[This is a repost from nearly three years ago, very slightly redacted]
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 received 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 such 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 deadened 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 possesses (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.