Many years ago in a music forum, while defining Art, I wrote that it is a non-economic activity that, by connecting with the evolution of aesthetics, seeks to represent the reality surrounding humanity. Good heavens! My statement provoked a hornet's nest of controversy aimed at asserting the “neutrality” of art regarding human ideas and philosophies.
At that time I had not yet read Milan Kundera, but now that I have, I think I must correct my statement in this manner: those who practice Art, more than just representing reality, pursue «an intention to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality».
It is obvious: this definition, which partly corrects the more absolute one I expressed some years ago, would not satisfy the supporters of the “neutrality” of Art, but what seems to me entirely evident is instead that man, from his first graffiti made in caves, sought to narrate his life and, therefore, to interpret the reality that surrounded him.
With Art, the human being carries out that activity that brings him closer to the absolute more than any other, seeking to reach an unattainable degree of beauty, perfection, and truth, and, if I think of the many masterpieces of every art, I cannot but agree with all this.
Milan Kundera also states that «What will one day remain of Europe is not its repetitive history which, in itself, represents no value. The only thing that has any probability of remaining is the history of its arts». And here lies the point that connects with what was written in the post that you, Frank, cite: human thought, whether religious or political in nature, is always relative. All that remains of man as an imperishable warning is his Art—the true Art—which is never worn away by the passage of time. And it gives me immense pleasure that it was the great writer himself who made this concept explicit on the occasion of the award presented to him in Jerusalem a few years ago in his acceptance speech: «A beautiful Jewish proverb says: Man proposes, God laughs.(...) But why does God laugh looking at man who thinks? Because the more men think, the more one man's thought moves away from another's.(...) But man becomes an individual precisely when he loses the certainty of truth and the unanimous consensus of others... art (was) born as an echo of God's laughter and (...) has known how to create that fascinating imaginary space in which no one possesses the truth and in which everyone has the right to be understood.(...) But it is time for me to stop. I was about to forget that God laughs when he sees me thinking».
Milan Kundera is a writer of both novels and essays and, in both genres, one of the main protagonists is great Western music, this because his father was a musician and he himself, before becoming a writer, was one.
«(...) About a year before my father's death, I was taking our usual walk around the block with him and we heard songs from every direction. (...) My father stopped, looked up at the device from which the noise was coming, and I understood that he wanted to communicate something very important to me. He made a great effort to concentrate, to succeed in expressing what he had in mind, then slowly and with difficulty said: “The stupidity of music”!"
What did my father mean by these words? Did he perhaps want to insult music, which was the passion of his life? No. I believe he wanted to tell me that there exists an original stage of music, a stage prior to its history, prior to the first questioning, prior to the first reflection, prior to the beginning of the play with a motif and a theme. In this rudimentary stage of music (music without thought) the stupidity inherent in the human being is reflected. For music to rise above this primitive stupidity, an immense effort of mind and heart was required, and this has been a splendid curve that has dominated from above centuries of European history and reached its maximum point of trajectory before extinguishing, like the rocket of a firework.(...)».
This is an excerpt from the novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” which, besides representing one of its most important moments, expresses in an absolutely shareable way what is the sad sunset of “learned music” that began as early as the twentieth century.
Great Art music is increasingly ghettoized, both that which we usually call classical and, even more so, that which is modern and contemporary. This is precisely because in our current era humanity is returning to an original stage of stupidity.
On the other hand, as the Sicilian composer Salvatore Sciarrino reminds us in his book-lecture “The Figures of Music from Beethoven to Today”, the masses have always been refractory to Art, with the only exceptions being Greek tragedy and nineteenth-century melodrama. This is because: «(...)"
Two lines of reasoning, that of Milan Kundera and that of Salvatore Sciarrino, with many convergences, even if the Czech writer actually paints a more apocalyptic scenario regarding art and music in particular. Unfortunately, for the most part, this is true: while it is true that the masses have always been far from art, this was also true because they were deliberately kept ignorant by those who held secular or religious power.
Today, a greater general level of culture should have presumed a closer approach to the Arts; instead, in an era where so many people have been able to acquire such a high degree of knowledge, this has not come to pass because, in a society based on profit, power has moved away from the cult of Art. The result is living in one of the most mediocre periods in human history, and this fact is reminded to us by Milan Kundera in “The Curtain”: having lived in the Eastern communist world and having had to flee to the West, returning to his native soil in 1989 in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he bitterly noted through the words of a friend that: «(...) What you see here, in fact, is the restoration of a capitalist society, in all its stupid and cruel aspects, with all the vulgarity of swindlers and the nouveau riche. The idiocy of commerce has replaced ideological idiocy. (...)».
This is why I say that, for me, what is written in the post you proposed is pure gold.
