Contemporary Classical Music and Art

THE NECROPHILIA OF HIGH ART: WHAT TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET DIDN’T SAY
HOW THE DEAD CANONS LEECH OFF MODERN CELEBRITY CULTURE TO STAY RELEVANT

Opera and ballet have lunged forward to prove their relevance — and thus their necessity — to the modern world, as if sundials were striving to compete for relevance with Artificial Intelligence. No one denies their historical significance, but for the sake of human evolution, it is time to move on, shedding the old skin.

Old-format art has yielded to new technological forms that offer expanded horizons for human creative potential; as a consequence, it has lost its innovative edge and its grip on the world's attention.

Stranded upon the wreckage of a former reality, decimated by the technological breakthroughs of the 21st century, old-format art — instead of embracing the radical challenge of the future — has chosen to wall itself off within a niche circle of adepts of the past, those unable to process their grief and step into the unknown.

Only by a stroke of luck, rather than through its own merit, did it emerge from obscurity and stir in agony — as if realizing that this chance to latch onto the fame of a celebrated contemporary, using his name as both a spotlight and a megaphone to prove to themselves, “We still matter!” — would never come again. It is a mummy suddenly rising in its crypt — not from a surge of life, but from a stray draft stirred by the whirlwind of Timothée Chalamet’s living fame.

The Met Opera even dedicated a video to Chalamet, eager to ride the wave of an external scandal for a shot of fresh blood; and, more importantly, to shield the rose-tinted glasses of its acolytes, mourning their shattered dreams, from a painful collision with the present reality — and above all, from their exodus out of the intensive reanimating of the ancient world's corpse to architect the unprecedented greatness of the new era.

Elon Musk — as a true reformer, sensing the pulse of the era — drags humanity into an uncharted future, rescuing it from stagnation and the rot of passive nostalgia. He is today’s Richard Wagner, who has shed the old skin for the sake of new forms that now reside not within the halls of academies, but in the sphere of high technology.

When a reformer departs a sphere that has received his nourishment — it dies, becoming merely an exhibit in the museum of human genius. The castle of the former glory stands empty, a derelict monument immediately occupied by necrophile normies. Fearing change, they seek comfort in a predictable past, flattering themselves with illusions of belonging to something "great".

But true greatness is always found in the "here and now" — in the unsafe, precarious zones formed under conditions of uncertainty. The museum-goer, like a true necrophile, wants no part in true greatness because it demands risk and transformation. He prefers to parasitize the reforms of a safe past — Wagner's operas and Stravinsky's ballets, created by those who endured scandals for their disruptive, terrifying, "non-normie" mindset — while Musk today dictates a new reality that requires no proof.

What we face is not a dispute over taste, but a radical fracture of society: between the pioneers of the high-tech world and those left behind in the twilight of a primitive era, clinging to the wreckage of obsolete canons.

PARASITISM & STAGNATION IN CONTEMPORARY ACADEMIC MUSIC
CAN HIGH ART SURVIVE IN TODAY’S CLASSICAL MUSIC BUSINESS?

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.

THE SLOW ROT OF CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL MUSIC

Today, the greatest concentration of normies is found within contemporary classical music — a domain pushed beyond the margins of cultural competition and abandoned on the roadside of historical movement.

While the living resources of civilization are channeled into new technologies — and, as a result, today’s Beethovens and reformist geniuses are drawn into these fields — contemporary classical music remains frozen in a state of conservative stupor.

It exists under conditions of chronic poverty, having lost both its pulse of relevance and its connection to reality. In the vacuum created by the absence of genuine rivalry, it stands like an abandoned castle of former glory, overrun by parasites and the spongy mold of institutional inertia.

BACH’S SCAVENGERS

Answering the question:
If the world of opera and ballet is a sundial and the modern world is AI, then what is contemporary classical music today?

Tatiana Gerasimenok: A sundial on steroids.

Contemporary classical music today is a quiet harbor for those left behind by modern civilization. It lacks both scale and competition: all true geniuses have moved on to design the future in cutting-edge technology.

Today’s academic intellectual is like a craftsman spending years carving the perfect spoke for a carriage wheel intended for a supersonic jet: his labor is colossal, but the result is utterly useless. Like a stray dog, he feeds on handouts from states and foundations — tossed his way out of pity for a dying species and out of respect for a bygone greatness.

Instead of being the intellectual vanguard of humanity and building a new world as Bach and Beethoven did in their day, this "stray dog" stranded in the past simply picks the bones of their grandeur, scavenging the very resources meant to preserve their memory.

MIND-REJUVENATING ART
ART THAT CHALLENGES THE MIND, BREAKS COMFORT ZONES,
AND DEMANDS GENUINE ENGAGEMENT

“Does every work of art have to carry a message?” — answering the question.

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 DIAGNOSTICS
TERMINATE THE AVERAGE: HIGH ART ISN’T FOR EVERYONE

Answering the questions:

#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.

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.

TESTOSTERONE LEVELS IN ART

“What would you be if you were born a man?” — answering the question.

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.

ENEMA INSTEAD OF CATHARSIS
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
RESPONDING TO A COMMENT ABOUT MY BAUDELAIRE READING

Art is not an archive, it’s a séance.

Part 1:
"Recently, I have enjoyed some of your works in a theatrical genre. However, this work does not achieve what those works did."

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."

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."

The second part of the statement is incorrect for the reasons I explained in the previous paragraphs.

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

WHEN DOES SOUND BECOME ART?

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?”

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?"

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?"

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.