I was countering what I perceived as another example of a common fallacy, that one's deeply personal responses have any validity beyond one's own person. That is, my personal responses are not valid for anyone but myself. If my personal responses are based on experience rather than hearsay or popular opinion, the experience might be said to have some weight, but you were referring to a situation in which hearsay and popular opinion have ruled for far too long.
In that situation, how easy is it to have such a thing as "actual exposure to the art"? One brings one's biasses and prejudices into the experience, and those biasses and prejudices affect how the experience will go. I was extremely lucky in growing up almost completely isolated from anyone else who liked "classical music," so I could experience the things themselves with very little overlay from outside. There were program notes on the backs of the lps I acquired, of course, but I learned very early that those notes corresponded very little with what I was hearing, and I gave up reading them almost entirely. When I first started listening to music of the twentieth century, I knew nothing of the standard canards about it that litter discussion boards on line. They were there, lurking in the program notes I had learned to eschew and in the opinions of other classical fans. I came to know of them almost instantly after my first exposure to twentieth century music, but even almost instantly was too late. I was well and truly hooked and have remained so for almost forty years--forty very lovely and delightful years listening to very lovely and delightful music, sullied only by the incessant carpings of (some of) those around me who were convinced that the musics I found so easy to like were unlistenable in the extreme, were the cause of audiences abandoning concert halls, were the literal death of good music--and by the persistent perception that my simply liking this "horrible crap" was a personal insult to (and even a personal attack of) those who disliked it.
Heigh ho.
The music remains, however, and it's still loads of fun.
https://vimeo.com/202616984
Thanks for this. I admit I was being a bit contrarian... obviously my hope was that dropping an Op-Ed from a leading newspaper that essentially states "Classical Music is dead and kinda sucks, discuss" onto a classical music discussion board would promote some fiery and interesting discussion -- happy to see it worked
You make some very good points about the difficulties in separating one's honest reaction to a piece of art from all of the received opinion and impressions that inevitably color one's perspective. I struggle with that myself -- if a certain modern work leaves me cold, how much of that reaction is just my personal taste or preference (one can't love everything), and how much of that is driven by the discomfort of the music not meeting my preconceived notions of what music ought to sound like.
I don't want to overstate my own biases -- I do love some music that technically goes into the 20th century -- I greatly admire Prokofiev and Mahler, and enjoy quite a bit of Shostokovich (just getting into his string quartets) and Stravinsky. I like some of the Ligeti I've heard, though I don't claim to understand it. But I've tried Berg and Schoenberg with no success. It's a journey.
What I struggle with in this article is this... I agree that the public representation of classical music and opera through performances and recordings needs to evolve. We do need to shift the balance of attention back towards music composed in the last hundred years; and it seems obvious that if we don't do this, we risk the music becoming an antiquarian activity rather than a vibrant art form. But at the same time... for me, if I'm honest, given a choice between tickets to see a new 21st century opera or Don Giovanni, I'm picking Mozart. My choice might be different if I lived in a big city like New York and had the money and opportunity to see a live performance every weekend, but I don't. It's a relatively rare and special occasion for me, and so I would go with the comfort of the known quantity.
I realize that this makes me part of the problem, but at the same time I don't think I'm at all unusual... if anything I'm far more knowledgeable (dim though I am) and think more deeply about music than the average person, simply due to spending some of my time at a forum like this. If I'm this way, how much stronger are the barriers against modern music in the wider population?
So how does the trend get reversed? Can promoting more modern music help all of it to thrive in the modern marketplace? If so, how? Or are we stuck listening to dead Austrian guys in powdered wigs* forever?
* Please don't hit me, Gurn!
