Composer gets quarter of a million bucks

John Borstlap says:

“…… an artist who has ‘pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change and paved the way for the next generation,’ ” ….. The boundaries of which art form? Certainly not of Western art music. Contributed to social change: making primitive voice exercises accessible to slum dwellers? Paved the way for the next generation: so that they can happily forget that there exists something like a musical culture around the corner? In reality, Ms Monk has made a contribution to music genres which never had the ambition to be part of Western art music, but are mere conceptual fun for juvenile minds without very developed aesthetic needs, if we have to believe the video.

The silly accolade: ‘…pushed the boundaries…’ etc. reads as the embarrassing, entirely outdated ideological rant of modernism, which sees music as developing along a line where the articulation points are created by the moments when someone ‘transgresses a boundary’. Such vision tries to make change permanent with the result that any art form eventually empties itself. Art is not about transgressing limitations, pushing boudaries, contributing to social change (as if change in society is a priori a good thing – which is nonsense, there are good and bad changes), and least of all paving ways for next generations – all this utoopian rhetoric is meaningless and mere repeating dead formulae now more than half a century old.

But it is really great that Ms Monk, in spite of all this, has been generously paid for her efforts, so that there is something concrete, at least, to be had from her work. Congratulations!