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Monthly Archives: July 2013
Free concerts every day
I’ve been doing yoga with a large group down on the ocean-front bluffs near the Long Beach Museum of Art. There is a lot more noise than one hears in a yoga studio. The teachers will often tell us to soften our muscles, to breathe into a cramped or stretched part of the body. They will also often invite us to take in the sounds going on, without judgment. Depending on the day of the week and the weather, the combination of sounds can vary a lot. Just as certain thoughts and certain yoga positions can induce a reaction, an unpleasantness perhaps, so can the sounds. When the Harley Davidson engines of weekend cruisers roar by and drown out everything else, it can elicit rage. When the foghorn and engine sounds on Ocean Blvd. merge to create a stable fundamental drone, it can soothe. By following the suggestion of the teachers, I’m finding a way into letting each sound be itself, without my aesthetic opinion.
It’s been a long time since I read John Cage’s Silence. The effect that the book had on my as a youngster was tied closely to a nascent interest in a sort of improvised Buddhist meditation. As Cage suggested a sound world all over that could be taken in with the interest of a devoted concertgoer, I would open my ears to this world as I was then opening them to the avant-garde music I was being exposed to (mostly via Pacifica Radio). The ‘opening’, then, was a connected experience, and the usual discomfort associated with hearing something that vexed would be replaced by a certain calm detachment and perhaps a curiosity. Hearing agreeable sounds that would normally be ignored or taken for granted could now be a source of calm delight.
Somewhere along the line, I lost this ability. I suspect that it’s about ego, the usual culprit in stealing serenity from any moment. For years I have been trying to hear that ‘music inside my head’ and get it in notation or digital audio. This inward-looking process has yielded some good surprises and a unyielding predilection for sublimity, but always with that judgement attached. Is this good? Does it sound like someone else? Am I becoming too antiquated?
Yoga’s got me back in a good place – listening to the variegated strands of noise and pitch and make up Long Beach’s waterfront. Listening with more interest than I have felt in the concert hall in years.
Music for the End Times
According to a Newsweek study, 40 percent of the people in the US think the world’s going to end in their lifetime. Their descendants are not a consideration, it would seem. The claim is that religious faith that motivates this view; I believe it to be guided more by ignorance and world-fatigue. I am world-fatigued, too, and that does not excuse me from concern over what the world might be like for my nephew’s children in 50 years in the event that the Book of Revelations is nothing more than the obscure rantings of a holy man suffering from a delusional mental condition.
The future of man, the outcome of his impact on this planet and it’s ecosystems, is very much on the mind of composer John Luther Adams, who has stated that composing is an act of faith, but faith in the future of mankind. This could sound all very Age of Aquarius, except that it’s not.
Thomas Mann’s ‘Doktor Faustus‘ develops this question about man’s simultaneous impulse for both creation and nihilism. I found in it’s pages a nostalgia for the notion that humanistic philosophy is the crucible where the future of man outweighs the decadence of the times one lives in. In the novel, the fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn creates a large work titled Apocalypsis cum figuris, intended as a final devastating blow to the An Die Freude (‘Ode to Joy’) in the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Leverkuhn had been a theology student prior to his career as a composer, and so knew of this contradictory impulse in man’s nature (here finely calibrated as a portrait of the ‘German’ soul. Mann wove this anti-humanism into a larger parable for the catastrophe in Central Europe in the first half of the 20th Century, but it’s core argument is applicable to modern life.
When I read that such a large part of the American electorate has such surety about the future of the planet, and that this is tied to an eschatology learnt in churches, it makes me less than optimistic about addressing long-term problems such as climate change and projected shortfalls in Social Security solvency. It seems that it is a sort of myopia, self-induced by laziness, indoctrinated by fundamentalism, uncaring in it’s desire to get easy answers and then consume resources and pollute with aplomb. To be so certain about the future of man therefore is the worst form of selfishness and self-justification. Why make hard ethical choices about consumption of resources and despoiling of the environment if God’s going to blow it all up and start again, anyhow?
This, then, is the crux of the matter facing composers now, at least the composers who write music is intended to be listened to, and not just heard. No one can fault the one who composes to raise a little cash, or raise one’s public profile a bit in order to secure some career aims. That’s part of the life. When one considers, however, how heavy the lifting is for making large works for perhaps one premiere opportunity and how many of these products of toil and Big Ideas now line the obscure corners of academic music libraries, it becomes incumbent on the artist to consider if the work, and mankind itself by extension, indeed has a future. The usual teeth-gnashing about the ‘future of classical music’ and so forth are merely a proxy for the larger question.
Why We Allow the Destruction of Our PlanetIt’s not enough to point out that our political system is saturated with money, including money from coal and oil and nukes and gas. Of course it is. And if we had direct democracy, polls suggest we would be investing in green energy.
via Thehumanist