| From: Alex Honzen Subject: Jerome Hines & "Modern" Music To: vocalist-at-lists.oulu.fi Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>
Naomi Gurt Lind wrote: < and I think it's an unfortunate mistake to lump it all together as one sound, one artistic idea, one aesthetic...I personally embrace the non-linearity & think it's an apt metaphor for many aspects of our century's history & culture.>>
I agree with this. Believe me, I love bel canto as much as the next person - my initial post regarding Hines' writings was more in relation to aesthetic judgements as opposed to the physical or technical ease of singing the music. Besides the fact that I think he dealt with John Cage and the art student in bad faith, I also find attitudes like Hines' troubling in their inability to see things in terms of non-verbal or non-narrative communication - and of course the power of a lot of music is that it communicates something that is not verbal nor narrative, even if it is the music used for a Mozart or Rossini aria. I would imagine most people interested in opera would agree with that, and yet some are not willing to extend that opinion to, say, modern compositions (which they view as being "noise"), or current productions of operas. A good case in point is Robert Wilson's production of Lohengrin at the Met. He was apparently booed at its premier, and I suspect it was basically just because of the fact that he had recontextualized a piece that Wagnerites are used to seeing performed with a certain, more traditional aesthetic applied to it. The performers in Wilson's works are usually asked to interact in a way that may have more to do with emotional landscapes than demonstrative storytelling - this does not, in itself, make his take on an opera inferior to a more "conventional" reading.
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