The Catastrophic Loss of an Educated Musical Literati

Stravinsky became a friend, and Carter was witness to a legendary musical encounter when he and Stravinsky were having dinner in a New York restaurant. A waiter asked if a fellow diner could have Stravinsky's autograph. A somewhat irked Stravinsky chose to keep the fan waiting. So it was only after an agonisingly lengthy pause that a bemused Frank Sinatra, accompanied by his then wife Mia Farrow, were signalled that they might be allowed to approach the table. 

Interview with Elliott Carter 

These days when you look at most academics in the arts outside of music departments, you see little interest in art music. As always, I prefer to use the term "art music" to "classical music", which is a "genre" that I simply thinks does not exist.

At times when you hear personal interviews with the likes of well known professors in the arts, you find that when talking about music they only know the commercial pop/rock music of their youth. At the most, they might mention some lollipop piece like the Pachelbel Canon as a token piece of "serious" music. Even Slavoj Žižek is hardly better in this regard, despite having once played in a prog rock band.

Likewise, the transformation of the phrase from Nietzsche "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" into a piece of pop kitsch is universally accepted to be "artistic" is simply astonishing. It merely shows how Nietzsche has degenerated into the pop philosopher du jour, hardly to be taken seriously compared to the body of Continental philosophers before and after him. He is grossly over-rated.

On the other hand, there is Theodor Adorno. Readers who know their Adorno might have noticed that his influence pervades and haunts the thoughts found within this blog. Not withstanding, of course, the fact that I have also been scathing about Adorno's views on certain things. Yet, however dated and rather weak some of his arguments will strike most of us today, Adorno's post-Marxist and anti-capitalism critique of popular music as commodity music is more pertinent to us today than it ever was.

The fact that literati and intellectuals outside of musicology circles—even those in arts departments who read Adorno—have their heads full of commodity music is a complete disaster, astonishingly even thinking that this is "modern art". There is nothing "modern" about commodity music except for the stage costumes. For popular music is the ultimate form of subliminal capitalist brainwashing. Yet even Harvard humanities professors, when asked about their musical tastes, seem to shamelessly discuss commodity music, as though it could be taken for granted that it constitutes "art". Even the most intelligent and educated person today almost always exhibits a grotesque degree of discord between their literary and musical tastes.

It is a catastrophe of the highest order today that the supposedly educated—people who hold trashy novels, and populist Hollywood blockbuster films in utter contempt—can be found thinking that popular forms of music, with all of its pseudo-genres, might somehow be regarded as acceptable. It is the profoundest symptom of the cultural bankruptcy of our age, and how it is has been brainwashed by capitalism.

Perhaps part of the problem here can be traced to the fall of the Soviet Union, which produced many fine musicians. The West used to try to keep up with the cultural competition. That is how the Berlin Philharmonic was subsidised by West Germany to keep it the finest orchestra in the Western world, while turning Karajan into a celebrity, and one of the richest men in Germany. It was, in part, a propaganda exercise, to show that the West were not second to the East when it came to high culture.

Now that the need to keep up this sort of cultural propaganda has gone, interest in serious art music has largely collapsed along with the communist bloc. The type of person from the old Soviet bloc who followed pianists like Sviatoslav Richter, and contemporary composers such as Schnittke, is becoming rarer and rarer amongst Russians today. Some readers may remember how back in 1986, members of the audience were in tears when the 81 year old Vladimir Horowitz returned to perform in Russia for the first time in 60 years. I doubt we could witness such scenes today.

There will be those who insist that the ban in the Soviet bloc on Western pop music was regressive, and that pop music is thus a progressive capitalist force for good and liberty. To a limited extent that used to be true, but only with limits—limits long ago exceeded. Popular music as a form of rebellion during the Western cultural revolution once used to be a liberal and spontaneous form of youth rebellion. However, those days are long gone. Today, popular forms of music are the manufactured product of a billion dollar culture industry that dictates to the masses what it must consider "cool". What "rebellion" it peddles comes manufactured and sold in little plastic packages for mass consumption.

The most disheartening example of this was the recent use by Apple, the computer giant, of music by the band U2 to promote itself. While the manufactured veneer of the stage appearance cultivates an air of rock 'n' rock "rebellion", it is clearly one that is slave to the corporate dollar. The Apple-U2 corporate deal, probably worth millions, resulted in a huge backlash. The reality is that people sensed something deeply inauthentic about the formation of an unholy alliance between a huge multinational corporation and a commodity band for the sole purpose of manufacturing an image of rebellion and coolness, when really it does little more than promote brand obedience to a corporate behemoth.

The artificial and corporate sponsored image of "rebellion" with sunglasses and leather of the rock "artist" is cheap rebellion sold in plastic packages for mass consumption

The end result is that we live in a sorry world, where "literary" and artistic music is perpetually under threat, and in ever danger of being swamped out of existence by mass market commodity music. It represents the ultimate victory of mindless capitalism of the worst kind. Worse still, it is the ultimate victory for capitalism that it has brainwashed the masses into thinking that this obedience constitutes some sort of "liberation".

Nor does the crude commercialisation of the image of a conservative and elitist, so-called "classical music", peddling pop-classic sweetmeats by Mozart and Tchaikovsky help one iota. The fact that contemporary composers no longer have substantial followers in the way of many literary novelists have is a major disaster, while in the concert hall we get a repetition ad nauseam of Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Dvořák's New World Symphony.  This is something that cannot be allowed to go on perpetually, even if it means having to "blow up all the opera houses" (even if only figuratively) and starting all over again.