 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-13 12:02
This is obviously not a topic specific to clarinet players, but I figure that they have as much right to it as anyone practicing the arts. Typically anyone practicing the arts will have some opinion on the relationship between what they do and their culture and society, particularly because practicing the arts in the public arena tends to hold it's difficulties, a bit like delivering a birthday cake in the Himalayas.
Will the cake be truly appropriated for all that's gone into the process?
Why is the road typically so rocky?
Plato firmly believed that and Arts where what defined civilization, which I find interesting , because in our world today, I think we are inclined to site the technologies. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these two value systems however, so what's going on ?
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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Author: ruben
Date: 2024-06-13 12:19
In the old days, there were pages in magazines and newspapers in a section called: culture. More often than not, this section is now called: entertainment. I find this significant. Most people just want to be entertained and partake of a consumer product that requires no active involvement.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: hans
Date: 2024-06-13 21:44
Daniel H. Pink, in his book "A Whole New Mind", writes that right-brainers will rule the future. I'm halfway though reading it, and it is interesting, but I'll have to finish it before deciding if I agree with his statement that MBAs (left brain dominant) can be replaced by right brain dominant MFAs (Master of Fine Arts).
Hans (MBA)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2024-06-14 02:04
Quote:
Plato firmly believed that and Arts where what defined civilization, which I find interesting , because in our world today, I think we are inclined to site the technologies.
I think Plato saw the power of the arts and therefore banished them from his Republic.
There's the idea of something, say, love; then there's the myriad ways we experience love out in the world; and then there's the way we take these experiences and transform them into poems or a pieces of music. For Plato, then, art is two steps removed from the idea, which he thinks is the truly important thing. Most people, though, seem to prefer poems and music to sitting around with philosophers and discussing the idea of love. So Plato puts philosophers in charge of his Republic and sends artists packing: fewer bad influences, I guess.
In some way, I think Plato's thinking here is still playing out. Now, though, instead of artists and the arts holding influence over people, it seems to be social media and other similar distractions (sports betting, YouTube "content," etc.).
I don't think it's an issue of technology itself. Indeed, throughout a large part of the 20th century, arts and technology were engaged in a very fruitful relationship. Just thinking off the top of my head: there's the telephone and airplane scenes in Proust, the printing press machinery scene in Joyce, Marinetti's manifesto, Anteil's Ballet Mechanique (and these examples come only from the beginning of the century: think of all the technological breakthroughs with musical instrument construction, electronic music, and so on). I also don't think it's an issue of art versus entertainment. In Proust and Joyce, for example, we see the mingling of high and low art: newspaper advertising slogans bump up against allusions to Dante and Shakepspeare. In, say, Stravinsky, jazz and dance-hall music intermingle with folk tunes and the Italian baroque.
It seems to me that entertainment during this period was rather homogenous. There were a handful of actors people went to see performances of and later discussed, a handful of newspapers people read, and a handful of popular songs everyone knew. This homogeneity perhaps allowed for more interaction with high art, i.e. everyone "got" the references.
There was a time when society's shared range of reference encompassed the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante all the way up through Proust (the so-called "canon"). Then, there was a time when the shared range of reference perhaps included some books but perhaps more so The Beatles, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Star Wars. Perhaps now, though, there is no shared range of reference. People's media "consumption" is driven by algorithms and specifically curated for individual tastes and preferences. It seems so difficult for something to have the cultural impact that Star Wars had (and films that do breakthrough, such as Barbie, appear very much to be outliers).
Hollywood film is doing poorly, traditional television is doing poorly, the recording industry is doing poorly. If the early and middle part of the 20th century was a time when art and entertainment interpenetrated to sometimes incredible results and the later part of the 20th century was a time of great popular entertainment (blockbuster movies and "must-see TV"), it seems as though we are now in a time of distraction: infinite scrolling on social media, TikTok trends, and so forth. I'm not sure where high art fits in here: if Hollywood can't get people off of streaming to come to the movie theater, how does an opera company get them to come to Verdi?
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Author: Jarmo Hyvakko
Date: 2024-06-14 11:31
By the way, Plato divided human action in two sections: Ars and Praxis (arts and practicalities). Arts is suitable for a free man, practicalities should be done by slaves. Playing Kithara (guitar) was considered Arts, but playing Aulos (sort of an oboe) made you sweaty and exhausted, therefore it was considered Praxis, and should be left to slaves!
Jarmo Hyvakko, Principal Clarinet, Tampere Philharmonic, Finland
Post Edited (2024-06-14 11:32)
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Author: hans
Date: 2024-06-14 22:10
Bennett,
Thank you for the link. Very interesting.
Regards,
Hans
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-15 14:23
Those were all very interesting angles on this topic....Thanks!
I suppose my own observations on the subject are along the lines of artists roughly falling into two basic categories. Those who study and cater to popular tastes, and those who seek to expand the menu. Having three young children, I know how hard trying to expand the menu can be. A Catalan friend of mine living in London, once joined a demonstration carrying a banner saying " Say NO to new ideas", so I guess this is something of a human tendency that the more creative artists have always tended to come up against. Then there have been artists such as Shakespeare ,who was catering to the common people, so essentially an entertainer, but who now would come squarely under the heading"Culture".
The Beatles similarly didn't imagine that their popularity would be anything other than fleeting . The tale of how most artists have taken a foothold in our cultural heritage is a tale of talents, but also a good degree of calamity it seems.
Perhaps this is just MY trouble with accepting new ideas, but I can't help but feel that the arts are passing through a rather dreary period, where creativity has become somewhat tethered to the post of conformity with existing trends, which is a kind of a "going nowhere" position for it to be in .Whatever one thinks about the "Godfather" of Pop Art Andy Warhol, he WAS practicing his arts with originality. But to declare a tin of Campel's soup "Art", seems to have led to some confusion I feel, because it's one thing to make art from the banal, and quite another to make an art of the banal.
I must confess that I have trouble seeing "the wood for the trees" in all this, which is why I'm interested in other peoples views on it.
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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Author: brycon
Date: 2024-06-16 04:22
Quote:
Then there have been artists such as Shakespeare ,who was catering to the common people, so essentially an entertainer, but who now would come squarely under the heading"Culture".
I don't think you can break things down into entertainment=popular, art=niche. Something very clearly a piece of high art, like Van Gogh's The Starry Night, can be immensely popular with all sorts of people. And something clearly meant to be entertainment, such as the 2000 box-office bomb Battlefield Earth, can be largely ignored.
The question of what is and isn't art is addressed in Terry Eagleton's book The Event of Literature. How is it that, at one point of time, an almanac or a book on history weren't considered pieces of literature (i.e. art) but now are and now are even studied in English departments in universities? Moreover, how come some other contemporaneous almanacs and histories didn't receive similar elevation to the realm of art? Eagleton's answer, drawing on Wittgenstein and other philosophers, is that art is whatever experts (artists, critics, patrons, etc.) say art is: clearly, it isn't sharply defined and can change over time.
Quote:
Perhaps this is just MY trouble with accepting new ideas, but I can't help but feel that the arts are passing through a rather dreary period, where creativity has become somewhat tethered to the post of conformity with existing trends, which is a kind of a "going nowhere" position for it to be in.
I think "creativity" and "originality" are far too strongly pushed in arts education. J.S. Bach was not original: in his own life, he was considered out-of-date, an encyclopedic throwback to previous traditions rather than an adopter of the new galant tradition. But his out-of-dateness is a negative only if you see music history trending toward some far-off goal, with Bach holding things up. Art, though, isn't moving forward: historical and material conditions change, artists and the arts change accordingly. And among the historical and material conditions of the 18th century, Bach was one of the greatest artistic minds (and funny enough, many people now can't name a single galant composer).
The goal of creativity and originality is a 19th-century thing. Before then, artists cared much more about craftsmanship and intelligibility. I think this approach would be much more helpful for young composers, writers, etc. Students stress so much over composing something original when they can't even write good beginning counterpoint. Maybe focusing on craftsmanship and not worrying about originality would better allow for the latter to come out naturally when an artist is ready? As Stravinsky said:
“My freedom is so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
That is, working inside the box or manipulating the box is, in a way, more creative than getting outside the box.
Post Edited (2024-06-16 11:10)
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-16 12:55
Thank you Bryson,
Both your replies were excellently expressed and really put the matter of the cultural assignment of the label " Art" into context with the works themselves.
So I guess "Art" is better viewed as, not so much the creation of "artists", so much as the creation of developing cultural view points regarding what they have done. This certainly goes a long way to explaining the " calamity " aspect by which the works of " Artists" have become established in culture/civilization. This angle might be interpreted as discrediting artists, but more significantly, I see it points to the creation of " Art"( being entirely a concept), as being a joint venture between "craftspeople" and a culture. This is rather obvious when I think about it, and yet somehow I was thinking about it wrong. So if I feel the Arts are going through a "dreary period", then that's likely a better description on my own narrow mindedness and apathy, or at least I would do better to consider that angle, both for my own benefits and for those of the Arts I proclaim to defend.
It looks like I'm becoming an old fart......Aaaaarg!!!
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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Author: brycon
Date: 2024-06-18 06:37
Quote:
This angle might be interpreted as discrediting artists, but more significantly, I see it points to the creation of " Art"( being entirely a concept), as being a joint venture between "craftspeople" and a culture.
Yes, and well put.
Quote:
So if I feel the Arts are going through a "dreary period", then that's likely a better description on my own narrow mindedness and apathy, or at least I would do better to consider that angle, both for my own benefits and for those of the Arts I proclaim to defend.
I think perhaps society is going through a dreary period and the arts are being affected.
It's amazing what a resource YouTube can be. When I was practicing my jump shot, for instance, I found some videos with a shooting coach from an NBA team. For every great video, though, there are thousands of bad ones. And in terms of YouTube's business model, the quality of its videos doesn't matter; they just need a lot of them to keep people watching and generating ad revenue. Both good and bad videos are simply money-generating "content." And thinking of stuff as content flattens it all out. A basketball video and some morons doing a TikTok dance are content; a recorded performance of a Mahler symphony and a tier list of fast food franchises are content: it's all simply content. And because of this flattening out, high art's placed on the same level as TikTok dancing and clearly cheapened. (Walter Benjamin has a wonderful essay that I'm thinking of called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; I can't imagine what he'd write about YouTube if he were still alive!) And, at least in the U.S., universities and other educational institutions are kind of exacerbating this problem. At one somewhat prestigious institution I was at, students could progress through the English curriculum without reading a Shakespeare play; they did, however read several comic books.
My hope, though, is that there's a desire among young people to unplug and deliberately engage with art--the tragedies of Shakespeare or the cantatas of Bach. From my own experience, I've seen many eager students. But I guess time will tell!
Post Edited (2024-06-18 09:01)
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2024-06-18 07:08
Julian, brycon, and others - thanks for your thoughts in this thread.
I very much enjoyed brycon's take on things (they mirror my own to a large degree, but brycon always states things so much better than I am capable.)
"From my own experience, I've seen many eager students." - My experience has been the same - lots of "hungry" students coming from our educational institutions.
As an old-timer who lived the life of the "listening library" - where one had to pore over index files, find LPs or Reel-to-Reel tapes (hopefully they were put away properly, and weren't mangled or scratched) just to hear the excerpts required for Historical Survey of Music or to hear a piece you were expected to play, reserve an seat at the record player, with the communal headphones...or the Reel to Reel...as that old-timer - I look at the wonder and beauty of YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Archive.org, etc. and ponder how easy it would now be to achieve what was once arduous, scheduled, rigorous, etc. Yet - when I look at today's results of access to such bounty - I become doubtful that it would have helped afterall.
;^)>>>
Fuzzy
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Author: brycon
Date: 2024-06-18 09:22
Quote:
I look at the wonder and beauty of YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Archive.org, etc. and ponder how easy it would now be to achieve what was once arduous, scheduled, rigorous, etc.
I remember listening to an interview with a cognitive scientist who had written an article (or book?) on how search engines affect our learning. She had found that Googling something on your mind led to a rather surface-level understanding of whatever you looked up and that it wasn't likely to stay in your memory at any rate. I also had a colleague who always talked about how, according to studies, writing something down by hand (notes in a lecture course, for example) lead to it staying in your memory better than typing it on a computer, listening to it on a recording, etc. (I'm just going to say it's true and not bother Googling it!)
So perhaps your analog listening routine was deeper and more impactful than our modern version?
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-18 13:42
Back in the days when we were obliged to study from textbooks and established literature, there were certain limitations, but one of them was that everything we had access to, had been screened academically in one form or another as appropriate to its literary category. Whatever a library doesn't have, all that it DOES have will have been screened according to this process. Also there has to exist some legitimacy for a book to get published in the first place.
Although one might call the internet the greatest library of all time, legitimate writings rub shoulder with illegitimate ones on shelves with no clear division between fact and fiction, this is probably why we seem to be becoming somewhat wooly in regards to that distinction( fact vs fiction), offering opinions as if they had the same legitimacy as facts.....and worst still... accepting them as such.
The internet is great for expanding one's knowledge, but for school children who may not start their search with much basis of knowledge regarding their search to begin with, it can be rather like setting sail on a treacherous sea without a compass.
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2024-06-19 04:54
brycon,
I think you're onto something there. Writing by hand always did help me secure knowledge more long-term to my memory. Perhaps the analog version of the listening library would do the same...except (and this is a large exception) that the process was so tedious (or the media in such bad shape) that it was almost pointless to attempt.
I love using the online services to hear multiple versions of things now.
I appreciate that in the 1930s and 1940s a new tune would come out, and the market would hire folks to play the sheet music for customers, several big names would have records of the same song out at the same time (or in close proximity) etc. I know it didn't turn out too well for many of the creative artists financially - but as a consumer, it must have been similar to having YouTube at our fingertips now.
Coming back to art, though - it seems to have always been tied closely with culture. As our culture(s) become more varied and fractured to the point of being unrecognized by one another even in tiny cities and towns - I do wonder what qualities/forms art might find to attract enough of a crowd to be noticed in an important way.
With the never-ending variety of all things digital, we're losing (culturally) the commonalities which used to help bind us together and somewhat unify/inform our concepts of art.
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-19 11:38
I love records, although a wandering life has made keeping a collection impossible. I love that their size allows for appreciable cover art. Then you have to handle them respectfully as you put them on the turntable. Then you align the stylus carefully. Then comes the sound of it as it lands on the disc, which is like that moment of suspense as the conductor raises their arms and sweeps their gaze across the orchestra. Then you tend to listen to the complete album as it was compiled and conceived by the artist ( at least I do....did..." sigh!")
Sometimes I think we lose more than we realize when we give up little rituals or things which take time for the sake of convenience, because our relationship with them looses some dimension which is mysteriously significant . By the same token we tend to have a different relationship with things we become accustomed to getting free, as opposed to things we have to pay for, in either money, or some other form of personal sacrifice.
However much we all naturally fancy readily accessed and preferably free music, that state of affairs is bound have an effect on our relationship with it.
No doubt by the same token, when we are obliged to write something down, then that personal investment deepens our relationship with that material and a lasting learning of it.
I suspect that this phenomenon applies to our relationship with pretty much everything.
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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Author: brycon
Date: 2024-06-28 00:26
Quote:
I love records, although a wandering life has made keeping a collection impossible. I love that their size allows for appreciable cover art. Then you have to handle them respectfully as you put them on the turntable. Then you align the stylus carefully. Then comes the sound of it as it lands on the disc, which is like that moment of suspense as the conductor raises their arms and sweeps their gaze across the orchestra. Then you tend to listen to the complete album as it was compiled and conceived by the artist ( at least I do....did..." sigh!")
That Walter Benjamin essay I referenced above has been collected in a volume called Illuminations. The first essay in that collection, "Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting," is something you might want to read (if you haven't already): you basically just wrote a mini version of that essay!
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Author: Julian ibiza
Date: 2024-06-28 11:25
Thank you Bryson,
Walter Benjamin is definitely going on my " next ups" reading list.
To ramble on with my thoughts on this topic,( apologies where in order),
I think that in our materially oriented world, we tend to forget the substance which can be drawn from the ether, which is surly where our magnetism to what we call art derives. There's obviously no need to patronize a bunch of musicians with that observation, but I was again musing on the standing of the arts in our modern world.
Ok!.... To try to streamline whatever it is I'm trying to express, the best example that comes to mind living here in Spain, is if one happen to be somewhere with gipsies around, and they suddenly break out into " palmos ", the flamenco syncopated clapping. All they have is their hands, the air and the art of creating something from nothing ... yet it can make the hairs stand up on your arms inadvertently.....And you don't need to be particularly into flamenco..... it just hits you WHAM!....and takes you.
And the very fact that it isn't Mozart, is the part I find most fascinating .
Julian Griffiths
Tel. 34 696 798 853
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The Clarinet Pages
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