Creative free spirits skydive into the unknown. The noble ideal, not that it always works out this way, is to expand music’s expressive purview. But Messers Lloyd Webber, Barlow et al actively seek to contain language. Ambiguity doesn’t play well in that brutally corporate world lorded over by Simon Cowell. Ambiguity means difficulty and the trouble with difficulty is that eats into profit margins. And so musical language is siphoned down to a pre-packaged catalogue of dependable, bankable expressive reflex actions: fast, slow, happy, sad. The cushion of tonality remains, the inconvenient truths are ruthlessly circumvented.
I could hardly have put it better. We live in an age of capitalist mass commodity music.
It is unfortunate that there are many out there who believe that the popular music manufactured by the corporate world is in some ways "modern music". I pulled a score by the heavy metal band Metallica off the internet the other day, and compared it side by side with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Stravinsky made the corporate mass produced product seem positively archaic—astonishing when you consider that his score premiered in 1913 will be a hundred years old next year.
The pseudo-modernity of corporate mass produced commodity music comes from its extra musical associations. The pink/purple/orange hairdo, or the meat dress:
Corporate mass produced music needs these extra-musical gimmicks to distract us from the reactionary conservativeness of their narrowly tonal products.
We are also told by corporate Big Brother that popular music this sort of gimmick represents some sort of "rebellion". It is a rebellion that comes manufactured in little plastic containers ready for mass consumption. The corporate line about "classical" music being allegedly "elitist" is likewise just pure propaganda.
I agree with much here, but I find very few - although there are no doubt some - who would believe that Metallica (yawn)or Weber (and one thus assumes Williams, Howard, etc") are "moderns" as it is being defined here.
ReplyDeleteThere are equally those working outside of "classical" music that might be considered "pop" - or at least "Rock" or "alternative" that produce music of "ambiguity" - sometimes using mainstream success to fund these more "interesting" projects. Would it be easy to suggest that Bowie's "Outside" album didn't play with "ambiguity"? Or what about Mike Patton's "Mr Bungle" (signed to Warners) or Lydon's new PIL project (funded, he boosts, by his adverts for Country Life Butter? And then of course we could take an ever interesting journey down to the work of Mark E Smith's "The Fall"
http://youtu.be/PHuBRe22Df0
"Modernity" is not dead it is simply doing what it has always done - waiting a hundred years or so, to get used in the latest "blockbuster" soundtrack
In fact, it is truly frightening that much of Wagner—a man of the Victorian era—remains much more radically modern than what regular appears on the pop music charts today. The modernity of Wagner is purely musical, devoid of all extra-musical gimmickry. As for his social and philosophical critique and commentary, its decisive relevance is only scarcely beginning to be understood.
DeleteI would not disagree Sator, but note my further comment below: I would suspect that "people" are not ready, or want, to hear.
DeleteI have become so used to this now, and so ingrained is Wagner's association with the "Nazies" become (thanks Millington, Kohler, etc!) that I need to clarify that neither of us are discussing "anti-semitic" elements.
DeleteIts no wonder I rarely comment on articles. Stop enticing me Sator :)
People would infinitely rather hear a cheap, Nazified interpretation of Wagner than to hear the truth. That is too much for them to handle.
DeleteIndeed. Yet again, something that might support my "argument". :)
DeletePerhaps, diverging too far from the main article but alas, (or perhaps not alas)in the "West" Music Hall" has always been more popular than Wagner, Weber, etc. Indeed more popular than Mozart or Bach. This is the nature of the "western world" - in its present construct. Admittedly, the continued "dumbing down" by those such as Cowell etc may not not help - but it would be foolish to assume that this was not at the "request" of those being "dumbed". The truth is that few people either want or indeed seek ambiguity. And that many see some ambiguity where it clearly does not exist - at least to most of "us" - is proof of this.
ReplyDeleteThose that seek such stimulation will always be the minority - in many ways could be classed as "deviant" I would suspect. But as they say "vive la différence"