(Within my small circle, I'm somewhat notorious for my unaccepting attitude toward, and my reluctance to spend serious time investigating, what's been called New Music. The following is on the order of a brief apologia of sorts for my admittedly intellectually lazy and uninquisitive stance on the matter.)
"All art aspires to the condition of music," wrote critic and essayist Walter Pater, seeing, in an epiphanic moment, to the living core of the nature of all genuine art. That trenchant aphorism refers to music's unique ability among all the arts to address directly the human center of feeling sans any participation by, or recourse to, the human intellectual apparatus. In fact, at its best, music has the uncanny capacity to paralyze intellect; to force, for the time, an automatic suspension of rational thought.
It's precisely that unique ability and uncanny capacity that's so singularly lacking in so much of classical ("serious" or "art") music written by composers who first began writing after about 1940 or so. Of that so-called New Music of which I've direct experience, almost all of it not recognized immediately as blatantly and tiresomely derivative tripe requires at some level, and to greater or lesser degree, the active participation of the intellect in order to appreciate or, in some cases, even begin to comprehend. That, to my way of thinking, is the very definition of non-music — more, and much worse, a veritable perverse contradiction of just what it means to be music; in short, anti-music, much of it concerned with sound and process per se rather than with purely musical ideas and their development, and much of that traceable to the influence of the charlatan John Cage.*
Which is not to say such can't (or shouldn't) be enjoyed, even relished, at some other level. But at the level of music — that condition to which all art aspires — it fails utterly and abjectly. And that's principally why, not much time left me for music listening as the human span goes, I've little or no time for it. There's simply too much music — genuine music — I've either not yet experienced, or not experienced or understood to the deepest level of which I'm capable, to spend valuable time sussing out the ostensible music value of such presumptive music which, on initial hearing, I find to be no music at all. And so I leave the experiencing of, and involvement with, such to those who've more of a taste than I for quasi-music.
Is all this the musical equivalent of what it means to be a Luddite, or, worse, a woodenheaded philistine? Perhaps, and perhaps such an attitude and stance are responsible for my missing out on a good thing(s). But that sort of thinking the way to madness leads, and I'm quite far enough along that road already, thank you, to tempt matters further.
* A charlatan as a composer. As a philosopher, a different argument could be made.
On The Road To Prohibition
