Re: [LAU] Paul Hindemith says hello

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:47 AM, frank pirrone<frankpirrone@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> Dave Phillips wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Something to start the week. While reading from PH's A Composer's World
>> this morning I discovered this passage:
>>
>> "If there is anything remaining in this world that is on the one side
>> basically aristocratic and individualistic and on the other side as
>> brutal as the fights of wild animals, it is artistic creation. It is
>> aristocratic, because it is the privilege of a very restricted number of
>> people. If it could be democratized, it would lose its quality as an
>> art, become reduced to a craft, and end as an industry. In many branches
>> of our musical life we already have reached this lowest, industrial
>> phase, as we let musical democracy have its unbridled way."
>>
>> Prophetic or just dyspeptic ? Comments welcome...
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> dp
>>
> Thanks for posting this provocative piece, Dave.
>
> This response follows the many you've already received, so I'd just like
> to add that Hindemith appears to be drawing a distinction between the
> rare achievement of art and the common achievement of craft.  His
> prophetic caution is that society will lose if it conflates the two, and
> what once was art will become just another industrial product.
>
> Perhaps, more provocative is his assertion of the brutal aspect of
> artistic creation.  True art is not only difficult to achieve even for
> those supremely qualified, where they'll savagely discard most of what
> they create as unworthy, but also in regards a discriminating society
> savagely rejecting much of what artists actually present as unworthy,
> both in its own time but even moreso across generations.
>
> So, make musical "art" if you can, and your audience and history will
> provide judgment, but if you're not quite up to that, by all means make
> musical "craft," as the very act of making music in any form and at any
> level is its own reward.
>
> Frank

With mechanical reproduction, there is no longer a need for a
competent musician. Imagine the era before recording, when only a few
thousand people would have ever heard Bach as played by Glenn Gould,
when if someone wanted some dance music for a party, they would have
to hire some musicians who could play music you could dance to. The
skill and the drive are still out there, but nobody really has much
use for it any more, because we can all settle for recordings of the
best of the best.

Music as craft has always been around, there was that guy who played
the tuba for the polka band down at the beer hall, the street corner
accordion player, the strolling violinist at the restaurant, the big
change of this era is not the proliferation of music as craft, but its
displacement in the face of recording technologies, all the Italian
restaurants can pipe in some opera with some of the best conductors
and performers of all time through their speakers, all the bars have
jukeboxes where everyone's favorite performance by their favorite
musical ensemble is available for a nominal fee.

There has been formulaic commercial crap well before our time as well,
tin pan alley anyone? Most of it is thankfully forgotten by the wise
ears of history.
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Received on Tue Jun 23 00:15:02 2009