The Analects of Music part 5: Tradition
Some years ago, someone asked me if I played traditional music. I no longer knew how to answer that.
An elite minority of musicians must function to preserve traditional music. Most musicians will simply follow the herd. What remains are the visionaries.
Style and genre easily become a prison. Concern yourself primarily with the psychoactive properties of music. Beyond this, remember that all of creation works exactly as does music. Music is a microcosm of the universe.
Most musicians, while they will approach what they do with sincerity and enjoyment, are not breaking new ground or exploring anything of great profundity or sublimity. The voices of their lives have validity and meaning.
The elite who preserves tradition are important. For example, someone who studies and plays traditional Indian ragas in the classical manner, or those who master the classical music of Europe or America are preserving something of immense value which must not be lost. Such people are providing a great service.
Artistic / musical innovators are always in direct contradistinction to the society that produced them. Its leaders fear them, and for good reason. Their work is the greatest threat to their tyranny because it erodes the corrupted psycho-spiritual foundation of their power and replaces it with something better. No totalitarian power structure can tolerate this. This is why poets and artists have been thrown in prisons. Their work is as real as revolution. There are places in the world where poets have been thrown into prisons. It proves that what we do is as real as revolution. One of the most interesting, and little known, residual effects of oppressive governments is that it can produce truly great people of the arts, sciences, philosophies and spiritual disciplines among the oppressed who reject and resist the evils of their leaders.
The modern music business has the same problem. But rather than using brutality, they attempt to solve it by delegating the sublimity of music itself to a zeitgeist of insignificance. About a century ago, Eurocentric ears could not hear music of other cultures as anything other than noise. Now, with neo-capitalist globalization, the old European formality has been used as the foundation of an ugly and empty hybrid of sensuality and spirituality. An entire component of the music industry exists for no reason other than to analyze human reactions to different music, apply legal fiction to claim ownership of it, cultivate and program your dreams, steal them, and sell them back to you. Products are no longer designed to meet the needs of consumers; consumers are designed to meet the needs of the products!
No artist or musician ever accomplished anything useful or great without offending someone of limited vision.
In 1916, a Russian music critic named Leonoid Sabanyev published a scathing review of a Moscow performance of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite. The problem was that he was 1. completely unaware that the performance had been canceled & never took place, and imagined the whole thing, or 2. he lied. Either way, I think Stalin had something to do with that.
A German reviewer described the 1808 premier of Beethoven's 5th symphony as “a hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire.”
An American writer once described John Coltrane's music as “gobbledy-gook” and ‘‘anti-music.’’
When Mozart wrote The Magic Flute, he put secret freemason symbols and rituals into an opera. The freemasons were livid. I wonder if they were the cause of his early demise?
The visionaries are those who venture into uncharted territories, who forsake the safety of the comfort zone of what's been established. They take immense risks and fearlessly face the consequences of these risks. When they play, it could be a work of genius, or an utter train wreck; and they are ready to accept responsibility for it. They are the musical equivalent of the likes of Yuri Gagarin or Alan Shepard.
Style and genre easily become a prison. I must give a nod to one of my biggest musical influences: Bruce Lee. He was not a musician, yet his martial arts philosophies are easily applicable to music. He was not concerned with following a style or school of thought, because he refused to be frozen in that form. He sought formlessness and found in it his astonishing mastery.