this is a probably-embarrassingly-banal recurring thought/observation i've had lately, but (artsy commentary below the cut)—
it seems like really great art (in a variety of mediums) only really arises out of a whole ecology supporting that art—e.g.,
-> you don't get great oration the way you did during Frederick Douglass's time because oratory is no longer a “live” art in the way it was back then (audiences prefer other options for entertainment/information; audiences don’t have the patience for that style of delivery, etc);
-> Mozart's genius for improvisation, while impressive, was an outlier on a spectrum of talent that existed back then, and wasn’t categorically different; he was pulling from a massive vocabulary of licks/phrases/etc that he knew by heart because that was How Music Education Worked Back Then—i saw a video recently that talked about that, and which also claimed the mythopoetic status of “singular genius composer” only began to rise and become so socially prominent during the Romantic era specifically because the ecosystem that supported that style of music education (e.g. sacred music and the church and such) was on the wane, which is FASCINATING even if it’s probably more “complicatedly true” rather than “straighforwardly true”;
-> and also, i enjoyed this Kanakia column that argued that the Western (as in "western/cowboy novels") managed to produce some truly great work, but only when that general *ecosystem* reached its apex…
most people, i think, don't think of the arts like this? like, i was into composing music when i was a kid, and i remember my parents—who are lovely, just not AT ALL musical—regarded it with a bit of awe. after i worked really hard writing this one song & performed it at a recital, my mom asked me if there would be more if i only “had one song in me.” she wasn’t asking in a negative “you should be doing more” way! but in a wistful-earnest way, like, “wow, it’s so lucky you had even this one song in you; sometimes that’s all there is and we just have to be grateful for it” kind of way. they asked me where my ideas for songs came from. and i, being a kid, was like “uhhh idk they just come to me” and they were awed all over again.
as an adult i know that wasn’t the whole story—the real answer is, well, i had piano lessons, so i already had some idea (both intuitive and formal) of common chord/arpeggio/etc patterns; i played a lot of nobuo uematsu and frédéric chopin so their compositional styles "lived" in me; and so when i started playing with a little melody for fun, i had some “hunches” for where to take it, how to develop it, and “it just came to me” but… only because i had this whole vocabulary that i, being a kid, didn’t even realize was a learned thing; it just felt like part of the air i breathed.
i got to thinking about this recently when reading adam kostko's post about the process of learning to how to better listen & look in order to better appreciate art… and he argues that e.g. those with some formal music education may in fact get less out of a music performance because they’re trying to “decode” the piece rather than really listen. which is interesting, and i think has some truth, but i suspect it’s *specifically* that music education today mostly involves learning some theory “in a vacuum” (e.g. “label these chords”-style worksheets) and learning how to precisely replicate prewritten songs, rather than… developing that fluency & that access to the wider ecosystem
uhhh hm do i have a thesis here. i guess (1) it’s weird to me i rarely/never hear defenses of canon articulated in these terms: “this is the working vocabulary of your literary/artistic/musical inheritance (which is well and truly yours by right of being a human being on planet earth), and you need some fluency in it in order to have access to it, and really you need much more fluency than modern primary/secondary education is going to be able to give you on its own, but we should at least give people a fighting chance”, and (2) i used to be pretty anti-rote-memorization but i’m now kinda pro-memorization for like. idk. good poetry. some music. sacred texts. anything that gives you some richer basis of expression to fall back on in a pinch
