Album of the Week locates the pleasure spot
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
There used to be a drive-time program on BBC Radio 3 called Mainly for Pleasure. They changed the title when too many musicians referred to it as Strictly for Cash, but the formula got thrown away with the concept. We forget that music exists primarily for pleasure and we tend to disparage those albums and concerts that aspire to no higher purpose.
Here’s one….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
“There is nothing in this record not to like.”
Well there must have been something! Three out of Five says it didn’t really knock it out the ballpark. I listened to it on streaming and loved every minute. Even the Dohnanyi.
Music life around 1900 was saturated with the ‘higher purpose’ of classical music as a whole, people going to concerts with a grave expression on their face and artist photos with one hand pensively on their chin. This was mainly due to the domination of German repertoire which was used as an artistic standard for anything else. Debussy rebelled against that attitude and claimed time and again, in letters and in his articles, that music should give pleasure before anything else. But his own works offer much more that pleasure alone. The issue is accessibility: beauty and pleasurable experience are merely the outside of the art form, meant to invite you into the interior experience of the music, which is about meaning, not pleasure which remains on the outside.
it is like the good looks of people: they are not a value on its own but beckon you towards the person as such.
The reason why so much 20C music is so ugly, is because composers thought that truth and beauty/pleasure were a contradiction.
If music is ONLY pleasure, then it sinks to the level of entertainment, nothing against it, but it is not serious. The idea that seriousness is different from pleasure is a misunderstanding.