You find amazing things on the internet, and often without looking for them. I was at lunch one day recently and heard a bit of classical music playing. I don’t really care for classical music, but I do have a fondness for the piano and, especially, the cello. Rock and jazz are what interst me, but I try to keep an open mind about music. So when I do catch a bit of classical music on the radio that I like, I try to find out what it is and see if I might like to hear some more of it. Such was the case with a snippet of very slow, very beautiful piano music I heard on a local NPR station. Some internet investigation revealed that it was the “Sarabande” from Debussy’s Suite Pour le Piano (1901) as played by Aldo Ciccolini.
It took some digging, but I found some decent mp3s of it in this thread as performed by amature pianist Erich Huang Here are the direct links:
While I was slogging through the net, discovering these gems, I also happened across a series of university lectures on European music by John Ronsheim, put together by his former students. A complete set of his lectures from a class called “The Contemporary Era” is available there, the content itself residing at archive.org.
I previewed the first lecture in the series, and enjoyed what I heard. But there was something about it that made my head hurt. I finally decided it was Ronsheim’s very modernist notion of art and what it means to be an artist. For him, tonality is dead. Composing such is pointless–a task worthy of pity, if not loathing. Artists are people interested in creating what hasn’t happened yet, in, as the phrase goes, “making it new.” Perhaps that’s a necessary assumption; certainly a lot of good art has come from it (bad theories often fuel good art. See Mondrian for but one example). But hearing Ronsheim lecture makes it clear in my own head that my own notions of art and artists are more postmodern than I would have assumed. That is to say, I see the entire field of art as a wide palette of stylistic choices. And it’s often the juxtaposition or odd combination of such that I enjoy.
I guess, when you get right down to it, I don’t really believe in progress in the arts. You can be an aficionado of Gregorian chant and hard bop, if you like, and of both simultaneously. The creation of atonal music doesn’t, for me, cancel out or render irrelevant the joy of the tonal music that came before it or of creating new works in an old style. So, rather than progress, you have, on my view (probably influenced greatly by Richard Rorty, though not on this specific subject) not progress but increasing variety–something a die hard modernist would probably dismiss as decadence, but that I see as the only real progress.