EPTMusic and the Art of Form - Page 3
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phosphorylation
United States2935 Posts
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jon arbuckle
Canada443 Posts
On December 19 2010 15:07 Chef wrote: I think I've tried to respond to the modernist comment like six times now and deleted it every time. There really isn't a good way to argue about art. All I can say is that modernism/post-modernism is one of the most important movements in art to ever take place. It's been incredibly liberating and allowed creators to invoke feelings which in the past would have been considered out of the realm of art. Imagine not being able to describe the gritty details of war, imagine where we'd be if war poets had never done that. That was art before modernism. Romantic poems about failed love and clouds and personal regrets. And before the romanticists, political poems that always tried to teach a lesson and never talked about the poet's feelings. Shifts in music have been similar. One of the things modernism has really done for art is being able to express psychological disorders like PTSD and schizophrenia... If everything were nice and pleasing and obeyed the rules, it'd be really difficult to express that kind of stuff. But by being allowed to make jumps and sharp, unpleasant sounds, you can get a sense of stuff like that so much better. Broadly speaking, modernism may be the most cold, unfeeling art movement. Its innovations are formal more than anything - e.g., twelve-tone composition, T.S. Eliot's 'object correlative', Dadaist self-consciousness, Cubism's many perspectives, the Crystal Goblet and grids and gestalt theory in de Stijl, all drawing upon and eviscerating the higher artistic subjects of the past - and mainly addressed, responded to, and concerned itself with 'high' art. The appropriation of modernist forms and the collapsing of high into low, further complicating the issue through the introduction of new perspectives, is what typifies postmodernism. What distinguishes modernism from postmodernism and both from (I guess) not-modern (and whether or not they're finite terms, whether modernism or postmodernism are states of mind) is open for debate. Like most, I will likely not attempt to make that distinction wholesale. I will note that the hierarchy presumed upon for 'classical' forms of music that was maintained by Cage, Stockhausen, or Schoenberg was nearly destroyed by postmodernism in music, which to me takes hold with the Beatles, who were often collapsing Stockhausen, skiffle, and Phil Spector together, sometimes in the same song, and yet could not read sheet music. I think this is what bothers other people about the notion of 'postmodern' music? That it's somehow cheapened the art? Not unlike the change in purified imperative to form and scholarship some glorify in the evolution from romantic poetry (which is definitely not all about "failed love and clouds and personal regrets," man), frothing in an aggressive boil-over in modernist poetry (e.g. Ezra Pound's Cantos), and then evaporating outright in postmodern poetry, which some consider lazy or obscure or asinine or all in the above. This perceived cheapening or deadening of the art leads some (I guess?) to deem it artless and then vie for the past (which 'postmodern' 'Continental' philosophy has some opinions about, lemme tell you). I don't particularly agree with this position, but I like Frank O'Hara more than Samuel Taylor Coleridge (and I like Samuel Taylor Coleridge more than Ginsberg), just the same way that I would rather listen to disco than Mozart. Though Mozart's got some good tracks, man. I just can't dance to him. | ||
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