Who do you think is an artist?
"The internet removed all barriers and there are no filters. Very democratic, but completely destructive for Culture."
I have known Adam Baruch for several years. We got to know each other thanks to my publisher Jan Sudzina (Hevhetia). Adam has written several reviews of my albums and has very interesting lectures about music. The dialogue came about during the pandemic.
Hey Adam, how was your time in the pandemic? I noticed that you kept posting reviews on your site.
Corona’s most significant impact was the isolation from other people! It is now over a year that I didn’t travel outside Israel and rarely met with people outside from the immediate family circle. It’s been a while since we (my family) have been vaccinated and now slowly is opening up in Israel and life is returning back to normal. During the pandemic I managed to continue teaching my University courses via Zoom. As a technical / computer oriented person I had no problem adjusting to Zoom, but of course standing in front a class of students is a completely different experience. The immediate eye contact, the exchange of a smile or a wink are all not possible in the Zoom isolation / desolation.
Personally I was incredibly busy during the most difficult pandemic time moving to a new flat we bought just before the pandemic. It was a lot of work, moving my enormous record collection piece by piece and putting everything on new shelves – tiring but successfully pushing the pandemic depression. I try to continue my daily routine – writing about music every day, listening to the records that keep arriving in my post box, teaching and watching movies. I really long to hug my friends around the world! We will see the impact of the pandemic as far as music is concerned (and other areas of course) in 2021. 2020 had a lot of new releases, mostly recorded in 2019 or earlier, which is normally the case – physical releases appear usually about a year after they were recorded. The reissues sector was not influenced at all of course. So in total 2020 saw more or less the same number of releases as most years earlier. Live music suffered as did musical cooperation between people in different counties – this is the most dramatic and direct impact of the pandemic. But the pandemic also taught us to be more cooperative and communicative since direct contact was impossible. The Internet, perhaps for the first time in human history, proved its real value as a communication medium. I will keep writing music reviews probably even when I was the only person on earth. Writing is a form of expression I love the most, as it forces you to choose your words, reconsider, try to be clear about your ideas and so on. My reviews, although read my millions, are first and foremost for me. Writing makes me listen more attentively, research the background, and most importantly say what I really think. Being completely independent from any external influences, dependencies, relationships etc. enables me to write what I believe in. Of course sharing my knowledge is also extremely important – this is why I still teach –
“Teach your children well” says the song...
I agree that the Internet has reached its peak so far in terms of importance and communication in the period of covid-19. Do you think that distance learning has advantages over full-time teaching? All this time I'm at home watching the distance teaching of my 11 year old daughter. I can't compare with the presentation teaching. I noticed that a lot of children have learned to cheat. They secretly write messages during tests and help each other. Maybe it's good for something but I think it's more harmful. What is your experience? Do you have some funny situations?
I have been teaching for the last 50 years or so and my overall reflections about education are sadly pretty grim. The “modern” schooling system is in my opinion a complete failure and we have been producing generation after generation of morons. After 12 years of school the graduates have almost 0 knowledge and 0 skills, they can hardly read (and understand what they read) and write (to express themselves). Higher education is not much better.
Teaching a class of 40, 30 or even 20 students is a completely wrong way to go about it, especially when those students have absolutely nothing in common. Personally the ancient Greek model of a teacher / mentor who teaches a small group of students is much more productive, but sadly not practiced any more. Human race is lucky that some very talented and highly intelligent people manage survive the schooling system and emerge victorious, mostly by self-study.
The schooling system devised 200 years ago was good to get rid of illiteracy, but very quickly ran out of steam producing another kind of illiteracy and complete lack of individual thinking. Teaching remotely is a complete joke – the teacher is talking literally to the wall (screen). Remote communication is important and useful of course as an instrument to guide, advice and steer, but not for teaching. We use it for the lack of a better idea – there is so much to learn from the pandemic, which shows even more dramatically how the system fail.
Will we learn from it? I am not sure....
I totally agree with you. Personally, it seems to me that humanity is experiencing a crisis. I read somewhere that the hierarchy disappeared from the music and replaced it with a network. There is a lot of music coming out every day. Anyone can do a recording studio in the children's room and produce music. I read an interview with Steve Lukather. He named it very nicely. He said that the vast majority of these musicians could not play a song from beginning to end. They have no idea what it's like to play in clubs for years and record with musicians in a professional studio. Music development must have an organic development. My music friend and trumpet teacher told me that he had three students in class who had huge problems in elementary technique. They are mainly engaged in promotion on social networks. They have more likes and folowers than he does. For the public, they will give the impression of excellent players ... Isn't that all perverse? Real musicians do not pay much attention to the promo and are lost in the smog of music pre-production. What do you think about that? What awaits us?
This is a very well-known problem of course. The internet removed all barriers and there are no filters. Very democratic, but completely destructive for Culture. With all the bitchnig about Music Industry and Record Labels, they were a filter and an instigator of the music produced between 1930 and 1980 and we owe them a lot of gratitude for shaping the music to a large extent. Yes they were often immoral on the financial plane, but they also invested vast amounts of money into production of music that could have been never made before. No Beatles, Stones, Hendrix without Record companies. The situation where every wannabe has potentially the same status as an established musician is completely destructive. But people have no ability to distinguish between Art and garbage, since they are not educated to do so – see our exchange about education. So yes, humanity is self-destructing rapidly on every possible plane, we destroy the planet we live on, we neglect our Cultural treasures, we forget about morality...
The Earth is unable to support and sustain such vast amount of people living on our planet, produce enough energy or food, water, etc. We have made all the possible mistakes during the last 200 years and sometimes it look like we are beyond any hope. This happens when Money replaces God. It says “In God We Trust” on the American Dollar bill – what level of cynicism. It replaced the “E pluribus Unum” which was initially there showing you the way things are going...
This Covid situation shuffled the cards even more. Artists began to be had in one bag with entertainers and pop stars. Everyone is asking for support from the state and people are starting to make fun of the artists. “Why should the state support the music of someone who had little people at the concert and plays music that most people do not understand.?” Looks like everyone is artist but good artist is liked by lot of people. Who do you think is an artist?
This is an incredibly difficult question, with which I have been struggling for most of my life. Since I am a man of science I am used to clear definitions, logic, measurements and criteria, which give clear answers, but this question has probably no clear answers. It is very close to the question what is good music and what is not? And more importantly are there any criteria which decide is some music (or any other art) is “good”. Of course the most common opinion is that there are no defined criteria, that everything is subjective. His is the most devastating and harmful statement about art that I have been fighting with for my entire life as well. It there are no criteria there is no possibility to decide what is good music and what is not. Somehow from a very early age I felt I have a very clear feeling about what is good music and what isn’t, way before I studied aesthetics, philosophy and history of art, which eventually led be to define my personal set of criteria about art / music.
Are those objective criteria?
Perhaps not entirely, but since many other people, who I consider knowledgeable, educated and intelligent, share many of them, they must be valid to some extent. During the 2019 Hevhetia meeting I gave a long lecture about music criticism, where I tried to justify the very validity of its existence, the moral and ethical questions involved, etc. Everything is subjective is just a poor excuse for stupid and lazy artists / musicians ;)
Of course I have been criticized as condescending, pompous and other less intelligent titles, especially by those whose art / music I criticize. I am used to this after well over 50 years of being a music critic, but I still firmly refuse to concede to the simplistic notion of “who are you, what do you know, etc.” to criticize my music – everything is subjective anyway.
So an artist is a person, who uses his God given talent to express his internal truth and remains faithful to this truth for his entire lifetime, no matter what.
You said it exactly. Especially on social networks you can see comments of this type. "Art is what I like and entertain people ... "Why should there be financially supported art that very few people go to and it is not popular? When someone makes good music, everyone should like it. I read it very often and I don't react to it at all.How do you explain Andrei Tarkovsky's statement "Beauty is a symbol of truth?"
There is a deep beauty in mathematics, the laws of physics, symmetry, logic, language and of course Art. The aesthetics is built on “truth” – something either is aesthetically valid = true or it isn’t. The meaning of truth can be as fundamentally simplistic as the binary 0 (false) or 1 (true) and an infinitely complex set of information, which ultimately can be found to be either true or false. Is some Art gives us the feeling of beauty, it instigates a feeling of truth in our brain.
What do you think about folklore? Should a musician incorporate the folklore elements of his country into his music? When you see an Indian play, the main element of his music is Indian music. When you hear an African musician playing, there is also the root of African music in his playing. When you hear Polish or German, in most cases it is not ...
The meaning of “folklore” is quite speculative – I understand it (in musical term) as a common musical history of a specific group of people. Indian or African musicians were nor exposed to Western music for a long period of time and only recent development of communication and media brought Western musical influences to these part of the world, this is why these musicians were mostly using what they were aware of. I don’t agree that European musicians do not use folklore – either local or external (for them African or Indian). Being exposed to a huge number of releases, there is clearly a large amount of folkloristic influence, at least in Jazz. In contemporary Pop music the only influence is the smell of shit – or money.
Music journalist Adam Baruch (1951) was born in Poland and has lived in Israel since 1967. He studied at the Haifa Institute of Science and Technology, where he lectures in computer technology and software engineering. While still in his native country, he fell in love with jazz, which he sought out on various Western radio stations. As a musical enthusiast, he has been involved in artistic activities all his life: he founded the Israel Jazz Society (1978) and the absence of an independent label prompted him to found the Jazzis label in 1987, which has released projects by, for example, clarinetist Harold Rubin, saxophonist Albert Beger, pianist Sasi Shalom, and the Dave Liebman Big Band. Since 2001, he has run the website The Soundtrack of My Life, where he has published more than 6,600 reviews of not only jazz, but also blues, rock and experimental albums (with a readership of almost 12 million). Having reviewed several of Hevhetia's albums and participating in the label's events.