Please throw yourself fully into this thought experiment.
Imagine that a ghost arrives on Earth who erases all music of the past. Every score, every recording, every history book, every performance of every single piece of music written in the past is suddenly and mysteriously vanished. You can recall names of great composers (e.g. Mozart, Handel) but you can recall nothing of their artistic contributions. What is now available is only music of the present day in October 2020.
First, discuss any ethical implications of playing music exclusively of the past. Then please write about the music you would then perform on your instrument and include any links to this music, if possible. Why are you including the music you select? Finally, offer your cogent opinion on this quote from Nietzsche:
If you are to venture to interpret the past, you can only do so out of the fullest exertion of the present. Only when you put forth your noblest qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving in the past. Like to like! Otherwise, you will draw the past down on you.
Word count for entire prompt: approximately 300 words. Due Wed Oct 21 at 10am on your blog site. Thanks as always for your contributions.
I believe, like all art forms, music is a way of expressing yourself; be it your opinions, thoughts, dreams, point of view, or even your ethics. Itâs a way to share something from yourself or from your culture. Aboriginal cultures (as do other cultures, I believe) use music to record and share their history. So, the further we travel back, the more history and perspectives we lose. Iâm also in Mus105, and one of the topics we are learning about is Modernism and how it (in my opinion) is all about breaking conventional 18th European composition rules and exploring what can be. To me, this music mostly sounds awful, so if I didnât have the past compositions of Mozart, Bach ect to look back on, I would have no idea why these modern composers are writing bad-sounding stuff. I wouldnât understand their purpose or what they were trying to do (and in the case of Musique concrĂšte, what they’re not trying to do).
Ex. We recently listened to Ruth Crawford Seeger – String Quartet (1931). I did not like how it sounded, and the last movement really scared me (I felt like I was being stalked), but because I had some background on 18th European music theory, I was able to see some of the techniques that they were strongly avoiding (thus making it a bit ironic, since by avoiding them, she accidentally highlighted the techniques).
I only play music for fun, and that music pretty much consists of video game music (the oldest comes from a 1999 action game, so this music isn’t exactly old). If all the present music was erased and I could only play music of the past, I’m not actually sure of what I’d play. I have always liked to listen to Debussy, so maybe any piece by him; the only problem lies within my skills as a pianist.
I donât quite agree with the quote from Nietzsche. Winston Churchill once said, âHistory is written by the victorsâ. I take this to mean that the human written history is biased, no matter how much time research goes in to uncovering what really happened in events of the past. For Nietzsche to say an analysis of current âqualitiesâ divines what was âworth knowingâ in the past, puts quantifies on some things that just canât be quantifiable. The small, cute melodies Dr. Krebs writes for his wifeâs birthday might not make the history textbooks, might not have relevance in future famous compositions, but they mean something precious to her and to Dr. Krebs. I think small stuff like this matter, and are worth knowing about.
On the matter using personal quantifiers to discover what’s important and worth knowing for yourself, that I can agree on. I just don’t think that should ever override the value of something. Art is subjective, so you can’t quantify the worth of something to others.
