“the Beatles are the greatest songwriters since Schubert”, and said about their song This Boy that “harmonically, it is one of their most intriguing songs, with its chains of pandiatonic clusters, and the sentiment is acceptable because voiced cleanly and crisply”.
Dis epic cg. It’s my longheld opinion that early Beatles is utter rubbish and they only matured c 1966/7.
“Thinkers such as Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall persuaded us that everyday culture was as deserving of close study as high art.”
I’m with Lachenmann and Adorno here. Everyday culture is produced on a commodity basis and serves to inculcate confirmity along pre-indicated lines. Even much pop culture purporting to be rebellious is constructed along clichéd lines. If you ask me, even hip hop has been completely subverted (or de-subverted) and gone from true ghetto to formulaic self-glorifying pastiche.
It’s the veneration of material which isn’t even meant as great art, merely on the grounds of its ubiquity, that I find preposterous. Extremely pernicious cultural relativism.
Yeah I don’t agree with it but the point breaking down the ranking low and high art.
If something is art, it’s art.
If it resonates with people, it has some element of validity.
When we denigrate the validity of works that are important to people and have moved then, changed their lives, we are being elitist and very insulting.
I haven’t kept up with this thread. Where does humour fit into this art/entertainment dichotomy? Is humour inherently entertainment? Can it also be art?
Humour would fit into an extended definition of both, I think, depending.
Most people use humour in a throwaway way but some professional comedians really use it to express ideas, make people thing, and expose truths that hit harder than ‘serious’ things.
Yeah the irony is that via the cloak of humour - some of the most serious truths are learned.
I’ve tried to make that point here as well. “Entertainment” is a lighter form, but not in of itself a lower form. With regards to piano playing I’m sure I’d be royally entertained at a Horowitz recital - as well as impressed, enlightened, etc. At a Sokolov recital I’m certainly impressed and enlightened as well, but entertainment has very little to do with it. It’s heavy stuff which takes days or weeks to digest. I’m more drawn to the latter category in art music myself, but both recitals would be with me for years afterwards.
Ha, if I could attend ONE historical recital/performance it would either be Liszt v Thalberg or Cziffra bar impro. I’m conscious I really should be choosing something like Liszt playing the Hammerklavier or Busoni playing the Emperor conducted by Mahler…
Yeah Cziffra jamming in a bar would be by most peoples standards not the ‘highest’ of art, but really who is to judge that? To me it would be a transcendentally moving experience, like I get from his recordings.
It’s profound, visceral, makes me think deeply afterwards about life. Not because it’s deep music per se - but because it feels so ALIVE and it makes me think that such violent joy of physical movement expressed in his pianism has something to do with the the most important things in life - to be present, to enjoy the physical sensation of life.
So if I can get that from Cziffra jamming in a bar - and it’s art to me, but others would see it as entertainment and playing to a crowd/showing off.
Well, who’s right? And does it matter what I or the others think? or only just what Cziffra thinks it is.
I don’t think Cziffra improv is the pinnacle of musical art; it’s possibly/probably the pinnacle of technique combined with spontaneity. Tbh I find the best of his Strauss paraphrases profoundly moving in their sheer exultancy in his own music-making and technical potency, but maybe that says more about me and my preferences than it does about music per se.
Well this is my point, it’s not about being a pinnacle, it’s about having an aim - a niche, and satisfying it.
Music isn’t about expressing everything all at once, it’s about expressing something unique and personal.
A person can be the greatest scratcher in the world, but if you’ve got an itchy arse and someone’s scratching your head, it isn’t satisfying
Ah but the pinnacle aspect is important, to me at least. I think I’m a good improviser (and tbh it’s sometimes pretty obvious that there’s a bit of wannabe-ziff in there, glaring in fact in my recent tube warmup vid) but if Cziffra was only at my level of improvisation, then he wouldn’t have the same level of impact on me…
Yes, probably, though on reflection I’m not completely happy about passing judgment on the the validity part. To give another example, Saint-Saens was really skilled at writing accessible, polished music that probably doesn’t aspire to ultimate greatness. Personally I’m glad that not everyone tries to write their answer to the Goldbergs/op 111/The Ring, much more interesting and diverse that way.
Yes. I mean… exactly. Of course it also matters how good you are what you’re doing, but I think it’s really hard to compare pianists like Goldsand and Gilels because they’re so fundamentally different musicians. And far too often you hear people pass judgement on people whose playing style they neither appreciate or even understand. CHERKASSKY SUCKS. Yes indeed if you’re measuring him by Zimerman’s ideals. If you’re listening for moizt & colour oth it’s rather Zimerman who sucks.
Yes and in a way this is why most competition winning pianists are bland as their primary attempt is to aim for a broadly appealing interpretation that gets a solid 7 or 8 out of 10 for all judges and slips through to win.
The memorable artists are the ones who inspire 10s via the risk of getting 0s from some.
So you could say competition winners are often entertainers in their aim to appeal, and artists like POGO, Debargue etc are more artists because they say this is me, take me as I am, love or hate.
