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I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.
Glenn Branca, NYT.
#1) Culture Industry & Adorno much?
#2) I disagreed with Adorno’s work when I first read it 2 years ago and was dismayed when it kept coming up in my academic life. Here it is again and I’m still just as bothered by these same kind of melodramatic, all-or-nothing, & attention-grabbing statements (“the end of music”? Really?). Mr Branca seems to enjoy perpetuating the judgmental, snobby attitude that has, in my personal experience, frequently been associated with Western art music (“Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring”; emphasis mine).
#3) I think music educators in general need to be careful about attitudes such as these, or at least know that these attitudes are out there; it’s much more likely that the students in our classes have been raised on a diet of popular music than Western art music, and music educators may run a risk of alienating their students through letting these types of attitudes accidentally show through repertoire choices or verbal comments. Regardless of how we aesthetically or personally feel about any type of music, our students may have positive associations towards the same works of music and we have to be conscious of that fact.
