Is classical music dead as a creative activity?

[pbrower2a]

The Grey Badger 

Quote:For over 100 years we've been in an era when the popular forms of the arts - any of the arts - are actually superior to the 'classical' forms. "Classical" being a term my Music Appreciation prof said should not be applied to what she prefers to call modern 'art music'.

That is - show tunes and movie music fill the niche that opera did in the 19th Century; genre fiction, well done, is actually better and more readable literature than the plotless, pointless stuff the lit-critters like, etc.

By saying this I am stamping myself irredeemably as not only middlebrow, but lower-middle-brow. Nuts to it - that sort of terminology wasn't even in use before the Third Great Awakening (a.k.a. the End of Western Civilization as people had known it since the Renaissance) as far as I can tell. It's an artifact of the post-modern mega-Saeculum.

From a certain huge, flawed, but still readable alternate-universe novel from 1958:
(The intellectual community is sounding off in the living room of a minor villainess)

"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature"
"Melody is a primitive vulgarity in music"
.....

For all her many and manifold flaws, there are times Rand called it on the nose, and those times are true gems.

Quote:Last edited by The Grey Badger; 11-13-2010 at 02:50 PM.

Odin

    For all her many and manifold flaws, there are times Rand called it on the nose, and those times are true gems.
   I agree with you completely. I find much of "post-modern" art music and high lit to be really dreadful, a giant clusterf*** of "only us cultural elites can appreciate this" garbage. A good example is that "poetry" read during Obama's inauguration.

KaiserD2 Wrote:   
   I agree with a caveat.

   If I were going to prison and you gave me the choice between taking all the rock/pop songs on my ipod with me, or taking "classical" music written since 1955 with me, I would take the former without hesitation.

   But if I had to choose between the rock/pop songs and the Beethoven/Mozart/Haydn/Chopin/etc., I would have to take the latter.

Chas'88
Senior Member

Join DateNov 2008LocationIn between Pennsylvania & PennsyltuckyPosts9,432

Quote:I say that the blame has to go to Stravinsky and his Rite of Spring. That and the movement towards "Primativism" in art is what was the death knell of Western Civilization.

~Chas'88

Stravinsky himself, Prokofiev, Bartok, Elgar, Vaughan-Williams, Messiaen, and Shostakovich all wrote some very "classical" works after that. Need I suggest Robert Simpson and Vagn Holmboe? 

Chas\88 Wrote:Nah, the rise of Atonalism and Serialism is really the marker, I was just going for the revolt over what happened in the theatre at the presentation of it.
 
Schoenberg and Webern.
 
~Chas'88

When I start hearing people whistle or hum twelve-tone music, I will be convinced in its victory. Until then...
...Musicians are prone to the same vice of making themselves the focus of the audience instead of the music. Of course, composers are often not the performers. The extreme in performance may have been Liberace, who raised his hands pointlessly high above the keyboard. 
I am tempted to believe that folk heritage will fertilize the sonata form wherever someone tries to compose in it. I have more faith in the power of folk culture than I do in atonalism and serialism.