A Brief Digression on Musical Brilliance

 We fundamentally misunderstand brilliance in the arts in four ways:

1. There is brilliant talent everywhere. Talent is as common as artificial intelligence can reproduce it, but without deep life experience, talent can only produce insipid things that only make sense during the moments when life itself feels insipid.
2. Genius is both less and more common than we think. No generation has more than a very few geniuses in every field, and you can't expect that every talent of the hundreds hailed as a genius is a genius. Nevertheless, there are geniuses in every field worthy of note. Duke Ellington was no less a genius than Dmitri Shostakovich, and both of them were quite a bit more a musical genius than Elliott Carter or Pierre Boulez.
3. Genius makes its own rules, so it does not need to be properly trained. If you can't understand the genius inherent in the work of rock groups like The Beatles or The Beach Boys - the burden of proof is now on you, not the people who hear it. But what makes us know that genius is genius is the mutability of the product - does the universality transcend cultures? Not just cultures of place, or even cultures of time. but cultures of mentality. Can the work speak to the same people in bad moments as well as good ones? Can the work of this talent not only make one feel joy but also put suffering in context?
4. It would be wonderful if every talent is equally worthy of merit, but if that is true, then why are the rewards of some talents put on such a pedestal that it's at the expense of the thousands over whose work they climb to get those rewards? The answer is that there is an inborn capacity in the human built for worship that will not go ignored. So if we're going to irrationally worship certain objects and people, we might as well rationalize which objects are worth our worship. It is better to worship artists who put us in touch with the deeper phenomena of the world than it is to worship whatever is the latest pop sensation, whose entire cultural purpose is to turn us off to things in the world that actually happen.

The 20th century was a time of musical atomization. It was full of musicians, classical as well as popular, who pandered to good moods for money's sake and made people feel anxious in those moments when their mood was not how this easygoing music was supposed to make them feel. It was also full of musicians, popular ones as well as classical, who viewed themselves as a provider for a chosen elite whom they forced to 'stand up and take your dissonant suffering like a man.'

But there is so much great music from unknown sources, and so much of that that will repay the ears who open themselves. They come from all walks of life, but what they share is the willingness to not seal themselves off from life's many walks.