The death of western art music has been greatly exaggerated

[Old Grumpy]

'Fraid my reaction to the first few lines of the article was "can't be bothered with this"*, so I have nothing to add, one way or the other.

Quite enjoying the ding-dong though [* What I've read hasn't changed my original thought!]

OG

[gradus]

Ditto.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Quite enjoying the ding-dong though

Ah - that'll be the tinntinnabulation. (A method of composing invented by Hergé.)

[jean]

There you go, sneering at Part!

[Richard Barrett]

Now you people have forced me to read it. That's some minutes of my life I'm never going to get back.

The association of Schoenberg with euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian and with totalitarianism in the second sentence already confirms one's suspicion from the words "American Foreign Policy Council" under the author's name that here is someone with an axe to grind and an aversion to letting facts get in the way.

"Music went out of the realm of Nature and into abstract, ideological systems." This kind of thing is a central dogma to FSI contributors. On the other hand they never say what this "realm of Nature" is except that it has something to do with 19th century tonality, itself a highly developed and artificial phenomenon (coeval with the colonialist's certainty that his "civilisation" was superior to all others both geographically and historically). Anyway, the choice is not and has never been between 12-tone music and holy minimalism. In making the situation so black-and-white the author betrays his ignorance at the same time as reducing everything to simplistic good/evil oppositions which are the stock-in-trade of the kind of propaganda machine he seems to have spent his professional life working in.

"By the 1950s Schoenberg’s doctrines were so entrenched in the academy, the concert hall, and the awards system, that any composer who chose to write tonal music was consigned to oblivion by the musical establishment." Presumably that would exclude Britten, Tippett and Vaughan Williams to name only British composers.

The anti-Semitic "dog-whistle" that sounds through the paragraphs on Moses und Aron is disgusting - "the silence into which Schoenberg fell before the end of Moses und Aron has now been filled. And the music filling it is written by Christian composers who have found the answer to the question that so tortured him." This idea that there are truths to which Jews because of some inbuilt deficiency don't have access is the stuff of... well, I don't need to go on.

The material on Górecki, Pärt and Tavener is fan journalism, the like of which is to be found everywhere on the internet. What is different here is, as Kea has pointed out, that these composers are upheld as a paragon of the kind of "purity" (another dog-whistle word) which is the salvation of music from the "rubble of modernity". Behind the appeals to spirituality lurks a nasty reactionary politics which attempts clumsily to deny the diversity that's the most rich and optimism-inducing aspect of today's music (and not only this).

[french frank]

Now you people have forced me to read it.

Objection, my lord. But apart from that, yes.

[P. G. Tipps]

I might be a strong advocate for some musics

BUT I'm not suggesting that somehow my own interests are somehow morally superior or founded on more significant history.
You can like what you want (though I do draw the line at a certain English composers choral music one has to make a stand for some things ) these people (and don't forget that one of them is responsible for this http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/...8_25e9a8fc.jpg) like to dress themselves up, but it's clear to see that it's bullshit.

Taking oneself too seriously is unwise methinks

Mr Robert Reilly is not forcing others to think like he does anymore than Mr Richard Barrett, he is merely expressing his own personal opinion in an article. Mr GG.

I am all for people enjoying the music they prefer, even Brahms. I am also all for people to be able to express an opinion (however bizarre to others) without a following torrent of ad hominem abuse.

As Evelyn Beatrice Hall (and not Voltaire apparently) once famously put it .. 'I disapprove of what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it!'.

If defending this essential ethic of free speech/writing is now to be simply derided as 'posturing' by some on this forum then God (or Marx) help us all!

[edashtav]

The critic's role

Getting back to Arnold Schoenberg.

Early in 1914, the poet and critic, Gerald Cumberland, attended the dinner and concert given to honour the composer when he came to London to conduct his 5 Orchestral Pieces, a work performed by Henry Wood the previous year and received by the audience with hisses. The recital on the night of the gala dinner (delayed because AS was over an hour late) contained the 1899 sextet version of Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, and two sets of songs from the same period. Cumberland filed a detailed review of the event that was published in the Manchester Courier on the 17th January. The piece ended with this paragraph that's pertinent to aspects of this thread:

"I have before me as I write a copy of his [AS] Klavierstuck, Op.11 No.2. It has been in my possession more than a year, and I suppose that scarcely a week has gone by without my playing it. Yet I do not understand it in the least. To me it is without meaning, or so far as I can discover, it has neither form nor emotional continuity. I used to doubt this music, but now having heard so much of his earlier work, I doubt myself. And that, I submit, is what the critic should always do when he finds himself unable to appreciate or understand the creative artist. The man who creates is always right, right in proportion to the measure of his faculties; whilst the critic (and everybody who studies art is a critic) is not even right to that extent. For the former puts life into things and the latter frequently attempts to sow death."

[MrGongGong]

Mr Robert Reilly is not forcing others to think like he does any more than Mr Richard Barrett, he is merely expressing his own personal opinion in an article. Mr GG.

I am all for people enjoying the music they prefer, even Brahms. I am also all for people to be able to express an opinion (however bizarre to others) without a following torrent of ad hominem abuse.

As Evelyn Beatrice Hall (and not Voltaire apparently) once famously put it .. 'I disapprove of what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it!'.

If defending this essential ethic of free speech/writing is now to be simply derided as 'posturing' by some on this forum then God (or Marx) help us all!

Nonsense I'm afraid
The whole reason for the "organisation" to exist is to point out where we have all gone "wrong"

the Institute focuses on providing visionary leadership and contributions to strategic thinking, scholarly research, policy formation, and public dialogue.

And so on .... at interminable length

As far as I'm aware Richard isn't trying to "lead" anyone though some of us might regard his music as "visionary"? at any rate it's got more integrity than the sham buildings promoted by some of Scrote's chums in this "institute".

They can say what they want and no-one is trying to stop them rambling on and on.
And some of us can carry on pointing out their pompousness and misunderstandings

[french frank]

And some of us can carry on pointing out their pompousness and misunderstandings

Or ignore them. It seems that people have a predisposition either to reject what they're saying or take it seriously because they find it chimes in with opinions which they already hold: it all goes with a great deal of other accumulated experience and opinion.

What I think is that denouncing it as rubbish won't change the minds of those predisposed to take it all seriously (and I would add 'think critically about it for themselves' - but that just indicates my own intellectual 'baggage').

[Neil]

In his book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (1st edition), after mentioning 'the hieratic role of music', Reilly goes on to say, in the introduction, in the section Is Music Sacred?: "At the same time God disappears, so does the intelligible order in creation. A world without God is literally unnatural. If there is no God, there is no Nature, that is, the normal and ideal character of reality. Stripped of its normative power, reality no longer serves as a reflection of its Creator. if you lose the Logos of St. Clement, you also lose the ratio (or, logos) of Pythagoras."
Oh dear! Let's hope there is a God, otherwise we'll be losing Nature. I wouldn't like that.

Medieval nonsense - this man is a religious fanatic and this is garbage.

The introduction ends with: "Cicero spoke of music as enabling us to "return" to the divine region, implying a place once lost to man. Contemporary British composer John Tavener agrees: "My goal is to recover one simple memory from which all art derives. The constant memory of the paradise from which we have fallen leads to the paradise which was promised to the repentant thief." Tavener, Adams, Rochberg, Albert, and many composers like them have restored music to its role of recollecting paradise and bringing us ever closer to the New Song that shall resound throughout eternity. if you listen closely, you can hear strains of it now."
More garbage - but keep listening for it if you want to, and good luck!

In the Contents he has a huge list of 20th century composers whom he is going to discuss in this huge 610 page book. The famous Walter Braunfels, Jennifer Higdon, Peter Schickele, Libby Larsen and Stephen Albert are all there - and why would they not be? But not a mention of poor old atheist Bartok or Messiaen, and the latter such a religious, devoted soul and such a brilliant composer. Funny, eh?

And his book has a website: https://surprisedbybeautyorg.wordpress.com/ in which Sir Roger Scruton says lovely things about the book including: "The result is an indispensable guide to the forbidden land of REAL contemporary music." (My capitals.)
See full review here http://www.theimaginativeconservativ...r-scruton.html Personally, I wouldn't dream of reading it.

As far as I'm concerned the whole thing is an utter, utter, utter waste of time written by a man who knows a great deal less about music (and maybe much else) than he thinks he does. The Ignatius Press would have been better to produce toilet paper. At least it has some value.

[french frank]

The Ignatius Press would have been better to produce toilet paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Press

[jean]

It seems to me that the danger of pieces like this is that they try to enforce a binary view of musical history which puts serialism together with secularism and opposes that combination with tonality/minimalism/spirituality - especially an avowedly Christian spirituality. And it insists that you opt for the latter.

And then, if you shout 'Rubbish!', it can seem that you're simply championing the other side - and this, as kea said earlier, does no favours to Tavener, Gorecki or Pärt.

I knew about minimalism, found it boring, and avoided it; I somehow missed the 'holy minimalism' subset, which seems to be the only sort that counts.

Reilly has a lot to say about homosexuallity, too - again, in binary terms, involking 'natural law':

“But what if you organize your life around something that is wrong? This is exactly the case with active homosexuals, now extended to homosexual marriage, where they have to say that wrong is right and not only is it right but it’s normative, morally normative ... Now when you take the goods and the obligations proper to that state of marriage and transfer them to two men or two women, that is an act of injustice.”

[P. G. Tipps]

Considering the article is 'nonsense', 'drivel','horse****', 'an utter, utter, utter waste of time', 'garbage', 'more garbage', the writer 'a religious fanatic', and worse than 'toilet-paper', it has certainly somehow managed to create a bit of a stir among members hasn't it? ...

[ahinton]

The above extreme attitudes demonstrate the case for the defence of this challenging if otherwise speculative and simplistic article.

Speculative and simplistic, as FF also agrees but what's "defensible" about it and, perhaps more importantly, what does it "challenge" and how? Moreover, I question how "Christian" it is of the writer to pour his own particular brand of patronising abuse on Schönberg and then compound it by making unworthy and dishonourable observations about the composer's vacillating attitudes to Judaism and his part therein; somehow I doubt that Christ would have been impressed by such conduct (the author's, I mean - not Schönberg's!).

All composers need to have a belief or set of beliefs but they do not need to be and have by no means always been "religious" ones. The writer, on the other hand, seem mainly to hold (and seek to promote) his belief that all real music is overtly tonal because it somehow conforms to certain unspecified natural laws but that, having "lost our way" during the early 20th century, we've only rediscovered the true path to salvation more recently thanks to such Christian figures as Górecki, Pärt and Tavener who have led us back to the Promised Land. As a composer of tonal music and a non-Christian (though by no means an anti-Christian) I suppose that, according to the author, I score only one out of two and so may as well have scored nil for all the good that my work can do (and, even then, I imagine that he'd disapprove of my particular kind of tonal music anyway).

You mention some members as reacting to this piece by "ranting and raving"; speaking for myself, I do no such thing but that doesn't mean that I cannot and/or should not question its very principles (insofar as it has any) and premises.