Man do I feel this sentiment in the realm of classical musical.
So many performers alienated from their own creative agency, desperately presenting themselves like peacocks to each other in ivory towers. Composers acting like puppet masters playing with instruments like they’re toys. Musicians exploiting each other for their chance to suck at the tit of aristocratic patronage, because they never learned what it was like to gig in the real world after they graduated from their boutique conservatory.
Milton Babbitt was right, at least he acknowledged the truth of how irrelevant the pursuit of academic and theoretical music aesthetics alone are to the broader industry and public interest. What good is performing for yourself if you have no way to relate it back to an audience, with no community to cultivate a genre that can be valued and understood by others? You can’t challenge people if you don’t even have anything substantive to say beyond your own self-interest.
Man do I feel this sentiment in the realm of classical musical.
So many performers alienated from their own creative agency, desperately presenting themselves like peacocks to each other in ivory towers. Composers acting like puppet masters playing with instruments like they’re toys. Musicians exploiting each other for their chance to suck at the tit of aristocratic patronage, because they never learned what it was like to gig in the real world after they graduated from their boutique conservatory.
Milton Babbitt was right, at least he acknowledged the truth of how irrelevant the pursuit of academic and theoretical music aesthetics alone are to the broader industry and public interest. What good is performing for yourself if you have no way to relate it back to an audience, with no community to cultivate a genre that can be valued and understood by others? You can’t challenge people if you don’t even have anything substantive to say beyond your own self-interest.