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On Bridge-Building
- University of Illinois Press
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on bridge-building 1977 In the sixties, I wrote a paper called “On Context,” in which I expressed the opinion that we are collectively at a moment of history where a chasm faces us, which we must either bridge or fall into. I sounded an optimistic note, though the paper came just at the darkest point of the decade. (It was read the very day Martin Luther King was assassinated.) I said I felt that for a bridge over the abyss to hold, it must be anchored far in the past and far in the future. Later, in trying to rise to the challenge of giving an overview of my own work, I discussed several works in relation to this chasm: whether they lay on the past side or on the future side or whether they dealt with the depth themselves. The concept seemed more than ever apt, coming as it did just in the heyday of The Exorcist and in the final days of Richard Nixon’s agony, events which seemed clearly hell-images. Whether the “abyss” be understood to be atomic holocaust, ecological disaster, world revolution, apocalypse, or simply a private season in hell, it is very much a phenomenon of our lives today. I began to see that I had been writing most of my works in relation to this experience. Today, when things seem at least temporarily less disaster prone I still feel very much that we are walking the knife edge and that the best prophetic capabilities artists can muster are very much needed by humanity today. Much of my work relates intimately to various aspects of our musical past and to our global heritage. I think nostalgia is a shallow “pop” version of a very apt and real concern for vanishing species. This is not a new awareness. Earlier in this century it motivated neoclassicism and much eclecticism. It is not a false concern, but it does take many false forms. The falsest of all is the ubiquitous museum mentality of nearly all concert series and impresarios. The practice of constantly recycling old and accepted “masterpieces” as if that serves a cultural need is not only false: it is genuinely pernicious. It blocks reception and production of vital new art 144 on musical aesthetics and culture that could speak significantly to people about the needs and truths of their own lives. It does not even present them with Beethoven’s truths (however dated these might be) when it presents Beethoven’s music, because with overfamiliarity the music’s meanings have undergone a total sea change,but into something which is neither rich nor strange, but is rather something comfortable and complacent,something which saps all appetite for art while providing very little nutrition. An appetite for art is an appetite for the mythic symbols which constitute this time’s vision of the meaning of existence. We come upon these depthimages when we open ourselves to them, a receptiveness that costs dearly in courage and in tenacity. It also costs in terms of the rejection such meanings meet upon first encounter,since people do not always love truth above comfortable complacency. There are certainly insights which are not at all new, which nevertheless hold for us a compelling immediacy. And these, in finding a right form of expression, generate artistic traditions which can endure as genuine wellsprings of meaning, not at all as idols which we adore more for their power to insulate us from the transforming experience of genuine symbols than for their own intrinsic worth. One of the undesirable effects of doctrinaire avant-gardism is its tendency to inhibit or to prevent entirely the rediscovery of these perennially valuable mythic themes and modes of expression suitable to them. There is a vast difference between the use of these themes and an aping of the manners of another time and place. If it were not for the persistence and power of symbolic themes,there could be only a spurious value in playing the music of any other time and place than our own. It is, in fact, the alien manner of older music which most seriously obscures our grasp of these meanings. It is ironic that it is precisely the manner of traditional music which creates a cult of “classical music,” causing people to reject the manners of their own times, when they encounter them in art.When you add to this the resistance new myths always meet, a serious handicap to art in...