Why are Classical Arts Dying?

[Bloomfield]

Then lately, the demise of the middle class results in tiered marketing and demographics, locking a lot of people out of experiencing older arts and culture by ticket price.

Not to mention that our only classical radio station (maybe you have more choices up your way) markets itself in the most pretentious and pathetically barf-worthy way. Classical music is apparently no longer useful for anything other than soothing yourself during your stressful commute.

Oh, in a way it's worse than that even: If it doesn't have vocals and if it lasts longer than 3 or 4 minutes tops, it doesn't register as music with a large part of the populations, at least if you look at CD/online sales and ClearChannel (what, 80% of all US radiostations? )

Jim in the OP mentioned Dance among the dying classical arts. I don't agree. Isodora Duncan was pioneer, but not a theoretical artists. Other pioneers were Martha Graham (of course), Mary Wigman, and Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. I'd also include Doris Humphrey since she is the root of a style that is still very important today. Modern dance really only flourished in the middle of the 20th century, and while it's gone through several post-modern phases, it's still a viable form of artistic expression, with a substantial number of great, even classical artists living today: Merce Cunningham (nearly 90 now), Paul Taylor, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, Tricia Brown. There are several well-established middle-generation choreographers like Mark Morris, Garth Fagan, Jiri Kilian, to name a few.

[Jack]

Other forms of art have supplanted them, such as pop music, photoshopping, and lichen.

[The Weekenders]

[

Not to mention that our only classical radio station (maybe you have more choices up your way) markets itself in the most pretentious and pathetically barf-worthy way. Classical music is apparently no longer useful for anything other than soothing yourself during your stressful commute.

Absolutely. Drive-time classics. Oh, the fall from exalted art.

Back when I cared, I used to use this example about how overwhelmed we are with noise and music and how we can't get away from it fast enough.

Imagine being a villager somewhere back in Europe in Bach's time. You would work all week, hearing mostly the rhythms and sounds of your work, maybe your own work singing or two and nature. Then, on Sunday, you went to church and heard the music. Marketplace maybe once a month.

Can you begin to imagine the impact it made on people's ears and minds? Especially if they lived in Bach's hood? A musical person would just hunger for that fix, I reckon.

We can take it or leave it, if we can even hear it above the din and through our tired ears.

That sparkling impact of music is something that I idealize because it's so hard to come by.

[monkey587]

[

Not to mention that our only classical radio station (maybe you have more choices up your way) markets itself in the most pretentious and pathetically barf-worthy way. Classical music is apparently no longer useful for anything other than soothing yourself during your stressful commute.

Absolutely. Drive-time classics. Oh, the fall.

Every time I hear "Casual. Comfortable. Classical" I wish the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole.

[djm]

the demise of the middle class

Sorry, I would disagree with this assumption. It was the growth and spread of the middle class through the 20th century that lead to the demise of the "classical" arts. Those arts were fostered by a privileged few in an isolated, supremist cultural bubble. With their growth in afflenuence, it was the tastes of the middle class that helped move the arts away from the thin air of the remote and obscure, and encouraged things like jazz and abstraction, until these too devolved into more and more vulgar forms - the drek we are saddled with today.

Least, that's the way ah sees them.

djm

[Congratulations]

The problem, the real problem, is we've set up a false dichotomy between "high art" and "low art" and actually believe it. There are great poets, composers, playwrights, what-have-you, but they're lost in an imaginary, self-defeating struggle to compartmentalize artistic stature. Most of the greats fall through the cracks between.

Case in point (I'll use poetry because it's what I actually know a bit about): Frank O'Hara. The man was a revolutionary, and is nearly completely ignored, because he doesn't fit any contemporary preconception of what poetry "should be."

And I mean, a lot of it has to do with technology changing the nature of all artistic medium and the way art is perceived. It wouldn't be outrageous to say that it's the huddled masses (as well as the critics and aficionados) that perpetuate the false idea that capital-A Art is only for people with a PhD, and that the rest of us are relegated to what is thought of as sub-standard art. And, of course, since sub-standard art doesn't need to be thought about and analyzed and appreciated, it's become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy--crappy because that's all we expect.

I wrote a paper that's vaguely related to this topic, but poetry-specific. I titled it: "What's wrong with poetry and who can we blame it on?" Thesis: it's Eliot's fault. True story.

[CHasR]

Peter Maxwell-Davies 'Caroline Matilda' suite, 'Farewell to Stromness',
Part, Gorecki, certainly.
John Taverner
Gyorgy Ligeti, Harry Hewitt, both freshly dead.
Rauatavaaraa, (surely I spelled that wrong)
and a Hungarian named Bardos.
Turnage, Adams.
Who's the chap from RSAMD? also a very good composer.

djm said:
"It was the growth and spread of the middle class through the 20th century that lead to the demise of the "classical" arts. Those arts were fostered by a privileged few in an isolated, supremist cultural bubble."


ok fine: but you havent been to south Philly, where rosinni , belinni + puchinni were sung everyday by workers as rivets were hammered in Cramp's shipyards. Then after work their few meagre cents for entertainment were spent on RCA red labels recorded in camden, featuring toscaninni conducting. later on in the century, saturday afternoons were spent in sacred silence during broadcasts from the met. trust me ,all this is true, deej



'dying' can be a good thing for the classical arts: consider the 'celtic twilight' of the early victorians... it makes us...fundable.
We artists have been wooing the moneyed/titled classes for centuries...why stop now?

[susnfx]

Anybody else remember when classical music was used as the score for many cartoons in the 50s and early 60s?

Susan

[djm]

I don't argue the point at all, CHasR. But that music was only ever made well-known because of a previous age when a very rich class of patronage ensured its fame, and that stamp of approval by an upper-class ensured that it was taken for granted as somehow "superior". It was the snob appeal that made that music retain its fame, and it was the same snob appeal that ultimately finished it off when snobbery fell out of vogue with the ascendancy of the middle classes.

Besides, if it's the South Philly I'm thinking of (Italian) then remember that a lot of that "classical" music got its early source from Italian folk songs and music to begin with.

Susan, a lot of those cartoons were made back in the 1930s-40s, and the music was arranged and performed by unemployed (unemployable) classical musicians. At least it exposed us to classical music.

djm

[I.D.10-t]

Classical music is apparently no longer useful for anything other than soothing yourself during your stressful commute.

I have always thought it was music that old people listened to as they wait to die. Don't wake the people up! ...and remind them of the option of leaving a gift in the estate planing.

[JS]

Weeks says:

The baby got thrown out with the bath water. After the turmoil of the 60s, wholesale cultural rejection of the 70s, and political correctness of the 80s and 90s, works of dead white men (and women in some cases) are discredited as well as their imperial and/or colonial culture.

Sorry, Weeks, I usually read your comments with interest, but this seems beside the point as an answer to Jim Stone's question. Even if the attitude you describe is part of our cultural discussion (and mostly in academia, is my impression), there's plenty of rear-guard action too. And I don't mean in a self-consciously New Criterion sort of way. I mean there are plenty of people around who, for example, show up when the Emerson String Quartet plays in the chapel of the small college where I teach. It's easy to phrase the argument for/against broadening the cultural frame of reference by breaking down conceptual barriers as an us vs them struggle. But it doesn't have to be that way, and I don't think the impulse to take seriously forms other than the traditionally canonized works has to be a matter of putting those works on the shelf. From the comments I've read over the years on C&F there seem to be plenty of people of eclectic taste whose cd collections range from Mozart to Miles to Molloy.

Jim mentioned Pound, Yeats, TSE (and he could have added Williams or Stevens or my favorite Hart Crane), but it's worth remembering that it took modernism time to shake these writers out as the main ones. I'm a little surprised he didn't go on to point out that Lowell, Bishop, Ginsberg, all from the next cohort, seem to have (judging from the volumes of letters, criticism, and biography) gained a similar position. Frank O'Hara, I'd argue, is far from being ignored (as Congrats suggested); he's represented in anthologies, easily found on line, taught often (just last week, by me), and there's a new edition of his selected poems out. James Wright too. That was a terrific generation of poetry in America, so it can be a little hard to see the trees for the forest. It doesn't seem exactly reasonable then to think that we'd know who the best of the current senior group are.

My own way of thinking about all this, though, has to do with niche marketing. Pop culture--the stuff that sells in huge numbers--seems to a lot of us to be pure product, and consuming it a kind of dead-man-walking trip from one emptiness to another. The good stuff (by which I mean the sort of work that increases your sense of the complexity of life) falls into the niches, and we go for what we like. So there's a classical music niche (further subdivided between opera fans, lovers of Glass and Reich, original instrument purists etc.), a jazz niche (equally honeycombed), bluegrass, the varieties of rock and roll, and ever onward. That there's not much consensus doesn't mean there's not much quality, I'd say, which is why the conservative analysis of cultural downfall strikes me as mostly a nostalgia in the face of the pervasiveness of easily available cultural multiplicity.

I should really lay off the coffee after dinner.

[BillChin]

How about John Cage, the one that wrote 4'33?

That is what has happened to a lot of old school arts, Mondrian, Rothko and others, took painting to a new level decades ago, by having one or two basic colors on a canvas. Cage did it with music with the empty musical composition, and was hailed as a genius by the elite intelligensia.

Also factor in the retro grouchiness of elders. Everything was always better in the good old days. Never mind all the old problems and idiocies. It is at times selective memory. Only in the fullness of time will art historians have a better read of how many great works and how many great artists there are now, vs. the old times.

[JS]

Cage is a smart and funny writer too, as well as a composer. A Year From Monday is a one collection of his journal entries, essays, lectures (these were in the form of anecdotes, Zen-like stories, gossip, his ideas about how art might work, all written on index cards and then shuffled before the presentation). Good fun. And you don't have to be an elitist to enjoy it, which was sort of his point.

[jim stone]

There may be great artists working now in
these genres, but part of my point was that we (or at least
people like myself) don't know them or much care.
But when I was a boy we cared terribly about
such people and knew who they were and argued
about them. The classical arts were front and
center in the lives of reasonably educated
people. No more.

Consider the great short story writers in the last
century. I don't know any great short-story writer
now. People like Hemingway were the center
of vast attention. No one like that now, to my
knowledge.

What I think: part of this is that the old forms have
exhausted themselves or lost touch with their
audience. What, there were a hundred years of the
baroque, then what? You can't go on, the ore
has been mined by Bach and Handel, there's only
so much in the form. Then the Romantic, and finally
you can't go on, the good stuff has been mined.
And then you go on to...what? Atonal music that
the audience can't understand.

Same with painting. You get different waves of classical
painting, then the impressionists start painting light,
not what's out there. Then colors and forms and
the painting becomes its own subject and you
lose representation entirely and the audience too.
The impressionists and modern art were enormously
vital and creative but they were the death knell
of painting, because you couldn't go back (that having
been done) and forward led to....well, inspired wall paper.

Also the emergence of new forms like the cinema,
the general lack of education.....

So Yeats said:

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhausts his glory with his might.
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.

These forms have largely consumed themselves,
I suggest, and so are burning out. It's over largely
because it's over.

[susnfx]

Jim, I don't understand what you mean by "it's over." I suggest you say that to the thousands of artists in all types of media who frequent the Wet Canvas website. Do you mean art is over because you haven't heard of any famous artists recently? Or do you mean it's over because you can't fathom anyplace else art could go? Does there have to be a "next big thing" in order to stay alive? I disagree. As long as there are people who find deep satisfaction in expressing themselves through art, it won't ever be dead.

Almost every weekend I take part in a Weekend Drawing Event on the Wet Canvas site where the "host" posts 15-16 of their photos of various landscapes, people, still lifes, etc. You choose one and paint it in any medium you choose. You stop after two hours and post your work. It's a neverending source of amazement to me how many different ways there will be to express the same subject. Watercolor, oil, acrylic, pen & ink, collage, scratchboard, on and on. Different views, different crops, different focuses, amazing creativity. Some sort of beginnerish, some average, and some absolutely spectacular. If the human brain can fathom it, it can be created.

Susan