Comments on: Learn the craft. It may become art.

By: Chris Gale

Wed, 13 May 2015 20:55:24 +0000

One comment: it is morning and I have a job that is calling. Most people in Europe walk through cities that work: have been restored (after being destroyed 70 years ago) as they were. They see buildings from three hundred to fifteen hundred years ago every day: those buildings are used.

Where I live, the oldest buildings date from the 1860s: they are the remaining buildings from a Gold Rush. And that is considered historical.

It is when you do not walk through history that you notice it.

And… arguments about grammar and calling people names does get used. As fuel. For extensive comments in other posts.

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By: Praguer

Wed, 13 May 2015 14:09:42 +0000

That blogger you quote is a philistine. ‘Beauty’ is not and has never been the sole ideal in art and architecture. Look at memento mori art, particularly of the 15th century. The representations of death and decay are not meant to beautify and exalt death, but to remind the viewer that death is final and terrifying.

I am writing this not far from the Franz Kafka museum. Kafka’s art was not ‘beautiful’ but extremely disturbing. Yet his work is truthful and honest.

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By: Bratsche 4 Lyfe

Wed, 13 May 2015 11:51:16 +0000

Perhaps you can begin practicing this ethos by correcting the spelling and grammar errors in your posts?

Your allusion to the words of Keats, as if they are automatically true, is interesting. Multiple critics have considered these lines only weaken the poem. It has also been considered an “uneducated” conclusion, according to Arthur Quiller-Crouch.

As you mention viola playing, I can see AQC’s point: When you write of intonation (and, I presume, bow articulations, timbre, tone, projection and clarity), you are speaking of the basics. The fundamentals.

Yet as a violist you know that going beyond the rudimentary means developing phrasing, musicality and interpretation. All this requires a much more extensive palette than just “beauty.”

For example, have you played the Penderecki Concerto, or, in ork, the Threnody? (The latter was used in the film score Kubrick’s horror film “The Shining” to terrifying effect.) They are intense, transcendent works of art. They contain truth. Yet few would describe them as things of “beauty.”

I suppose I find it ironic that someone who plays the viola, an instrument whose solo repertoire is among the most experimental and least conventionally “beautiful,” would espouse such an opinion.

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