Modern music seems a lot like abstract modern art. It’s extremely easy to do poorly, and sometimes the difference between crap and high art is very fine. Also, it seems like, much like modern art, a lot of the beauty comes from people performing classical riffs in a disconnected manner. So we have beautiful shading and rhythms and curves, but they don’t come together to create a concrete picture, they are instead intended to evoke a feeling.
Also, I’m starting to believe that Samuel R. Delaney quote where he says that it’s really true that the number of people with a given skill level has gone up proportionally with population. How many truly excellent poets were there in 1900? Well, we now have more than 6x as many. The problem is that this means that the required skill level has gone up as well, and the real problem is that what people who are excellent at something and/or educated about something find excellent is not what the general public likes.
Ian Schempp finds things funny that it takes me a long time to find funny. I like art that is not Thomas Kinkaid or Wyland, but professional artists like stuff that is even farther away from that. Well read people often lose the ability to enjoy crap novels. Modern music is most appreciated by musicians, who tend to prefer it to the regular stuff. Modern poetry is difficult to read and get into – the last poetry that had mainstream effect is perhaps 60s poetry, and the last poetry that the average person appreciated might really be Emily Dickinson.
This is all motivated by the presentation of Jeffrey Stolet where he played a piece using his computer that was almost completely unapproachable for some, but the more musical training people had, the more they seemed to be into it as I looked around. Specialization might kill approachability, but is that a bad thing? Now that I know more, I really do think that a lot of art and music that I once liked is not good, and not fun to look at or listen to. It would be sad if there wasn’t anything better. But we need more texts that live in both worlds – and perhaps that’s the hardest task of all.
