Can high art survive in today’s classical music business?
PARASITISM & STAGNATION IN CONTEMPORARY ACADEMIC MUSIC
Thanks to widespread access to the Internet, we can see how many mediocre people are making art.
Unoriginality, formulaic thinking, imitating the same images. Instead of doing quality work for the benefit of society, where they fit — like a fish in water — people who belong in factories come into the arts and start stamping out their mass-produced garbage.
And then equally useless musicologists dig through that trash to spew their clichéd nonsense about the “creativity“ of people as talentless as themselves.
And this isn’t about pop culture — which, at least, is intended to be accessible to everyone — this is happening in contemporary academic music, where creative stagnation hides behind complex terminology and institutional prestige.
Well-known ensembles, whose true place is playing gigs in bars for hire to make money, adjust to the demands of the public. Composers, in order to be performed, adjust to the demands of these ensembles. Despite relatively small sums compared
Not only do factories pollute the planet by producing unnecessary things, but the “creators”-conveyors, capable of stamping only boring plastic crap, have sucked on academic art, and instead of using contraceptives and finishing their work “in a desk drawer,” they pollute the World Wide Web with junk, bringing disgrace to academic music while performing under its cover.
High art is an elitist field where the basic requirement for the author is exceptional intellect, along with the ultimate originality of every piece. The essence of this endeavor lies in creating a unique work of art, as rare as a diamond — independent and uncompromising, opening new dimensions of perception — rather than stamping out as many copies as possible in the style of Lachenmann, Romitelli, etc., useless and unnecessary.
High art is a place for passionate and contradictory freethinkers who challenge all conventions.
Premature compositions, intellectual miscarriages of mediocre minds, with which “creators”-conveyors seek to flood the academic domain are a hindrance to the qualitative development of our species.
and demands genuine engagement.
MIND-REJUVENATING ART
Answering the question:
“Does every work of art have to carry a message?”
Tatiana Gerasimenok: I prefer art that rewires the neural connections of the brain — that benefits me by getting it pumping. Uncompromising, powerful, and independent. Challenging and uncomfortable. Such art is created by geniuses — original and controversial freethinkers who, like gems, are very rare.
Art with a message is a waste of my time. I’m not a psychologist whom an “artist” pays to be treated like a toilet for unloading emotional baggage born of chaotic thinking and an immature mind.
Let’s leave these banal and mass media-imposed “messages” — the kind that give birth to boring crap copied from one another — for kitchen talks with friends, and devote the audience’s lifetime to bringing them real value.
HIGH ART ISN’T FOR EVERYONE.
Answering the question:
#1: What's your definition of genius?
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Out-of-the-box thinking, attention to non-trivial details, obsession with something, curiosity, ignoring simple tasks, challenging tasks come easy, self-obsession, distinctive appearance.
#1.1: Are you describing yourself here?
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Since there are very few geniuses on the planet, I have to use myself to define.
Pets resemble their owners as much as
performers resemble their composer:
HIGH ART DIAGNOSTICS
Me, analyzing contemporary academic composers
for their belonging to high art:
When the composer is conveyor-belt mediocrity.
When the composer is a diamond.
Answering the question:
“What would you be if you were born a man?”
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Since a woman’s strength lies in intellect and creation — and a man’s in physical force — if I were born male, with healthy testosterone and muscular drive, I’d be pushing the limits of the human body: breaking athletic records, building bridges, exploring outer space, saving lives, working in factories, defending my country; I’d unleash beast energy while performing the kind of music I compose, or battling Brian Ferneyhough’s technical madness on stage — and coming home only to give women orgasms.
If I were born a man, I would be someone in this video. But because my hormones are suited to feminine activities, I am a composer — quietly creating in the comfort of my home.
Emotional Diarrhea Instead of Meaning: Art Without Intellect.
People with low intellectual abilities, instead of working through their emotions with a psychotherapist and beginning to create intellectually meaningful art, dump their emotional excrement onto the public. These tangled feelings, suppressing the function of their intellect, become the source of primitive creativity that holds no value for progress.
Pouring one's pain into creativity means temporarily alleviating suffering, but this anesthesia does not address the underlying cause. Moreover, intellectually underdeveloped "creators" use their psychological problems as fuel for emotions and, instead of developing their intellect, churn out meaningless works, endlessly repeating themselves.
Whatever fuel or crutch their creativity may find in emotional turmoil, the root of the problem lies in the fact that they’ve fallen overboard from modernity and failed to notice the birth of a new world. As if science, medicine, and high technology had never evolved; as if the world hadn’t changed fundamentally. Like in ancient times, they continue to believe in the supernatural, fiercely rejecting progress.
Inspired by quotes from great figures of the pre-Internet era, they pick up a pencil and, instead of isolating themselves for the duration of their emotional purging — shutting the bathroom door and flushing it all away — they drag all their accumulated baggage onto the stage, "therapeuting" themselves the old-fashioned way, in full view of modern society.
The Internet has already been invented, rockets fly into space — yet they’re still torturing carrier pigeons and horses in harness, making archaic art well — but time moves forward.
Considering that most organizers of concerts or exhibitions also "therapeut" themselves using folk methods, they fail to distinguish intellectual Übermensch-art from self-therapy of the primitive mind — thereby missing the essence of any academic activity — its progressive value.
INTERPRETATION AS THE ART OF RESURRECTION
Response to the comment on my Baudelaire reading.
Part 1:
"Recently, I have enjoyed some of your works in a theatrical genre. However, this work does not achieve what those works did."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: What exact parameters should be used to compare the achievements of Stravinsky, the composer of The Rite of Spring, and Stravinsky reading a Pushkin poem over his morning coffee?
Part 2:
"It seems that you are more focused on the technological aspects of how your voice sounds in your own ears through the headphones, rather than on the actual poetry, meter, rhyme, and the elements of the tailor-made style that explain why this work was presented at that moment."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Only a highly intellectual person can truly sense the present, and this is the kind of individual that every artist working in academic field must be.
For an author's work to remain relevant after their death — rather than being locked away in a museum vault or performed in the dust of mediocre academic art events — the interpreter must be deeply attuned to the present, analyze the emotional structure and content of the work, understand its historical and cultural context, uncover its hidden meanings, and, finally, reinterpret the material through the lens of the contemporary era, using current forms of expression.
To give Baudelaire artificial respiration, not to embalm him, I, as an interpreter, create an intimate space for deep immersion into the atmosphere of his work. My narrative style is closer to trance and meditation. My task is to tear off the straightjacket of outdated templates and give him breath. Let him speak not as a monument, but as a living, contradictory, terrifyingly beautiful soul — just as he was.
Part 3:
"This is not a project, but a vanity installation, / completely disconnected from its soul in terms of the origin of the work."
Tatiana Gerasimenok: The second part of the statement is incorrect for the reasons I explained in the previous paragraphs.
Conclusion
Given that most "academic creators" have chosen the wrong field — they lack sensitivity to the present and sometimes even long for the past — all they can offer the authors of previous eras is to lock them in a crypt of rotten templates, leaving both themselves and those they interpret overboard the airplane of modernity.
If you disagree with the necessity of progress in academic art and plan to decompose in my comments with superficial judgments — I will be forced to throw you overboard from my page.
Tatiana Gerasimenok reads the Russian version of
Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Une Charogne” (1857):
LISTEN
Art is a dialogue, not a mirror.
Not every sound is art, and not every perception is understanding.
The singing of birds and the sounds of the city are not art, as they result from random coincidence.
Music is one form of transmitting information from one consciousness to another, encoded in the language of art.
Unlike random noise — which is not aimed at communication and can therefore be interpreted in any way: freely, subjectively, using randomness as an indifferent object for one’s own projected meanings — music is a two-way communicative process: creation and perception.
Responding to a comment on my post.
Part 1:
“What if the composer as a symbol is not actually real and has nothing to do with the music itself?”
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Art is a deliberate human expression intended to communicate through cultural, aesthetic, emotional, symbolic, and intellectual codes. The composer is not just a symbol, but a key to the encoded meaning. Without the composer’s name and its broader context, music can sound, but it cannot speak.
Part 2:
"Well... what happens if you take the individual out of the equation?"
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Excluding the author’s identity from the equation means confusing the act of intentional human expression with random sound processes that are merely byproducts of something else.
The skill of not turning everything around you into a screen for your own projections, not limiting the world by the boundaries of your own experience, setting aside your ego during moments of two-way communication, and distinguishing where your inner world ends and another’s begins is the foundation of developed intelligence and the path to free thinking, deep relationships, and a mature perception of art and the world around you.
Part 3:
"How about more questions and less certainties?"
Tatiana Gerasimenok: Doubts and questions stimulate development and the creative process, but without seeking answers, there will be no progress. If we only ask questions and avoid forming clear positions, we risk remaining in eternal search without creating anything tangible. In art, as in life, the balance between doubt and certainty is the key to genuine growth.
PERFORMERS OR PARASITES?
There are two types of performers: Homo sapiens and Homo primitive.
Both types can be talented and curious.
Homo sapiens are explorers, active minds, thinkers, logicians with the ability to gather relevant information and draw conclusions. Such performers know how to fill themselves internally to get the best results at a performance, they rely on their own minds, so they are equally good at performing both living and dead composers (to which they no longer have access).
Homo primitive are parasites who, lacking an analytical mind, look to the composer for explanations. Instead of doing the work themselves, parasitic performers interrogate the composer in order to understand the idea of the piece and get into character. Collaboration time should be used to resolve technical issues, not for chit-chatting and expecting the composer to entertain you enough to do your best.
This same parasitism is demonstrated by many zombie interviewers asking artists clueless questions.
Explaining to parasites is a waste of time, for which they will not pay with even a sincere understanding of the topic at the end of the explanation. Thus, any comments and inputs on their part are simply unnecessary.
Solution for parasites: if you can't understand a piece yourself, perform it superficially, purely technically. And at the same time, in the age of the Internet, don't prevent yourself from becoming Homo sapiens, use your brain and do your research.