Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Fragmentary Arts
In this piece David Brooks thinks things are breaking apart in pop music. The fragmentation isn't good because mass audiences aren't attracted, and I suppose, that means we are heading for a tower of pop culture Babel.
The fine arts, as it often does, prefigured this. The isms and movements and theoretical constructs were supposed to deepen and intellectualize the arts, making them a proper subject for study, formalizing them into academic seriousness; but they just were distractions from the impulse to make art and to enjoy it.
Brooks, quoting Steve Van Zandt,
…[Van Zandt] says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.
As a result, much of their music… stinks.
Van Zandt thinks the answer is education,
Van Zandt has a way to counter all this… He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. … he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.
Brooks says, “It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.”
When Larry Summers ran Harvard he suggested to an art history prof that they teach a survey class. She laughed at him.