Sounds & Fury

For The Record

George Hunka of Superfluities Redux has posted a separate addendum to his post on new music on which original post we commented here, and Kyle Gann of PostClassic has posted a lengthy expansion of his previous thoughts on the same matter here.

All these posts addressed the problem of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" new music where audiences are concerned (Mr. Gann's piece focused on complexity in music the tacit assumption being that in music complexity and difficult to understand have always a hand in glove relationship each to the other which is not always the case by any means and rather blurs the argument). But to our way of thinking, that perceived problem is misidentified the misidentification due entirely a misunderstanding where music is concerned.

We responded to Mr. Hunka's addendum in a comment in that addendum's comments section which comment we'd like to make a part of the public record of Sounds & Fury. Accordingly, a reprint of that comment follows instanter.

It's almost oxymoronic to speak of "difficult" or "difficult to understand" music [where audiences are concerned] unless one is using the terms as euphemisms for the repulsive. The concept of difficult plays no part in the reception of genuine music by a listener. It's a fundamental characteristic of all genuine music — underline, all; there are no exceptions — that it resonates with or makes its impact on listeners, positive or negative, sans any participation by the intellect the determiner of difficult and not difficult, and the effect is immediate. Genuine music in fact bypasses intellect altogether by its very nature, and engaging the intellect to receive it actually requires an act of will. That's almost a definition of genuine music. Any music that doesn't act in that way has no right to the title. Since you mention Wagner (incorrectly in your stated context, BTW; that honor goes rather to Liszt from whom Wagner filched much if not most of his "atonality" [Mr. Hunka had written that atonality "began with Wagner and Debussy, not Schoenberg and the Viennese School"]), the huge majority of the first audiences for, say, Wagner's Tristan (as opposed to professionals with axes to grind) understood little or nothing about its "difficult" music, but that didn't prevent them being emotionally captivated and overwhelmed by it.

I could do a full-length treatise on this thesis, and as soon as I can locate someone willing to pay me cold, hard cash up-front for my trouble, I will.

ACD

How To Write A Classical Music Review

So, we think we heard you saying you don't know what all the recent fuss over almost-centenarian composer Elliott Carter is all about — beyond his being some five months shy of his 100th birthday and still active as a composer, that is. We confess that knowing as little of his work as we do, we didn't either — until we read this:

The first piece was one of those recent efforts, the 2003 fanfare Call, in a bright titular wake-up by horn player Michael Winter and trumpeters Brynn Rector and Christopher Coletti. It was a reminder right off the bat of Carter’s ability to turn typically "Carteresque" gestures to varied ends with context and orchestration; here the familiar trope of busy trills, fluttertonguing, and staccato mutterings coalescing into homophonic chords was like a sudden collective memory, a centripetal conversation that comes around to a shared anecdote.

Conductor Leo McFall led a performance of the Asko Concerto (2000) marked by beautifully saturated color. It’s one of a handful of recent Carter works that take the form of mini-orchestra concerti, tutti perorations alternating with often unlikely duos, trios, etc. The instrumental combinations are particularly arresting in this piece: clarinet and double bass harmonics with marimba/harp/piano sparks, cello with bass clarinet, trombone, and pizzicato strings, &c. The performance showed the expressive possibilities that have opened up for Carter’s music as the steady advance of technical proficiency has caught up with his vocabulary: that cello solo, for example (played by Marie-Michel Beauparlant), came off as positively Brahmsian. The piece also showed, in a particularly clear way, the complex relationship between rhythm and pulse and meter in Carter’s music. There was much of his penchant for fast music in slow tempi and slow music in fast tempi, but the fairly constant underlying pulse, even when it was more visible than heard, gave a sense of how much more than just a means of coordination meter is for Carter; it’s the tie that binds, the underlying connection between the instrumental individuals, linking them in common cause no matter how fractious the argument.

In those two grafs, one can almost — almost — hear the music, one can, and all by themselves those grafs are hint enough to make that recent fuss seem not the least bit unreasonable.

But there's more. Lots more, which you can read in two parts here and here.

There will surely be other reviews of these two concerts in the MSM, but we can assure you, with little possibility of our being in error, that nowhere will you read reviews more richly telling — or more poetic — than these two.

What's that? Who wrote them?

Don't waste time asking unnecessary questions. Click over and read them. That's what the bloody links are for, you silly person.

Inferiority Or Outrage?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

Playwright, critic, and blogger George Hunka of Superfluities Redux adds his voice to the growing chorus censuring The Guardian's Joe Queenan for what he had to say about "modern" or new music, and for how he went about saying it.

Once all [the] poor rhetorical flourishes are chipped away, one is left with a sense that what drives all this is the emergence of an inferiority complex — that Queenan just doesn't "get it." Setting aside for the moment the assumption that art is something that one has to "get," whatever that means, one doesn't need to get past more than an introductory course in Freud to recognise that Queenan's attack on this music is an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior.

Hmmm.

Well, even though we're in sympathy with much of what Mr. Queenan had to say in his piece, we must concede he unquestionably painted with a brush broad enough to paint Fifth Avenue without ever once having to lift the bristles from the pavement.

But is Mr. Queenan's attack really "an act of aggression towards that which makes him feel inferior," or is it rather an expression of his sense of outrage at our postmodern art-is-whatever-the-artist-says-is-art Zeitgeist wherein snake oil pimped by charlatans is being bought wholesale and with enthusiasm by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better — most especially by those best equipped by native intelligence and refined education and sensibilities to know better?

We suspect the latter is more the case than the former.

But, then, perhaps that's just us.

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Update (7:17 PM Eastern on 24 Jul): For more on this, see this post.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

New ears for new music! The new ears were necessary to appreciate the new music made by Serge Prokofiev.... As a composer, he is cerebral... The lyric themes are generally insipid.... The [Piano] Sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical development. The finale of the work evoked visions of a charge of mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic plateau.... Prokofiev uses, like Arnold Schoenberg, the entire modern harmonies. The House Of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage — above all, rage — disgust, despair, mockery, and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods.

—Richard Aldrich, The New York Times, 21 November 1918

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

The Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune has pretty sonority, but one does not find in it the least musical idea, properly speaking; it resembles a piece of music as the palette used by an artist in his work resembles a picture. Debussy did not create a style; he cultivated an absence of style, logic, and common sense.

—Camille Saint-Saëns in a letter to Maurice Emmanuel, 4 August 1920

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

Midgette On Slatkin

In a remarkably blunt but fair-minded piece for The Washington Post, the Post's newly appointed classical music critic, Anne Midgette, interviews and looks back over the Washington career of the National Symphony Orchestra's departing music director, Leonard Slatkin.

[Slatkin] skitters across topics [in the interview], anticipating the criticism that may be lurking behind every question, mentioning it, steering away from it, then returning to it to show that he is not steering away from it, until one is left with the impression that outside criticism, despite his protests to the contrary, matters to him very much indeed.

The general impression is that conducting is a difficult métier for a man who describes himself as having been chronically shy in his youth. The particular impression, as Slatkin talks about his 12-year tenure at the head of the National Symphony Orchestra (which concludes with a gala concert tonight), is of encountering someone in the final throes of a failing marriage, going over ground that has been trodden many times before, prodding the scars of old wounds that still have a tired ache.

"It was probably time to go," he says.

"I know inside of me," he adds, "that I could have been better."

[...]

[Slatkin] generally gives the impression of fluency rather than profundity [in his music-making], and the orchestra sometimes seems not to care. He is effective in his signature American pieces because he is best at activity and complexity: Del Tredici, Christopher Rouse. But he is not someone you turn to for profound meditation. His modus operandi is to do a lot, quickly.

[...]

He excels on paper. He is great at coming up with unusual ideas, talking to the audience, sitting in on planning meetings and looking at Web sites in Detroit [where Slatkin will assume the post of music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra this fall], glad-handing patrons at fundraisers in St. Louis [where Slatkin was music director of the St. Louis Symphony]. In fact, he is outstanding at all the parts of the music director's job that aren't about making music.

RTWT here.

Refreshing News

In a post of 10 May of this year, we had, in part, this to say concerning the work of classical music reviewer and journalist, Anne Midgette:

We've often in the past come down fairly hard on classical music reviewer and journalist Anne Midgette (most famously — or as famously as anything written on this blog can be considered famous — here), but since her move from The New York Times to The Washington Post in January of this year to take the place of the Post's on-leave Pulitzer Prize winning chief classical music critic, Tim Page, and where her official designation is, "interim chief classical music critic," Miss Midgette has been turning out reviews and commentary that are of consistently high quality and well worth one's time reading.

Apparently, The Washington Post agrees.

Amid the current trend to the contrary among newspapers, The Washington Post last week hired a permanent staff music critic to succeed Tim Page. Anne Midgette, who has been in the job on an interim basis since January, when Page took a leave of absence, has been hired officially as the Post’s classical music critic.

“In light of all the lay-offs around the country, they’re really bucking the trend in committing to serious arts journalism,” said a delighted Midgette in a brief telephone conversation.

The newspaper recently completed a round of voluntary buy-outs (of which Page availed himself, to start an arts journalism program on the west coast), offering early-retirement packages to some 200 employees; half of them accepted, having been asked to make their decision by May 15. That same day, the staff classical music critic job was posted.

“It’s fantastic that, after a round of buyouts, the music critic was one of the first people they hired,” said Midgette.

RTWT here.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, [Joseph Joachim] Raff is a giant, not to speak of [Anton Grigorevich] Rubenstein, who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.

—Diary entry by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 9 October 1886.

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Oh Yeah? Sez You.

There's no gainsaying another's personal response to a work of art no matter how benighted one may feel it to be. One can simply shake one's head, shrug one's shoulders, and move on.

Or write a blog post about it.

Blogger and Orange County Register classical music critic Tim Mangan of The Arts Blog has this to say about Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

If I could grab hold of a piece of music and give it a life-ending chuck, I’d choose Carmina Burana. Why? Because its music is longwinded and repetitive, its mood is maudlin and manipulative, its view of life is (overly) sentimental and tragic. The Nazis loved it, too.

Oh yeah? Sez you. We say (and say in more detail here):

[We] confess to having an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with Orff's Carmina Burana. Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required.

[...]

One critic would have it that Carmina is "toxic" music that will make Nazis of all who succumb to its primitive charms. A more idiot notion can hardly be imagined, and no more attention should be paid it than should be paid the notion that one who is not master of his domain, to borrow the Seinfeldian locution, will go blind as consequence. And so what if Orff himself was a Nazi as has been alleged. If true, that's Orff's reputation's problem, not [ours] or yours — or Carmina's.

We're tempted to say more, but, then, what more can one say in response to the opinion of a professional classical music critic who, in respect of his above quoted comments on Carmina, thinks Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares some of those same qualities, but escapes the same censure because "the music is way better"?

Not much.

Of Interest To Classical Music Newbies

If you're a classical music newbie looking for a blog addressed specifically to your needs and concerns for introductory information on the field, then you should look in on The Horn, a newly opened blog written by former French horn player Robert Berger. Mr. Berger's passionate devotion to classical music, and to introducing classical music to those who've had limited or no experience of it, is evidenced in all his posts, and they make informative and engaging reading.

So, for all you classical music newbies out there, do stop over and give Mr. Berger's new blog a read.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I confess freely that I could never get any enjoyment out of [this composer's] last works. Yes, I must include among them even the much admired [last] symphony, the fourth movement of which seems to me so ugly, in such bad taste, and ... so cheap that I cannot even now understand how ... [the composer] could write it down. I find in it another corroboration of what I had noticed already in Vienna, that [this composer] was deficient in esthetic imagery and lacked the sense of beauty.

—Composer and conductor Louis (Ludwig) Spohr in Selbstbiographie (1861) on Beethoven and the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

(Adapted from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Rich Is Rare

A rare creature it is today within the professional classical music critical fraternity who can do well-informed snark with eloquence and style in a classical music or opera review, and possesses the courage to commit it to print.

Case in point:

MAGDA DOES JOAN: La Rondine is with us again, Puccini’s elegant snore, with Marta Domingo’s tinkerings in place to confuse what is already inadequate in the dramatic resolution and with Michael Scott’s Coney Island Merry-Go-Round of an Act-Two stage set to cheapen and vulgarize even further what is already wrong-headed and simply clumsy in Signora Domingo’s "conception and direction." Speculations, however cynical, as to why impresario Plácido tosses this directorial bone to his wife from time to time don’t work this time, since Plácido is also in town, conducting the last few performances of Tosca.

Marta’s most blatant tinkering is to allow her heroine — mere moments after her Ruggero, having discovered the seedy details of her past, throws a hissy fit of the sort that any exuberant loverboy might throw from time to time and recover from an hour later — to hook onto a passing tsunami and disappear, Joan Crawford style, into the billowing wave. The dramatic timing is completely wrong; a suicide scene in any other Puccini opera — Madama Butterfly for one — takes up a fair proportion of the act; this one goes wham-o, with music Marta has dug up from somewhere. Granted, the opera’s ending as composed (and laboriously revised) by Puccini is hardly thrilling: the heroine Magda bathed in melancholy resignation; at least the timing is right. Marta Domingo’s evasive justification for the suicide, as printed in the program, is so much baloney. And that placid expanse of ocean in Michael Scott’s set design looks as capable of churning up a tsunami as my backyard fishpond.

We rest our case.

RTWT here.

Worldwide Compendium

We've just been made aware of what turns out to be a valuable online classical music resource. It's a new website called Classical DJ, and the name is most apt. Classical DJ is a worldwide compendium of online commercial (broadcast) classical music radio stations neatly organized and hyperlinked for your convenience. We've added Classical DJ to our exclusive listing of Culture Sites on our left-hand sidebar.

(Note to those contemplating eMailing us to announce the existence of a new website or blog and requesting a link on Sounds & Fury in exchange for a link to S&F on the new website or blog.

Although we're most gratified when linked to by others, we don't engage in link trading on S&F. We almost dumped the eMail that came to us announcing the above website as it suggested such a link exchange. If you have a new website or blog that you think would be of interest or use to S&F's readers, by all means let us know about it. If we think the website or blog worthy of a listing on S&F, we'll list it. If not, not, regardless of whether you post a link to S&F on your website or blog or not. We trust we make ourselves clear.)

Alan Rich's New Blog, So I've Heard, Is Now Online

The new blog of venerable classical music critic Alan Rich, So I've Heard, is now online and logging reports direct from the Ojai Festival. Time for everyone to update their blogrolls, then click over to So I've Heard to read what Mr. Rich has written, and to welcome him to the classical music blogosphere.

Heads, We Win; Tails, You Lose — Or: Pimps 1, Artists 0

When it was announced a couple weeks ago that Universal Music Group, owner of the top classical labels Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, was forming a new division called Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Production — a division designed to provide management services for prominent classical musicians, and produce recordings and live events for them, the division to be headed by classical superstar manager Jeffrey D. Vanderveen (Anna Netrebko is one of his clients), formerly of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of artist management, IMG Artists — it sounded to us like a natural and a good deal all round for everyone.

How thoroughly silly — and purblind — of us. How we could have missed seeing this huge, devouring monster lurking beneath the surface of that cozy little arrangement is simply beyond our comprehension.

A manager has moved from one agency to another. So what? "It happens all the time," says Barrett Wissman, the chairman and owner of IMGA , and Mr. Vanderveen's former boss. "But here much more is at stake. The suit [instituted by IMGA against Mr. Vanderveen and the new Universal group] is about huge conflicts of interest. Who will protect the artist? No one is talking about that. And many of the artists don't even see what's coming."

Mr. Wissman conjures up scenarios of junior Artur Rubinsteins and Renata Tebaldis suckered into indentured servitude for the sake of a coveted recording contract with a major label. You want to sing Schubert in Salzburg? Too bad, this is business. It's show tunes at the Garden for you. For an analogy, think back to Hollywood in the days of the almighty studios, when the moguls owned stars virtually body and soul.

[...]

The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, wants an ally who answers only to him. "The recording company has to think commercially," he says. "That's the nature of their enterprise. As an artist, I need room to think completely differently, to think about which projects are artistically interesting and only that, and then to see if we can sell them."

The disagreements are never-ending, and recording executives are not the only ones who may think an artist's ideas too esoteric. Lately, Mr. Andsnes had to battle presenters in Paris who thought Debussy piano pieces too recherché for the French. How much harder it would have been had his manager — who is paid to represent his point of view — been a paid operative of his record label as well, working hand in glove with the impresario. Here we touch the crux of the matter: Under such circumstances, manager and impresario would be united in the common interest of maximizing profits for themselves rather than for the artist. And the artist's creative agenda would have no true defender at all.

During intermission at the Metropolitan Opera, a competitor of Mr. Wissman's explained some of the basics, on condition of anonymity. "Say I manage Diana Damrau," he said, referring to the diva of the evening. "As her manager, my interest is to maximize her fee, and thus my commission. But if I'm presenting her and selling tickets, my interest is to reduce her fee to zero or even to get her to pay me for the privilege of singing, and thus to maximize my take at the box office."

IOW, heads, we win; tails, you lose — or: Pimps 1, Artists 0.

RTWT here.

A Little Simplistic, But Not Far Wrong

T

im Mangan, writing for The Arts Blog of the Orange County Register (we do wish he'd set up his own personal blog), has several hundred choice words to say about how the average classical music listener limits both his own musical horizons as well as those of classical music concert programming. Writes Mr. Mangan:

The average classical music listener – that is, the majority of those who attend concerts and opera performances and listen to the radio – is a simple soul. Looking into it, one finds that he prizes melody above all else. But not just any melody. The melodies of Hindemith, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, Lutoslawski, Glass or Adams, to name a few, will not do at all, and the average listener, in so far as he is able to define what a melody is, would not recognize these composers' efforts as such. No, by melody, the average listener means something narrower in scope, a tune, really, a song.

His definition of melody, though he doesn’t realize it, also includes a type of phrasing, regular and foursquare, and a question-and-answer design to the harmony. It’s this whole melody package that he enjoys most, which limits his aesthetic scope to the music from roughly 1750-1900. Beyond that he can find himself in rough waters.

RTWT here.

And More Distressing News

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May. See below.]

The appalling beat goes on. The latest to join the march is The Washington Post. Reports the Washingtonian:

The [Washington] Post collected six Pulitzer prizes for 2007, but it could lose as many as 12 Pulitzer Prize winners in the current round of buyouts.

[...]

Tim Page, who previously won for his classical-music criticism, is taking the deal and planning to teach.

Not altogether unexpected, but distressing nevertheless.

If true (no notice or confirmation from The Washington Post yet), Mr. Page's eloquent and authoritative voice will be sorely missed.

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Update (11:07 AM Eastern on 23 May): It's now public officially.

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

More Distressing News

More distressing news from the MSM classical music critical front. Longtime New York Times classical music critic Bernard Holland has accepted the buyout offered him by the Times to relinquish his staff position as a Times classical music critic. That means the Times is now left with no-one on the classical music staff who deserves the title of critic.

Sign of the times (P.I.).