Postscript

with PETER DALE

<< Continued from yesterday

At its worst, modernism has failed to earn its place inside our heads, inside our listening habits. At its worst, it has allowed style to degenerate into stylisation, art and artifice to become mere design (or worse, designer-labelled). It has so often confused the rhetoric of making a statement with the much harder task of making sense. It has largely failed, I think, to meet the challenges of electricy. It accounts for ninety per-cent of the dynamics, the mood, the success, of a successful film in the cinema, but it has failed to claim that most modern of media as its own. It has revelled so much in rhythm that it has often lost sight of pulse. Like an hubristic aviator it gleefully shouts: Look. No feet! (on the ground of metre, of pulse). But in the process it has left the field open to the crude, atavistic minimalism, not of pulse or metre, but merely of beat, in the pounding of Rock music.

Music casts shadows forwards - rarely backwards. Something like a canon of 20th century music - a settlement between the creeds of composers and the needs of listeners - will gradually emerge, and it is going to include the awesomely good at the same time as it will allow us to overlook the awfully bad.

Whatever else may happen, part of that shadow cast onto the music of the future by this music from what is now the past is going to continue. Harold Bloom, that great mapper of (literary) canons, recently suggested that we may be suffering from the 'embarrassment of a tradition grown too wealthy to need anything more'. If that's true, then we have lived at the best, the richest, of all possible historical moments. If it isn't true, the treasure-house of what we already possess gives us a head-start in appreciating, enjoying, and in making what is still to come.

Copyright © Peter Dale, August 23rd 1999