"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[Mal]

For me, modernism is full of utopian potentialities that seek to transcend and revolt against the commodification of art.

For me, it's unnecessarily obscure.

I wouldn't call it elitist... in the same way that acknowledging the expertise of one's medical doctor is not elitist...

Your doctor is part of a medical elite, but medicine is something that all sane people will take. Modernists are part of an intellectual elite, but their works are avoided by most people. Why is this? I think it's because these works are obscure. And there is no obviously good reason why they should be obscure.

[Bryn]

How has this thread deviated in to a discussion of "modernism"? Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is not remotely modernist. As to its use of Latin, what about the long history of liturgical works using this some ancient tongue, and Oedipus Rex has the benefit of a narrator who uses the vernacular tongue.

[Richard Barrett]

Modernists are part of an intellectual elite, but their works are avoided by most people. Why is this? I think it's because these works are obscure. And there is no obviously good reason why they should be obscure.

Generalisations as sweeping and superficial as this do the credibility of your position no favours at all. Who are these "modernists"? Are they all really so "intellectual" (whatever that actually means...) Who decides whether something is "obscure" or not and according to which criteria? To name an obvious example, J S Bach's work was pretty "obscure", known principally to insiders, during his lifetime and for many decades after his death. Do you think popularity is or should be a measure of quality in an artwork? If so, pretty much all the music discussed on this forum is "obscure".

[teamsaint]

Most things are avoided by most people. That’s just a numbers game. Most people dont watch even the biggest football match.

But on the other hand Tate Modern is absolutely full of visitors much of the time.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

How has this thread deviated in to a discussion of "modernism"? Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is not remotely modernist.

That is a very good point - indeed, it brings attention to the point that (like Picasso's) Stravinsky's Modernist works are generally more "popular" than his Neo-Classical works.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... Tate Modern is absolutely full of visitors much of the time.

Yes, Modernist (and Neo-Modernist) visual Art does attract huge audiences. I can't think of anything more "obscure" than a Jackson Pollock painting - and yet they are "popular". Viewers of visual Art are less perturbed by the idea of a single, definite "meaning" to a work of Art than some "Classical" Music enthusiasts.

[Richard Barrett]

Yes, Modernist (and Neo-Modernist) visual Art does attract huge audiences. I can't think of anything more "obscure" than a Jackson Pollock painting - and yet they are "popular". Viewers of visual Art are less perturbed by the idea of a single, definite "meaning" to a work of Art than some "Classical" Music enthusiasts.

Unique works of visual art are "worth" large amounts of money - I think this gives them a cachet that infinitely reproducible works of literature or music can't have (for which I for one am grateful!).

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Unique works of visual art are "worth" large amounts of money - I think this gives them a cachet that infinitely reproducible works of literature or music can't have (for which I for one am grateful!).

There is that aspect, of course - but the sheer enthusiasm I noticed at the Matisse Cut-Outs exhibition at Tate Modern four years ago suggest that that this isn't the only consideration. Seeing so many people of different ages and ethnic/cultural/social backgrounds made me wonder why an "equivalent" Musical event (say, a series of concerts devoted to Stravinsky's last decade of works) would probably not attract such a huge audience. I think that the individual's "control" of their experience of the works plays a significant part: people can spend five seconds or five hours looking at a single work - they can move on to another work, and return to those they've already seen - they can view a work from different perspectives and different proximities - and view details in any order that they choose. They can (finances and travel permitting) return day after day for as long as the Exhibition is on - they have greater say in when they go to look at something. (And, in many cases, they don't have to pay to get in to see works.)

Similar control is possible with works of Literature.

But with Music, audiences are often dependent on a single performance - which they have to adapt their social lives to accommodate. Events flash by - it's not possible to get the performers to go over a particular passage again. And, if there's no recording available, that one experience is all there is - and one hopes that it was a performance that fully accommodated the work's expressive content. It's a vicarious experience, dependant for most listeners on the intermediary performer - a bad performance creates the idea that it's a bad work; there isn't the same immediacy between Artwork and listener that there is between Artwork and viewer/reader.

And then there are the various "conventions" of Concert-going that many find excludes them - and the price of tickets - and the time of day. As the "Free Mondays" at Huddersfield show, there is a greater interest in unfamiliar Musics among the wider audiences, even in "Modernist", "Post-Modernist", and "Neo-Modernist" Musics.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes, Modernist (and Neo-Modernist) visual Art does attract huge audiences. I can't think of anything more "obscure" than a Jackson Pollock painting - and yet they are "popular". Viewers of visual Art are less perturbed by the idea of a single, definite "meaning" to a work of Art than some "Classical" Music enthusiasts.

My dear mother (RIP) had a delightful answer to the question why "modern music" was more unpopular than other forms of modern art: "We all have eyelids, but none of us has earlids"! Most, or perhaps most of us would admit to cut-off points where our willingness to transcend our comfort zones listening-wise reaches a limit; which is why the presence on this forum of people who are more open-eared or open-minded than myself is so healthy a challenge to my prejudices. Often their reference points are broader than mine, enabling them to start out from different perspectives, relative to genre, and appreciate accordingly. We all do this to an extent - I listen to Beethoven in a completely different way from how I do to, say, Messiaen - likewise different periods of jazz, but I guess we can all learn something from this. And I'm not so sure as to whether or not there are hard and fast lines separating the avant-garde from the less so.

[Serial_Apologist]

Unique works of visual art are "worth" large amounts of money - I think this gives them a cachet that infinitely reproducible works of literature or music can't have (for which I for one am grateful!).

Walter Benjamin had a lot of wise things to say about that!

[Serial_Apologist]

There is that aspect, of course - but the sheer enthusiasm I noticed at the Matisse Cut-Outs exhibition at Tate Modern four years ago suggest that that this isn't the only consideration. Seeing so many people of different ages and ethnic/cultural/social backgrounds made me wonder why an "equivalent" Musical event (say, a series of concerts devoted to Stravinsky's last decade of works) would probably not attract such a huge audience. I think that the individual's "control" of their experience of the works plays a significant part: people can spend five seconds or five hours looking at a single work - they can move on to another work, and return to those they've already seen - they can view a work from different perspectives and different proximities - and view details in any order that they choose. They can (finances and travel permitting) return day after day for as long as the Exhibition is on - they have greater say in when they go to look at something. (And, in many cases, they don't have to pay to get in to see works.)

Similar control is possible with works of Literature.

But with Music, audiences are often dependent on a single performance - which they have to adapt their social lives to accommodate. Events flash by - it's not possible to get the performers to go over a particular passage again. And, if there's no recording available, that one experience is all there is - and one hopes that it was a performance that fully accommodated the work's expressive content. It's a vicarious experience, dependant for most listeners on the intermediary performer - a bad performance creates the idea that it's a bad work; there isn't the same immediacy between Artwork and listener that there is between Artwork and viewer/reader.

And then there are the various "conventions" of Concert-going that many find excludes them - and the price of tickets - and the time of day. As the "Free Mondays" at Huddersfield show, there is a greater interest in unfamiliar Musics among the wider audiences, even in "Modernist", "Post-Modernist", and "Neo-Modernist" Musics.

There's a lot of truth in that!

[Richard Barrett]

with Music, audiences are often dependent on a single performance - which they have to adapt their social lives to accommodate. Events flash by - it's not possible to get the performers to go over a particular passage again. And, if there's no recording available, that one experience is all there is - and one hopes that it was a performance that fully accommodated the work's expressive content. It's a vicarious experience, dependant for most listeners on the intermediary performer - a bad performance creates the idea that it's a bad work; there isn't the same immediacy between Artwork and listener that there is between Artwork and viewer/reader.

Yes, it's the investment of time that's often the problem, even with recorded music - while you can get some idea of the overall structure and nature of a painting within a few seconds, which isn't likely to be the case with even a relatively brief piece of music.

[Conchis]

Most things are avoided by most people. That’s just a numbers game. Most people dont watch even the biggest football match.

But on the other hand Tate Modern is absolutely full of visitors much of the time.

The preponderance of male visitors may be attributed to the fact that it's 'the best cruising ground in western Europe' - at lesat it is according to a friend of mine, who regularly uses it for that very purpose! :)

[Mal]

How has this thread deviated in to a discussion of "modernism"? Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex is not remotely modernist. As to its use of Latin, what about the long history of liturgical works using this some ancient tongue, and Oedipus Rex has the benefit of a narrator who uses the vernacular tongue.

The mass was in Latin, hence the long history of liturgical works using Latin. Oedipus Rex feels modernist to me, here's some support from the academy for my feeling:

"Nietzsche conceived the music of the abyss along Wagnerian lines: beneath the mind’s categories of time
and space, beneath all the precisions and divisions that articulate our vision of reality, there lies a delirium, a
vertigo, a void, a plenum. The prelude to Tristan, with its long reeling from one key to another, seemed a
good musical image for this state. Stravinsky, however, had no interest whatsoever in smears and blurs; on the
other hand the notion of music as a kind of torture device, a machine for pounding, crushing, dismembering,
interested him a good deal. Stravinsky’s way of attacking the concept of the human subject – and Nietzsche’s
early philosophy is one long attack on the human subject – is entirely of the twentieth century: through motordriven
devices, mechanical warfare, ... "

"Sophocles has Jocasta hang herself; but Stravinsky, a more flagrant sort of mass murderer, kills off the language, the
music, even the concept of drama itself. "

"Why Latin? Sophocles wrote in Greek, and Stravinsky didn’t imagine that performances of his work should be confined to the Vatican. Stravinsky gave several
reasons for this peculiar choice: ... The notion of detaching language from normal speech, perhaps from any sort of speech ... intrigued him. Stravinsky also said that the
music was composed during his “strictest and most earnest period of Christian orthodoxy,”...

"Another reason for Stravinsky’s choice of Latin was that he wanted a text that could be heard purely as phonetic, that is, musical, material;... writing in a language that few listeners could understand, he minimized the troublesome and distracting semantic elements of language: as he put it, “When I work with words in music, my musical saliva is set in motion by the sounds and rhythms of the words” (Dialogues, 22). For all that, sometimes the Latin text is extremely effective on a semantic level..." [Aaagh!! So do we translate the Latin or not?]

"one doesn’t usually think of Stravinsky as a Dadaist. But Dada is as good as any way of imaging the abyss; and
Stravinsky’s way of dealing with Dionysus is to negate his material via Dada procedures. Devices, little tricks
of music drama from Gluck, Verdi, Handel, everyone you can think of, are picked up with tweezers and glued
together."

" Stravinsky is using the stuff of high music drama, but in a way that reminds us that this stuff is splendid but passé; Oedipus Rex is a kind of tombstone over the whole genre
of opera. "

"If Oedipus Rex is dead music ornamenting a dead language, it follows that it might well wish to kill off the
notion of drama as well. The dramaturgy is quite peculiar, as Stravinsky explains: No one ‘acts,’ "

"The notion of a stage fractured into a number of private mini-stages, each inhabited by one character, suggests
just how far Stravinsky was willing to go toward a Cubist tessellation of the concept of drama: he happily
dismembered the stage, just as his music sometimes seems to tear the characters limb from limb."

"Oedipus Rex was intended as a birthday gift for Diaghilev, but the great impresario didn’t much like it,
and it had trouble finding its way into the twentieth-century canon. Those who hated Stravinsky – and
incomparably the most talented hater of Stravinsky was Theodor Adorno – found in his works of the late
1920s fresh ammunition to be used against him. In the course of his astonishing book Philosophy of Modern
Music, ... Adorno calls Stravinsky an acrobat, a civil servant, a tailor’s dummy, hebephrenic, psychotic, infantile,
fascistic, and devoted to making money."

"The Venus de Milo is exciting because she has lost her arms: we are all caught up in force fields that extinguish, snap off, stub out,
rub away, and Surrealist art sets itself the challenge of exhibiting these force fields. Surrealism ... is
simply entropy in visual plastic. It follows that Oedipus Rex, like The Waste Land, offers us pre-decayed
materials, flitters and rubble – for the only way to be truthful to the past is to recognize its lack of integrity."

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3356137/albright_oedipus.pdf

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The problem with your comment that "Oedipus Rex feels Modernist to me", Mal, is that you've previously described Britten's Winter Words as "the highest of high modernism", and so suggest that your use of the word "Modernism", rather than coinciding with how that word is usually understood, is simply a shorthand for "Music/Art I don't like". The quotations you cite don't refer to Modernism, either, and only "support your feeling" in the sense that they are from (or about) people who don't like the work, either.