We shape the world and the world shapes us.
In Music, what we need is a listener-based criticism,
and not merely the self-interested views of producers,
conductors, performers, and composers. Relevance,
or how we experience music as being fresh and new,
is how the music we perform resonates with the current
repertoire of cultural metaphysical urgencies. Vision is
the why, the energy, of meaning, why compose and
perform this music now. Without relevance and without
vision we have a music which is no better than the worse
than worthless chatter heard in parliaments around the
world, hysterically debating wholly pseudo-problems like
evolution while we destroy the biosphere of our home
planet. Without relevance and without vision we may
it is true in a state of comfortable collusion with each
other enjoy perhaps another technically perfect Tschaikovky,
Bach, or Paganini CD. Yet from this wider perspective
of the listener firmly rooted in the crises of the current era,
such work is as uninteresting as it is unethical, more like
strip mining the greatness of the past, than rising to the
necessity of nurturing new seeds of creativity now. From
this point of view, what we see marketed over and over
again as beauty is really just more shrink-wrapped trash
ready for the decomposition bin of self-centered cultural
excess.