The Decline of Serious Music

The Decline of Serious Music : A Review of “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts,” from American Masters, (PBS Wed 4-08-09)

The musical decline of serious music since 1945 led us to Philip Glass, as music began to lack a sense of tone, key, centering, and lack a place to return to. (See “Can There Be Great Composers Any More" by Webster Young.)  Glass seems to be trying to bring tonal music back, but he has not.

Composers rejected the historical retelling of past ages. They said “to hell with the past.” This attitude is reflected in all revolutionary movements, including political movements. In revolutionary movements each person is on their own, they can't refine previous techniques. This is important because our present achievements are as much the result of past achievements as it is with personal genius. Mozart did not invent most of the features of his music, he improved on the work of past composers.

A conservative, classicist, or neoclassicist builds on the past. His work is a culmination of what went before. He does not need to create a mini-revolution and be innovative in all ways. The ancient classical ideals involved beauty and harmony, clarity of form, nobility of subject, and meaningfulness. Meaningless beauty is not classical. The concern that the work be only original rather than asking how beautiful the work is, has created mediocre works, because all past musical tradition has not been involved in the work.

The “new” is not rejected in neoclassical music, as the revolutionaries falsely claim to advance themselves, the old should have a grain of the new but not a whole field of untested grain. In modern music and modern art the new is a destruction of the old. So why would composers (or any kind of revolutionary) wish to destroy? Why not develop old forms rather than discard them? Why destroy old forms when destroying them only alienates audiences and ruins the economics of serious music?

We cannot really know the psychology of individual revolutionaries, but we can see patterns and general traits. The key to understanding Philip Glass seems to reside in his stated belief that if you don't like his music, don't listen to it, he could care less (bull). Glass is syncretistic, fusing widely different forms, he has attempted to combine the melody and rhythm of Hindu music with the melody and harmony of Western music; but he ends up rejecting Western harmony for a monotonous version of Eastern melody and rhythm.

Often individual modernists are simply not a part of the old classical culture. Often the modernists simply have no talent for classical music. Modernists have problems with authority in general.  Modernists are often egocentric, or megalomaniacal. Or modernists display all of these traits. Philip Glass is defined in all of these categories.

Certainly a return to classicism will one day be strongly fueled by the usurpation of this inferior clique. We need artists and real critics to begin to speak out against this usurpation by the ugly.