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{"id":18171,"date":"2016-06-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2961"},"modified":"2016-06-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T00:00:00","slug":"music-and-risk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/06\/music-and-risk\/","title":{"rendered":"Music and Risk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Culture, writes David Goldman<\/a>, is \u201cinherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar \u2014 the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet there have been eras driven by what Oswald Spengler called \u201cFaustian\u201d restlessness. The 19th century was one of them. As Goldman says, \u201cthe Faustian spirit of the 19th century gave us all the great inventions that inform our daily lives: electricity, the automobile, the aeroplane, and so forth. The latter part of the 19th century was the most fecund period of human history, and Continental Europe contributed disproportionately.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

What made for this energy, this willingness to risk and to change? Can there by a culture that is conducive to risk-taking? Goldman sees Israel as a contemporary \u201cFaustian\u201d nation, and suggests that the arts are central to a culture that encourages economic risk. He writes, \u201cSeveral years ago a Jewish magazine asked me to report on the success of Israeli classical musicians, whose disproportionate success compares to that of Israeli entrepreneurs. I interviewed many performers, and observed that they threw themselves into their music with the same sense of risk that they must live with in everyday life. All the virtuosos I met had served in the Israeli Army and took their service seriously.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The arts can become hardened and static, of course, but there is an artistic training that encourages individuality and hence innovation. Goldman cites Edmund Phelps\u2019s Mass Flourishing<\/a>, which argues that \u201c<\/span><\/span>music, the art form that most embodied individual expression, became a middle-class occupation during the 19th century. If the modern economy is an imaginarium, as Phelps suggests, classical music is the imagination at play. In 1800 the largest English piano manufacturer, Broadwood, made only 400 instruments a year. By 1850, world piano production reached 50,000 a year, and 230,000 a year by 1890. Many of Beethoven\u2019s piano works were first performed by aristocratic Viennese ladies. By the middle of the century they were heard in millions of middle-class households in Europe and America, along with Chopin, Schubert, Schumann and other composers who espoused an impassioned individualism embodied in musical forms that posed problems and came to resolutions.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 19th-century Europe, \u201cthe disciplined artistic imagination, the embrace of risk at the expense of security, and the assertion of individual expression\u201d formed a potent cultural package. Today, it\u2019s not Europe or the US but China that seems to be carrying on this Faustian legacy: \u201cIn 2008, only 3.1 per cent of Americans reported playing classical music in the preceding 12 months. By contrast, there are about 35 million piano students in China. In 2012 China produced or imported more than 400,000 pianos, not counting digital pianos, which are an adequate substitute for elementary students.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerhaps,\u201d Goldman concludes, \u201cthat foretells where the centre of gravity of innovation will be during the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"