irredenta • Most notably, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a...

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Most notably, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a monumental minimalist opera evoking Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa, had a transfixing revival at the Met, even as Occupy Wall Street unfolded downtown. The contradictions seemingly inherent in the presentation of a Gandhi opera at Lincoln Center led activists to stage a protest after the final performance, with Glass in attendance; the theatrical force of the action only added to the uncanny aura of the work. I was elated by this constructive confluence of music and politics, and yet I wondered whether the demonstrators had selected too predictable—and too small—a target. Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system. I’m with Seth Colter Walls, who, in a generally positive commentary on the “Satyagraha” action, wrote, “This persistent fiction of ‘elitism,’ and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to ‘Satyagraha’ alongside a 3D screening of ‘Transformers 3.’”

I was haunted all year by a sentence that I read in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” These days you can’t live outside the machine for more than a minute. Contradictions invade every square inch of our physical and mental space; even the purest-seeming creations are in some way tainted by the radical inequalities of early twenty-first-century society. The most potent artistic work, though, doesn’t conceal such contradictions; instead, it makes us agonizingly aware of them. Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.

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Culture Desk: Outside the Machine: The Best Classical Performances of 2011

Alex Ross demonstrating, yet again, why he is the best at what he does. I’ve often wondered about the key absurdity relayed here: that classical music is the domain of the elite. It’s chief flaw, in the eyes of its credulous critics, it seems to me, is that, like most truly meaningful artform, its very nature precludes it from partaking in the creative destruction of capitalist market economy. A saving grace, as far as I’m concerned!

Source: newyorker.com