The Future of Music in America: The Challenge of the COVID-19 Pandemic

IF 0.1 3区 艺术学 0 MUSIC
L. Botstein
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引用次数: 22

Abstract

This verse from the Old Testament describes how the prophet Elisha called on God to perform a miracle. There was a desperate need to fill a dry ravine with water. Music became the instrument of rescue, and the musician the giver of a new lease on life. The idea that music was in some measure a privileged means of communication, a bridge between the human and the divine, and thereby crucial to alleviating human distress through its capacity to bring forth the power of God, has never entirely vanished from our collective consciousness, despite the increased dominance of the secular over the sacred in Western history since the late eighteenth century. A case in point from the far more recent past can be found in H. G. Adler’s magisterial and exhaustive 1955 study, Theresienstadt 1941–1945: The Face of a Coerced Community. Adler, himself a survivor but not a musician, understood that performing music and listening to music in the camp by the incarcerated inmates, which had once “fulfilled a real need,” had become a “curse” when music making ceased to be voluntary and became subject to the sadistic whim and orders of the SS. But for a long stretch of time, concerts by inmates—Adler cites performances of music by Beethoven and Brahms by fellow prisoners—were “triumphs of pure morality over the adversity of an almost unbearable present.” Not because it was a means to an end (e.g., water), but music alone elicited the capacity for hope and goodness—theologically speaking, gifts of the divine located in the biblical account of creation. They were brought forth by the playing and hearing of music. A renewal of faith in this theological image and in the justification of music as indispensable to life and therefore hope and survival in dark and difficult times would be welcome as each of us struggles with isolation,
美国音乐的未来:COVID-19大流行的挑战
《旧约》中的这首诗描述了先知以利沙如何呼吁上帝创造奇迹。人们迫切需要用水填满一条干涸的峡谷。音乐成了拯救的工具,而音乐家则赋予了新的生命。音乐在某种程度上是一种特权的交流手段,是人与神之间的桥梁,因此通过其展现上帝力量的能力对减轻人类痛苦至关重要,这种想法从未从我们的集体意识中完全消失,尽管自十八世纪末以来,西方历史上世俗对神圣的统治地位日益增强。在H.G.Adler 1955年权威而详尽的研究《Theresienstadt 1941-1945:被强制社区的面貌》中可以找到一个最近的例子。阿德勒本人是一名幸存者,但不是一名音乐家,他明白,当音乐制作不再是自愿的,并受制于党卫队的虐待狂心血来潮和命令时,被监禁的囚犯在营地里表演音乐和听音乐,曾经“满足了一种真正的需求”,现在却成了一种“诅咒”。但在很长一段时间里,囚犯们的音乐会——阿德勒引用了狱友们演奏贝多芬和勃拉姆斯的音乐——是“纯粹道德战胜了几乎无法忍受的当下的逆境的胜利”。这并不是因为这是达到目的的一种手段(例如水),而是音乐本身就激发了希望和善良的能力——从神学角度来说,神圣的礼物位于圣经中对创造的描述中。他们被音乐的演奏和听觉所吸引。当我们每个人都在与孤立作斗争时,对这一神学形象和音乐作为生活不可或缺的理由,以及因此在黑暗和困难时期的希望和生存的重新信仰,将是受欢迎的,
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
发文量
13
期刊介绍: The Musical Quarterly, founded in 1915 by Oscar Sonneck, has long been cited as the premier scholarly musical journal in the United States. Over the years it has published the writings of many important composers and musicologists, including Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, and Camille Saint-Saens. The journal focuses on the merging areas in scholarship where much of the challenging new work in the study of music is being produced.
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