RTF Class invitation: Musical Renaissance: Bringing Classical Composition Back to Life (Aug 28 at 2pm ET)

Many people think of “classical music” as a boring and outdated expression of musical taste from the past bearing no relationship to the needs and realities of our current age. The idea that no one creates music in the spirit of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin or Brahms is justified by the idea that they were born into this thing called a “Baroque or Romantic Age” as though the arbitrary delimitations of the age in which we live somehow determines who we become and what we create.

Those exceptionally lame ideologues who assert such lazy explanations not only ignore the phenomenon of brilliant modern composers like young Alma Deutscher, but also assert dogmatically that our current “post-modern age” demands that musicians either choose to produce elitist “high art” or populist “low art”.

Aspiring artists are taught early on that if they wish to engage in “high art” as a profession then it were vital to detach their sense of aesthetics from reason, or objective notions of Truth and Beauty. They must instead compose atonal music that defies any harmony or coherent development of an intelligible idea. Random sounds, paint splatterings, dissonance and chaos are the ideals of such music which can only be properly enjoyed by “the elites”.

Without knowing it, devotees (both producers and consumers) of this post-modern aesthetic movement find themselves increasingly detached from their own sense of natural judgement of good or evil, right or wrong and fall instead increasingly into a cult of ugliness incapable of recognizing basic beauty if it slapped them in the face.

If, on the other hand, an artist wishes to engage in “low art” to be consumed by the “masses”, then this artist is taught that it were important to banalize their lyrics, and rhythms around easily consumable repetitive sounds and mindless sensualism that keeps the minds and emotions of music consumers as stagnant and infantile as possible.

In the Rising Tide Foundation lecture to be delivered this Sunday August 28 at 2pm Eastern Time, Dr Jonathan Tennenbaum (whose previous lecture on The Stupidity of AI can be viewed here) will address these problems and much more with a class titled ‘Musical Renaissance: Bringing Classical Composition Back to Life’

Click on the zoom link below to access the presentation live: