[LAU] Paul Hindemith says hello

[nescivi]

On Monday 22 June 2009 07:06:23 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...

To put it the other way round...
(Which is partly what Paul Davis was also hinting at...)
You need to have mastered the craft, before you can make art out of it.

In some cases I find it rather embarrassing with computation/electronic arts 
(as a broad term for anything made with electronics, algorithmic computation, 
computers, etc.), that sometimes the technological aspect is used in such a 
naive way that it rather shows off the excitement of the creator about that 
technology, which (s)he hardly understands, rather than taking that 
technology, and creating some artwork that is beyond the technology itself.

sincerely,
Marije