I've just finished watching The Science of Sleep. It was a fitting, strange movie for a fitting, strange couple of days. A series of events partook in these particular days and I'm not sure if the movie is feeding into this concept, my lack of sleep, or that it is truly 12:46 in the morning.
I'll start with my frantic evening last night...open Mic night that is, at the Commonplace Coffeehouse. I am the Mistress of Ceremonies. Sounds formal and I would like to say I am awful at the task, or should I say new and un-confident. Either way, I sat in the shop nervously writing down some thoughts in order to escape the events that were about to take place. Few performers were showing up, and i didn't truly want to be there, so I shortly escaped with my tiny moleskin of a journal. It was good.
This was our second open Mic, and in all honesty it turned out pretty swell. We had an upright basses play, which was pretty much amazing. And the conversations the rest of the evening were provoking, quite insightful and educational. Now...after this, I would like to blame it on the caffeine, I went to bed and never slept. I was wide awake and full in thought after thought about what to do next. Is open Mic helpful? Does it foster community? Why is music and coffee so good together? Is it? What is missing?
I believe, when it comes to art, that we have lost a lot of creativity. Everyone is an artist, everyone is a poet...we have made everyone confident and left out no one. This can be good. However, where do we raise the bar and call people to be creative and go beyond choice words or simple phrases that can stir a crowd for a second but then cause normality to settle in once the next artists arises. Where do we cause people to think anymore and cause them to ponder the very words that drip out of our mouths and our hands. As I wrote before open Mic I said something to the effect of; art has become colorless and literature has become empty pages upon pages....
We have become so narcissistic that everyone is right and entitled to their words and thoughts and actions. We have the freedom of speech, but not the freedom to oppress. What does this mean? How do we call people to persuade their audience and swoon them, instead of offend them and call them close minded. Someone told me that we have overcompensated for pushing people to have self-esteem and in reaction have caused a lot of individually minded people who are all right. Interesting.
I was going to talk about my strange dreams last night, yet I fear they have escaped me at the moment, but I know they were obsured and realistic all at the same time. I was also going to talk about my car getting towed and so on and so on.... but alas open Mic and the Mistress of Ceremonies is finished here.
7 comments:
There's a book by a composer, I believe it's out of print, so my point may likely be moot. The book is call Muse and Fashion, it's by a Russian composer named Nikolai Medtner. Medtner lived around the turn of the last century, dying some time before 1950. He lived during a lot of different trends in music art and lit.
I have not read the book, but, the gist; Medtner holds to the classical models of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the like; composers who were innovative and whos works have lasted for hundreds of years...he dismisses the trends he was living through in music, that of throwing out the old ideas of aesthetic in favor of experimentation. Short end of it Medtner felt that throwing out the time-tested models was a cop out and an opening to the platform of untallented people to "express" themselves as artists.
In a similar vein is an article by a scyholar named Edward T. Cone, who is the musicology professor at Harvard. The name of the article is "101 Metranomes" and takes it's name froma work of the same name by the composer Ligeti. This work is performed by collecting 101 of the old school wind-up, pendulum metranomes, setting the BPM at random and letting them run until the last one has stopped. Very post-modern, bla bla bla. In the article Cone discusses a student who came to him asking for help in getting the school to sponsor a performance of the work. Cone proposes the question "why"...what insues are Cone's thoughts, drawing from history, on the value of art produced.
His basic conclusion is that art of any form, music, poetry, painting, what have you, is like anying else produced; its value is determined by how effectively it serves its purpose. A candle stick maker who makes a candle stick that holds no candle, has not produced a candle stick holder--is one of the examples.
The are examples of post-modernist ideals in music, ad nosium, including the one above.
Charles Rosen, former professor of music and social thought at Cornell Univ. has writen some wonderful books on music and lit. in context and the establishment of an aesthetic. His ideas are too great to condence here.
My basic thought is thus: I am a musician, I have made a life study of music, I understand it to a degree that 90% of people who claim to be "musicians" do not (the open mic-ers were great, but I put money on understanding the craft of music better than any of them). As a dedicated, EDUCATED musician I find it insulting for people who know nothing of the craft of music to call themselves musicians simply becuase they can strum a few chords on a guitar or carry a tune.
No on who can argue well can call themselves a lawyer unless they fulfill a heafty criteria. A doctor isn't someone who's pulled a few spliters out of a finger or two. We have very concrete meanings of many things, carpenters, plumbers, doctors, lawyers, etc...why should musician, poet, painter be any different? Becuase we're dealing with thoughts? Does someone who reads a book by Socrates worthy to call themselves a philosopher without some in-depth education in the field?
Second year law students don't call themselves lawyers, they say "I'm studying law"...I would love for every Tom, Dick and Harry who plays a guiter to stop saying their a musician and start saying "I play guitar."
There is a difference between Kasparov and your grandpa who always beat you at chess...there's a difference between Beethoven and some dude who plays a couple of chords on the guitar, or piano, or anything...
The results can be judged.
p.s. 3 hours of sleep, please excuse type-o's and grammar slips.
Lawyers/Doctors make for a poor analogy. The titles are connected to official certifications which ensure a degree of quality to clients unable to judge the practitioners--something that isn't the case with musicians. A Juilliard degree will not say so much as 30 seconds of performance--even to most untrained ears.
Beethoven, et al, absorbed enough from folk _musicians_ that they probably wouldn't deny the title to them, anyway.
The official titles given to certain professions is exactly my point. There has always been, within western music, a seperation between the popular music (folk music) and art music.
You really don't want to get into a debate about the history of music, unless you're going to use the ever trust-worthy wikipedia as a source...honestly.
A few things to ponder here.
Who were some AMAZING artists, that never had an education in music? Who are some lawyers who have a degree and are not true "lawyers". If you know what I mean?
Times have definitely changed. And I do agree that some people should not call themselves musicians but rather say they play music. Art is a touchy subject because it is very flexible and versatile. Yet being a doctor or a lawyer has definite margins. A doctor can not say "well I felt like the lung needed to be sown this way because it embodies the very core of who I am."
As an artists can truly create/shape and experiment with different styles. Though these margins tend to be gray, and in that we get both types of artists, ones that create beauty and thought and others that create an empty space. I'm not critiquing any certain artists or any fashion. I just believe that something has blurred the lines a bit more.
In other words I think both of you are fostering truth. James: YES I agree that not everyone who plays an instrument is a musician. I dabble with the harmonica, BY NO means am I a musician. I think the standard of classical music and the great composers had something greater. Sadly we have lost a lot of this, if not all.
Josh (whoever you are?) I agree that lawyers and doctors are not creators as much as inventors within parameters set up (like life and death).
So now I'm at a loss for words. Go ahead and shoot me down or respond appropriately.
That's exactly the point! Artists (of each vein) create within parameters. A sculptor works in 3 dimensions with objects, a poet expresses using language, a musician through the organization of sound. These are parameters. How concrete we make these margins has changed.
When composers study to be composers they are required to compose works "in the style of", mimicing the compositional techniques of those that have come before them, so, by the time a composition student gets his masters or PhD, he has earned any right he might take in expiramenting with the margins. They have mastered their craft, much like an apprentice with a leather worker, or a glass blower...
Great composers who never studied music? Can't name one. In the 29th century there were a great deal of mathemeticians that got into composition (Boulez, Stockhausen, Brown, et al), but each of them made a study of music after their establishment in another field. It was like this prior to the 20th century as well, Tchaikovksy was a law clerk, I could name several others who had initially stuied other fields and were professionally established within those fields who later turned to music...Ives was an insurance sales man...
Lawyers...couldn't really tell you.
The problem I see with a lot of art is that there has been no pressure to master a craft. Painters used to study with a great painter for a long time before they became well established on their own...now, technique is all but absent.
Even with expiramentation, you are stuck to a certain number of limiting factors, and the truely sucessful expiramentors have earner the right to do so, by showing their master of the craft before diverging.
As sort of a final thought...
A friend of mine visited this past weekend and we got to talking about artistic expression; specifically, we were discussing litereture. We talk about the differences between art for entertainment and art as expression.
My feeling is that art, whatever the specific discipline, is to enrich the human spirit. Music is perhaps the most profound vehicle for expressing the inexpressable, in the words of Leonard Bernstein: "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." Music speaks directly to human emotion, while litereture speaks to the left side of the brain and attempts to conjeure images, what can be felt by the read is limited to the metaphore of the writer. Art (painting, sculpture) expresses entirely different things, it is not meant to remind us, or evoke images--the images are given to us. At any rate...not my point...
Back on topic...
I think that what detirmines a great work of art (music, litereture, painting) is what the human spirit of each individual member of the audiance takes away. If I go to a musical performance and my spirit takes nothing away that is new, nothing that sheds light on some corner of my psyche, or on my understanding of the human condition, it has failed to achieve the eternity that, say, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis has. If I read a book and it enlightens me to nothing of the struggle of humanity, if it does not help me understand my fellow man, and love him more, it has failed to achieve eternity. If a painting does not open my eyes to beauty in its naked form, I'll forget the work by the time I walk away from it. Images of great works of art are burned into my eyes.
Great music is not for entertainment, great litereture is not for entertainment, nor painting/sculpting. Nobel expression of what it is to be human.
This is also part of what makes a great performer. Mahler said "the score gives you everything you need to know about music, except for the essential." That essential is the meaning of the work. If I sit and play a piece by any composer and I cannot find the aspect of humanity the composer is trying to evoke, I have failed as a performer. This need not always be tears, in Haydn it may be laughter, in Chopin it may be isolation, in Beethoven it may be triumph, in Schumann, pathos...but it has to express something.
Paul Badura-Skoda said "If music is expressive at all, it must express something. You can't just express music."
This value on art can be different from person to person, but, for art to truely be eternal, the artist music avoid fashion and vouge as mear attention getters and seek to express that which is eternal, the human spirit, whatever shape it takes.
Novalis says that art is order contrasted against the chaos of life; to that end, life nor art imitate one another becuase they are entirely different creatures, it is that which makes life impactual on a person that sets chaos in relief against art.
I understand this point and yet I want to then say in disappointment, art is neither achievable nor does it have the capability to be held to a standard.
Each person's concept of a standard (a bar to hurdle over) becomes their own "soul-seeking longing."
Art and beauty to me is totally, i believe, different that your concepts of beauty and art, james. This is what makes art great, and back to my original post... how do we call people to be more imaginative and creative with their words. To get a point across without the narcissistic garbage of "you may take offense to this" and once people do it's their own fault b/c the artist warned them therefore they must be a close-minded so and so.
How do we call individuals to pull others in and provoke thought and not just profanity for the sake of profanity. Cause people to think...call them to action, not just a fist of fighting for two minutes while the singer is singing or the poet is poeterising (made that word up, yes i did).
Think about it.
Post a Comment