Are the classics history?

Posted by admin on Oct 7, 2010 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

Would Dickens be picketing against Kindle, Mozart sighing at the sound of electronically composed music, or Beethoven burning iPods in the alleyway? What exactly does the irruption of new artistic advancements mean for classic poetry, music, instruments, and literature? It would be impossible to count how many times recent conversations of Kindle or the iPad have included statements of the apparently inevitable demise of traditional books.

Our society becomes engrossed in reality television while Austen and Fitzgerald collect dust on library shelves. Musicians frantically fight for their own album sales while music downloads rise, with professional songsters voicing despair over full albums dissolving at the hands of LimeWire. And what is to be said of instruments themselves when guitars and pianos are being replaced with the electronic sounds of Ableton?

Of the movement of modern machines disrupting the way we construct and view classical art, Luigi Russolo, in his Futurist manifesto of nearly a century ago, observes that, “This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front;” a dated statement that timelessly holds weighted truth. There is also overwhelmingly similar consent to be found with Russolo’s bold proclamation that “musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones… And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.”
Are the classics then tired and stale with no room for new growth or variation? In a society with so much attention deficit, a circular struggle with little promise for birthing of the irregular or unheard of may be a knock sounding on death’s door.
On one hand there is merit in aiming to not hold onto the past; the arts must be progressive as creativity and expression are reflections and extensions of our ever-changing culture.
On the other hand, classical literature and music, or classical instruments for that matter, are in many ways similar to history. Not to say that they are history, but rather they may find exemption from death because they are foundational. They provide the basis for current music and literature, the soil that springs creative extension.
A 3/4 time signature remains the same, whether classical or electronic in nature. Musical composition continues to fall into classically determined key signatures, regardless of the product being a sonata or house music. Tolstoy and bloggers alike construct their sentences from written word, grammatical rules, and a love for language. Even though the classics may lack progression, there is much timeless beauty and romance to be found in them; they are and always will be the roots of contemporary art and its continual growth.
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