Can Women Return Us to Beauty?
By Christopher Chantrill
If anyone wants to know why theater is dead in the United States, the reason is simple. It is trapped in a time warp of liberal pieties. When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival sent out a call for plays celebrating "American Revolutions," it didn't get one play written from a conservative perspective. Not one.
But there is hope. And it is coming from women -- not from the usual feminist robots, but from playwrights like Mary Zimmerman who write from an unashamedly feminine perspective. It's part of the Girls Gone Mild movement, which celebrates a woman's life in its own terms rather than the women-can-do-anything-a-man-can-do madness of liberal women's studies, diversity, and Title IX.
Now, of all things, a woman has written the libretto for an opera from a story by Stephen Wadsworth, and it is good. Premiering at Seattle Opera earlier this month under its indefatigable general director Speight Jenkins, Amelia is the story of a woman whose naval aviator father was killed in action in the Vietnam War. Librettist Gardner McFall's naval aviator father was also killed in the war, but in a training accident.
Oh no! Not that. Conservatives have learned from hard experience to stay away from anything to do with Vietnam. But McFall's effort works. It works because it stays away from the liberal shibboleths and sticks to the girl stuff: love, risk, loss, relationships, babies, natural childbirth(!), death. In an opera about flying, we get a dose of magical realism with Daedalus and Icarus, those early accident-prone fly-boys, and Amelia Earhart lost over the Pacific in her Lockheed Electra.
There's only one problem, and that's the music, written by Daron Aric Hagen. It provides color and mood, as it would in any movie, but it leaves opera-goers in the limbo they have lived ever since Puccini died 86 years ago. No melody. No songs. What a pity. The libretto deserved better.
We all know the problem. Modern art music just doesn't do beauty. It's all very well for your Andrew Lloyd Webbers to lash their audiences with melody, but for art music, darling, it's just not done.
It's telling that in this age of license, when ordinary pleasure-seeking is trumpeted as a basic human right, the search for higher things in the form of asceticism still gets smuggled in the back door. We produce and consume at unimaginable levels, yet we force everyone to perform the Corvée of unpaid garbage-sorting. We fill the world with lascivious female curves, but we strip poetry of the pleasure of meter and rhyme. We fill every ear with music, but we strip out the melody.
Arnold Schoenberg thought that he could cure us of the delusion that art's aim is to create beauty, according to Robert R. Reilly in Surprised by Beauty. Schoenberg predicted that in the future, schoolchildren would be singing twelve-tone melodies.
On the contrary, modern schoolchildren barely get to sing any melody, let alone twelve-tone rows.
In turning from beauty, we are stripping ourselves of our humanity, argued Frederick Turner in 1991 in Beauty: The Value of Values. The problem is, he wrote, that the huge demographic waves of adolescents in the 19th and 20th centuries produced "an ideal of artistic originality modeled on male adolescent ideas of freedom: hypercritical, sexually demanding, aggressive, and egocentric."
A poet and English professor, Turner argues not for an aesthetics, but for a biology of beauty. Our appreciation of the arts, language, and music does not just start out from a blank slate or a social construction. It starts, on the contrary, with a brain preprogrammed with age-old responses to language and music. Did you know, for instance, that "all over the world human beings compose and recite poetry in poetic meter; all over the world the meter has a line-length of about three seconds," and that this three-second line is "tuned to the three-second information processing cycle in the human brain"?
The war against beauty cannot last. The opposition is fighting against nature itself.
Conservative women are already leading politics back to sanity. Is it too much to ask women also to lead the West back to beauty in art and in music? It makes sense, for women have more skin in the game: For them, life and love are the real thing.
For men, it's all just practice.
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/05/can_women_return_us_to_beauty.html
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The comments accompanying the above article are as interesting to read as the article. One raises a point I almost commented on after making the post. That is, that the last sentences stating women have more skin in the game because for them life & love are the real thing struck me as not only sexist but definitely inaccurate. Many men know that life and love are the real thing. At least, that's been my personal experience.
5 comments:
I would agree with many of these sentiments without attaching them to any particular politcal direction or gender. I think that quite often in our modern world beauty is dismissed as soft or sentimental. Reality is hard and unvarnished (thus often) ugly. Yes, ugliness does exist and must sometimes be addressed. Think Dickens and what he wrote in order to draw attention to the plight of the poor in Victorian England.
I would definitely agree that there exists a longing and a need for beauty in each human soul and that people are in danger of being seriously undernourished if not exposed to beauty in many different forms, poetry, art, music, books, nature! As a teacher of young people I try and work directly with these issues.
As for beauty vs ugly realities, when it comes to entertainment my preference is the former. We're surrounded daily with harsh news reports, TV drama, movies that constantly highlight bleakness & despair - no need therefore for me to rub salt in the wound by choosing more of the same during what should be time better spent absorbing instead the joy of living. The latter moments fortify us to meet future challenges with strength and determination.
Have you read the latest positive reviews of Strike Back? Can we look forward to another series...feel a poll coming on:)
Beauty fortifying us to meet the harsh challenges life bring. You're a philosopher Missy. I'd buy that self-help book you're selling.
Of course I keep up with all the reviews, good, bad and indifferent. Mainly good, I'm pleased to note. There had better be another series with Porter. He's my main crush at present, before Lucas returns, of course!
Enrich, you're more open minded, intellectually curious and willing to take a discussion to further lengths than many other RA enthusiasts. Not just returning the compliment - it's a sincere assessment:) Trust me, I've had enough experience with the topic to make that judgement.
What path might he lead us on next? Pre-British Civil War? I've done extensive reading on that subject, as a natural result of ancestors residing in Notts until 1862. Believe they lived a short distance from the former monastery granted to Lord Byron's father.
I found the music to be absolutely gorgeous, memorable, highly tuneful, and deeply moving. I cannot disagree more with the way that it has been characterised in this blog post.
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