Re: GG: Music and Morality

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>]

I'll respond in clips because it's much easier to read.
-Mary Jo

Robert C. Kunath wrote:
<snip>

> I'm also intrigued, though, by Gould's statements that
> art is amoral, and even possibly immoral.  Do you recall the line in the GG
> Interviews GG about GG where he says that art should phase itself out?  I
> get a sense (and my memory is a little faded) that he's arguing that the
> artistic enterprise automatically compromises the artist's morality.

I always read this passage to mean that Gould thought Art as some regal 
institution should phase itself out.  That what we now call art should
be
the business of everyday life and not something (in terms of music) say
that
you have to go to a concert hall to experience.  It's *that* mode of 
commercialized entertainment-- of spectacle that is immoral.  Anyone
have 
thoughts on this matter to add?

> Certainly our conversation about Karajan showed that many of us think that
> Karajan's alleged moral flaws are irrelevant to his achievement as an
> artist, and Gould seems to have agreed.  

I don't know...I'm still not convinced that Gould chose to be aware of
the Karajan 
issue.  At least to the extent that GG sort of always seems to put HvK
in 
this Sibelian place of the Nordic mind as opposed to the tropical
mindset of
say Italian opera.  (His love of things German is like Oliver Alden's 
in _The Last Puritan_ no doubt.) GG's reliance on binaries is most
irritating to 
me at times. Also, to what extent was GG's opinion of HvK filtered
through his own 
aesthetic morality? I mean there's no denying that HvK's Sibelius 5th
has a moral 
*meaning* in the Idea of North. 

>One of the troubling issues here
> is that it is by no means clear that art really helps make us good people,
> and I'm hard pressed to say whether Gould's intense devotion to music made
> him a better or a worse person.

I don't doubt that art can "excite the passions" to bad feelings-- I
think GG 
avoided (to steal from _Birth of Tragedy_) the Dionysian for the
Apollonian. 
Both extremes have their consequences.  To risk making myself wide 
open here, it's that (GG called it medieval) disassociation of one's
identity from the work performed that seems to make political concerns
of 
no conscious consequence.  HvK stayed in Berlin-- other artists of his
stature
immigrated.  Why?  I think this *may* be an issue of the ethical
ramifications of
aesthetics. What did GG say? "Enough the man is a monster!"  In the end
it didn't 
matter for him-- he liked his icons unsullied.  It didn't hurt that HvK
was vocal
about his admiration for GG's work. (I should say, I guess, that I find
HvK to be
a fascinating personality, esp. vis-a-vis his contributions to musical
technical 
history.  I also love that Sibelius 5th!)

<snip>

I think this has been a very interesting thread and I'm pleased that
it's 
remained fairly civil and transformed. This is the level of
philosophical 
discussion I had hoped for when I started the list.

Thanks!

Mary Jo Watts
mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu
listowner, f_minor