Post by darkehmen on Feb 4, 2008 21:27:58 GMT 1
I was an avid classical-music aficionado for a long time, but over the past few years, I drifted out of the scene somewhat, due to increased demands on my time in other areas. The Karajan Centenary has brought me back in, and what I find is not a pretty picture.
Perhaps the funniest thing I've come across so far, (funny in a "Ha, ha, I wish I were dead" kind of way) is the phrase "museum culture."
When I first read that phrase, I thought, "Goodness, what an interesting idea. How noble. A museum culture."
It was with a mixture of exasperation and dismay that I learned that this phrase is being used in classical-music discussions as a smug put down -- basically, of musical performances and stagings that the public actually enjoys.
This bad joke gets even worse, because the antithesis to this so-called museum culture -- the supposedly "better" alternative to it -- is something that can only be described as propaganda culture: performances that violate the composers' intentions, impose modern values on historical works, inflict political diatribes espousing Marxist, feminism, post-colonialism, etc., onto the audience.
This is the essence of "living art" today -- assailing past works? How is this creative or original? How is this a "living" art form? The endless mortification of the dead? By contrast, the creations of so-called "museum culture" are genuinely regenerative, creative exploits -- bringing the past back to life, presenting it anew to a world to which it is unfamiliar and fresh and new, and into which it arrives like a creation from out of space and time.
And the last twist of all is that the proponents of the propaganda approach claim that "museum culture" is the creation of musical "dictators." The irony is too rich. In fact, in museum culture, the interpreter is not merely imposing his own will, but is negotiating with the original creator's intentions. The composer is at least as much a part of the creative process as is the interpreter. The creator of "museum culture" in fact subordinates his will to the original creator's.
Who is truly dictatorial? The modern director of propaganda culture, that's who -- the man who rejects the composer's intentions and values, and instead imposes his own modern values on the staging of the work, in juvenile defiance of the original conception. Now that's dictatorship.
A work of art created according to the premises of "museum culture" is a melding of wills between composer and interpreter. A work of propaganda culture is solely the dictatorial imposition of will by a modern interpreter.
And incidentally, it's mind-boggling (albeit predictable) that anyone in the arts could actually use the word "museum" as a pejorative. What in the world do they have against museums? Museums = buildings in which the greatest creations of mankind throughout his history are preserved; buildings through which one can wander, enraptured, escaping for a few hours the banality and vulgarity of the modern day, and immersing oneself in the achievements of nobler eras than our own. Why all this resentment of such great institutions, and all that they represent?
I venture to say it's because the awe-inspiring cultural legacy that is preserved in museums, and in "museum culture," shames the propaganda-culture dictators so much that they need to take cheap shots at it, slight it or demean it in any way they can, because they know, deep down, that their own expressions can never match up. They seek to cover up their own meagreness by slighting or obscuring the greatness of the past.
Perhaps the funniest thing I've come across so far, (funny in a "Ha, ha, I wish I were dead" kind of way) is the phrase "museum culture."
When I first read that phrase, I thought, "Goodness, what an interesting idea. How noble. A museum culture."
It was with a mixture of exasperation and dismay that I learned that this phrase is being used in classical-music discussions as a smug put down -- basically, of musical performances and stagings that the public actually enjoys.
This bad joke gets even worse, because the antithesis to this so-called museum culture -- the supposedly "better" alternative to it -- is something that can only be described as propaganda culture: performances that violate the composers' intentions, impose modern values on historical works, inflict political diatribes espousing Marxist, feminism, post-colonialism, etc., onto the audience.
This is the essence of "living art" today -- assailing past works? How is this creative or original? How is this a "living" art form? The endless mortification of the dead? By contrast, the creations of so-called "museum culture" are genuinely regenerative, creative exploits -- bringing the past back to life, presenting it anew to a world to which it is unfamiliar and fresh and new, and into which it arrives like a creation from out of space and time.
And the last twist of all is that the proponents of the propaganda approach claim that "museum culture" is the creation of musical "dictators." The irony is too rich. In fact, in museum culture, the interpreter is not merely imposing his own will, but is negotiating with the original creator's intentions. The composer is at least as much a part of the creative process as is the interpreter. The creator of "museum culture" in fact subordinates his will to the original creator's.
Who is truly dictatorial? The modern director of propaganda culture, that's who -- the man who rejects the composer's intentions and values, and instead imposes his own modern values on the staging of the work, in juvenile defiance of the original conception. Now that's dictatorship.
A work of art created according to the premises of "museum culture" is a melding of wills between composer and interpreter. A work of propaganda culture is solely the dictatorial imposition of will by a modern interpreter.
And incidentally, it's mind-boggling (albeit predictable) that anyone in the arts could actually use the word "museum" as a pejorative. What in the world do they have against museums? Museums = buildings in which the greatest creations of mankind throughout his history are preserved; buildings through which one can wander, enraptured, escaping for a few hours the banality and vulgarity of the modern day, and immersing oneself in the achievements of nobler eras than our own. Why all this resentment of such great institutions, and all that they represent?
I venture to say it's because the awe-inspiring cultural legacy that is preserved in museums, and in "museum culture," shames the propaganda-culture dictators so much that they need to take cheap shots at it, slight it or demean it in any way they can, because they know, deep down, that their own expressions can never match up. They seek to cover up their own meagreness by slighting or obscuring the greatness of the past.