Serial music you can relax to?

A good majority of people never get any further than André Rieu and the Four Seasons, parla... and we don't usually quote them as examples of good taste here.

Brumas summed it up nicely. I think Schoenberg will always be remembered as one of the 20th century's towering giants - even if his bombastic prediction that his "invention" would ensure the domination of german music for 1000 years didn't come true... luckily.

I was watching a documentary on Piet Mondrian lately, and what struck me was how much time he invested in not his painting work but his hairbrained theories about the future of mankind and the leading role of art in that future. The 30's and 40's were fanatical times, where modernism and fascism went hand in hand and many modern artists had views on society that we wouldn't hesistate to call totalitarian now. See le Corbusier, who wanted to deport people from their native grounds and home them in the perfect, sterile contraptions of his own design. Instant happiness.

This creepy notion of "be modern... or else" never bothered me with Schoenberg's music, though. His works have always a warm glow of humanity, something that indicates that he never had the one-track mind of many of his contemporaries. See Moses und Aron, which is a multilayerd, multi-interpretable work in which not totalitarian convictions are celebrated, but the necessity of compromises.

Schoenberg's status as a major composer is pretty much undisputed in the classical music field. To say that he is was not truly influential would be both ridiculous and just plain wrong. Like it or not, the whole post-war avant garde is directly influenced by Schoenberg's achievements; Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités and subsequent works of total serialism would not have been possible without Schoenbergs earlier forays into serially organised music. 

As for the humanity or lack thereof in his music; you can say a lot about his music, but not that it is cold and calculated. The accusation of being cold and calculated might be true for a lot of post-war works (as well as for a lot of second rate baroque works actually...). It is the prevailing cliché about twelve-tone music, but in the case of the works of the Second Viennese School, it is simply not true. If anything, their music is intensely human and emotional. 

To quote Schoenberg: "I am a twelve tone composer, not a twelve tone composer". 

 

Mondrian’s theories might seem hair brained to us, but there’s no basis to suggest he had any sympathies with fascism (he left Europe in the 1930’s precisely to avoid the Nazis). He was a follower of theosophy (as were Kandinsky and Klee), which is essentially spiritual and had no political dimension.

Nor is it right to say that there was a general link between modernism and fascism. Constructivism, surrealism, Dadaism if anything were strongly inspired by socialism and Marxism and the need to find an alternative to nationalism. The other modernist movements, fauvism and cubism, had no political dimension whatsoever (Matisse lived through two world wars, but you would never guess from anything he painted throughout that time). About the only exception here is futurism and its celebration of war and the machine - and there only really its manifestation in Italy. Russian futurism which it would be more accurate to describe as anarchism than fascism.

 

I think that misrepresents Greenberg. What he was trying to do in Avant Garde and Kitsch was to explain the creation of abstract art at a particular point in history (it was published on the last day before the outbreak of World War II). This is the ‘art-intrinsic’ point you make: that, faced with kitsch forms of culture, painting, as an attempt at survival, concentrated almost exclusively on those qualities of its medium which were specific to it. And he went on to say that Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were complicit in the proliferation of kitsch and therefore, by implication at least, that avant garde art was a reaction against totalitarian ideology.

In any case, I can see very little in the way of totalitarian tendencies in 20th century art (with the exceptions of Italian Futurism and Soviet Constructivism perhaps). What’s totalitarian about Matisse? Or Duchamp? Or Jackson Pollock? It just so happens that the 20th century was a time of world wars, upheavals and revolutions and art responded to it as it would to any other external historical event.

I do agree that Greenberg’s distinction between avant garde (= good) and kitsch (= bad) doesn’t bear much close scrutiny – it’s not much more than Greenberg’s own personal taste (which is why of course he was unable to comprehend pop art where kitsch became the avant garde). But that’s no different as far as I can see with the hierarchy of genres which dominated European art in the 17th and 18th centuries – whereby history painting was superior to portraits which was in turn superior to still life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_genres). In each case, a decision has been made that some types of works are better than other types – and a fairly arbitrary decision at that – from which a set of aesthetic criteria is then developed. Although the hierarchy has no logical basis, I really can’t see that either could be accused as 'artistic fascism'.

 

And your description of the 20th century music/art worlds as ‘infected with a fanatical obsession with progress, novelty and change’ could of course be equally (or better?) applied to the 19th century – it started off with academic and history painting and embraced pointillism and expressionism before ending up with art nouveau and post-impressionism (which itself laid the foundations of abstract art). And, as far as music is concerned, look at the extent to which the symphony developed between Beethoven and Mahler, or how opera evolved from Rossini to Wagner. In both cases, there was a striving towards innovation and the development of existing genres almost beyond recognition. But whether that is an obsession is a matter of opinion.

 

 

Brumas, if you accept the fact that there can be any hierarchy, then, you should accept that, eventually and inevitably, the always "third-rate" stuff is to be marginalized and even "renounced", in one or the other way. It does not mean that artists, composers etc. would stop creating new works necessarily, but they will be treated as a sort of dismissed or disgraced art.

The question is whether the hierarchy is artificial, arbitrary and, thus, unnecessary or a matter of artistic value and greatness of form and, in this way, needful for the proper appreciation of Art.

Parla

Of course people are still making art and music. I'm not claiming that art or music have reached their endpoint. What has reached its ultimate conclusion, pretty much from the cold war onward, is modernism's teleological view of history. We're in what you might call the post-modern era, if it were not such a misused, illdefined term. At any rate, the Big Stories, to borrow a term from Lyotard, are over, both in politics and in art. It's very unlikely that nowadays a composer will publish anything like this: 'It is not deviltry, but only the most ordinary common sense which makes me say that, since the discoveries made by the Viennese, all composition other than twelve-tone is useless.' (Boulez - Schoenberg is dead). In fact, tonality as well as styles from the past are being embraced again by lots of contemporary composers.