Augustus Arnone — Journal

“Perfect adaptation to any environment is achieved by a total channeling of energies and vital force that amounts to a kind of static terminus for a creature. Even slight changes in the environment of the very well adjusted find them without any resource to mmet new challenge. Such is the plight of the representatives of ‘conventional wisdom’ in any society. Their entire stake of security and status is in a single form of acquired knowledge, so that innovation is for them not novelty but annihilation.“ (Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 69)

I’m sure this passage speaks to a lot of different people on a lot of different levels. I myself find it profoundly relatable to the deeply conservative musical environment I encountered during my conservatory/university years. Musicians coming of age in this time are faced with the challenge of having to enter into this environment and then deciding to what extent they will let the sightlines of their musical development be shaped by the demands placed on them by the environment. In a musician’s life of uncertain place or position, perfect adaptation to the institutionalized musical world can certainly have its appeal,  and so the struggle for artistic development becomes the struggle for anticipating and realizing the ideologies of whatever professors and panels/committees/adjudicators to whom they’ll apply for conferral of legitimacy and status. And for those that go through it and do adapt, their position as a kind of musical leader will depend on the acquired values and conventions which were the product of that adaptation. Naturally such a person will be quite hostile to any kind of innovation or change, for it will amount to the renunciation of precisely that accrued ‘knowledge’ which is the foundation of their claim to musical merit. Those panels and committees aggressively promote shared values, as anyone coming up in the academic music world can attest.

A person can become so preoccupied with optimal functioning within this environment so as to really have no aspirations or direction, or even value (if I may be a little unkind) apart from it. What is an artist really if not an expeditionary? There’s a Kafka parable which gets right at the heart of it, the one where the people have a choice to be kings or else to be couriers of kings. They all choose to be couriers and so go around shouting meaningless messages to each other.

Economics is a good word for it, It’s a bit like investing in stock, if everyone invests in something it has great value, if people stop investing in it then the holders find themselves with very little. I encountered this when I started to study 18th and 19th century performance practice and learned that many of the performance conventions that overwhelmingly predominate in our time are based in habits that formed around the mid-point of this century, and seem not to resemble much of what we can know about the musical cultures in which these classical works were spawned. Naturally, those venerable professors whose sole source of acquired knowledge rests in the perfect absorption of mid-century performing conventions are incredibly hostile to such sentiments, or to any suggestion that we (the people) should stray the slightest bit from prescribed and collectively accepted performance concepts. Of course, predictably a new economy has sprung up around the acquired knowledge of performance practice, with values just as deeply conservative as any more traditional conservatory example.

It’s why so many people admire Bob Dylan actually, the quintessential example of avoiding at all cost any kind of static terminus. How does the song go…. “you must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.” The kind of adaptation Mcluhan talks about precludes the possibility of any thought of “leaving.” In a letter to Milton Babbitt I found myself saying “I realize I’m speaking to the original Magi captain himself.” Gosh, we need people like this!