August 16, 2013

Last August was turbulent and wounding; so is this one turning out to be. I suppose there’s something in the transition between summer and autumn that brings once face to face with unrealizable, or at least titanically difficult, expectations.

Did greet the new faculty in the department (sweet-faced and eager), finish syllabi.

To the Apothecary last night for an evening of avant garde (self proclaimed) music. Most of it was just painful–and by “just” I mean that there was no other attribute but painfulness, and this was to some degree intentional. Alec was the exception. Alec was working out real ideas with real intention and some degree of virtuosity. He allowed the work to be sometimes beautiful. When the beauty came it was earned.  As the prelude to discovery or splendor is the proper use for painfulness. He knew that. I didn’t hear everybody–I fled after the third and worst–but what I heard was badly digested (and completely unconsidered) theory which has become (and became almost instantly) a cliche. I understand the anger at and mistrust of personal expressiveness in music, but the time when the anger and mistrust were properly articulated as objective inexpressiveness was very brief and is long passed. I sat there blaming university music programs. You cannot teach inspiration. Maybe you’ve even forgotten how to describe it, or know it. But you can teach the manipulation of electronic equipment, so that’s what you do, protecting your limitations by theorizing that’s what you SHOULD be doing. Musicians last night had let the machines write the music. Number three presented stabbingly loud sounds made by the computer, while he played nothing, but ran from one control board to another, twiddling dials. This is called composing because at some point the lad must have chosen what sounds the computer would make and for how long, but a cat on a keyboard can do that, and it might not have been the case at all. He may just have plugged the thing in and let it spew. Yes, he could explain it (maybe), but art that needs to be explained is, finally, not art. Where was virtuosity? I could make compositions of the same order after an hour tutorial on how to use the machines. In what sense is that art? It’s sound-making, surely, but why present that as a created moment? I amuse myself by playing interesting chords on the piano with the pedal down so there’s all sheeny and lustrous and indistinct, but I’d never present that as a discovery or a conviction. It’s an indulgence. Music schools are the worst now of the ones who enforce bad art by despairing of the good, but they are in no sense alone. The film programs with which I am familiar give an excellent background in using the newest machinery, but none at all in actually making a film (which requires a script), and when one goes to a festival, one sees long sequences of beautifully photographed nothing. Art schools are back on track, I think, but for a while you could not get through them without subscribing mindlessly to the commandments of Abstract Expressionism, which also had its moment, but which was made of limitations rather than discoveries or possibilities. In literature, Deconstruction took the academy’s failure to teach inspiration or genius or ideas and asserted instead that none of these things existed, but only the picking away at ravels and loose ends, which the academics were good at already without really trying. You take a deficit and turn it into an orthodoxy. It’s very clever.

Sweet climbing bleeding heart ringing its tiny golden bells. Wild clematis like a dusting of snow over the tops of the shrubs.