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A close study of the history of art brings out the salient fact that by its very nature, the field of its activity is restricted to a select few who are above the common run of mankind. Those people have been found to possess a unique and profound hypersensitiveness in the response to life and nature. "The great are born and not made". They are even greater in their power of expressiveness in communication their reactions to life and nature. Every true and great artist chooses his own medium of expression and imports a new significance and utility to its technique. The result on the audience is an almost visible contagion of the artist's own reactions. It would hence be quite logical for anyone to deduce that not all and sundry are capable of enjoying and reacting to such works of art or its creations.
All art interprets, clarifies and idealises life. Thus it is that great artists are only those endowed with a superior hypersensitiveness and emotional responsiveness, who are gifted with the power of expressing their reaction to and hence their own meaning of life in a contagious effectiveness. They carry you through the five senses into a world beyond all of them that defies analysis, through the known into the unknown, through the communicable into the opposite. This is particularly true of all the fine arts, especially music. Says Blake - who was six artists in one, engraver, printer, decorator, bookbinder, painter and poet - Use imagination, passion and inspiration, actively, freely, and boldly. They will induce the creative state of mind, indispensable to any art worth the name. The opposite condition is logic and reason that produces routine and everything dull and dead. Better to have evil that is active than good that is mechanical and sterile. He was a fiery romanticist.
The work of such romanticists has always been the most powerful. the medium and technique of any art are put to a new and strange effectiveness by the master artist, the painter with colours, the architect, with stone and mortar, the sculptor with marble, and the musicians with sounds. The musician is a painter of sounds. Sounds are his colours, melody and rhythm are light and shadow, his own unique personality and imagination are the twin brushes with which he creates beautiful forms on the canvas of his voice.
Beauty is therefore and inherent quality or attribute of all the fine arts, without any regard to their utility or commercial value or purpose. It is no wonder that idealists have constantly warned the art-world whenever any commercialisation of art is evident, that art is greater than the artist and should not be vulgarised for the sake of the economics of life, however legitimate it may appear at the moment. Art is vastly more significant than economics. to bring them both together will be a tragic marriage of incompatibles, which will end in the dissolution of art.
With regard to the music of the present, though artists in south India are enjoying a bigger social and economic status than formerly, one cannot but feel that Art is being led to the sacrificial altar. Economic and social freedom are supposed to indicate the release of art from the pedestal where it rightly belongs and it looks very legitimate and reasonable to bring classical art into the open marketplace within easy reach of one and all, the lay and the trained, those who long for it and those who do not.
Everywhere sabhas have sprung up and at various cities colleges have been opened to cater music and musical training to the lay and young aspirants in the art. Nowhere or at no time has there been such a loud clamour for music and artists. Performers, all and sundry, are always in great demand. You find brilliant pretenders, aesthetic noise masters, who lure the public with their cheap, but colourful, tawdry wares. this being an age of iconoclasts and communists, respect for age and tradition is gradually dying out. Everything is in an unsteady state of flux. Monetary return is the only criterion or incentive for artistic creativity. The masses have thus been led into lawlessness. All sense of fear and reverence for the glorious traditions of the past is fading away, giving us licentious music with more licentious words. This is nothing short of aesthetic shamelessness, at which our senses of dignity and nobility naturally revolt.
All schools and colleges are lavish in giving technical training. Creative activity is neglected. The syllabus for a high degree in music does not schedule even an hour or two for real voice training. Students and aspirants to fame as performers are treated to a sumptuous fare of theory and things of historical and archaeological interest, of throughly no use in the practice of the fine art.
On the platform, form has suppressed matter, clarity has unsurped imagination and intuition, producing what can loosely be called the pill-form" of music. it is no surprise therefore that one finds such an appalling paucity of promising juvenile talent. Of course in the highest art, form is inseparable from matter, the end from the means. No one can think of a soul without a body or a man without a soul.
Mere accumulation of facts is no acquisition of knowledge. the aim and object of all education is to train the younger generation in their finer sensibilities, physical, mental and moral, so that in their own time they are able to see facts in the real and true perspective, learn to think and become critically aware of their deeds and actions.
The artist is an educationist, who without the trouble of organisation, holds up to the audience or listeners, delectable, shapely and definite ideals in performance. It is a responsible, gradual and slow process of training the audience in the aesthetics of musical enjoyment. Hence, unless the slow process of training the audience in the aesthetics of musical enjoyment. Hence, unless the artist has high ideals, he will be inevitably forced in the long run to tone down his musical ideals and ambitions and try to please the undesirable elements in the lay listener, probably the greatest disservice to the cause of an art that has been the glory of all mankind.
The greatest threat to the life and growth of all classic art is regimentation, which is to a certain extent unavoidable when the dissemination of art is mechanised, commercialised and discriminate. It clogs the springs of imagination and all creativity, forcing the artist into a dull, cold and inane level of achievement, at once tiring him and satiating the listener. Worse, the artist is subtly led into the cankerous delusion that only such regimentation is dependable, hence desirable and paying as a professional policy from the standpoint of financial success. It is curious that a certain economic handicap or depression has always been a necessary adjunct to all great artistic achievement. This is also borne out by its reverse that in the history of all young and rising artists the beginning of economic security has, without exception, produced artistic stultification. The individual artist loses his personality and he becomes as it were, one of the common herds of sheep whose wool is sheared for producing aesthetic warmth to the otherwise il-clad, common, lay listener.
Very often we hear the cry, "Get music down to the common man: Artists are exhorted to try their best in that direction. Nothing is more suicidal to the interests of higher, classical art than the repercussions following such well meant, but tragically ignorant and irresponsible statements of persons, who are unfortunately for art, placed in very high social positions and whose words have great pull with the masses. Democratisation of music has gone to its maximum length. Any more that way is bound to be ruinous to all sane ideals. Once can understand the legitimacy of an urgent desire to raise the level of mere entertainment by improving and indenting on the lighter aspects of classical music and its forms. The minimum attainments in listening to and creating the lightest forms of classical music presume aesthetic and mental equipment that is very much above the common man's and the labourer's. Communism in social life may exist at a certain time in a nation's history, but in the realm of the spirit or mind or the intellect, or in the realm of art, no democracy, much less communism, is thinkable or practicable. The minimum needs of the maximum number are more of an economic and social ideal than an aesthetic or artistic one. Even in countries where communism has been practised art of a high order is found to be dead. Mere entertainment can be worked at that level, but never classical or high art. Cultural evolution is possible only up to a degree for the peasant, the labourer and the common man. Even there, it is a very slow and coercive process. It cannot be done overnight by any legislation by the lifting of controls, purchase of commodities, of food, clothing etc. The genuine artist and the lover of art are tempted, on such occasions, to pray with Jesus Christ on the cross, when he was betrayed: "Oh God! Forgive him. He knows not what he says."
Here one is naturally reminded of a parallel from literature. One of the aims of all art is to communicate. To whom? According to Tolstoy and Wordsworth, to the common man, the peasant. This means that all art should be so watered down and so easily intelligible that the simplest man or woman can enjoy and appreciate it. Herbert Read says in The Meaning of the Art, "Then goodbye to Euripides, Dante, Tasso, Milton, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goethe and Ibsen." In the music of south India goodby to Sri Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, Syama Sastry and Tiger Varadachariar and Konerirajapuram Vaidhyanatha Iyer and the other giants of the music world.
For the common man or peasant, as for others, life has become very difficult. He has little or no time or inclination to develop any longing for the mental and spiritual. His mode of existence and social position do not permit him to learn anything of life from life itself or through the experience of the five senses. Democracy means equal opportunities, not doubt. But the fine arts are not such stuff as to be made easily available for all and sundry, irrespective of their status or affordability. Even at the lowest level, classical music and its enjoyment demand a basic minimum of aesthetic equipment and natural aptitude which by any extension of the principles of democracy cannot be brought to be utility of the peasant or the common man. It is best that our legislators and politicians leave this aspect to the the teach and the artist. Maritain says, "The artist is the son of art and the more he is left free in his field, the better. Here, as in the sphere of all education, the teacher is a man of higher authority and experience. The appreciation and enjoyment of all the fine arts is unlike any other education in that it demands special equipment and finer sensibilities and aptitudes. The language of art is different in technique and more difficult of acquirement than the study of the three Rs. As such, it is sheer sacrilege to bring art down into the forum or market place. It is like bringing noble works of art in marble and the statutes of national heroes into the same place to be exposed to the cruelty of the sun and rain, for the birds to besmear them with their dirt and in the long run to be unnoticed and uncared for by anybody. There is a sanctity about art which demands that it should be placed on a pedestal and at a respectful distance, a thing of beauty, for respect and regard in the Temple of Life. That way it is a luxury and not a necessity like food and clothing. The common man can and will never attain the aesthetic level to realise and enjoy the unworldliness and immaterialness of all art. Any movement in the direction of bringing art to the utility of the common man will be ludicrous and will go down the history of art as the most ignoble prostitution of all aesthetics. Once cannot be tired of repeating that the vision of the common man does not extend beyond the horizon of the present, that he lives essentially a physical life and as such he does not nor can have any ardour or yearning not the time for cultural activity, much less for aesthetics. Probably at some distant date, he may, when his economical needs are more than met and satisfied and he has the inclination and desire and leisure to think of high things. Our legislators could better devote their precious time and influence in raising the standard of living for such poor human beings, for whom they display so much concern otherwise.
Music is intangible and emotional in its essence and substance. The edifice of all art is built on values eternal and absolute in humanity, not on those which are contingent and topical. Otherwise, how can anyone explain the perennial appeal of all great works of art produced at different periods in human history? That way, the great marble statues of teh Greeks and the monumental works of Shakespeare and Kalidasa are more alive today that in their own time.
With all good intention for good, we cannot but face the undeniable fact that in the present day the artist is greater than the art, that democratisation has stifled, cheapened and vulgarised art, thus accomplishing its annihilation in the very attempt at its resuscitation. But art will never die - as Wilhelm Kaiser said at the end of the first great world war. "You can kill me, but not my soul".
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