mf@cornell.UUCP (mf) (01/08/85)
What is music? Why, it's what musicians do! It's whatever a given listener feels it to be. It's any series of sounds and silences capable of moving at least one heart. It may move us, but won't change us. The experience of exposure to music may change us (though one may be exposed for years with immunity), but not the music itself; it can only awaken and make us more what we really are. Art has no ethical purpose and does not instruct. The same ``message'' can be reiterated by different artists but is most educational when least artistic (i.e., most literal). What is *good* music? The music that is good for you, that disturbs involuntarily like an erection. Longevity is no prerequisite since ``good'' is not an artistic but a moral ingredient... But *great* music doubtless does deal with Time, though not with decisions of the greatest number. The mass does not decide. If Michelangelo did create for a mass (debatable) his subject matter was the same as that of lesser artists. He was great not because of his material or mass appeal, but because he was Michelangelo. The masses don't know the difference. Ask them! Until yesterday music's very nature was such that explanation was unimportant to appreciation (proof of the pudding was in the eating); today music's very nature is such that explanation is all-important to appreciation (like certain political polemicism which theorizes beyond proportion to reality). I say *appreciation* advisedly: *enjoyment* is now a niggardly, if not an obscene, consideration. That composition should need such verbal spokesmen indicates that, for the first time ever, the very essence of the art has changed. There's no more room for the *petit maitre*, that ``second-rater'' (if you will) whose talent is to delight or, even sadly, to move his hearer to dance and sing. There is room for only masterpieces, for only masterpieces have the right to require the intellectual (as opposed to sensual) concentration and investigation needed for today's ``in'' music. Masterpieces are made by the few geniuses born each century. Yet hundreds now compose *in the genius style* while denigrating those who compose *what they hear*. Certain painting now is healthy if only because it's witty. Music, as always, trails humorlessly behind the other mediums. The fact that music is scandalously received seems automatically to validate it for those afraid of ultimately being proven wrong. Since we all must live in a cage (also the artist: without restraint he is not one), I prefer my own design, If I've not joined the avant-garde (henceforth called the Academy) it's not that I don't approve of--or even agree with--them; it's because of a terror of losing my identity, Still, I'm capable of arguing any views or its opposite, depending on who I'm trying to persuade what to. Ned Rorem from the Paris Diary, 1951