criticisms of my
frank opinions something like the pot calling the kettle black. If you can
say that Mahler "could orchestrate with the utmost delicacy" or that "few,
if any, have approached his subtlety in orchestration," then I'll be glad to
deep-six your remarks with a little counterpoint, such as "Mahler, despite
whatever skills he possesed, chose to orchestrate poorly", and "few, if any,
have approached Mahler's level of grotesqueness and sheer badness".
At least my criticism, like Bernstein's championing of Mahler's music in the
first place, is pro-active and not reactive. There's no hope for art if
people are so lethargic that they won't actively support the prodigious;
condemn the loonies, such as Eurotrash producers and Dadaists; or vent their
frank opinions. Don't tell me I don't have the right to speak, or that I do
so inappropriately or unfairly, or try to put the fear in me with comments
that begin with "What if people better-educated than you...". Tell me that
my opinion is wrong, and explain why, because your reprimands and your
prudence won't discourage me or anyone else from doing what comes naturally,
and there are people who will listen and be persuaded by my and others'
words. You might as well agree with everything I say if you are going to
acquiesce for fear of appearing impolite or because you don't want to get
your hands dirty, and who would respect you for that? Probably not the ghost
of Bernstein -- a great, assertive, and genius of a man -- and probably not
the ghost of Mahler, who really couldn't equal Bernstein's genius, but I
hear you like him nonetheless, so his opinion would probably matter to you.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that praise is a more useful critical tool
than condemnation, or that elevation is more constructive to criticism than
degradation, because they're both intrinsicly linked. Considering there can
only be so many musical performances in a year, and listeners have only so
much time for listening, choosing one composer to perform or listen to is
the same as elevating him above all others, and that is the same as
degrading all others.
REP
Mike Scott Rohan
from "Chernobog" <chern...@hotmail.com> contains these words:
> "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> wrote in message
> news:pDM%e.3395$097.22@trnddc01...
> > "Mike Scott Rohan" <mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote in message
> > news:200510011...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
> >> The message <2n5%e.29181$y64.14924@trnddc06>
> >> from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
> >>
> > My aesthetic does involve pyramids, but one for each epoch and each
> > medium,
> > rather than a single cross-media one. Romantic music, baroque music,
> > post-modern writing, Romantic writing, twentieth century serialism, Greek
> > tragedy, Elizabethan poetry, and folk music all have their own pyramids.
> > Some rise higher than others do -- with height denoting quality -- such as
> > the Romantic music pyramid, which rises highest and is capped by Wagner.
> > The
> > pyramid capped by Shakespeare is the second tallest. Bach follows, then
> > Beethoven, then the lower levels of the Romantic music pyramid, then
> > Leonardo, Lucretius, and so on.
> That's a pretty ugly aesthetic - you can't see the pyramids for the bricks.
> .. .or is it the other way around? Either way it's a pile of bricks.
It also suggests that greatness narrows to a point, a capstone to
maintain the pyramid image, in other words that there's one or a very
few artists who are so great as to tower unarguably above all the others
-- that there's a Beethoven above a Mozart, perhaps, or a Wagner above
either. I just cannot buy that as an absolute state. I couldn't accept
it even as reflecting the common values of a particular culture at a
particular time, ours today. Opinions change just too quickly. Within
the lifetimes of people still alive Mozart was considered little more
than a perfumed dancing master, unfit to be considered against, say,
Brahms, let alone Beethoven or Wagner, while Bruckner and Mahler were
extravagant eccentrics of dubious technical ability. Within my own,
medieval music was considered dry and of scholarly interest only, its
great composers admitted to such a pyramid only at the base, or not at
all. On the other hand composers like Boulez, Nancarrow and Stockhausen
would have been much higher up it than they are now. Moving outside
music, in the last century Turner was an eccentric, Rafael, El Greco,
Ingres and Rubens among the giants. Aesthetic values simply are not
fixed even within a culture; they're in constant flux. Only our
individual opinions fix them, and how long do they last? And how
dominant are they? The best we can hope for is a brief consensus --
unless, of course, we assume that our values should be everyone's. But
that way Herr Beckmesser is waiting.
{snip}
> Ooh! Hills Angels! Ooh!
> Just to keep things firmly on the topic of unwanted erections. Who
> remembers
> Hill Angels? Go on, admit it. Isn't it strange to think that Hills Angels
> were banned from prime time TV and could only be shown after 10.30pm.
> Whereas nowadays one can see simulated sex masquerading as "dance" at
> 10.30am on any Saturday morning Kids show.
That's in the USA; it was always family entertainment in the UK, like
the Carry On films with their double entendres.
Cheers,
Mike
Mike Scott Rohan
from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
> "Mike Scott Rohan" <mike.sco...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:200510011...@asgard.zetnet.co.uk...
> > The message <2n5%e.29181$y64.14924@trnddc06>
> > from "REP" <loIr...@Iolrqapq.com> contains these words:
> >
> > {snip}
> >
> > > I find your sentiments naīve.
> >
> > I find it naive to so confidently define something so elusive -- not
> > only to me, but to every worthwhile artistic commentator I've ever read.
> Yet you have the audacity, in contradiction to your own philosophy, to
> define art for everyone else. You've already said in no uncertain terms that
> art has no acme, which is the same as defining it: it is now, by definition,
> "something without an acme". Not true, I say.
No; you're quibbling. I am simply questioning the nature of art, and
thereby placing the burden of proof on you. I take it as pretty
self-evident that art has no acme, since values and opinions in art
change so quickly, even within individual lifetimes -- so obvious I
hardly thought it needed saying. Some concepts of greatness survive from
generation to generation, but the majority don't -- you only have to
read the criticisms of past generations to see this graphically spelt
out. Comments like "Rembrandt has some claims to greatness, but in his
draftsmanship he is generally agreed to be no equal to our talented
Mr.Hawkinshaw". When Egon Schiele was studying art the absolute acme of
painting was considered to be Makart; then along came Picasso; and so on
ad infinitum. Even among those who do become established, the relative
values may well change. I assumed it would not be necessary to spell all
this out.
I made no insults, underhanded or otherwise. In the above paragraph you,
on the other hand, misrepresent my views, then sneer at me for not
applying proper standards, as you see them, because it's too hard, and I
really want to curry favour (who with, you don't say -- all those others
out there?). When I called that "overtones of abuse", I was being pretty
restrained; It's wildly abusive. What you apparently consider the
ultimate insult is my remarking that most people do not share your
particular views -- which is a perfectly valid point of discussion when
you are putting forward those views as an aesthetic standard, and a very
absolute one at that. It was also entirely valid to remark that your
views are highly personal in explaining why I don't see much point in
discussing them any further -- which your highly personal reaction here
simply confirms.
{snip ad lib}
> In a word, I find your thoughtless ideology unsympathetic at best,
> destructive to art at worst. You and I both, as practically professional
> music-listeners, have a responsibility to use our knowledge and expertise
> for the betterment of art and music. That means making calls on the value of
> certain works and composers at times, based on our own opinions. If we don'
> t, then other less-educated people will, and maybe tomorrow, Joyce's,
> Kurosawa's, and Spike Milligan's works will all be a memory because of it,
> and we'll wake up to Faulkner, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Benny Hill instead.
What right have you to call my opinions thoughtless? Or, indeed, to
suggest that they are in any way an ideology? I don't find it necessary
to have any such thing, or to construct vast ramshackle aesthetic
structures, pyramidal or otherwise. And you have no business lecturing
me or anyone else what our responsibilities are for anything, let alone
"the betterment of art and music". That's my concern and will be carried
on as I see fit, with regard to opinions I may respect but none
whatsoever to self-appointed and self-important fingerwaggers.
I haven't the time or inclination to comment on this great rambling
screed of yours in detail, since my only reward would be more abuse, but
I will point out that your theories, whatever else they are, are based
on self-contradiction; on one hand you suggest that your relative
standards are absolute, the next that they change with time. I myself,
as I've said ad nauseam, don't reject the idea of abstract greatness. I
simply believe in caution and moderation in relying on it. You are
making every effort to depict me as non-judgemental; that's nonsense. I
am simply aware of the limits of judgement and the dangers of elevating
my own opinions to an exclusive creed, a la Beckmesser. Nothing in that
means I don't hold such opinions or defend them -- simply that I have
seen too many follies created by those who have done so in the past. The
history of criticism is full of them -- Hanslick on Wagner, Shaw on
Brahms, the English critic who announced that Tchaikovsky "revealed the
core of coarse barbarity that is said to lie at the heart of even the
most civilized Russian" (Tchaikovsky!) or Virgil Thompson and other
Americans for whom English composers could do nothing right, one
declaring only about twenty years back that Vaughan Williams' Riders to
the Sea with "better staging and singing than it deserved was rendered
only slightly less effective than the original Synge play".
Equally, though, I know what I believe, and expound that to the best of
my ability -- only with reason, where I can supply it, and without undue
arrogance. I prefer to believe in Wagner's greatness and demonstrate it,
without feeling it necessary to strut around thrusting it down people's
throats as "the only greatest", and recognising that it comes in
different forms and appeals to minds and hearts in different ways.
And I certainly don't accept your contention that without stern
aesthetic thought-police the bad will thrust out the good; there has
never been a time when the good and the mediocre didn't co-exist, and
mere education is not necessarily a qualification to make the
distinction. Look at the vast mass of playwrights who existed alongside
Shakespeare -- yet upon whom he drew, like fertilizer. Compare the
source play with what he made of Measure for Measure, for example. I
find it perfectly possible to believe that Joyce and Faulkner, Kurosawa
and Bruckheimer and Milligan and Benny Hill can coexist and even on
occasion cross-fertilize, part of a wider aesthetic that thrives on
diversity. Hollywood and Kurosawa have certainly cross-fertilized;
Hollywood westerns inspired Kurosawa's most famous early films, while
Stars Wars is full of Kurosawa influence. At times some masterpieces may
vanish from popular consciousness, at others resurface, and occasionally
some may be lost along the way; but in our present information-hungry
culture I believe that will become less and less likely. It has happened
more rarely in recent years; we may have lost part of the original score
of Rienzi, but we haven't lost the work. And while I might more or less
agree, in my own view, with your relative ranking of these people, I
often find Faulkner more rewarding than Joyce; Pirates of the Caribbean
more effective than the worst of Kurosawa; and unambitious Benny Hill a
great deal funnier than Milligan's all too frequent misfires. Genius is
not constant, and at times the more modest one can achieve more than the
master. I don't sneer at either. You say you can *tell* me this or that
-- well, so can anyone sufficiently opinionated. But a responsible
critic can try to supply reasons why his readers might discover a
creator's particular claims to greatness -- among them, certainly, that
he himself believes it; but if he starts to dictate to them, he's out of
line entirely.
And you say I need a wake-up call; it's absurdly arrogant of you to
assume I'm in any way asleep. I may be more alert than you, because I'm
more open-minded. I cannot help remembering what someone once said of
Macaulay "I wish I were as sure of anything as that man is of
everything". I don't; I think it would mean I'd exchanged informed
judgement for narcissism.
Charles
aesthetic ravages of time, if not the physical in most cases. What I
mean by this is that very few original great sculptures from classical
Greece remain, but those that are, and the period itself, are judged by
many educated and experienced viewers to be at the acme of art. But you
yourself choose to leave it out completely in your pyramid
descriptions. So obviously mere survival as greatly admired, for two
thousand years, is not enough to get on one of your pyramids. Therefore
again, in your system, you personally are the ultimate judge, and as I
pointed out before we all know the sad fallacy of someone setting his
personal judgment as an absolute. And you have not answered this
objection. To me, a system that leaves out the Elgin marbles as a top
achievement is as wrong as one that left out Wagner would be, for
either yourself or I.
And when you say earlier in your reply that you can judge the greatness
of a work even if it doesn't appeal to your personal taste, the only
way I see that you could do that is by using time as a test, but
obviously, the test of time in relation to the Elgin marbles doesn't
mean anything to you. And if not the test of time, then in what other
way could art be judged without involving personal predilection of some
kind? Rules? A formula? Whose? Once again we are back at same issue:
you are the Judge. Not good enough.
REP
> This reply misses my point. Greek sculpture has certainly survived the
> aesthetic ravages of time, if not the physical in most cases. What I
> mean by this is that very few original great sculptures from classical
> Greece remain, but those that are, and the period itself, are judged by
> many educated and experienced viewers to be at the acme of art. But you
> yourself choose to leave it out completely in your pyramid
> descriptions. So obviously mere survival as greatly admired, for two
> thousand years, is not enough to get on one of your pyramids. Therefore
> again, in your system, you personally are the ultimate judge, and as I
> pointed out before we all know the sad fallacy of someone setting his
> personal judgment as an absolute. And you have not answered this
> objection. To me, a system that leaves out the Elgin marbles as a top
> achievement is as wrong as one that left out Wagner would be, for
> either yourself or I.
I think you misunderstood my original post, and I mistunderstood your
question. The list of pyramids I provided was incomplete, and just an
example of what it might include. All art, except for what has been lost or
forgotten, is represented, because the pyramids are an actual representation
of the world of art in the world's conscious. Except for the layering and
ordering of bricks, the pyramids are not an opinion per se, but a scientific
representation of the ebb and flow of art throughout history. They represent
the staying-power of a few works and artists over the centuries, as well as
the thousands that slip through the cracks every day. However, I don't
decide what stays and what goes, or what's on top. The world decides, when
works and artists fall out of critical favor, or are outright forgotten.
> And when you say earlier in your reply that you can judge the greatness
> of a work even if it doesn't appeal to your personal taste, the only
> way I see that you could do that is by using time as a test, but
> obviously, the test of time in relation to the Elgin marbles doesn't
> mean anything to you. And if not the test of time, then in what other
> way could art be judged without involving personal predilection of some
> kind? Rules? A formula? Whose? Once again we are back at same issue:
> you are the Judge. Not good enough.
It's not good enough that I am the judge of my own aesthetic? I don't
understand. I would tell you that, obviously, the works you mention are
great, but then I'd be dragged into another argument about how I have no
right to declare things this and that. So what gives you the right?
Personally, I think you have every right. People should defend the things
they love and not spare the feelings of others, in my opinion.
REP