Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Mavericks on the Radio
If you've been reading the Times or various NY bloggers, you know that SFS's American Mavericks programs were a huge hit in NYC. (I only wish I'd been there to...no, wait. I'm actually very glad to have been on vacation elsewhere.) If you missed the SFS and NY shows (and the other landing places in between), or you want to hear everything again, KDFC is your friend. The station is broadcasting three Mavericks programs, on April 15, 22, and 29; all Sundays, all at 8 p.m. Not sure why these aren't in the usual SFS Tuesday-night time slot...oh, probably the perceived hatred of their typical audience for anything out of the ordinary (sigh). Anyway, starting this Sunday, there you go.
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7 comments:
Lisa
"Not sure why these aren't in the usual SFS Tuesday-night time slot...oh, probably the perceived hatred of their typical audience for anything out of the ordinary (sigh)"
*******
Well it's also possible that Steven Pinker is mostly correct here:
My quarrel isn’t with Modernism itself, but with the dogmatic versions that came to dominate the elite arts and bred the even more extreme doctrines of postmodernism. These movements were based on a militant denial of human nature, especially the idea that people are born with a capacity to experience aesthetic pleasure. Beauty in art, narrative in fiction, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, ornament and green space in architecture, were considered bourgeois and lightweight, or products of mass-marketing. Instead, modernist and postmodernist art was intended to raise our consciousnesses, illustrate a theory, or shock us out of our middle-class stupor.
[....]
Regardless of what lies behind our [evolution determined] instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic really can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures.
[....]
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. [...] And they’re surprised [i.e., the critics and scholars] that people are staying away in droves?
I'm asking about decision-making at KDFC, and, honestly, I do not give a damn about Steven Pinker's opinions of modernism. Not to mention, if anyone thinks these particular composers in any way dominated the "elite arts," s/he needs to go learn a little about the history of 20th c. American music.
What Lisa said.
Hey! Thanks, and long time no see!
No, Mr. Arepo.
I am usually not one to appeal to authority but here I really believe that Mr. Pinker is closer to the truth.
I'm repeating myself, but: the blog posting is about how KDFC decides when to broadcast SFS programs, not about modernist.
The Mavericks programs - which got rapturous reviews everywhere they were performed - took up a lot of space on the SFS schedule. In two weeks, they normally present two programs. During the two weeks of the Mavericks concerts, they had five. So KDFC's schedule would need to change somehow. That's all this is about.
modernism, not modernist.
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