We Should Be True To Our Senses

18Dec06

I was once on a flight from London to New York (on a personal photo shoot as it happens) and had the good fortune of sitting next to Anita Zabludowicz – a prominent collector of contemporary art. This was a very fortuitous chance encounter for me, and a real privilege. During our conversation I asked Anita what she looked for in contemporary art. Regretfully I cannot remember exactly what her reply was, but essentially she said that it had to be new. Whilst I would agree with this to a certain extent, it was what she didn’t say that intrigued me. She didn’t say it had to be beautiful, skillfully done, of outstanding quality – or anything along those lines. That is not to say she doesn’t think art should be these things – just that she didn’t mention them…

Let us consider newness in relation to something else. I think most of us like to try out new food, but we probably wouldn’t take the view that all the food we eat in the future must be new. And just because it is new does not mean that we are going to like it. Whether we like a meal or not is actually out of our control: it is a natural and spontaneous reaction between the chemicals in the food, our taste buds, our olfactory (smell) system, and our brain. We cannot decide if we are going to like a meal or not.

Beethoven once said of his music that he could communicate directly with people’s hearts – meaning their emotions. He knew human nature well enough to know that we all respond in a predictable way to certain types of music. His music could make us feel sorrow, joy, pride, reflective – whatever he choose – and film score composers today use the same principles all the time (Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone to name a few). We respond automatically to harmony, melody, and rhythm. It is a natural and spontaneous response to sound waves being converted to electrical signals in our ears and the brain’s reaction to them. We cannot decide if we are going to like what we hear or not.

This begs the question: why do some modern day contemporary composers create music that they know will probably be displeasing to the vast majority of us? They even have words for it: atonal and discordant music! Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, and Nicholas Cage – to name a few twentieth century composers of this negative, atonal, discordant genre – were striving for newness almost for the sake of newness – forgetting what music is for: to give pleasure, to stir the emotions in us. This is what was said by the eminent contemporary musicologist William Thomson about Schönberg, the father of atonal music:

What was Schönberg’s error?
(from the book Schönberg’s Error by William Thomson)

“Renunciation of even the primal tonal archetypes bequeathed him by his full musical heritage, believing all the while that he was rejecting only the major-minor conventions of his immediate past. He did not understand the full ramifications of his renunciation, a denial that if followed rigorously entailed abandonment of the full range of structuring potentials of pitch. His transformation of music was motivated by the same hubris that in the world’s myths spells the tragic downfall of heroes who try to call the shots of destiny.

“Schönberg thought he was fueling music’s flight to the next plateau, in its ascent toward a musical heaven. He was in reality only fueling the ambitions of a singularly enormous talent and establishing a brief, strange interlude in an art’s checkered history. It is true, as some contemporaries have said, that “he showed us the way.” But, some eighty years later, we must recognize that his way fell short of becoming the next Golden Age so anxiously sought during the beginning of the twentieth century. Nor was it the inexorable “way” that music’s hop scotching development had pointed toward in the long haul of history. As evolution, it was an ill-conceived , though passionately propagandized, mutation. It was an achieving far more radical than Schönberg dreamed.”

I think such discordant music will be very rarely played, quickly forgotten, and will crop up in academic circles only. The same goes for a huge amount of contemporary art…

It is as if pleasure is out-dated, it is time we had a period of displeasure! Isn’t this tantamount to saying you have enjoyed food for too long now – now it is time not to enjoy it and eat dirt?! I think artist neglect human senses and emotions at their peril…

Art should be made to be appreciated at a superficial level at least. Deeper dimensions add to its cultural value, but this should be of secondary importance. Most viewers or listeners are unsophisticated and/or they do not have the time or inclination to delve below the surface. Good art communicates directly to everyone at the level of the basic senses and emotions.

Is there too much pressure in the arts to be original – as opposed to simply good…?

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Michael Autumn
Cambridge, UK
January 2006

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