To be more serious, I did not say that Fados and such were doomed, I said that the cultural matrices that produced them were doomed. Therefore, they will be relics of the culture that produced them, and even if new music in several of the styles is composed, it will not be the same.....Whether or not rock will replace it all, I have no idea. Certainly, one of the strengths of rock has been its syncretism, so that new elements are continually incorporated from various sources. This is one of the reasons why I think rock is important: it has created a medium in which diverse influences can intermingle. In any case, the strong music will generally find institutional support and an audience, and the weak music will disappear. That seems to me a good thing. It also seems to me that the spread of a common culture is a good thing.....
My reference to retraction was your use of the Wittgenstein paraphrase against me, when clearly it applies at least as well to someone who considers it a point of pride to have avoided listening to crooners like Frank Sinatra. How alienated from one's own culture can one be?.....
I did use the word "sophistication", I did not use the word "primitive". However, you are right enough, I thought it a couple of times. So what? First, if I value things like education and science and industrialization and urbanization, as I in fact do, then I think that it would be desirable for people to assimilate whatever is necessary for participation as rapidly as possible, for their own sake. Second, if I value these things, I also value, in a broad sense, the styles that go along with them. I love skyscrapers and abstract sculpture and the aesthetic of the machine. I prefer cities to the countryside, generally. I prefer parks and farmland to wilderness. In various and sundry ways, I have a sensibility fashioned by a particular cultural matrix. And the soundtrack is one of jazz, and rhythm and blues, and rock and roll, not just because they were there, or marketed, but because they are closer to what the world in which I grew up feels like. I listen with pleasure to Palestrina and Bach and Schoenberg and Carter and---- Bob Dylan, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Frank Sinatra. What is best? Probably the Bach, but it is not always appropriate to the mood or situation. If I am riding the roads, I would rather have on Bruce Springsteen or the Grateful Dead than the St. Matthews Passion or the Brandenburg Concertoes......Similarly, it is idle to think that there will not be a change in sensibility as various peoples develop economically and politically...... |
