Friday, July 26, 2019

The Museum of Uncommon Composers - Episode #0 - A Mission Statement - Halfish

This podcast is about the composers who slipped through history's cracks; composers so distant from the wellspring of cultural history that few were there to listen to them, and therefore few to tell others they're worth hearing; composers of such forward vision that there was no place for them in the world of their present, and the future has yet to catch up with them.

But there are also some well-known composers who are extremely well known, and yet they too fall through history's cracks. Composers whose music is so misunderstood and sometimes even dismissed that the era for proper redressment is long since passed, and all we can do now is talk about how and why they were dismissed. In the case of Scott Joplin, the African-American founder of modern American music, the reasons seem rather obvious, and yet it's not quite as obvious as it seems.

What does it mean to be thought of in the Pantheon of great composers? Is it really that much of a reward? You know the stories as well as I do of the suffering: of how Bach buried a dozen of his children, of Beethoven's deafness and Mozart's pauper's grave, Schubert's manic depression and Schumann's insanity, Bruckner's obsessive compulsions and Brahms's loneliness, Tchaikovsky's secret homosexuality and Mahler's neurosis, Sibelius's alcoholism and Scriabin's drug-induced delusions, Shostakovich's political terrors and Britten's un-acted upon love of children. The list goes on and on and on, and the notion of the suffering artist continues from generation to generation.

But is it true that artists must suffer? When I was a somewhat younger artist, perhaps more self-fancied than the real thing, but already beset with more mental agonies than I care to ever share in this podcast, I would rail against that notion as so many young artists do, and about how it's just an excuse to treat artists badly and dismiss their concerns. But as I've gotten older, and life seems still more difficult than it ever did before, I have a somewhat more forgiving view of that notion.

In any field at all, making something good is really, really, really hard. Whether it's effecting even the most minor social change, or getting a business off the ground, or becoming professionally good at a sport, or even raising any child but one possessing the most obedient sort of temperament, the wear and tear of creating an achievement you're proud of is colossal. How much more colossal must it be for an artist? 99.9% of us are not celebrities, and more than half of us can barely make ends meet. When you sail right against the prevailing winds - when 99% of the population will perceive you as the type of person who flaunts their disobedience of everything that's acceptable socially, aesthetically, and even ethically, you will spend the vast majority of your day feeling utterly, completely alone. You're such a misfit that even many other artists won't tolerate you - nobody is more merciless to one another than people on the margins fighting each other for the smallest piece of dignity.

And for those of us who can realize this vision more often, it's better, but at least compared to any other white collar profession, it's a pretty miserable living. For a vast swath of artists, perhaps even the majority, the state of being this type of person even is agony in the best circumstances. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, but at least if you do, the itch temporarily goes away. Some artist hear rejection every damn day of their lives, nevertheless, they persist. And furthermore, because the situation of artists is inherently so vulnerable, there are all manner of psychopaths and narcissists who, if they rise to a powerful position within the artistic community, exploit the vulnerable. And how do they rise to positions of such influence, often they rise precisely because they are psychopaths and narcissists, and therefore have the ambition and obsessive drive that propels them to the top of their fields, the charisma and social sense to charm people who can make enable their brilliant careers, and the willpower and lack of conscience to step on all those people who could be hinderances to their careers.

So why do it? The reason you do what you do is that you are responding to an inner itch so unbelievably strong that to let it remain unscratched is agony. Think of all those people in the stereotypical American family who go to seed because their minds are literally dying from a lack of outlet; intelligent, creative people who live within communities which demand they conform to expectations for which conformation is impossible for them. Nobody can figure out why they go in and out of hospitals, nobody can figure out why they abuse substances for decades - either outwardly or in secret, nobody can figure out why they commit suicide, nobody can figure out why they seem so sad, or angry, or weird.

What so many of them lack is an outlet - be it creative, intellectual, professional, or athletic. An outlet is small consolation to people whose other life-circumstances are un-conducive to letting them live a tolerably decent life, but for so many millions, a neurological outlet where a person can realize at least a vision their best self it is the difference in their lives between living, and living death.

So yes, there is no question in my mind, artists suffer for their art, and they always will. The vast plurality, and perhaps more, of the people who will engage in the sheer amount of hard work it takes to become good at an artistic craft will be people whose life circumstances are such that they require an enormous amount of respite from them. And if they weren't predisposed to feel as though their lives were terrible before they became artists, the conditions in which they have to work will make the potential for mental illness within them that much more likely to be triggered.

And furthermore, there's a still more difficult question. Why be an artist when you can be a star?

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. But if you're a movie star or TV star or a rock star, the rewards of being one almost always have very little to do with your finest achievements. No actor of our generation starred in more quality movie projects than Leonardo DiCaprio, but the reason he's a star is Titanic, where his acting was mere scenery while the real star was a sinking ship. No rock star has sold more tickets than Mick Jagger, but most fan think the Rolling Stones have not written a great song since the early 70s. So yes, being a star is not mutually exclusive from doing valuable artistic work, but those two states of being have stunningly little to do with each other. Beethoven and Brahms, however celebrated, labored day after day with only their music for company, at least modern rock stars never have to be alone if they desire company. So when people say that being in the pantheon of great rock musicians is the same as being in the pantheon of great composers, my eyes have the tendency to be rather glazed.

Even the life of the average rock musician is kind of a dream in comparison to the classical musician. Of course, you need an enormous amount of skill to do it well, but if a guitarist only plays ten chords in a cover band, they have a better chance of making a living in most cities than they would if they wanted to expose people to what a great guitarist sounds like. And sure, some of us string players can make some money playing Pachebel's canon at wedding ceremonies every weekend, but we'll be making roughly half of what the wedding band makes.

So when people in classical music, particularly older people, get very protective or touchy about creative musicians in other fields being admitted into our pantheon, believe me, I completely understand why, and think to myself that the classical musicians who see it differently have not yet sufficiently been worn down by life to stay protective of their turf, and there's little question that life in the 21st century will wear our generation down much more than it already has.

But the pantheon of classical music is so old-fashioned a conception of greatness that it had already outlived its usefulness by the time Scott Joplin began publishing his music in 1897, and it is now more than 120 years later. Western classical music, the most aristocratic and authoritarian conception of art that has still not undergone any meaningful reconstruction, is on the verge of a collapse and revolution so total that all the proud institutions which have stood for hundreds of years are threatened not only by obsolescence to contemporary life, but with the notion that the high arts actively collaborated with evil.

To make a long story short, Western Classical Music never updated itself to the Age of Liberal Democracy. When you go to an art museum, you don't just expect to be carried away by the Kings of the art world: the Picassos, the Rembrandts, the Turners, the Monet's, it's just as often the lesser names that make the biggest impression: the Joseph Stella's, the Robert Williams's, the Christobal de Villalpando's, the Vasily Vereshchagin's, the Paul Delvaux's. Anybody who goes to an art museum a couple times a year can recall stunning works by artists whose names completely escape you. You'd never heard of the artist before, you haven't heard of them since, but you remember the work itself in miraculous detail.

But in the concert hall, there is no such opportunity to hear the the lesser known pieces and names. It's the same few names with their regularity continuing apace, the concerts themselves undergoing year after year routine of a religious rite in which nobody ever learns anything new.

So inevitably, whenever a new piece of music gets premiered from composers who've kept abreast of hundreds of years of musical development that audiences have never heard, there's a shocking disconnect between what the composer hears and what the audience hears because no regular audience member has the context to understand what's being performed. Furthermore, and here we will wade into extremely uncomfortable waters, because the average classical audience is so unexposed to any music more modern sounding than Shostakovich, composers have much less idea of what more progressive techniques might successfully engage a large but intelligent public, and in that sense, the quality of the music can definitely suffer. With regard to that observation you may direct all hate-mail to etucker82@gmail.com

We live in 2019, and yet classical music is still a monarchical hierarchy. There is a thousand years of music, yet less than 50 composers from the last 250 years dominate concert programs, and we worship these names the way we would an absolute monarch. Music is not meant to be worshipped. Music is meant to be your friend, and friends can do all kinds of things which annoy you.

Let's just say that all 50 of these names are the fifty greatest composers in history, a notion whose truth I very much doubt, are they really THAT much better than every other composer? Surely there has to be a 51st greatest composer who wrote individual pieces that are just as good or perhaps even better than the 50th, and a 52nd for whom that's true too, and a 53rd and a 54th and a 555th.

We are twenty years past the 20th century's completion. By the end of the century it was thought that liberal democracy was the very end of history, that it was scientifically and statistically proven to be the best form of government. Whatever you believe about the efficacy of Fukuyama's claim, and many people certainly did a quarter-century ago, there were all sorts of places which.

We no longer live in the Age of Liberal Democracy, we probably don't even know what age we live in yet. It is definitely the Age of the Internet as much as the 20th century was the Age of Mass Media. But will it be the Age of Social Democracy? The Age of Intersectionality? The Age of Illiberal Democracy? There's no way of knowing yet - the problems of our era are so new, so complex, so fraught, that there is no way of understanding much about them yet. The only fact which is clear about our era is that things are looking as though they're falling apart, the center cannot hold, and if mere anarchy is not loosed upon the world, it is most certainly loosed upon this virtual world where you, dear audience member, either read or listen to this text.

Liberal democracy is demotic, and of course, in a democracy, it is nearly impossible to say that one conception of the world or art is inherently better than another. Perhaps that's exactly as it should be, but without the safeguards of a liberal rule of law, the circumstances of democracy can become extremely undemocratic

To new generations, classical music may well be thought the soundtrack of Western imperialism, and it might be the most attention people have paid to it in a hundred years.

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