{"id":4056,"date":"2018-06-16T02:44:45","date_gmt":"2018-06-16T02:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/16\/bach-at-the-burger-king-los-angeles-review-of-books\/"},"modified":"2018-06-16T02:44:45","modified_gmt":"2018-06-16T02:44:45","slug":"bach-at-the-burger-king-los-angeles-review-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/16\/bach-at-the-burger-king-los-angeles-review-of-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Bach at the Burger King – Los Angeles Review of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect classical works into short melodies \u2014 quotable passages severed from their original context \u2014 assembling a menu of musical leitmotifs to bolster their message with a desired tone, mood, or association. Like artificial flavoring for the ear, these symphonic excerpts infuse scenes with the synthetic emotion of choice. Need a touch of European elegance? Mozart will make that minivan commercial suddenly suave. Concerned a slow sequence leaves your audience snoozing? Wake them up with the \u201cWilliam Tell Overture\u201d for instant adrenaline. Does your pancake promo lack punch? Reroute Wagner\u2019s \u201cRide of the Valkyries\u201d from Valhalla to the International House of Pancakes.<\/p>\n

The artistic consequences of such practices are devastating. Conscripting Wagner\u2019s Valkyries as pancake saleswomen necessarily lowers their impact at the opera house. Some pieces are quoted so often that their secondary associations overtake and cheapen the original music. <\/span>Carmina Burana<\/i> <\/i><\/span>exists as a permanent musical clich\u00e9. Orff\u2019s \u201cO Fortuna\u201d evokes only kitsch; under which circumstances can a listener now have an authentic encounter with that choral-chanting calamity?<\/p>\n

Such a sound-bite culture negates the definitive value of classical composition: the extended development of complex musical themes. Extended musical forms allow the listener to appreciate the subtle interplay of motif and movement \u2014 and it is exactly this nuanced appreciation that quote-clipping nullifies. There is a two-part mechanism to extract and transplant a tune: detach a 15-second theme from a 45-minute symphony (where it functioned as an integrated part in an organic whole) and attach it to an alien subject. Uproot \u201cO Fortuna\u201d from a Latin cantata, so it can be grafted onto a Domino\u2019s Super Bowl spot. These transplants produce jarring mashups that trigger another insidious side effect: by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context. The spectator forgets that \u201cO Fortuna\u201d could be glorious in its original context because it\u2019s absurd hyping Domino\u2019s Pizza. In sum, in the remix media ecosystem, famous compositions degenerate from serious music into decorative sound, applied like wallpaper to lay a poignant surface over banal intentions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/bach-at-the-burger-king\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect classical works into short melodies \u2014 quotable passages severed from their original context \u2014 assembling a menu of musical leitmotifs to bolster their message […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-13q","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4056\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}