Classical music... that wonderful stuff that lets you fall asleep and/or helps you study, and/or the stuff you hear on elevators. Or, as Benjamin Zander says, "you experience it like second hand smoke" while doing other things.
Or should it be?
I took a course in undergrad once, on arts management (I have no idea why). I don't remember much about it, except one thing: that in order to gain an audience for an art form, you need to educate the public about how to appreciate it. That seems obvious, but in reality it's usually not the route taken by artists. bah! I will do what I want, when I want, and if the people don't understand it, then too bad! Well...Noooo, you see, appreciating an art is like any other medium and appreciation: At some point you have to learn what to appreciate, how to appreciate it, and with out that knowledge it is lost by the beholder. It's like a language, and you have to show people where to look, and why. To snub away from doing so is doing your own art a disfavour, and also severely limits the expansion of the arts itself.
Benjamin Zander understands this. This little video I'm embedding here is a lecture from TED.com. It's an awesome website with wonderful lectures by all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects, but this one is about classical music... and more specifically about how to listen to it... and why the art form is moving, and the potentials it has in expressing and realizing the most amazing parts of humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment