View across Little Eagle Meadows, out of the High Wallowas and
into the drier and lower Canyon country of the Imnaha and Snake Rivers . . .
Eagle Cap Wilderness . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.

ON THE COLLAPSE OF CONTEMPORARY
MUSICAL CULTURE (I) [an essay outline, from
my whitebark blog . . .]

“When words become unclear, I shall
focus with photographs. When images
become inadequate, I shall be
content with silence.”
Ansel Adams

Music is not separate from Nature.
Music is not separate from metaphysics.

How we think about Nature, and think about
about thinking itself, conscious or not, in a
tacit yet powerful way, shapes our perception
of music and musical meaning.

The current habit of both Western popular
and intellectual culture is not to give attention
to these things. In music, this means that things—
assumptions, traditions, habits, practices—by
and large go unquestioned. This unquestioning
attitude is really a kind of denial. And denial, in turn,
is a kind of fragmentation or a separation from the
urgencies of reality which makes short-term existence
a bit easier to handle, but has from a broader
perspective potentially devastating and disastrous
consequences.

Collapse in the most fundamental sense is
caused by contradiction. Contradiction is literally
when two movements ’speak’ or fight against
one another. Contradictions are not a part of
natural movement simply because they are a
tremendous waste of energy.

Contemporary musical culture—classical musical
culture—is now rife with contradictions. Almost
none of these are being addressed.

The key feature of these contradictions in musical
culture is fragmentation. Keep one image in mind:
the form of a fine violin, weighing almost nothing,
yet capable of projecting its vibrant, living sound
and filling amazingly large spaces. If we smash the
violin, however, it is nothing. Just a pile of
useless shards.

That is fragmentation.

This is what at a much larger and more profound
and subtle level has happened to musical culture
as a whole. It has been smashed. What we have
now is shards, all struggling to exist in isolation,
but not adding up to anything sustainable
on the long term.

Yet we continue, unquestioningly, as if everything
where still whole, yet repeating over and over again
the same mistakes. By now, like a piece played
with wrong notes and out of tune that nobody
hears any more, mistakes have become the norm.
They get contracts. Applause. They win prizes.
So now, the AT (Alexander Technique) adage
demonstrates its truth: If you’re wrong, what is
right is bound to seem wrong to you.

My contention is that there is not a single
contradiction in musical culture that is specific
to music. That is why it is necessary to pause
and step back to view carefully and with a certain
sustained seriousness musical culture from the
broadest possible vantage point. [part I]

THE LITTLE CLAVIER please preview 150 of 631 pages
w/ my black & white photography [opens in new window]