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Art and Culture, Art and Technology Both periods are utterly necessary to the life and growth of a culture and at all times elicit different solutions by different people in every culture. There also exists a music that appeals to innocent ears, soothes tired nerves, and lulls the mind into an easy, relaxed mood (perfect background for superficial conversation) such as Musak and much of so called New Age music... In contrasting this unobtrusive form of music to Penderecki's St. Luke Passion, we can say that Penderecki?s music reflects the final stage of disintegration of European culture, while Musak embodies a stage beyond disintegration (the settling of the dust?): a place in time where Art as a driving force has lost all credit and where music is a mere commodity in the order of an underarm deodorant for the herds of suburban sleepwalkers. European music which always attempted to dominate the world by its drive to an all inclusive universality, reached the phase of disintegration (roughly at the beginning of the 20th Century) when its very foundation, Tonality, was questioned and progressively eliminated by the then modern composers. I have already stressed elsewhere how the disintegration of Tonality (the tonal center being in European music like the nucleus of the atom around which the electrons -the notes or scales- gravitated) parallels exactly the development of nuclear physics and the political dispersion of the European empires with their immense colonial satellites. This process is as well reflected in all other art forms through the course of this 20th Century. We are now witnessing a planetarisation of culture at all levels, a fusion and a mixture of all earthly art forms. As always in such a situation the paramount danger is the uniformisation of all cultures at the lowest common denominator (one size fits all) while the highest goal is the integration of each current into a greater whole, the true synthesis where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We see here that Musak reflects the absence of culture itself as a form of expression in the life of our "equal" human beings. And both the music at the disintegration stage and the music of absent mindedness (musak) are but mirror images of the many seasons of human endeavor. We cannot then put any blame on the music itself without attacking the cultural whole (no matter how small) that it represents. At the stage of disintegration, the effect of a tormented, dissonant music such as Penderecki?s can still awaken the mind and warn people of the impending disaster or slumber where culture is slipping, while Musak, like a soothing rain on the charred remains of a leveled city, only serves to reassure the dead and further the sleep of things. Having developed these analogies and shown the indivisible relationship of music to culture, we want to briefly analyze the INTENTIONS underlying the creation of such music, since as the saying goes, it is not the gift that counts but the thought behind it. It thus becomes immediately apparent that Musak (and American Pop music in general) is not created by highly individual, original musicians, but by an industry which makes a living by keeping the awareness level of people as low as they possibly can ("opium for the masses"). On the other hand, an individual musician like Penderecki who expresses his anguish and his alienation, stands as a healthy reminder of the instability of human life in troubled times rather than trying to cover up the wound, however impolite it might be considered to do, so to speak, your mental laundry in public. At this point in our conversation, my New Age friend (let us call him "I") interjected: "You are here exposing the political and cultural implications of music, but from a much more simple and purely sensual point of view, when I close my eyes while listening to Penderecki or Ligeti, I see little green demons with horns snooping around the air flapping their shady wings in the phosphorous gloom; it is a totally negative and unpleasant experience. Isn't great music supposed to bring peace and ecstasy rather than nightmares?" In great Art, pain and pleasure become practically indistinguishable, I answered, quoting Hermann Hesse, but any vision one has can only emanate from one's own mind otherwise one could not describe it so accurately as my friend did. I agreed however that Penderecki's or Schoenberg's music were leaning too much on the side of anguish for my own personal taste, but this is beside the point and is not even what I would object most to in this kind of music. People too often forget that European music developed as a whole on Middle Eastern, Greek and Indian foundations through a unified Church that strictly codified at first the various influences under one banner. No one knows what will happen if a multitude of influences as in America today have no greater unifying power than arbitrary geographical location, race, sex, social status or buying power. A work of Art, contrary to some fashionable belief, is not made by gathering randomly all colors and letting them loose under the sun. And Nature does not create in this way either. Human concepts such as equality or good and bad are meaningless to Nature and the artist is her witness. But my friend "I" pursued: "When you listen to music emotionally, it evokes a subtle vibratory realm which can be either pleasant or unpleasant to tune into. This is what Scriabin pointed out when he wrote his "Black Mass" and his "White Mass". He modestly always refused to play his "Black Mass" in public, not wanting to expose the people to his own despair." Yes, I replied, the French poet Rene Daumal wrote an entire book on this subject titled "Poesie Noire, Poesie Blanche" where he defined with great accuracy what he called "Black Art", that is roughly speaking, the expression of the human ego trying to sell to itself its own death, and in contrast, "White Art": the expression of the will that has overcome the desire for world fame and personal glory, merged with the cosmic will and become the channel and servant of the greater whole. But we want here to make it clear that great Art is always a combination, a transmutation and a synthesis of both "black" and "white" in the outcome, rather than a clean cut, preconceived and prepackaged choice. Symbolically speaking, the Lotus grows out of mud and the rose wears thorns. The inspiration of true Art starts beyond good and evil and its magic is to abolish entirely such human inspired concepts. In feeling the lover forgets and transcends the thorns, but this feeling does not eliminate the mere physical existence of thorns. Cosima quoted Wagner as saying: "You can be glad that there is no police in Art's heaven to give certificates of good behavior and decide who the chosen Artists will be; otherwise you and I probably wouldn't have made it to say that." The difference between uplifting and enslaving Art lies in the deeper motives of its creator and his/her readiness to express them at any cost and beyond any limitation. And by the eternal bourgeois resistance to change, great Art is indeed dangerous and subversive. Even pure Joy can be subversive in a world fed on pain. How could music that is made for the sole purpose of profiteering financially without any concern whatsoever for the inner needs of the listener have anything to do with a spiritual commitment? Music in America today is almost exclusively the preconceived corporate use of sound as an opium for the people. In this way, "easylistening" is the musak for senior citizens, pop-rock is the muzak for the teenage masses in the cities, and country pop for country teenagers; Not forgetting the subscription classical concerts of the symphony halls being the muzak for the well-to-do bourgeois, ethnic pop the muzak for minorities (each have their own station but it is almost all recorded around L.A.) through which they can safely release their frustrated needs on one another instead of turning to the Establishment to require improvements...etc... In this perspective, we are witness to the tremendous importance of music as a distraction, a drug, in today's society, an escape that alone permits the dreary freeway rat race to continue as usual and drowns the screams of Nature's rape. How far from the sacro-magical purpose of music in Past Civilizations this trend takes us, I do not even need to stress at this point if our reader has followed through. We are now living in what Hermann Hesse in his "Glass Bead Game" referred to as "the age of entertainment" where technology supplies grown up children with an infinite variety of gadgets and toys to play with in the sandbox of time. This leisure time, however, has mainly been paid for with the goods stolen from a third world and unless we quickly succeed to addict them to our muzak (we have a head start) they might demand a different show. In our world without faith, without any Ideal beyond material wealth, the only so called art is entertainment in its most immediate, evanescent fashion: who wants to build or work for a future whose very existence is everyday more threatened?! And whether it is entertainment for massage parlors, TV saloons, barber shops, shopping halls, symphony malls, or drive in churches, it remains ONLY entertainment. Entertainment is an idle, gratuitous activity not to be taken at heart which only requires a minimal outside participation and never attempts to question the basic principles and habits that make our everyday life. It is never threatening enough to challenge our well established pattern of the least effort thinking and therefore does not demand from us any drastic change of perspective or direction but rather releases us cheaply of the tension whose build up only could result in the healthy turning point of inner crisis and inner revaluation. The art of entertainment has henceforth created a sort of parallel world very much like in the myth of the cave by Plato where the cave dwellers spend their lives gazing at their own shadows (reflected on the walls of the cave by the sun outside) thinking them to be the only reality and never reaching outside for the real source of light and the real world whose mere existence they do not even suspect. Like a theater where people pay to see actors caricature their very own misgivings and are thus able to escape the realization that it is them and their own behavior which is laughed at, they exorcise in this way the need to transcend the limitations of routine and stereotype. It seems awesome to describe such a spectacle, even more awesome to realize its magnitude that through television has contaminated the four corners of the earth far beyond national borders and/or cultural identity, and we certainly will be asked if an equal amount of true art does not still survive at least in "our" Western world - Art that is uncorrupted, challenging, enlightening. I am afraid that I will have to reply here, taking the chance to be thought of as ignorant, uninformed and naive: "Show it to me, I am eager, I am starving for it, I just don't know about it, show it to me now!" Where are the Bach, Beethoven, Wagner of today and the spirit they embodied for the human community? I can already hear names, alas, of great stars of today that will be thrown at me and this is enough to die of sadness and laughter. Of course I know how impossible it has become to get such works published, let alone to create them. In the world of ruthless and proud profiteering, Art for Art's sake is the greatest taboo, a crime of insanity, enough to lose your life and your freedom countless time's over. And certainly it was not easy in the past either, but since the means have expanded infinitely, even if the need for great Art had not decreased at all, we still would be facing an undeniable devolution - what I call an inversely proportional relationship between THE QUALITY OF THE IDEAL AND THE QUANTITY OF THE MEANS at our disposal presently to realize this Ideal. In 1854, Richard Wagner in exile in Zurich wrote to Liszt : "So long as money remains the power before which all our doings and dealings lose their force, Art (or true love) cannot bear legitimate fruits". Wherever Money is the only God, the need for the sanctification of Nature through human creativity is reduced to utter insignificance, prostitution (the selling of Love or Art) and generally outlawed as we have seen earlier. Of all human activities, Art is the easiest and first to be dispensed with, since the practical applications of Science still keep the scientist in the assembly line for the procreation of weapons to "defend the country", and the moral obligation of Religions to justify in their parishioner's mind the hatred of the "enemy", keep the Gurus employed. In past civilizations and communities, whether at the popular level (folk), or at the level of the eternal few and their high standards, music always assumed a sacro-magical function, be it for the so called primitive festivals of harvest, the rites of manhood, the celebration of mythical fathers, the dedication of an ascetic congregation, a new house, a new year, a new king... Art always served a supra-natural purpose where beings merged together beyond their daily differences and the prospect of immediate financial reward. Even at the courts of tyrants, artists were eagerly invited to embody the Divine Play of consciousness, the hope for a happy thereafter, and the continuous improvements of cultural standards. Then and there, Beauty and the quest for spiritual redemption through Art were considered major assets, trophies of war, dues payed to the Gods, means of outshining rival patrons, etc... Never before, it appears to us, has the value of artistic creativity ranked lower than it does today where it serves only for the satisfaction of trivial natural desires, political marketing schemes, psychological warfare and waiting room hangings. In the old world order, Art was the language of the Divine and the very highest relationship between Nature and man. Art was that common ineffable tongue, the common treasure, the invisible center to which the members of the community could relate both as intrinsic individuals and as familiar bells that rang in tune with the whole gamut of their diverse activities, whether they be thieves, priests, doctors or housewives. Music, beyond the power of institutionalized religion allowed the people to merge at once spiritually and sensually with the greater whole, this symphony where they all played an unquestioned part. Then, in Europe, following the French revolution and the rise to power of a wealthy merchant middle class, culture became democratized and for the first time, Art became a spectacle that could be acquired for a fee by any private individual regardless of education and merit. The patronage of the Court (and its high standards) disappeared and the theaters turned into a circus to dazzle the bourgeois. At the same time, of course, the power of the individual having drastically increased, Art freed temporarily from the tyranny of Church and State, became its own religion and under the first breaths of freedom gave rise to the great Romantic movement. However, with the advent of large scale industry, an overnumerous "working class" emerged that demanded always cheaper and newer Art works: little by little, Art became the industry of entertainment for the masses. The individual artist, severed from the patronage of the Courts turned to the rich merchant for support and the alienation between the artist and society grew and grew ever deeper as his artistic responsibility became more an more the object of bargaining and survival. Ineluctably, quantity replaced quality; mass production, craftsmanship; and after the great fireworks of newly freed individual geniuses (Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner...), the final heirs to a 2000 years old highly evolved culture had shot their last wad, Tradition, under the dismembering pressure of extreme individualization on the one hand and mass appeal on the other, began to disintegrate and lose its original, sacro-magical center. When, after World War I, the Arts became impersonalized out of all context through radio, movies, etc... transcultural program music became the job of most serious composers and we entered the present era of the lowest common denominator. In a Religion (or in any true mass movement), a common cause or Ideal animates and unites simultaneously the most primitive instincts and the most refined thoughts of the collective consciousness. After the collapse of Western European (and Oriental) ideologies, the American Dream and its corollary, the lowest common denominator, took over and spreading to the four corners of the world, thriving as it does on the lowest needs of modern beings, became the new "Divine" law. The concept of "One size fits all" pervaded every aspect of society from clothes designing to music making and asserted itself as the only link and point of reference that the people shared and recognized. The higher, sacromagical purpose of Art was thus sacrificed to quantitative consumption. In such a world reduced to the supply and demand of the lowest common denominator, the impulse towards perfection - the inspiration of Art - timeless and beyond immediate exploitation, slowly but surely expired. Whoever still lives today with, in his heart, the burning flame to achieve any degree of uncompromisable originality and greatness in the field of artistic activity, must be counted as the rare survivor of a cultural holocaust -an extremely endangered species, probably the fastest disappearing of all creeds. Artists have often been accused of elitism as if it were a sin to defend one's highest standards at the cost of one's health and worldly fame when no one else has the courage to live up to even an infinitesimal fraction of the potential of the human mind! Obviously, an artist who is open to the influences and advances of his time cannot be responsible for all the misunderstandings of life. In this way, the poet St-John Perse said in his Nobel prize address: "It is enough for the Poet to incarnate the bad conscience of his times." Just as if the tremendous laziness of human beings, the collective inertia and entropy, was reproaching the One who kept moving and creating, to be the symbol of their guilt for falling asleep while He alone kept watching! In the world of the lowest common denominator, the artists as standard setters and quality defenders are automatically numbered and "few". And if, to take a trivial example, we compare Art (and Culture in general) with a currency that has infinitely devalued, only its revaluation can secure a renewed power and place for Art in the human community. |