A friend, knowing I am a composer, asked if I thought Miles Davis was a good musician. What he meant was “Is Miles Davis a technically accomplished musician,” say like the famous French trumpetist Maurice Andre. I’ve been asked this question in various forms for years. It makes me uncomfortable. I’ve no idea about Miles Davis’ technical skills. Could he play as technically perfectly as Maurice Andre? Every skill set has its own parameters, and these are perfected by practice and immersion in a particular musical culture. While I doubt Miles Davis could play the Teleman Concerto as well as Andre, I also doubt that Andre could’ve created Bitches Brew.
The friend who asked the question isn’t really a jazz or classical music lover. What he knows best are little-known American rock bands from the years 1977 to 2000. He encyclopedically knows the bands, the members of the bands, and the histories of the bands. I’m sure he’d never ask me if any of the players in the hundreds of bands he knows are good musicians or not. This question would never come up because he likes the music and doesn’t need any outside assurances.
The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, in a conversation with Glenn Gould, admitted that he didn’t like Arnold Schoenberg’s music. But he added that he was interested in Gould’s opinion because he knew Gould was an admirer, and he preferred to hear what Gould liked about it rather than hear what someone else didn’t. This is a valid rule of thumb for any occasion, for it leaves open the possibility of new experience. It’s worth noting that after Gould spoke about Schoenberg’s music, Menuhin didn’t seem convinced, saying he found the music awkward to play, signifying technical incompetence on Schoenberg’s part, a mortal sin in the classical music world.
I’ve found that whatever people really like, including myself, they always like for emotional reasons. Only after do they seek to justify it through some form of technical prowess, claims to complexity, or some special spiritual content. Someone defined a snob as one who aspires to a social class of which they’re not a member. No one ever likes anything because they should like it unless they’re a snob or a fake.
In the current non-culture questions of value have lost all meaning. Value only occurs in a culture where people share traditions. In our world, the desire for inclusiveness makes these questions impossible to ask, and if one insists that a particular form of expression has a superior value over another, one risks being called nasty names. Still, people wonder about what has “real” value and what doesn’t.
I was sitting on the metro and overheard an older woman, an American matron-type that I didn’t know still existed, making pronouncements about a wedding she was soon to attend. From the way she was dressed and from how she spoke, in a sort of Midwest-by-way-of Connecticut accent, I could tell she was well-to-do, as was her audience. While she was speaking, she remarked, with the finality of a judge giving the death sentence, that “people stick to their own.”
How happy, unconflicted and honest a perspective I thought! Yes, people stick to their own! They gravitate towards the things and people with whom they share cultural and social affinities. This is a basic human truth borne out by history. Anything interesting always suggests a niche, people hanging out with others like themselves who share a set of definitions. The art of Miles Davis grew out of these types of elements, as did the art of Maurice Andre.
In a world where people from radically different backgrounds increasingly live together can trans-cultural values be created? To do so, they’d have to be universal. When something becomes universal, it becomes devoid of origin, place, time, culture, meaning or value. It’s from nowhere, an imposed reference of the Power Structure. An example is the song “Imagine.” Whatever its origins, it no longer has a context; it’s the Anthem of the Fake proclaiming the Universal Smiley Face of Brotherly Love.
Universals are what the media and advertisements present as cultural references. They are, however, only products. Things like sports results, Taylor Swift, trends in hip-hop, the paid-for opinions of movie stars and the list goes on. And their only result are depthless opinions on ever-changing and disposable cultural signs, devoid of past, present or future.