Friday, March 18, 2005
Another Brick in the Wall
Work has a disappointing tendency to interfere with my ability to put together a long post in a short period. The nerve! :) Anyway -- Rodney has a good response David's and my recent posts, in which he raises a number of good points. I'll do my best to respond.
1. "I don't understand the idea that academia is either 'a large receptive audience' or 'a marketing vehicle.' Maybe somebody can explain that to me." Gladly. My contention is this: Much of the Downtown music (and I'm thinking of Minimalism especially) is, to my ear, more closely aesthetically aligned with popular music, so it's more accessible to a general audience. My argument is not that academia itself is a "large receptive audience" but rather that it's the place where most people get their first exposure to 20th century music. If music appreciation classes and music history classes did a better job of representing this music to the students (a complex problem in itself), I hypothesize that more students would have their interest grabbed. In fact, I sometimes wonder if, say, Philip Glass has the potential to be more relevant to students than Beethoven has. Assuming that my model is correct (and it is untested, so I could be proven wrong) academia can serve as a tool for marketing downtown music to a general audience. (I would also say that academia could do a better job of marketing uptown music to a general audience, and that would be a worthwhile endeavor as well.)
2. I wouldn't say that the wall is "evil." I think it gets in the way of some potentially valuable things. But at the same time, I recognize that the building of walls often goes hand-in-hand with aesthetic revolutions -- serialism and minimalism have both, at various times, adopted a "screw you guys I'm going home" attitude, and I suspect that attitude was important to the development of a strong, independent community. Eventually, however, those same defense mechanisms that were beneficial at first start to get in the way. And the demonization of the uptowners by the downtowners is no more helpful than the demonization of the downtowners by the uptowners -- and I know I've been guilty of it myself. And to offer one telling anecdote, apparently at the first ever Bang-on-a-Can, Babbitt and Reich each left the hall before the other's piece, which was frankly childish on both of their parts.
3. What we really need is some sort of scientific measurements, since all that most of us can muster is anecdotal evidence. And of course, the "confirmation bias" being what it is, we all see the evidence that supports our own claims. And there's nothing worse than a composer complaining that his/her _own_ work hasn't gotten the recognition it deserves -- I try to be careful never to make that claim. But the core of this discussion is the contention that Academia either is or is not friendly to the downtown aesthetic, so here's my own anecdotal experience:
The most consistent message I've gotten in my academic career is "you're a talented kid, too bad you're wasting your talents." If the message were "you are a poor composer" that would be fine -- sad for me, but fine -- but the message is "you can't expect to be taken seriously if you write in that style." I have spent my whole academic career feeling like a stylistic outcast and like if I just caved in and wrote some sort of post-serial atonal music I would get a lot more respect.
4. There's been some discussion of "conspiracy" and I want to make clear that I am in no way claiming conspiracy. (My understanding is that once upon a time there was a conspiracy, but I haven't seen evidence of its continued existence.) But, as we can see in any number of other places in modern life, there need be no conspiracy for bias and exclusion to occur. And it's precisely because there IS NO conspiracy that it's difficult to prove discrimination.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:03 PM
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