Where the contemporary classical genre is concerned, music has become completely steeped in pretension, virtuosity and alienation. These days the average music lover can rarely attend any given concert to find himself being moved by the event, more likely he will leave uninspired and blank faced. One can't identify with the majority of this nonsensical, conceptual 'intellectualism' and perhaps this is why there is such a divide between the worlds of contemporary classical and popular: if an art form has solely an intellectual appeal, then, as explained in my previous article, it will represent only the class of people to which this bares relevance: academics.
In this case a crossroads is met whereby music evolves to fit a 'higher' class and its opposing 'lower' class: intellectualism versus hedonism. The intellectuals have their bourgeois contemporary classicism which allows them to pretend to be scholarly and impressive whilst those who oppose such pretensions have popular music which has developed into nothing more than hedonism: aesthetically pleasing, say-nothing enjoyment for a class that would rather have music as a backdrop or an escape from boredom than an art form. The result is two selfish and failing crusades, one of which is warring for the intellectualization of Music; for it to become symbolic of cleverness and superiority whilst under this veil it remains ugly, dishonest and pretentious while the antagonist, hedonism, fights to sacrifice Music to capitalism and stands to prove that material beauty is what Western culture has come to value above all else.
Both sides then are without honesty because rather than trying to create music, one is trying to generate capital while the other is simply pandering to a hierarchical system. Working on the philosophy that "truth is inherent in Art; Art is inherent in culture; culture in nature; nature in Art and nature is truth" we can deduce that these flawed crusaders are incapable of producing Art. They are deceitful because their art has ulterior, unnatural motives. Besides those of generating capital or creating hierarchy, whether intentional or otherwise they threaten to boycott Music as an Art and an expression of a free-thinking society. I'll come back to this in a moment.
Of course the situation is not black and white. There are Artists who bridge the gap and achieve in talking in a musical language that may be, to an extent, steeped in intellectualism or in hedonism but whose voice is not drowned out by either. Their work is a collaboration of Arts and genres and the exploration of ideology. Without ideology, music and Art equally are baseless. Similarly, without the ability to talk in a reasonably accessible language, art fails to meet its primary aim: to communicate. If art cannot communicate it is baseless.
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Interlude
The ability to create this language, which may be cryptic enough so to inspire debate, yet accessible enough so to communicate ideology and instill in a listener that out of body, liberating, transcending effect that true Art can, is what defines an Artist. Without a musical language, without ideology, without aim, an individual cannot create Art because at base, he is scarcely an individual at all, simply another expendable inflicting meaningless noise upon the world; a pollutant, stifling the endangered pure air of true Art.
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So the problem then is not only in the, for want of a better word, 'art' of the intellectuals and hedonists, but equally in us, the audience. that fail to understand communication in music: we cannot appreciate the presence or absence of musical language, or else these rival camps would not exist, and neither would music itself in this superficial sense.
If we accept this as a problem inherent in todays society then we can see how severe and imminent a threat contemporary music culture places upon Art Music. If more and more people are incapable of realizing Music as an Art then the future of Art Music is hugely threatened: if nobody can understand it, there is no place for it and modernity; capitalism, intellectualism, the machine and the fascist has won and replaced free-thinking Art; Music, nature, culture and truth.
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