At 12:41 PM 5/26/2007 -0400, Andrew Stiller wrote: >IMO the cultural shift has been in the opposite direction. The >fundamental antipathy among ordinary Americans toward classical music >has its origins in the country's founding. In the 18th c [...] >Prior to 1960, most Americans lived their entire lives without ever >experiencing and opera, a ballet, or a symphony. [...]
Let me explain how I perceive the cultural shift. America had home-grown composers as well as imported music, showing a dramatic change following the 19th century European invasion (which included American composers studying in Europe), after which the sweep of American symphony orchestra foundings could occur. [What might have grown from the original American composers 'stock' would never be known.] (As for your 1960 date, that seems peculiar to me as the child of a lower-class family. If you chose your word 'experiencing' to mean 'attending', I'd have to say you were correct; but the legacy of recordings and radio broadcasts says something very different.) But my 'cultural shift' is not focused on the distant history, and I believe it has no influence today. America doesn't have much of a collective cultural memory, so it wouldn't matter if the American orchestras had appeared suddenly in 1930 from the planet Zombartumian. Yes, the U.S. does have a long legacy of individuals who, whether self-made or heirs, self-educated or university, had open minds toward the arts and culture. Endowments from them built the opera houses and the libraries, and created collections that became their own museums or were given to museums. They wrote about and spoke about culture as significant. (I knew some of the last of that generation when I was the young 'token' artist on the board of the New Jersey State Museum in the mid-1970s: Barbara and Glenway Wescott, Douglas Dillon, Malcolm Forbes, Marjorie Graff, etc. They believed in cultural significance and collected and commissioned art they found compelling and challenging.) This cultural thinking grew -- and what might be called a 'cultural awareness' reached a moment of collective enthusiasm with, among thousands of other examples, the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, the consolidation of of educational broadcasting into National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System, the building of Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, and the peak of adventure and experiment in America's musical forms (jazz and minimalism) ... all within about ten years (1963-73). But the democratizing and public funding of the arts (the latter a mucked-up intrusion without the cultural experience of, say, Europe) and especially music (an intimate artform we bring into our lives in real time) also carried with it the tacit assumption that political and marketplace forces held a key to 'unlock' culture for Americans. It did and it didn't. Whether or not Pollock or Warhol or Oldenburg or Paik or Rauschenberg caught on in the general populace was irrelevant, because those artists could be given time and space to influence the generation of designers who can now create silhouette iPod ads -- without it being in the least visually confounding. Nor would we have "Studio 60" or "ER" without the products of handheld-camera experimental filmmakers a generation earlier and the vocal rhythms of Burroughs and Ginsberg. However, it also set in motion an aggressive making up for lost time among less fleet-of-foot organizations such as the major orchestras, which were being wrenched from the Toscanini-style domination (a few generations during which they did play new nonpop) into a swamp of licensing requirements and union rules and expensive buildings and recording contracts and political expediency and pseudo-participatory decision-making and accountancy management, leaving them unable to pursue artistic invention without being squashed deeply into the corner of a perpetual marketplace crisis. So while Marat-Sade was being premiered, across the fountain the New York Philharmonic was resurrecting Mahler -- and even that to controversy. Contemporary nonpop had a few minor film successes (such as Ligeti in "2001", Hermann in "Fahrenheit 451" and even Mancini in "Charade") during that ten-year flourishing of musical arts, only to be subsumed by shoot-em-ups like "Star Wars" with John Williams's retro-heist from "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex". Conservative politics and free-marketism snapped back before the path of new nonpop (which, one has to keep in mind, takes place in real time rather than in "considered time") could deeply influence the later musical 'designers' who would guide public tastes by example. Simultaneously, a rush into considerations of relevance -- understood and not -- had ruptured higher education's teacher training programs. Conservative by nature, musical education programs all but abandoned the creation of nonpop -- the creation of any music, for that matter. In twenty years, there were few to play, fewer to teach, and even fewer to listen. Attributes of cultural significance were rooted about for instead in the pop world, and a veritable industry of assigning meaning has grown from the fertilizer. At the same time, the fruits of the attempts at democratization and the accountancy of the marketplace are clearly audible on a present-day National Public Radio with its ignorant deejays playing hardly a whisper of new nonpop. These are stations whose mandate is, above all others, to meet the fundraising goals, and these are orchestras whose mandate is, above all others, to fill the seats. (Disagree? Show me a station or orchestra that has voluntarily shut down because it believed itself to be culturally [rather than economically] bankrupt, no matter how many artistic mediocritizations it capitulated to.) And there is the cultural shift -- not from the late 19th century but rather from the late 20th. Now I really have to go back to work ... my 45th composition this year is due tomorrow as part of my "We Are All Mozart" project... Dennis Please participate in my 2007 project: http://maltedmedia.com/waam/ My "We Are All Mozart" blog: http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/waam-blog.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
