The modern age was concerned with machines, and its artistic conflicts centered in which aspects of the scientificized and mechanized age to embrace. Our machines are different, chiefly in that they seem to have no moving parts. Artistic conflicts in the pop age are over which aspects of formula and genre to embrace, which aspects of a world where thre is no root of ultimate interpretation, no final court of intellectual, artistic or political "truth". Elites in this age struggle with the reality that ordinary people are more educated, but no less alienated than before. It is harder to lead, because people trust leaders less, but have no greater an understanding of what issues leaders - artistic and otherwise - grapple with.

There has been a recent flap in the world of classical music which helps illuminated the problems that are also faced in the political world. The composer's name is Jay Greenberg, and he's produced a work of astoundign shallowness and mediocrity - and the soulless machine has turned it into a cause célibataire.

Greenberg is known, not because he is 15 and has composed what he calls his "Fifth Symphony" - if one is looking for an astounding young talent as a tonal composer then Carson Cooman, who is both a performer and a composer, and has a catalog which dwarfs many people twice his age - is the name that people should be talking about. Instead as the Los Angeles Times Mark Swed accurate points out, is about the power of a schmerzlich conductor, José Serebrier, who, along with a voracious publicity apparatus, can make a non-issue an issue.

The conductor comes complete with a line of attacking talking points, with everyone who has any taste or sense being "envious". No, no one should be envious of the JonBenet Ramsey of music. But an establishment hungry for publicity jumps on this, as they have jumped on similar debasements of the brand name, and record companies are eager to oblige.

The response of critics, however, is of equal interest. Greg Stepanich points out that the powers that be in taste making in classical music want a composer who can "put it all together" as a great composer. One has to point out that there hasn't been such a composer since Mozart. There is a great deal that was in music in Beethoven's time, including the chromaticism that was the proto-romantic, in musicological usage. Celementi and Spohr and Weber had more of the witches brew of chromatic vagrancy that Beethoven did. One can point out how much is in Wagner's time that is not in his music - or Stravinski's time that is not in his. And so on.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I am the "anonymous" that he quotes from the comments, I just don't remember my blogger ID and don't want to look it up. The owner of the original weblog he is quoting knows it is me, so, in the cozy world of that small discourse, it is not really anonymous.)

The key to a great composer is not that he can do everything of his time, it is that anything he chooses not to do, seems a small price to pay for what he can do. While there is a great deal that is in Beethoven's era that is not in his music, there is even more in Beethoven's music which is no place else, and which would be imitated, expanded on and pondered upon to this very day. In short a great artistic leader does not merely put together all of the competing demands for genre, but changes the frame of the artistic debate entirely. Brahms couldn't do everything in music, but everything in the human heart can be found in his music.

The same is true of politics. On one side of a wall is a set of competing, and conflicting, demands. No one can put all of them together, but entrenched interests, like entrenched musical tastes, demand that their particular piece be present in the final synthesis in a form that they approve of. Writing a political platform is often an exercise in the absurd for just this reason.

As an example, there is a certain back and forth in progressive circles about Barak Obama's declaration that Democrats are "confused". That's probably true, but the question is whether Obama wants to be part of the solution, or whether he thinks he can impose one. If he is saying that the Democratic Party needs to have men and women of faith as part of the great conversation of governance, he is absolutely correct. If he is saying that everyone must bend a knee to his God, then he is completely wrong. Since he criticizes Bush's "messianic certainty", and the Democrats as the "party of reaction," it seems hopeful he means the first, and not the second.

The Bill of Rights declare that America will always have a secular, but not secularist, government. This synthesis shows the political genius of the people who created, and many who have interpretted and expanded, the meaning in the First Amendment.

The great political leaders change the very nature of aspiration. Let us take George Washington and the Federalist-Democratic generation, including Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton. Many people of that moment wanted there to be 13 states who could never be required to do anything for the union of states without the express consent of their legislature. It was precisely this that the Constitution of 1787 required people give up. It was precisely the 13 independent states that had to go to have a government capable of acting. At the same time, many people wanted a national government, with the states being merely provinces. This too had to go.

Their political leadership changed the framework of the debate, so much so that two generations later, states knew that they had to leave the Union in order to change the outcome.

This leads is to Lincoln. Lincoln offered peace on almost any terms before the war broke out, his first inaugural pleads for the south to come back. However, once the war was begun, he made hard choices about the government, monetary system, constitutional order and arrangements between the federal government and the states. The positions of pre-war Whig and pre-war Democrat were transfigured. Much was given up, never to return again.

In our own moment, we face a similar constriction - as the demands on the state and our future stream of wealth have now piled up beyond the ability of any resonable outcome to pay them. We have, in essence four great entitlements - Social Security, Medicare, Debt Service and the military budget. There is no way that all can continue to expand indefinitely at the rate that they are expanding. There is no solution, by any President, no matter how great, that can "put it all together".

Right now we have the political equivalent of machines jumping over hysteria and over trivialities and freak shows, rather than facing the realities of our position in Iraq. We had "The Path to 9/11", which is not about 9/11, but about the right wing's Clinton hatred. And even 9/11 isn't about 9/11 - it is designed to make it possible for every fat gasbag in the country to say "Bush had no choice after 9/11 dealing with a madman."

The other reality is both in our politics and our artistic world. The reason we have garbage art and garbage politics, is because the first imperative of the top down world is to support itself, regardless of what it has to do. If a plurality of people want to be lied to, then the top down system will lie to them. If a plurality of people want to believe that garbage music is great composition, because it can be the vehicle for "vulgar", and I agree with that adjective, over acting, one can't even call it conducting, on the part of an orchestra, a conductor, a record label and a host of big names of classical music who ought to know better - all piling on for the publicity.

And that's the last parallel I will leave you with. One of the reasons that this kind of nonsense is not put a stop to is that no one wants to offend the powers that be. In a world where who you know is a million times more important than what you know, no one who knows anything wants to upset someone who knows everyone. Fear, and the constant looking over the shoulder, is the corrupt deal that keeps a flow of sewage dropping into your television set and CD player every day.

And until you, and millions of other people like you, decide that you can live with out the lurid emptiness and gawking instacrowds, it is going to remain that way. Or rather, it will remain that way as long as China and the arab nations are willing to loan us the money to buy the river of oil that such worlds of illusion rest upon.

After that, reality will set in rather dramatically.

(Hat tip to composer-critic Steve Hicken for the links to the various articles. I'd never have carried enough about it enough to do the digging myself.)