Music No Object

After almost two years absence I received a very beautiful and appreciative email from someone who had read the three texts I included dating from 1999. So I decided to return with some more texts, this time from 1998! They form part of a book project which is still alive and well, even after such a long hibernation. The texts are the fruit of some profound thinking on the subject of musical values and their preservation, and even if they require some careful reading to be fully understood, they are central to the theme of this blog. Here is a first instalment:

1. The world of "serious" music continues to exist under the influence of attitudes that came into being centuries ago. Many an individual composer, performer or impresario has sought to develop new and more open or creative relationships between those who provide and those who enjoy music, and yet these efforts have usually only had a limited or local impact because of the strength of underlying cultural influences.

2. Any attempt to develop genuinely new and more fruitful paths for the future may very well involve an examination of these underlying attitudes and an attempt to trace their true origins. It is my belief that much which we consider as differentiating our modern artistic world from that of the nineteenth century can be more usefully seen as an extension of the latter – often an exposition, as it were, of the negative side of the same picture.

3. In order to see this more clearly it is useful, I believe, to cast a glance at some of the intellectual developments in the German-speaking world of the 1790s, which constituted perhaps a revolution as big in the cultural sphere as was the French Revolution in the political sphere. And just as we may now be witnessing (in the context of the European Union) the realisation, however imperfectly, of political dreams that came to the surface in that era, so perhaps we may now be in a position to consider some possibilities in the cultural field which were articulated in that same period but which, under the impact of other more enticing developments, have lain more or less dormant ever since.