This evening, I was listening to the classical station between students, and the host offered a poignant word. He expressed something to the effect of:
“If not yet fully realized, our popular culture is at a crossroads where classical music is soon to be fully novel again.”
Though perhaps not his direct intent, what he spoke of did not explicitly comment on contemporary music, Western art music, or classical antiquity. He spoke of how what is old might become novel once more - and raised a deeper question: how can we develop the patience to cherish working for something so that it may bear enduring fruit?
It is my own worry that today’s youth may no longer absorb classical music as others once did. Classical music is now omnipresent as rapid material offered as a disjunct foil; background for ridiculous social media skits or the like. What is worrisome is our culture’s complacency with the “all reward, no work” angle to life, and moreover, the apathy toward extricating first the self, and in turn a society, from the banal.
As we grow complacent in a world of exponential ease, we facetiously find ourselves blind; we lose our agency unto the human pursuit. We are built for scarcity, and in a world of utter excess, Mephistopheles dances with us. The “people” steering this ship speak of a world where “work/labor will no longer exist in due course” thanks to the advent of artificial intelligence. Is this what we want? Do we not want to work for anything? Alas, to work for nothing means that nothing is meaningful. There is not one without the other in any matter, and the world is foolishly attempting to rewrite this natural phenomenon. These acts of sheer hubris lead only toward one typified outcome. This tale stands as old as time itself. Like music, every world, every society, has the same ailments, only brought forth via different media. Music is the Master Raro, the mediator, the oracle.
The host acknowledged what we have lost: the investments required to truly experience the heady tapestries of art - the beautiful, moral, and ornate.
Alas, hope… There are exceptions. For every backward step a society takes into its aesthetics, an outlier stands valiantly against it as a beacon of truth, for this is the artist’s duty.
Where today’s youth may not know the depths of art’s beauty because of a merely lackluster, disseminated way of life, we are presented with a gift. When something is forgotten, we are given the chance to find the beauty of old as entirely new once again. In the host’s tone rang the whisper of a Renaissance. Not to entitle contemporary music as contemporary, categorically, but as music alone. Any meaningful thing will exhibit itself as such - we needn’t prescribe a restrictive title for anything at all - such words act only as detractors to natural beauty.
Every generation has its woes with the present state of affairs, and such may just be the nature of society’s cycles. No matter; without complete remission, there shall never be full actualization. An optimist under these guises might wishfully think that we presently find ourselves at such a crossroads. We now toy with the idea of a world where any remission, any agency at all, is suitable and to be encouraged… We are attempting to remove that which is a prerequisite to actual reward: struggle.
What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind.
Carl Jung
This is the secret of great art. The creative process activates an archetypal image in the unconscious, which the artist shapes into a work that speaks to the present. By drawing a primordial image up and transforming it into a form the present can accept, the artist compensates for the one-sidedness of the age. Art becomes a process of self-regulation in the life of individuals and epochs. Reducing a vision to personal experience turns a true creation into a mere symptom. While the artist’s psychology matters, the work exists in its own right as an autonomous complex. Artists who have fallen out of fashion are rediscovered when our consciousness has evolved to understand them in a new way.
Fresh eyes are needed because the old ones could see only what they were used to seeing.
Eternalised (Pseudonym)
Written in thanks to Dr. Nikolaus Hohmann
J.W.M.