[LAU] Paul Hindemith says hello

[frank pirrone]

Dave Phillips wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Something to start the week. While reading from PH's A Composer's World 
> this morning I discovered this passage:
>
> "If there is anything remaining in this world that is on the one side 
> basically aristocratic and individualistic and on the other side as 
> brutal as the fights of wild animals, it is artistic creation. It is 
> aristocratic, because it is the privilege of a very restricted number of 
> people. If it could be democratized, it would lose its quality as an 
> art, become reduced to a craft, and end as an industry. In many branches 
> of our musical life we already have reached this lowest, industrial 
> phase, as we let musical democracy have its unbridled way."
>
> Prophetic or just dyspeptic ? Comments welcome...
>
> Best,
>
> dp
>   
Thanks for posting this provocative piece, Dave. 

This response follows the many you've already received, so I'd just like 
to add that Hindemith appears to be drawing a distinction between the 
rare achievement of art and the common achievement of craft.  His 
prophetic caution is that society will lose if it conflates the two, and 
what once was art will become just another industrial product.

Perhaps, more provocative is his assertion of the brutal aspect of 
artistic creation.  True art is not only difficult to achieve even for 
those supremely qualified, where they'll savagely discard most of what 
they create as unworthy, but also in regards a discriminating society 
savagely rejecting much of what artists actually present as unworthy, 
both in its own time but even moreso across generations.

So, make musical "art" if you can, and your audience and history will 
provide judgment, but if you're not quite up to that, by all means make 
musical "craft," as the very act of making music in any form and at any 
level is its own reward.

Frank