Revolt into Classicism

[imomus]

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.

Comments

A scrabbling around in the ruins of pop culture

[(Anonymous)]

The 3rd variant of Romanticism (or shall we just call it US culture), has now been reduced to turning rebellion into a commodity. "Rock and Roll" is now appropriated by conservatives and corporations to pacify turn a profit . Thus any form of true rebellion is castrated. For me "Rock and Roll" has always seemed mindless, self-obsessed and conservative. Its sole aim has been always been self-destructive and its rebellion unilateral rather than political. It is adolescent, it does not grow up and as an atavistic form is easily understood. It sums up America today.

Music that dares to be intelligent is derided because it does not conform to this set pattern and 'purity' of impulse . This is evident in the Ilx thread. Nick is attacked for his ideological dislike of PJ Harvey's music. I also have a mistrust of emotion that is primarily concerned with' authenticity' and machismo. Her music is all pose and no poise. Well this thread neatly brings me to a recent PBS Frontline (current affairs show) that basically posited the fact that the music industry in fearing the Mp3 is again turning to the familar model it knows, namely "Rock":

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/artists/

The people who like Rock know the rules, ie buy product and buy into the clichés willingly. The programme shows how the daughter of a sixties novelty group is being marketed because she embodies the "rock-chick" attitude ( railing against boyfriends and parents ). Then there is also the hybrid of Guns N Roses and the Stone Temple Pilots. It's amusing to watch the record company A&R people salivating on how successful "Velvet Revolver" ( no joke) will be . I think the programme just goes to show how out of touch the music industry is; how bankrupt it is and how it only knows the romantic formula of "Sex, drugs and Rock N Roll" . I hope that the corporate structures of the music industry are destroyed and turned to ruins by their very ignorance and fear of change. I have great hopes that a new age of music enlightenment will come from the internet and the experiment that has been conducted here.

Richard G