My Take on Current Situation in Music
by Alexander Feht
The following is my personal view of the current state of the "serious" music. I compose tonal music and earn my living mostly as a translator; I am Siberian Russian, arrived into the US as a political refugee in 1987, and live in Southern Colorado mountains. I am looking for congenial minds who would be interested in discussing music on the similar plane. I am also looking for musically adept performers interested in recording my instrumental compositions and my art songs (in English, Russian, Italian, and French). If you strongly disagree with my views or tastes (which is more than possible, given the prevailing cultural atmosphere), please feel free to express your disagreement. My primary goal, however, is not to argue but to find those who may have made similar conclusions.
It is difficult for me to write about music, because musical ideas aren't designed to be described in words in the first place. There are so many connotations and overtones within the content of music that spoken word truly becomes a lie, however careful we weigh our expressions. When I call this or another composer "sick" (which, probably, sounds offensive to some), I refer to that morbid sensitivity characteristic of most artists and intellectuals in the first half of the 20th century, who felt that the European civilization, as a whole, didn't pass the test of time, that it failed, betrayed them, resulted in horrors of World War I and deserved, therefore, complete avoidance and punishment (as in Shoenberg's case) or partial avoidance and expressionist or symbolist deformation (as in Ravel's and Skriabin's cases). From Martian's point of view their world outlook would seem parochial, transient, local -- after all, most of the cultural shifts in the 20th century were reactionary, caused by the global wars and social upheavals which, in turn, were inevitable results of explosive differential between the paces of cultural and biological developments. I prefer the artists who could reflect the contemporary tensions but also transcend them by retaining the rich and comprehensible lexicon of the past, by referring to the European system of musical co-ordinates firmly based on the physiological correspondence between consonant and dissonant harmonies with pleasant and unpleasant emotions. For example, Rakhmaninov, Puccini and Sibelius were bold enough to use any chords, as dissonant as necessary, to express their ideas, but never lost sight of clear consonant harmonies serving as emotional anchors, mathematically and physiologically justified and embedded in the European musical language. They were the true developers of musical language, the ones who created new things without rejecting or mocking the solid treasures of the past. Ravel, Skriabin, Prokofiev, and many others felt an inner need to partially reject the past, more than it was historically justified; for them "sounding new and original" was already more important than being properly understood or identified with. This internal need could be explained by many cultural and personal traits but, in the final analysis, is entrenched in moral infirmity. (Here I come dangerously close to the Taliban certitudes of religious moralists; however, I don't hide in the past but face the future, my moral convictions are based on experimental facts, not on the faith of any kind. Moral relativism and moral absolutism are equally repulsive to me; we must be as moral as we can be, and our morality is measured by the extent to which we are able to predict the consequences of our actions and to prevent causing pain in order to achieve our own ends.) There were all kinds of degrees of that modernist shift toward oblivion, total break from tradition, disdain for audience -- finally arriving at artistic newspeak that only a few "chosen ones" pretend to understand. (In my opinion, jazz was already a part of that reactionary shift, because tonal harmonic system of coordinates, as used in jazz, becomes intentionally blurred, misinterpreted, ambiguous, non-essential. There is one step, really, from tonal jazz to atonal one, and difference could be almost unnoticeable.) Shoenberg and other atonalists were the most consistent haters and destroyers of the past, and later gained the acceptance of the modernist, emotionally jaded rationalizers of impotence and mediocrity of Adorno's ilk who viewed any tonality in general as a staple element of Nazi culture.
First atonalists and other "sick" composers, however talented individually, prepared a ground for something even they didn't anticipate. Gradually, a great substitution came, a true cultural catastrophe, so huge that almost nobody is courageous enough to talk about it. Musical talent, as well as musical perception, are inseparable from that physiologically justified musical system of co-ordinates which we call "tonality", from human emotional language that expresses itself in harmony and melody. Where tonal harmony and melody are not required, talent is not required either. So, one by one, talentless musicians started to realize that a new, easy path to fame was open to them: since their predecessors already used a language that nobody could properly understand, why couldn't they use any kind of gibberish, and get away with it, pretending that such is "their artistic language"? Et voila! The new era began, the age of the Emperor's New Clothes, and Andy Warhol, its prophet, intoned: "Art is anything you can get away with". Talent and skill don't matter, more than that -- they are orderly, purposely persecuted, hunted down, and crushed. Mediocrity triumphs, bureaucrats of art are entrenched in every artistic institution, their well-being depends on the status quo, and the status quo requires that talent, in no way or form, should be allowed within the sacrosanct confines of the Feeding Ground, "Serious Art". Whatever remains of talent is relegated to vulgar field of commercial art. Transition is complete.
There, you have it. Now, put me against the brick wall, and shoot away. I have nothing to lose.
Thank you,
Alexander Feht
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