Idol Speculation

It's said that successful demagogues grasp more than others the fact that people when part of a group are manipulated not by reason or argument but by an appeal to emotion and the mere repetition of an easily stated proposition or better yet a claim...an utterly unsupported assertion that is known to appeal to them.  It may appeal to them for various reasons.  It may be something they desire to be true, it may be something for which they seek assurance, it may be something they want to do or see happen for elemental reasons.

Not surprisingly, those who are successful demagogues are also prized by those they so manipulate.  They say what their audience thinks or better yet wants to think, believe or want to believe.  Also, they relieve their audience from the need to think.  Thinking being onerous, it's easily dispensed with, eagerly put aside.  Why think when all is so clear?  Why think when someone has already thought, and to your liking, on a matter important to you?

Those who manipulate come themselves to be manipulated, though, through the adulation of those they manipulate.  The idol expects to be idolized.  They relish it.  So it becomes necessary to preserve the idea, or claim, or desire, that fosters the manipulation that causes one to be an idol.

Usually, idols fall after a time.  Probably, some other idol comes along.  Or it may be that once the idol provides what the idolaters seek, they lose their usefulness.  There's something else to be sought and that may be provided by someone else.

Charles Foster Kane, Orson Welles' fictional stand in for William Randolph Hearst, learned this and huddled in his Xanadu while he was forgotten.  It's odd, though, that those who idolize when one idol proves unnecessary or unworthy merely replace one fallen idol with another. 

Did those religious who smashed icons and idols believe them to eradicated, not understanding that they merely replaced them with idols and icons of another kind?  It's likely they didn't.  It's likely that they simply convinced themselves that their idol wasn't an idol, not really.  A bare cross was substituted for statuary.  A book became sacrosanct instead of an image.

It's the same in politics and other matters.  There is an unreasoning acceptance of someone or something, replaced eventually by the unreasoning acceptance of someone or something else.

This is the norm it seems in the doings of humanity, for good or ill.

Overpopulation may threaten us for more than one reason, then.  It isn't just that our numbers exceed the resources available.  It's that we are more and more inclined to think and act as a crowd or mob or group rather than as individuals, which is to say in a thoughtless, irrational manner.  We're also more subject to manipulation because the demagogue  has access to us in more ways and may more effectively communicate in manners and through methods unimaginable even to those of the 20th century. 

Are we herd animals?  Have we always been so, or will we become so?  Who will ride the herd; who rides it now?  For how long?

Idols are accepted without scrutiny.  Thus we are where we are.  It's hard to explain in some other fashion why we're here, watching a buffoon capering haphazardly on the world stage like a malicious, mean, petty-minded  child or brat.  But idols fall, and this one will return someday to his own lonely, preposterous and gaudy tower.  We can hope our next choice is less scatterbrained and corrupt, hardly worthy of respect even as a villain.

Whither Classical Music?

Last weekend, I attended a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during one of my solo sojourns to the downtown of The City of Broad Shoulders, the Windy City as it's also called.  Charlie Kane said of it to his friend Jedediah that "the wind comes howling in off the lake and gosh only knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg" but it wasn't for that wind that it earned the latter nickname.  According to what I've read, an East Coast journalist called it that because of the tendency of its residents to boast of it, rendering them and their city "windy" in the parlance of the times.

It's interesting that although I visit River North and the Loop with some frequency, and enjoy classical music, I haven't been to a performance previously.  I'm not even certain why I did so in this case.  I had been to Winter's Jazz Club the night before and enjoyed what I heard and was checking for other live performance of music or a show, and thought of the symphony and am glad I did.

An orchestra at work is an impressive and powerful thing to observe.  It would seem to me that composing for a full orchestra is onerous and creating a composition which can be played and enjoyed by musicians and audiences is a remarkable artistic achievement.  Hearing an orchestra play great music is a notable sensory experience, or is for me. 

Listening to the CSO that evening prompted me to wonder, though.  Is classical music still a living art form?  One can of course still listen to and enjoy the work of great composers of the past as played by capable professional musicians, and that in itself, I would think, will always keep some of us listening to and appreciating the music.  But what of new composers and compositions and how they compare to the those of the past?

I was about to write that I'm unfamiliar with modern classical music (it seems difficult to even write those words as what is classical would seem on its face or by definition as not being modern or new).  But if we include within it the classical music written by 20th century composers, that wouldn't be entirely correct.  I have some familiarity with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy, Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Respighi, Berg, Poulenc, Richard Strauss, and Rachmaninoff so perhaps it can be said that as to classical music of the first half of the 20th century, at least, I'm not altogether ignorant.  But I know virtually nothing of what's gone on in the last 60 years or so.

I can't say I've liked some of the modern classical music I've heard.  Atonal and twelve tone music annoy me, for the most part.  To my doubtless unschooled ear, some modern classical music is mere noise.  It is I'm sure highly complicated noise, and may even be organized noise, but I don't associate noise with classical music or music of any kind.  I'm aware of the fact that certain composers have invited musicians to more or less do what they please, or select certain chords of phrases randomly and play them haphazardly, or laugh and shout or honk while others in the orchestra do something more traditionally associated with their instruments. 

That sort of thing has led me and perhaps others to speculate that classical music has played itself out.  That's to say that what has been done has pretty much covered all the ground which can be covered by orchestras or quintets or quartets or trios of a melodic nature by past masters of the various styles popular prior to the 20th century or the more melodic styles of the last century, for example the tone poems of Richard Strauss and Respighi.  And so, classical music composers now in a kind of despair resort to musical chaos.

I don't see how that can be, though.  I'd think that the variety of instruments available traditionally in classical music, combined with what technology now allow for, means it's likely still for new classical music to be made.  And, I think that it could still be music and not be wholly derivative of what has been done by the great composers of the past.

It's not a question of whether there is classical music which can yet be composed and played, then.  It's more a question of whether there will be patrons of that music.  Will those who now grow up with modern popular music even be exposed to let alone appreciate classical music?  Will they be musicians willing to play classical music?

The experience of being at a live performance of an orchestra would, I think, convince some of them at least to be patrons of it, because it can impress and can even be profound.  And, it does so without the need for the light shows filled with dancers, musicians pretending to play guitars and stars who most likely lip-sync their way through songs which are so over-produced that they can't be duplicated in a live venue.