Revolt into Classicism

Postinteresting is my new article in Voice: the AIGA Journal of Design. Elsewhere, I've been posting my reservations about the work of PJ Harvey. If there's a common theme to these apparently unrelated bits of writing, it's the attack on Romanticism, or rather what Romanticism has become in popular culture, more than two centuries after its invention. The original impulses of Romanticism were radical and rebellious. Now, though, re-incarnated, it's become a conservative mass cultural tic, an unsavory spectacle in which fragmented consumer-individuals look up to, and model themselves on, irresponsible, irrational and aggressive celebrities.

The song I'm working on today is The Artist Overwhelmed By The Grandeur of Ancient Ruins. It's about two gay archeologists on holiday in Italy, listening to Christoph Willibald Gluck on their iPod. The title comes from Henry Fuseli's watercolour. Fuseli is an early high Romantic: in his paintings all is darkness, sturm und drang, gothic nightmare, feverish imagining. My interest in him was piqued by an essay by Brian Dillon in Frieze magazine. Dillon writes:

'In Romanticism the ruined aphorism is exhibited afresh in the form of the fragment. Romanticism is in love with ruins: in Henry Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins (1778?9) the hapless artist contemplates a gigantic, severed sculptural hand and foot. Théodore Géricault's Severed Limbs (1818?19) depicts bodies hacked to pieces; the whole era is transfixed by fragments: everything remains tantalizingly unfinished. An aphorism by Friedrich Schlegel states: 'many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin.' The dream of a perfect aphorism - thought squared, condensed to crystalline angularity - lies shattered in contemporary confusion.'

As if to illustrate the shocking fragmentation that arrived with Romanticism (when the rationalism of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment came back all jumbled, chopped up and ruined, a sort of deranged and feverish dream) I've taken a piece of stately pre-Romantic music, Handel's 'Concerto Grosso in D Major, Opus 6, Number 5', and isolated the chords, slowing it right down and filling it with icy silences, until all that remains are fragments, with a voice precariously balanced on them, like an archeologist scrabbling across broken rocks.

My position on Romanticism is that I admire its political effects (the French and American revolutions) and some of its lurid imaginings (De Sade, bien sur, but also the continuation of Romanticism into Dada and Surrealism). I admire it as a critique of the Enlightenment. Wendell D. Garrett describes the process: 'The very intellectual underpinnings of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were being knocked out. The ideals of the previous age -- urbanity, precision, reason -- were under attack from the Romantic cult of the natural, the simple, and the ordinary.' What I don't like is Romanticism's third coming, in the form of mainstream pop culture products and movements: Goth, punk, Hollywood. David Lynch films, for instance (I just watched 'Lost Highway' the other night), strike me as somewhat ridiculous in their emphasis on 'the dark side'. I see nothing politically hopeful or helpful in this emphasis on all that's evil and irrational and inexplicable. Finally, I want to come down on the side of 'urbanity, precision, reason'. That's why, getting back to my design article, I don't really want designers to become artists. I want the future to be 'a clean, well-lit place'. I want the aristocratic Classical virtues to prevail: reason, harmony, proportion, restraint, good manners, poise, wit.

The essays Classical Composers and Classicism and Atrocity go further into my ideas on Classicism and Romanticism and their relationship with Rock and Pop.