"There is not a single case in musical history of a composer being a century ahead of his time: the greatest composers have been perfectly comprehensible to the average instructed music-lover of their day"
- Sir Ernest Newman, 1925
In partial reinforcement of my thought-probe in the previous post....
Although that said
a/ a century is long time to be in advance .... how about someone who's five years ahead of their time?
b/ greatest composers being comprehensible to the average music-lover of their day .... how about a not-so-great composer who is incomprehensible to most everybody?
Isn't the problem that the very concept of a band or artist being ahead of their time is a laurel that can only be awarded retrospectively? Isn't it essentially just the judgement of later critics viewing the past with a bit of perspective? In essence, are you just decrying lazy critical shorthand?
ReplyDeleteI'm not decrying anything, I am just speculating as to whether it's ever true that composers / bands are ahead of their time.
DeleteIt's a rhetorical device, a claim, I've used myself, but you are right that it can only be done retrospectively.
Or is it? I do feel like I have read people writing in real-time that such and such an artist is ahead of their time. But it's true that we won't know until much later. So really it largely works as hype - "pay attention to this, get in on the ground floor of something that's super-advanced"
Is someone ahead of their time if their music shapes the future while being relatively unknown when it came out? Or if it now makes sense in a different context? Outside proto-punk and Brian Eno's quote about the Velvet Underground, Manuel Gottsching's E2-E4 sounds much more prescient than it must have in 1981. From what I've seen and read, AUTOBAHN-era Kraftwek were seen as prog-adjacent stoner music or a novelty act rather than pioneers of dance music.
ReplyDelete