While you are awaiting for the appearance of Part II of the series of musicologically oriented critiques of The Rise of the Third Reich, I simply had to comment on the following article by Philip Clark on tonality, which appeared in Gramophone magazine. In particular I thought I would draw the reader to the following passage:
I could hardly have put it better. We live in an age of capitalist mass commodity music.
It is unfortunate that there are many out there who believe that the popular music manufactured by the corporate world is in some ways "modern music". I pulled a score by the heavy metal band Metallica off the internet the other day, and compared it side by side with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Stravinsky made the corporate mass produced product seem positively archaic—astonishing when you consider that his score premiered in 1913 will be a hundred years old next year.
The pseudo-modernity of corporate mass produced commodity music comes from its extra musical associations. The pink/purple/orange hairdo, or the meat dress:
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Corporate mass produced music needs these extra-musical gimmicks to distract us from the reactionary conservativeness of their narrowly tonal products.
We are also told by corporate Big Brother that popular music this sort of gimmick represents some sort of "rebellion". It is a rebellion that comes manufactured in little plastic containers ready for mass consumption. The corporate line about "classical" music being allegedly "elitist" is likewise just pure propaganda.
Creative free spirits skydive into the unknown. The noble ideal, not that it always works out this way, is to expand music’s expressive purview. But Messers Lloyd Webber, Barlow et al actively seek to contain language. Ambiguity doesn’t play well in that brutally corporate world lorded over by Simon Cowell. Ambiguity means difficulty and the trouble with difficulty is that eats into profit margins. And so musical language is siphoned down to a pre-packaged catalogue of dependable, bankable expressive reflex actions: fast, slow, happy, sad. The cushion of tonality remains, the inconvenient truths are ruthlessly circumvented.
I could hardly have put it better. We live in an age of capitalist mass commodity music.
It is unfortunate that there are many out there who believe that the popular music manufactured by the corporate world is in some ways "modern music". I pulled a score by the heavy metal band Metallica off the internet the other day, and compared it side by side with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Stravinsky made the corporate mass produced product seem positively archaic—astonishing when you consider that his score premiered in 1913 will be a hundred years old next year.
The pseudo-modernity of corporate mass produced commodity music comes from its extra musical associations. The pink/purple/orange hairdo, or the meat dress:
Corporate mass produced music needs these extra-musical gimmicks to distract us from the reactionary conservativeness of their narrowly tonal products.
We are also told by corporate Big Brother that popular music this sort of gimmick represents some sort of "rebellion". It is a rebellion that comes manufactured in little plastic containers ready for mass consumption. The corporate line about "classical" music being allegedly "elitist" is likewise just pure propaganda.