Vocabulary Test 24

[passage-header]Read the passage and answer the question that follows:[/passage-header]A jolly musicologist by the entirely unobjectionable name of Henry Pleasants has written a book called "The Agony of Modern Music". That word 'agony' is right. Much of it is just not written down but improvised. Much of what passes for the music of these times is raucous noise and the excuse for persisting with it is that every common youngster understands and likes it. The pleasant fellow concedes that "serious" music is virtually dead. This may be dismissed as yet another pleasantry which the undirected young indulge in. Paul Hinde Smith, possibly one of the last of the classical giants, once said that some composers tended to develop an over sublimated technique which produces images of emotions that are far removed from any emotional experience a relatively normal human being ever has. That is just the point. High art can never be totally democratized. There is a barrier between the egghead and the hoi poll oi and it would be lazy idealism to ignore this. When Bach played and Beethoven roared, who was then the gentleman? The pity of it is that while talking music to the masses, all known rules are broken and improvisation becomes king. That, roughly speaking, is how jazz was born: by dropping discipline, inspiration, deep personal emotions and every element of creative art, and adopting improvisation as its main rationale. Why they even tried to smuggle bits of jazz into serious music so that the composers could somehow survive. Now they are going one step further: learn it by ear, don't write down the stuff, make it up as you go along and hope, by these shoddy techniques, that everyone present will applaud and, thus, provide the composer and the performers with their daily bread.