Perhaps an interesting book here (I haven't added it to the now world famous
Complement.Inversion.Etc shop because it might
not be that interesting, I haven't read it, I might do at some point)
Writer/Composer David
Stubbs wonders why people 'get' Modern Art like
Mark Rothko's but don't 'get' contemporary,
avant-
garde music like
Stockhausen's and
Feldman's, listen
here on the
BBC's Today programme site, including some audio from the programme and some extracts to listen to of pieces
Stubbs recommends.
I sort of agree with
Stubbs, that contemporary music should be appreciated in the same way as modern art, however, there would be a downside, one thing that is valuable about contemporary music is its resistance to commercial appropriation (commerce being arguably, the most dominant force on the planet, for better or worse.)
I don't want to draw out some extended
Adorno like argument about how great it is to resist popular paradigms and so on but I think it's worth mentioning that having some forms of music or art which
don't appear in TV commercials or as background music in hotel bars and so on is a good thing.
It's like a musical wilderness or green belt land, somewhere you can go without seeing a
Macdonalds or a Barrett home or a billboard advert for underwear or car insurance. In this sense contemporary music is certainly not elitist as it is sometimes claimed, it's
our music, not something that can be co-opted and sold back to us as a
cliché (perhaps I have tempted fate, expect to see a new
iPod advert featuring one of
Berio's sequenzas or something)
By the way I am not suggesting
commerical music is bad or immoral by comparison (that would be silly), just that there is a place for music that is outside of mainstream discourse, we don't have to feel sorry for contemporary music or seek to change the situation.
While being at the cultural margins relative to the mainstream has its problems - e.g lack of resources, scores going out of print, lack of performances and so on - the plus side is more than a compensation arguably.
Either way, it's a win-win situation in my opinion, if contemporary music suddenly becomes the new pop, fine, if it stays in the margins, fine. I don't see any reason to complain.
Foucault said it far more elegantly some time ago (I've quoted this
before on this blog,
I'll probably do so again.)
'..Painting in those days was something to be talked about; at any rate, aesthetics, philosophy, reflection, taste - and politics, as I recall - felt they had a right to say something about the matter, and they applied themselves to it as if it were a duty: Piero della Francesca, Venice, Cezanne, or Braque. Silence protected music, however, preserving its insolence.'
Michel Foucault: 'Pierre Boulez, passing through the screen'; Aesthetics Vol 2, Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984.
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