Fuck the future

 ... perhaps ... Mr Carter's following will evaporate as the in-crowd enthusiasm for his music and personality grows passé.
John Rockwell, "Carter Returns to Composers Series", New York Times, 8 February 1977.

There will be time to decide whether [Elliott Carter's] music ... is more like a brilliant taillight receding down an increasingly unpopulated road.  ...  His remoteness from the public may have helped music down a blind alley...
Bernard Holland, "Elliott Carter at 90: Young Music for a Young Audience," New York Times, 29 October 1998.
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I will never cease marveling at how a single sentence can sum up, with wit and elegance worthy of Oscar Wilde or Bertrand Russell, everything one needs to know about the epistemic shallowness of yapping about what will be: 

It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future.*

Those who ignore this wisdom deserve no sympathy.  Which is why I have none for Carter-hating critics at the New York Times who waited decade after decade for Carter's music to fade into obscurity.  Long and frustrating decades they must have been.  Like the Second Coming, the demise of Carter's music remains stuck in that murky realm known as 'the future'.

In calling the future murky I was trying to be charitable.  Even in physics the concept future is not just murky (theoretically underdetermined), it is literally incoherent because its ontological import is described in logically incompatible ways by our best physical theories (general relativity and quantum mechanics).  At least in physics this concepts can be useful if employed 'locally' in the domain of a given theory.  In music criticism it is absolutely useless, and the only reason it keeps popping up in print is the critic's obscenely fraudulent habit of padding a review with empty speculations about the prospects of new music.

So fuck the future.  It is hard enough to maintain a clear view of the past, one's own as well as that of humanity in general.  (The mind excels at fabricating 'historical narratives' in both domains.)  The recent past is pretty much all that can be surveyed with sufficient clarity and, as far as I can see, it shows no signs of diminishing interest in Carter's music.  Having already visited this corner of Carteriana in an earlier post, here I simply add a few more recent performances of Carter's works.

Things to look forward to...

Kunst kann nicht nur in Bezug auf ihre Schönheit und Handwerkskunst wahrgenommen werden. Sie müssen es auch im Lichte seiner politischen Botschaften bewerten.
(Art cannot solely be perceived in regard to its beauty and craftsmanship. You also have to evaluate it in light of its political messages.)
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Nah...  That wasn't Dr. Goebbels speaking.  I just slapped his photo above the German translation of a statement made a few days ago by one Max Hollein, the new director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.*

I now look forward to a book-burning rally to be organized by the the New York Public Library in the near future.
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*  "At the Entrenched Met Museum, the New Director Shakes Things Up", New York Times, 20 November 2019.

THE TRUEST FACT OF ALL

Americans struggle to ID true facts

By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and HANNAH FINGERHUT

14 November 2019

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True facts???  But then why not?  After all, the truest fact of all is that the once respectable news agencies now employ stupid imbeciles incapable of using their vocabularies of words in ways which avoid superfluously redundant adjectives.

Has there ever been a better time for human people with pathetically stunted mental minds?

How many words is a picture worth?

The familiar adage assures us that a picture is worth a thousand words.  The one above, however, is worth only three:

Those were the days?

Hard to believe that, as late as 1981, a comedy show on a major television network could still take for granted the viewer's familiarity with the basic repertory of classical music.

It is tempting to think that, as the saying goes, those were the days.  But were they?  Wasn't there an even earlier time when one's reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was a certificate of being a cultured person?  Weren't there some old geezers still alive in 1981 who whined about the devolution of society in which supposedly cultured people are incapable of spicing up a conversation with a well-timed quote from Homer or Virgil?

Perhaps when I think that "those were the days," what I really mean is that "those were my days," while the earlier and the later days are always someone else's days which are either hopelessly antiquated or depressingly primitive and vulgar...

IT AIN'T OVER 'TIL IT'S OVER

The ability of good music to captivate the masses has been sacrificed to ... strained formalism and pretensions to originality...  The composer apparently never made it his goal to pay attention to what the Soviet audience expects from music.

New music has to be music that people love.
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The first of the above quotes comes from the infamous 1936 review (written on Stalin's orders or with his approval) of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of  the Mtsensk District.[1]

The second quote comes from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.  Well... not really.  Goebbels probably said similar things about music (the Nazis were studious imitators of Soviet Communism), but he did not make the statement in question.  That statement was made in 2010 by one Deborah Borda who at the time was the President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.[2]

As a concise summary of her philistine Stalinist criteria for desirable new music, Borda's statement is of little if any interest.  Totalitarian rhetoric and behavior are ubiquitous in today's America, where individuals and corporations grovel before Facebook lynching mobs and Twitter execution squads, where universities encourage students to think and behave like Brownshirts, and where art organizations have become eager servants of whatever ideology happened to be de jour.