Longer Questions That May Never Be Answered

If we were to put a moratorium on creative arts – that is, if we were to actively stop the creation of “new” artworks across disciplines – for a full generation, 25 to 30 years, what would be the result? How would the creative spirit thrive during that interstice? Would people create works subversively? Would the populace that survived the silence awaken with a deeper appreciation and understanding of dance, or art music, or poetry, or sculpture? Would we forget how to create? Would we forget our techniques? What of the children born during the silence – how would they cope? How would they be able to reinsert themselves into the world of artistic creation? Would they be startled or appalled at the idea of people freely expressing themselves through scores or canvases? Would we subsist on previously-created works for a full generation? If so, how is that truly different from the mainstream artistic world as it is now? What would happen to pop music? Would we enter a new Renaissance period where years of ideas accumulated creates a driving push into The Next Phase of creation? Or would we go backward?

Is there such a thing as a musical avant-garde anymore? Have we succeeded in shocking everyone into complacence, or is cultural literacy that advanced and uniform – that is, has a critical mass of understanding been met? I find it difficult to believe that either is true, but this creates a dangerous cosmic interplay of relativistic thought. A soybean farmer in Arkansas may never have heard of Xenakis or Lady Gaga – would either matter to him or her? Do we enter the dark chambers of "it’s new to you but not to me, and that’s acceptable"? Gravely seriously, though, what constitutes the New in music – other than having been just composed?

Is the term “experimental music” anymore just a marketing gimmick or a way to appeal to an already self-selected audience of cognoscenti, the pretentious, and/or gallery-hoppers? When we parse the semantics of "experimental," do we end up with the unified pluralism that all new music is in some way experimental and we need some degree of musical literacy to label something truly Experimental or more in line with Conventional models? Should we rather just make way for history and deem Experimental Music its own subgenre from the mid 1950s until the early 1980s when “experimental” veered into (or was concretized as) Performance Art?