Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: New music is at an impasse

New music is at an impasse—you can't convince people it exists. There
is a certain small culture around it, but it is impossible to get
power brokers outside that culture to believe that anything is going
on. The official line is, classical music is finished, a closed book,
Glass, Reich, and maybe John Zorn the end of history. And it does not
help that jazz is ever more officially referred to as "America's
classical music." First of all, what is that supposed to do for jazz?
Legitimize it, make it blandly respectable and therefore ignorable?
And it slaps those composers whose training is classical out of the
water. With the Wynton Marsalis crowd threatening to bring jazz
history to a close and turn it into a repertoire museum, jazz
musicians who believe in the ongoing evolution of the art are in the
same boat as the new-music people. We need to band together. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a certain small culture around new music, but it is
impossible to get power brokers outside that culture to believe that
anything is going on. 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are, it seems to me, two ways to interpret this impasse. One is
the Matthew Arnold/David Mamet-type theory of cultural decline,
according to which societies are born, mature, decay, and die, and in
their decaying stage nothing can go right. Classical music is dead
because the society has an internal, collectively subconscious need to
believe that it is dead, so the society can go to sleep. As Mamet
writes in his essay "Decay" in Writing in Restaurants, "In this time
of decay those things which society will reward with fame and
recognition are bad acting, bad writing, choices which inhibit
thought, reflection, and release; and these things will be called
art." No matter what great new music you produce, the society will
bypass it, and search out instead the bad music that fulfills its
mythic need to die. 
The other interpretation is perhaps more hopeful—that rather than the
collective subconscious, some human agency is imposing on us what
looks like a death wish. The corporations that own large record chains
and publishing houses can make more money off classical and jazz
repertoires whose histories are finished, whose "100 greatest hits"
can be defined and engraved in stone. New music represents a risk, a
need for creative thinking, and therefore an inconvenience. Those same
corporations stand to gain more tax breaks from Republicans than from
Democrats, and therefore find it convenient for the newspapers they
own to take Dubya's bizarre remarks at face value. I'm not talking
about an organized conspiracy, but a growing, unquestioned habit of
determining every decision by the financial bottom line. 
The difference between these interpretations may be moot—the society
wants to die, and chooses corporate thinking as its suicide weapon.
But I see a lot of composers sit and whine about their collective
impotence, and others pursue blindly optimistic marketing strategies
that never amount to anything because they're trying to buy into a
corporate mind-set built to exclude them. Both types might lead more
effective lives if they pinpointed, and took guerrilla action against,
the specific forces that keep their music out of the public ear. That
the culture is dying and we can't stop it might be exactly what the
corporations hope we'll believe.
http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0102,gann,21296,22.html

 need for creative thinking, and therefore an inconvenience.
Che pensare faccia male alla salute lo pensa qualunque società  
autoritaria. Ma se per questo leggersi il Brave new world e ci si trova  
una perfetta analisi non di una ipotetica società futura ma della nostra  
civiltà contemporanea (ed il romanzo di Huxley ha già molti anni sul  
gobbone). Il rifiuto della novità serve a mantenere intatta la struttura  
della società, ma al contempo  non dimentichiamo che la novità - o la  
parvenza di novità- è indispensabile: visto che si parla di case editrici  
che debbono fare soldi con la classica e il jazz mi si spiega come, senza  
la novità, si possa convincere il consumatore a comperare altri dischi?  
Solo inventandoci dei nuovi formati? Solo giocando con le edizioni  
filologiche? Un poco di musica nuova bisogna pure trovarlo. Purtroppo però  
quanto è nuovo mi richiede - poco o tanto che sia - un impegno, una  
fatica, la difficoltà di capire ed assimilare quanto di inusuale c'è lì  
dentro. Il problema non è quindi - a mio avviso - nel creatore ma in chi  
dovrebbe ascoltare la musica (e che poi - con il tempo - decreterà la  
sopravvivenza o meno di una espressione artistica).
-- 
Giuseppe Sottotetti
gso...@malice.it
Per risposte private levare la "m" da malice

 autoritaria. Ma se per questo leggersi il Brave new world e ci si trova
Tra l'altro lo sto rieditando per renderlo disponibile
in rete (visto che i diritti d'autore sono scaduti, ma le
versioni scandite attualmente disponibili sono delle
vere insalate miste di errori di ocr).
growl
 A.