By: Eric Chen
Now, before you rage at me about my title, I would first like to explain myself. I grew up in a household fond of professional, Baroque-style artwork, I was pulled into the world of classical music and I remerged from the other side as a glorified pianist, and I took my English courses to the IB level, studying Shakespeare just a bit more than everyone else, and, amazingly, I really enjoyed it. This is not an article hating on professional, historical or classical arts, (whatever name pleases you) but a story about the tragic future we are to face if we do not embrace the reality of our human situation.
Let us take a moment to admire the productivity of our twenty-first century mainstream society. As a majority, what do we listen to in the car? Is it something recent like Taylor Swift? Something a bit less recent, like the Blues? Or maybe it’s Justin Bieber, because you know, well, he’s Justin Bieber. But how many of us really bother to sit down and enjoy a Beethoven symphony, or a Haydn string quartet, or even a Chopin nocturne? I doubt many of you would even know what those things are, or who I’m even talking about. Let’s take another moment to consider the books we read. What did you read in the last week or month? Was it an Elizabethan play, or something even older, possibly by Aeschylus? Or maybe something contemporary, such as a poem by Margaret Atwood. No? Yeah…probably not. It was more likely a recipe book, or a short novel, or even a celebrity news magazine, or, my favourite one so far, this article I just happen to be writing….
But with all jokes aside, why does the professional world glorify classical music, and adore centuries-old texts if the general population does not bother to enjoy them? Why is Beethoven considered to be more of a musical genius than Elvis? Why is Shakespeare the master writer when we have J.K. Rowling? The answer is very simple: It is because these old texts really are the key to the ultimate creations in art. I can’t provide you with a proper answer about why these classics are “superior” as compared to their popular modern counterparts, but I can tell you from my personal experience that the age-old favourites hold vast amounts of information, detail, meaning and philosophy. Hours upon hours of thought and effort are combined towards their creation; this is vastly more than what happens today. But why do we not enjoy these old, sophisticated marvels? I’m pretty sure the answer is quite obvious, and it is because they are BORING. But to better clarify that claim, it is boring only because we do not understand them, as they do not as obviously link to our modern lives.
And these are the horrifying truths I believe: what was once is no more relatable to the modern world, and the modern world somehow isn’t completely capable of creating creations as sophisticated as their classical counterparts. To sum this all up, we must realize that the true purpose of all art, whether it is literature, music, theatre, drama, or visual arts, is to appeal to its audience. In other words, art must reflect the culture and the community in which people live. If classical arts are to be studied only in classrooms, and listened to only by those who took the burdensome time to actually understand and appreciate them, then why do they exist? Do they exist simply to stand as the epitome of human achievement of the past? Every day we witness the bankruptcy of professional orchestras. Every day more and more writers are going homeless. And everyday movie cinemas are further replacing opera houses and dramatic theatres. The root of the problem is actually quite complicated, but it has to do with our media, how it manipulates our general population and makes it believe something is better, because it has not come to understand the whole reality.
There’s more to all of this, but I think it is disrespectful to centuries of development to simply let all of these monuments slip away from our values and belief system. Others disagree, and say it is better to just let go, and let the past be rediscovered at another point in time. I do not lend my support completely to one side or the other, but I will give one piece of advice. I believe that the classics are becoming more and more divided from the contemporary, and if the classic works aren’t brought to universal attention by being made more relatable and accessible to the general population, they will be lost and studied only by the most isolated scholars, reading off manuscripts that have lost their meaning. I suggest you watch Tom and Jerry; the music is a good way of reliving those old moments. Watch Romeo and Juliet again, even if you still don’t quite understand half the things they recite to each other in their Elizabethan English. This is how the old world is exhumed and brought to the attention of the new, and in doing so, it has survived.
Nobody speaks Latin anymore. Nobody worships Ancient Greek mythology anymore. Nobody even performs human sacrifices anymore. Although this might be a bizarre list of extinct practices, they were once valuable at a time in history. Let us hope that the “professional” arts do not suffer the same fate, but instead, find themselves intermingled amongst the “popular” ideas of our mainstream society, so they may live on as integral pieces of our everyday lives.
