One of the serious issues facing our society today is a direct result of what Ortega identified as but one of the undue effects of “mass man” on society: a coarsening of art in the public arena. Given my background and inclinations, I perceive the coarsening most often in the performance arts, particularly music.
Now, let me back up a bit and articulate a bit of what this lil rant was spurred by. I recieved a glurge-filled email today that went on about the life of John Henry Newton, author of the song most widely known as “Amazing Grace.” So, naturally, besides beginning an automatic critique of the glurge in the email text, my mind’s ear began replaying various performances–including choral, congregational and solo–of “Amazing Grace” and found, as always, that (almost) ALL of them fell short of the power and beauty of the lyrics, because the tune most commonly sung to the words is a lousy match for the words’ meaning and is not really very singable, to boot.
*sigh* And then there’s the fact that everyone and his untalented dog seems to think that they can improve the tune (and thus the song) by screwing around with it and mangling it badly. While it may well be proper to abuse poor tunes in sch a way, sadly the abuse never seems to be performed by anyone with any real musical ability.
Well, that’s where this rant originated, at least. Now, what’s its point? Simply this: most folks’ ears are too deafened by crap sold as music nowadays that even attempting to point out the differences between good and bad prosody, between music/lyric marriages made in heaven and those made BY hell is almost impossible. Sure, if one is able to catch a child young enough, and feed the child a daily dose of well-wrought music, perhaps the child will attain adulthood with ears that can actually–at least–reproduce pitch and hopefully even desire music that feeds rather than craps on his higher nature.
But should that occur, then that adult will be an alien in our debased society.
And this alienation from “better things” in favor of scarfing up feces misrepresenting itself as art is symptomatic of the coarsening of every aspect of our society. The deaf ears that cannot even hear the difference between the musical feces that passes as most “music” today (and I include most contemporary soi disant “serious, academic or classical” crap as well) and real music cannot tell the differences between any of the other lies that the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind spews and truth, either.
*sigh*
And it’s all our fault for elevating the sensibilities of the common man to iconic stature, for whatever genuine virtues the common man posseses (and there are more than a few), lowering social sensibilities, and thus social virtues, to the lowest common denominator is a sure recipe for the demise of a society.
Teach your children well. The government schools and the Hivemind certainly will not.
Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, , Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, Right Voices, and DragonLady’s World, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
BTW, here are two very different performances of a tune that would make a better marriage with Newton’s hymn. Each offers its own unique variations on the basic tune, and neither of them use the oldest form of the tune strictly, so the minor mods to the oldest form that’d be necessary to marry it to “Amazing Grace” wouldn’t be out of line for the range of variations already available.
(No, I do NOT like Emi Fujita’s vowels, but the rest of the performance is a beautiful example of the tune with the traditional “The Water is Wide” lyrics. She gets a bye on her English vowels, anyway, since she’d probably hate what I would do to any Japanese song’s lyrics. *heh*)
Amazing Grace isn’t the only song to suffer the indignity of “improvement” by various artists — talented and untalented.
Still, I like the tune I usually hear it sung to, although I prefer it when that tune is played on the pipes. Of course the pipes pretty much rule out vocals and the important bit is the lyrics.
Thank God for that unmerited favor we know as grace.
Oh, I know what you mean, Perri, and I certainly would nt disparage any else liking the tune. I liked it well enough for most of my life. But I came to a point about 20 years ago where I’d been teaching and singing and playing and most of all directing music for enough years that it began to irk me.
“[M]ost of all directing” is the key, I think, because more than half of my directing experience was with choral groups (the rest divided between instrumental and amateur drama), and more and more I kept seeing instances where music–whether tunes or harmonies or accompaniments–did NOT enhance the lyrics being sung. If the music doesn’t work synergistically to advance the meaning of the text, then why have the music at all? It’s a matter of good text/music marriage. Music has an unique quality among all the arts in that it alone is geuinely an art of time. All music defines, circumscribes, controls the time in which it is performed, in good ways or bad, poorly or well. In this sense, only music can be said to be the teleological art–it always points to its own teleos.
Now, great music does these things exceedingly well. Beethoven’s Second Symphony could no more end differently to its intended, designed ending than Schubert’s Die Lindenbaum or Sibelius’ Finlandia. I often hear/sing (and sometimes play) the hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” but the hymn by Henry van Dyke using the tune from the an freude section of Beethoven’s ninth is forever crippled by the tune having been ripped from its source. In situ, the tune is much more powerful, much stronger, much more moving despite its wedding to Schiller’s pagan lyrics, because it is meant to fullfill its purpose in the symphony. (Yes, I frequently have to simply drop things and listen to the ninth again. Worth investing the time to shut everything else out and just listen.)
Just so, even simple tunes have a teleos, they point to a specific, pre-destined end, and the effectiveness with which they do so (or do not do so) determines to a great degree just how worthy they are as music. Until the age of crap music (today), a rough measure of a tune’s fitness, its teleological effectiveness, could be had by measuring its endurance. Centuries culled out the tunes that did not work well.
[Lots of academic balderdash and “inside baseball” music talk deleted–*heh*]
And then there’s the issue of musical/lyric prosody: the fitness of a tune (and harmonies and etc.) to enhance lyrics. Some tunes just do not “go” where a set of lyrics do, no matter how well they match up metrically. If you’ve been “inside church music” a while (youth choirs are a good place to hear such stuff), you will likely have heard the hymn “Amazing Grace” sung to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” or the Gilligan’s Island theme or “Ghost Riders in the Sky” or any number of other tunes that fit metrically. People–even musicians who ought to know better–do such things because they’re “cool” or have a “Wow. listen to this” factor, but the tunes do not suit the words at all, at all.
Were it not for the fact that the current most-sung tune has “tradition” going for it now, I doubt Amazing Grace (or “Faith’s Review and Expectation,” to use Newton’s own preferred title :-)) would be sung to it.
O WALLY WALLY (the tune used for “The Water Is Wide”) has been well-recieved the times I’ve used it for Newton’s lyrics and–key for me–the comments I’ve recieved have verified that non-musicians can feel the connection.
And that’s a good thing for a performer and especially for a conductor to hear: that ones performance has enhanced the hearers’ connection with the text, edified in a way that just keeping the standard fare would not have done, and remained accessible.
Oh. Classical values… *heh*
“The nearer we get to God, the more easily our spirits are touched by refined and beautiful things. If we could part the veil and observe our heavenly home, we would be impressed with the cultivated minds and hearts of those who so happily live there. I imagine that our heavenly parents are exquisitely refined. ” Douglas Callister wrote in a talk, “Your Refined Heavenly Home”, Sept. 11, 2006
“That which we appreciate we appropriate to some degree” (from an old saying which happens to be true)
It’s up to each of us as to what we listen to, what we read and then think about, ponder and become.