Just read this and found it kind of interesting. Will be spending the rest of my Friday night drinking some beer and listening to some of my favorite stuff trying to decide whether or not I entirely agree with the sentiments here. I figured if nothing else it might spurn some pretty good discussion around here, depending on whether or not people agree with this or completely dismiss it.
Quote:
" There are two main kinds of progressive, whether in music or in other fields of human activity. The first are those who are entirely disenchanted with the continued relevance of established methods and past traditions; they therefore seek to do away with them, and to replace them with something else; something fresh, untraditional. The second are those who do not discard past traditions, but seek instead to reinterpret them, and to apply them in a fresh context as they see fit.
The first kind, who may be described as the ideological iconoclasts, are far more readily noticeable than the second. It is indeed one of the prime requisites, if you are going to put forward new methods and fresh styles, that your gestures should he both strikingly novel, if possible outrageous, and immediately recognisable. Thus the avant-garde aesthetic is a simple one. But the severe risk run by those who subscribe to it is twofold; partly that means may be mistaken for ends - the striking of a fresh posture, the adoption of an untried process, may be mistaken in itself for an art-work, which it is not; and partly that, by thus shifting the scale of values, the concept of permanent validity in the finished work becomes relative. Your novelty one week may well be made redundant by someone else's more radical novelty the next, if you have no other yardstick by which to measure it than the fact of its 'progressiveness'.
The second kind of progressives run risks as well, though of a different, more subtle, nature. They may be overlooked as merely 'traditional', and their work not understood for what it is. Because they do not sever all links with the past, as the other kind do, but on the contrary accept the past and try to relate it to the present, their relevance for the present may he questioned. In the eyes of the first kind they will probably appear as 'blacklegs', who have, by compromising with tradition, forfeited any right to he called 'progressive' at all.
And yet the self-styled revolutionaries, of whom several adorn the history of music - much as heretics adorn the history of the Christian Church - rarely reach beyond the ephemeral stage. At most they succeed in focusing attention on to a particular idea, which others may then pursue and develop. Art reaches a more than ephemeral validity only when its creator takes a wider view of tradition than the narrowly revolutionary one.
