How Government Destroyed Serious Music
R.J. Stove, who just completed a one-volume survey of the history of classical music, offers some intriguing observations of how government destroyed serious music:
Orwellian bureaucrats, answerable to no one, determined the nature of such new music as would gain official sanction. This was no mere charity for occasional deserving cases, such as the Danish and Finnish governments' pensions for, respectively, [Carl] Nielsen and Sibelius. This was the establishment of veritable states within states. For the first time in Western history outside Axis dictatorships, music would be not something that a private potentate or a church wanted, nor something for which customers had exhibited the faintest enthusiasm, but rather, something that dragooned audiences would get given, good and hard.
Comments (4)
Ohhh Henry
My children are witnessing something very similar right now. Being acting and singing enthusiasts, they persuaded us to sign them up for a musical-theatre class at the local community centre. Visions of singing and dancing in a fun, exciting show evaporated on the first day. Turns out the class is subsidized by the city government, and the bureaucrats laid down some rather onerous restrictions - it must be "locally" written material, and by the way, there is no such material available, and the teachers have never put on a musical before, can't play or read music, and would you children like to write it and arrange and play all the music yourselves? Oh and the teachers' contracts apparently don't require their continuous attendance, so every couple of weeks they get a different teacher. That's the singing and dancing class. The "serious" theatre class got assigned a play that is very weird and obscure, something by a local author that no one ever heard of before, and whose language and plot is utterly unintelligible. You should have seen the glum looks on the kids' faces when they told me about this.
The dynamic at work is this: government bureaucrats cultivate obscure, unpopular art and virtually no one will watch it, listen to it or buy it. Does that cause the entire arts-subsidy racket to be exposed and abolished in a blaze of righteous indignation? Noooooo!!! To the bureaucratic mind (conveniently), the lack of a paying audience makes the music even more precious and rarefied, and deserving of even greater nurturing by government.
Published: January 26, 2008 10:52 PM
David Bratton
I think the demise of classical music happened for the same reason art declined. In the late 19th century there was a philosophical debate over the meaning of art. Was the standard of value defining art to be beauty or was it to be novelty? Unfortunately novelty won out over beauty. I believe the reason novelty became the standard has more to do with the needs of the new commercial art sector than with government. It's difficult to create beauty on a schedule according to the needs of a business - beauty that everyone will recognize as such that is. It's much easier to generate novelty because when you're not feeling creative you can always be shocking - everyone knows what society's taboos are are at any given point in time. That's why it was considered high art when Duchamp nailed a urinal to the wall of the Guggenheim for example.
I think music evolved for similar reasons. When the creative process moved into the modern studio where money and technology are no objects but time is always of the essence, something like modern music was to be expected. I don't have the revulsion towards modern music that I have towards modern art, but one cannot help but notice the constant drive for novelty and the often annoying fetish for shock.
BTW there is an excellent web site dedicated to rejuvenating pre-modern art at http://www.artrenewal.org .
Published: January 27, 2008 12:49 PM
Byzantine
The comments at Taki's site are very good. As one pointed out, high culture has always enjoyed government largesse, but the difference now is that instead of monarchs and aristocrats, it's now the province of secular democrats.
Published: January 28, 2008 8:30 AM
Tom Hurst
It is curious how the patronage of Mozart created wonderful, enjoyable music, while the late-20th century government patronages - Canada and Scandinavia come to mind in particular - have primarily produced what most of us would consider un-listenable crap. I was a classical music dj in the 1980's, and I remember getting boxes and boxes of free government-sponsored junk LP's from around the world. Of course, they were rarely, if ever, played on the air because I was acting as a sort of quality control.
And, as one would expect, the intended consequence of Canada's requirement that a certain percentage of their radio broadcasts consist of local artists - to encourage the creation of great Canadian music - had the opposite effect in creating a bunch of hack musicians that make Canadian music laughable. Will people never learn that the free market will necessarily make the "best" decisions, even in the realm of art?
Published: January 29, 2008 8:50 PM