Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
It's a strange issue that makes bedfellows of Terry Teachout and myself
on the one side, and A.C. Douglas and David Byrne on the other. That unpleasant
word-
Nothing here really changes anything I said in my
own original post on the matter earlier this week. There seems to be
general agreement that Byrne's argument was poorly considered in his
choice of Die Soldaten as the specific target of his dismay, but
one or two things in Kyle's comments section should be addressed. Kyle
mentions there that "[My agreement with Byrne] hinges on one assertion
that I hope to god we can all agree with: Not every composer who writes
thorny, complex, difficult-to-understand music is a genius." Sure; so long
as we can also say that not every composer who writes accessible and
easy-
Byrne does, however, question the motives of composers of this thorny, complex, etc. music:
There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmermann, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least? Why would anyone do that?
The only response to that is that composers (or playwrights or painters
for that matter) wouldn't do any of those things. This is an oddly
anti-
However valid Byrne's and Gann's charges of self-
All that said, in Queenan's and Byrne's original writings, something still irked me. Where had I heard this condemnation of artist, critic and audience before? Where in the recent past had I heard much of this same rhetoric? And then it struck me. The recent Bill Henson controversy also gave rise to much of the same kind of hostile vocabulary, political and cultural recidivism, and puritanical rhetoric; so much for the assumed cultural and inclusive progressivism of the Western left. Henson's motives in creating his work were questioned; artists themselves, as an elitist cabal, were charged with a deliberate attack on the nation's morals in defending Henson's work (as if two or more artists could be gathered as a collective to do anything in which they all agreed; the music and theatre blogospheres are evidence enough against that); the audiences for this work were characterised as potential paedophiles themselves. The situations are of course not at all identical, but there's some similarity; Australia's children needed to be defended from the depredations of photographers like Henson, and David Byrne's and Joe Queenan's ears (as well as the ears of others) needed to be defended from the subversive, "ugly" sounds that contemporary composers produce.
The Australian Prime Minister's office is a different, more chilling
bully pulpit than the pages of the Guardian or the entries on a
popular art-
On Monday, David Ian Rabey added to the comments section of my
original post a carefully-
The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace
I agree with Kyle again when he writes, "There are no easy lines to draw here, which I think is part of the value of art, that it plunges us into ambiguity; but there are some important principles, which perhaps it will take another blog entry to puzzle out." So let's not draw easy lines, and I hate to say this, but I think it might take more than one more blog entry to puzzle out. The question is far more important than that.
Posted at 9.24 am in /Music
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