Music and Writing and Things

“There is no question in our day of the artist receiving a true mandate from society to create. The mandate of society is to entertain, and that mandate is clear and uncomplicated. But the mandate of the artist’s own nature, of his special and innate gift, is to reach down into the depths of the human psyche and bring forth the tremendous images of things to come. These images are not yet art. It takes a lifetime’s work to mould them into works of art. For this the artist can have no reward but in the joy of doing it. He creates, because without art, in this deep and serious sense, the nation dies. His mandate is inescapable.” – Michael Tippett: Moving Into Aquarius, Frogmore, St Alban’s, 1974.

“Our need today is to see that most of our agreements and disagreements about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ music are, in fact, disputes not (as we suppose) about ‘aesthetic value’ as some mystical or abstract category, a self-enclosed system remote from the concerns of ordinary life, and with terms that have meaning and reference only within the system. On the contrary, we need to understand that these agreements or disagreements revolve around values that we hold to be important, or that are repugnant to us, or that fall somewhere between; and that such values are both social and historical.” – Christopher Ballantine: Music and its social meanings, Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984.

“What we have here perceived as beauty,

We shall someday encounter as truth.” – Schiller: The Artists.

I am aware that I am moving into dangerous and turbulent waters when writing about music and art in general in relation to social and individual values. This is disputed territory and I will be seen by some as usurping a position they hold by virtue of their learning or knowledge or whatever. Others will see all this as totally irrelevant in a world dominated by the quest for the almighty dollar, pound, rand, or whatever.

What gives me the right to write about things like this – a mere lay person, an amateur, perhaps even a dilletante?

For me it is simply that I am claiming my right as a member of society and one who is affected by arts in general and music in particular to think about what these things are doing to me, what I am doing to them, and what sense can I make, as an individual music lover, of all the music I experience around me every day.

We cannot escape art – every building, every motor car, every billboard, even the clothes we wear, not to mention the music that pours out of radios, CD players and TVs constantly – all are part of that thing we call culture, and culture and art are inseparable. And we each of us have a response to what we experience in our daily activities.

In this web site I want to express my response to some of the joys, some of the dilemmas, of the very human activities of making music and writing. Because, as Ballantine makes clear in his brilliant book Music and it Social Meanings from which I have taken some lines quoted above, the activity of making music (or any other art, for that matter) cannot be seen as abstracted from our culture and our society. And I’m not here referring to Culture with a capital C, but to the accepted ways in which we live from day to day.

There seems to me to be a continuum of ways in which the products of artistic endeavour are used by societies, from the purely commercial commodification of art on the one hand, art as a commodity to be bought and sold to the understanding of art as a sublime activity closely related to the health both of individuals and of society at large.

Randall McClellan, in his book The Healing Forces of Music, (New York: Amity House, 1988) puts the latter view of music beautifully in this passage:”This whole universe is one great symphony and around us everything and every creature of this Earth continually resonates to that symphony, adding its own voice according to natural harmonic law. It is only we confused human beings who add the cacophony and create the dissonance. We shall continue to do so until we relearn how to hear the silence within and how to once again manifest our life in harmony with the greater whole.”

The journey of my life

~ by Tony McGregor on May 22, 2008.