On the Future of European Music

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	GEORGE VALSAMIS On the future of the European music

	5. Too strange to each other for misunderstanding A COHERENT companion of the 20th century music would usually mention smaller or bigger revolutions and inventions: the collapse of the tonal center and the turns toward non-tonal compositional techniques, aleatorism, electronic and concrete music, minimalism, open forms, happenings and polytropes, concept music, non-western influences, etc. We could undertake the dangers and the responsibility of a schematization and skip the current critique of music in order to affront a decisive for the modern creativity fact: its principles are immersed in the whole history of European music. On such a scale there are not so many revolutions. The problem of the method is being posed intensely — and regarding this, modern music is related more with romanticism than with any other epoch. It is also akin to the 11th century: the music of the beginning of our century meets the cut off, indefinable, compact, sonic fact — and as such is considered not only a musical note but also any sort of sound or sonic masses or even whole parts of past music. The indefiniteness of the sonic fact favors an aversion to melody. A group of composers (Berg, Webern, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, Maderna, Nono, Dalapicola, Stockhausen, and others) acclaim Shoenberg as their origin. These composers, starting mainly from Webern, impose an absolute organization to their material, without serious concern for a spiritual content; there could not be a life of the spirit in terms of a mentality that insists in the construction of complex and rigid buildings, without foundations, without horizon and without people living inside. As for the quest for a public by means of polytropes in parks or of concerts in factories, it is impossible to be discussed without a simultaneous lowering of seriousness. Therefore, we wish more hesitation existed. Desperate efforts for the invention of a new musical language result also in a brutal representation and usage of the word. Settings to music of telephone books would provoke laughter if they did not reveal a horrific spiritual miss, which, regarding the wider political space, has been and it is expressed as a resort to raw technique. Socialist realism inherited this kind of "art," connected it to ideology and thus achieved to make raw technique ontologically valid, so that it became dangerous to the highest degree. It is macabre to have fun listening about a "Largo of the laic masses working at the underground galleries," or about an Allegro that "Symbolizes the giant machinery of the factories and their victory upon nature," or about a Scherzo that "Depicts the sport life of the happy Soviet residents", since such trash accompanied, in a manner of a social-surrealistic ‘musical' commentary, the imposition of the most harsh totalitarianism. Music until now had been producing works that, at any rate, asked to be recognised as aspects of some necessity, as natural beings, of a class which granted them a higher indicator of truth and rendered them more substantial even than nature; this explains enough the reason why the ordinary has been so often despised to the profit of the exceptional, the representative of the above mentioned class. Therefore, a finished work of art (a sonata, a sculpture, a poem or a philosophical system) went not only beyond its material self, but also beyond its creator, who remained only a "mediator" between the disorderly elements and the work that promoted out of them; and precisely because a work of art was not considered a constructed product, it became a scandal, how a nearly pointless natural being could bring forth The Tempest or The Magic Flute. For this reason the idea of inspiration has been exaggerated; we must not confuse this idea with the concept of gift in ancient Greece: in the first case it is about an inspiration toward creation, whilst in the second it is about a gift to be reciprocated. Besides this, in the case of inspiration the question when, how, why and to whom this inspiration is donated, is being left unanswered. Talking about an inherent in the work of art natural necessity, in this context, we mean nothing else than that nature exists accidentally so that the inspired is called to redeem it by repealing it. This also explains the misinterpretation and the consequent emphasis on the distinction between the genius and the mediocre. In Heracletus, for example, the best man (aristos) is not being distinguished as specially talented, but on the contrary, as accuser of the delusion of the talent concept, as defender of the based-on-the-one-and-shared-logos community of all; in European history genius is being distinguished as creator or prophet of the work of art. This work provides the exclusive testimony of truthfulness and freedom — so that a genius is obliged to create even when he can not or ought not to do so. The present situation of art has decisively unsettled the legitimacy of this distinction. To Castoriades' spiritual experiment — "would you really place yourself at the same high level with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Jian van Eyk, Velasqueth, Rembrandt, Picasso, Brunelleski, Michael Angello, Frank Lloyd Wright, or with Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke?" (Epopteia, vol. 46, p. 395) — no modern artist, I suppose, would answer affirmatively, which is encouraging only if it emanates out of a specific awareness: that arrogance has lost its sacredness since at least two thousand years, but it remained a disease and an absolutely dangerous one.


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5. Too strange to each other for misunderstanding