Art has been hijacked by the addiction-directed internet
Christopher Lyndon-Green's cycle of Valentin Silvestrov's orchestral works for Naxos is remarkable in several ways. His conducting of the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra does full justice to the music of one of our greatest living symphonists. But there is more. For the new release of Silvestrov's magnificent Symphony No. 8 and Violin Concerto with soloist Janus Wawrowski, Christopher Lyndon-Green contributes an essay that expresses what many of us feel, but with an eloquence we cannot match. Here is an extract:
Is Silvestrov a Postmodernist Composer?
What, exactly, is meant by the term ‘postmodernism’ has yet to be satisfactorily defined.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez has famously written, in his great essay about Boulez’s Répons, ‘Modernism created a gulf with the public, and postmodernism wants to bridge that gap.’
Such a ‘definition’ would seem to give free reign to the all-too-often superficial neo-Romanticism of much contemporary composition, to mimicry and facile imitation; to ‘easy listening’ for modern ears; to abandoning challenge or depth of any kind in favour of ‘entertainment.’
We are living in a pusillanimous age of ‘political correctness’, this era of a civilisation that has lost its way; thus it is hardly surprising that much of the art that paints a picture of our times reflects lack of purpose and clear direction in its very banality.
Composers throughout the ages have used ‘models’, have paid homage to their imperishable predecessors in ways that are more often than not loving tributes: think Josquin’s Déploration sur la mort de Jean Ockeghem, Mozart’s very early piano concertos that are unabashed ‘arrangements’ of Johann Christian Bach, or Alban Berg’s Violinkonzert ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’. Much of what is being written today is, however, merely derivative; betraying a lack of courage or of vision, straining our faith in music as an art-form with any future at all. Much contemporary art qualifies, indeed, barely as ‘entertainment’ any more, for it has been hijacked by the ‘addiction-directed’ processes of the internet, whose attention span is measured not even in minutes, but in seconds.
Where did we go wrong?!
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