«New dilettantism» like one of the strategies of metamodern music

Khrushcheva Nastasia Alekseevna ORCID: 0000-0003-2829-8817 PhD in Art History Associate Professor; Department of the History of Foreign Music; St. Petersburg State Conservatory named after N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov 191119, Russia, Saint Petersburg region, Saint Petersburg, Zvenigorodskaya str., 6, sq. 25 n-khroustcheva@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The end of postmodernism, which has been talked about since 2000 and which is now recognized by almost all historians and art theorists, has led to the emergence of a number of concepts of culture-postmodernism, among which hypermodernism, post-postmodernism, cybermodernism, renovalism, reformatism, cosmodernism stand out. The most convincing and widely recognized among them at the moment is the concept of metamodernism that appeared in the early 2010s: formulated first by Dutch cultural scientists Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Acker (in the manifesto of 2010^[1] and the book of 2017)^[2], as well as by British artist Luke Turner^[3], it is increasingly it is gaining popularity. The key points of the aesthetic platform of metamodern can be considered post–irony, which replaced postmodern irony, the return of emotion, constant oscillation - oscillation between opposite meanings and longing for discredited postmodernism meta-narratives.

Projecting the concept of metamodernism onto the musical art of recent decades^[4], a number of immanently musical trends can be identified: the rehabilitation of tonality and melody, the extension of affect, work with archetypes, the end of quoting other people's texts and the arrival of a new type of work with other people's material – collective stylization.

Another significant trend in the musical metamodern is the movement towards dilettantism – in its most diverse forms. It manifests itself in different, sometimes non-overlapping and even contradictory forms, such as:

- creation of declaratively simple, as if "children's" works with all the attributes of musical "childishness" - only one voice, only a treble clef – up to the external attributes of the composition – such as writing by hand in a clumsy handwriting (Kirill Shirokov);

- the use of quiet, slow and, as it were, "averaged" intonations, combined with the emphasized absence of any "compositional work" (Wandelweiswer group);

- a kind of "matte filter" that removes extremes – bright and saturated colors;

- the poetics of the "insignificant";

- declaration of exhaustion of the composer's profession itself (the concept of the "end of the time of composers" by Vladimir Martynov^[6]);

- deliberate self–destruction of the composer inside the play - conscious "non-demonstration" of his own skills, or demonstration of "incompetence" (Sergey Zagny);

- the use of amateur performers in music; the gradual blurring of the boundaries between "academic" and "non-academic", as well as "professional" and "amateur" in concert practice (in the Soviet Union/In Russia, started by Sergey Kuryokhin, in festival practice noticeable at the American B ang on a can festival);

- the use of extremely generalized intonations, "belonging to all" musical lexemes – as in many versions of minimalism, including the radical minimalism of Vladimir Martynov, whose theoretical works also give reason to comprehend his work in this way;

- the increasing role of artificial intelligence and neural networks in all areas of human life, which in music leads to the possibility of producing an unlimited amount of musical material in any of the existing styles; the "operator" of this process can be a person without any musical education or even hearing.

At first glance, all these trends have different scales, appeared at different times and manifest themselves in fundamentally incompatible planes. However, in all this there is a certain general trend dictated by our time; a trend associated with a departure from the professional /academic /perfect and the manifestation of a different musical logos.

To describe it, we will introduce a general term – "new dilettantism", which seems to us to most accurately express all these diverse trends taken together.

Dilettantism as an independent concept began to be discussed by aestheticians and art theorists since the last third of the XVIII century; this was facilitated by the emergence of a romantic worldview with its cult of the subjective principle and the figure of a free creative artist. Johann Georg Sulzer speaks negatively about dilettantism, in his 1772 work "The Universal Theory of Fine Arts", speaking out against "curious amateurs who extract only one game and entertainment from fine arts"^{[6; 7]}. This statement was harshly criticized by I.G. Merck, then Goethe joined the dispute, turning the sharp edge of criticism of dilettantism against Sulzer himself. As Kozhevnikov notes, "although the concept of "dilettantism" played only the role of a catalyst here, thanks to which a serious theoretical discussion was provoked regarding fundamental approaches to art, nevertheless, the controversy surrounding Sulzer's treatise highlighted the few but characteristic shades of the phenomenon, designated by a word still unusual for German ears: an amateur is engaged in art for entertainment, outwardly imitates the activity of a professional artist, creating a certain image of a refined person, and, most positively here, has a greater ability to truly enjoy art due to its openness to it than an enlightened systematizer"^{[7; 27]}.

In subsequent years, discussions about dilettantism are found in a number of authors, among them G.A.Burger, G. Hermes, I.G. Meyer, F. Schiller. The culmination of this controversy was the joint work of Goethe, Schiller and Meyer on the "scheme of dilettantism", which lasted from 1795 to 1799. For a number of reasons, this curious work was not completed and published, but later Goethe included fragments of it in his article "On Dilettantism" ^[8], which proposed lists of positive and negative aspects of this phenomenon in various fields of art. Such a fundamental approach in itself testifies to the importance of the phenomenon of dilettantism for the romantic era.

In Russian scientific thought, the most fundamental study of dilettantism was undertaken by A.I. Herzen. Herzen notes that the ultimate egocentrism of the creator is decisive in the phenomenon of dilettantism: "The thirst to enjoy, to revel in selfishness makes you look everywhere for yourself" ^{[9; 16]}. According to Herzen, it is precisely the inflation of the ego, the increase in the role of the subjective principle – which he directly blames on the romantic worldview – that leads to the fact that genuine knowledge of anything becomes inaccessible to an amateur.

An important milestone in the history of the study of the phenomenon of dilettantism is the study of Boris Asafiev, undertaken by him as part of the study of the history of Russian romance^[10]. Amateur composers not only contributed to the formation of this genre, but also defined the musical and aesthetic landscape of the era of Russian Romanticism. It was Asafyev who for the first time fully showed the colossal importance of the dilettante figure in Russian musical culture: an amateur, according to Asafyev, is an art connoisseur and a genuine lover of art, and his thought is not constrained by the conventionality of any artistic system. To some extent, this work served to rehabilitate the concept of dilettantism in the public consciousness.

In the twentieth century, with the advent of counterculture in the broadest sense of the word, dilettantism began to be understood as something genuine, original, immanent in contrast to the dogmatic cultural "mainstream". As Kozhevnikov notes, "the apologetic attitude towards dilettantism reveals itself on the basis of left-wing radical and nonconformist ideologies closely related to the "countercultural" aesthetic opposition"^{[7; 24]}. An article by I. V. Kukulin about the "high dilettantism" of Daniil Kharms, a poet who elevated dilettantism to the level of a radical artistic strategy, is indicative: "The position of an amateur, apparently, seemed suitable to him in order to avoid the enslavement that, in his opinion, the static and alienating schemes of modern science carried. This rejection of traditional social classifications was also important for Kharms' worldview as a whole"^{[11; 70]}.

So, the semantic cloud of the chosen term "dilettantism" has two poles. The first of them – negative – implies the author's lack of professional skills and/or professional musical education. The second, on the contrary, is positive and means actually "love" for music – these are Russian amateur composers, and dilettantism as love as opposed to professional non-love, and dilettantism as a territory of absolute freedom. and let us recall the phenomenon of "amateur composers", important for the Russian cultural code, in Russia of the XIX century, when composers without professional education created the musical landscape of their era. When describing the phenomena included in the circle of "new dilettantism", it is necessary to keep in mind both of these facets: they are important for the semantic amplification of the proposed term; in addition, semantic oscillation (as mentioned above) is an integral property of the metamodern.

One of the precursors of the "new dilettantism" can be considered the great French composition freak Eric Satie (1866-1925): this is the concept of "furnishing music" created by him, and the use of "weak", "sluggish" material (both of these words appear in the names of his works), and work with musical stamps. With his sometimes declaratively "weak" works from the point of view of musical material, Sati rebelled against the perfection of musical opus, even against the idea of musical opus as such: these are, for example, Three pieces in the shape of a pear, or Dried Embryos, in the last bars of which a primitive cadence turn is parodically "hammered in".

Sati's furnishing music opens up the poetics of boredom for academic music, anticipating the thought of Roland Barthes "boredom is not so far from pleasure: it is a pleasure seen from the other side of pleasure"^{[12; 482]}.

Eric Satie's discovery of the territory of musical boredom can be considered the most important for a new dilettantism: these are slow tempos, worn-out cliched turns, generalized intonations, traditionally rejected by the composer's thought. These can also include those minimalist opuses that are most removed from narrative logic and drama.

Another important idea of the new dilettantism is the poetics of the insignificant: often the works of the new dilettantism seem to manifest the composer's right to be weak, to talk about feeling his own powerlessness. This is, for example, the approach of the American minimalist David Lang (b. 1957), who prefaced one of his compositions with the reasoning: "Classical composers are trying to convey to you something they are proud of, something they like about themselves: here's a gorgeous flowing melody – look how emotional I am. Or here's an abstract play that's not easy to figure out–look how complex I am, how smart. <...> And I thought: what if composers wrote plays about what was wrong with them? For example, here is a play about how pathetic I am"^[13;125].

Elmer Schoenberger once defined Mahler's music as belonging to "the culture of the big, even bigger, greatest, painful, tragic, terrifying, most alluring, suffocating and stunning"^{[14; 162]}: a new dilettantism is "rebelling" against all these aspects. In all the opuses in which this trend manifests itself, music about "how smart, complex, and developed I am" is replaced by music about "how little I know, how little I can do." A literal expression of this trend can be considered Ten marches that do not lead to victory for brass and percussion (1979) by Mauricio Kagel, where "defeatism" is already stated in the title; the full and all-encompassing implementation of this principle can be observed in the "weak style" of Valentin Silvestrov, as if proclaiming the author's "surrender". As M. Buloshnikov notes, "a "weak style" is not only a "familiar" material, as if bearing the stamp of the author's self–denial. This includes the rejection of "activism" at the level of form formation, the rejection of duplication of the "drama of life""^{[15; 23]}. At another level, the concept of the "weak" in the poetics of Yuri Khanon continues this trend, expressed, among other things, in the opus Exercises on Weakness ^[16].

Among those who abandoned narrative drama and did not come to minimalism at the same time, the German group of composers Wandelweiswer, created in 1992 by Antoine Boiger and Burkhard Schlothauer, stands out. In their music, woven from quiet dissolving sounds and extremely stretched pauses between them, the opposition to a dramaturgically developed, eventful opus is noticeable – an opus in which everything is justified, every turn is justified, and all the elements are in their place. When listening to a Boiger, there is no such feeling: every consonance seems random, like a stone or a stump found in a natural landscape, and if they obey some kind of logic, then this is the logic of chaos. For Boiger, it is very important where the composer himself "is": he is not above the listener, but as if on an equal footing with him, he himself is an observer of this landscape of an unpredictable landscape for himself.

A distant predecessor of this phenomenon can be considered the strange and seemingly falling out of all piano creativity piece by Franz Liszt Gray Clouds (1881): in it the classical-romantic rigid form begins to disintegrate, and the material loses its functional certainty, the listener physically feels the transition of relief into the background and back – it is here that the storm clouds of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony are melted into Nuages Debussy. It is no coincidence that many consider Gray clouds to be an anticipation of Impressionism; however, unlike the Impressionists, gray in the Sheet is not given as a background for something colored, but in itself, in its pure form.

Another important process that takes place in the Gray Clouds (and will be continued in the "new dilettantism") is the "drying up" of virtuosity – the defining quality of romantic pianism. In Gray Clouds, virtuosity is declaratively stopped – technically, even a child can play them: the rich texture is replaced by stingy line graphics, motionless tremolo, ascetic figures of thematism, and instead of virtuoso Liszt octaves, we see in the last bars of the piece the octaves are uncertain, slow, devoid of tonal support.

The title of the play, Gray Clouds, looks manifestational from the time of the metamodern:

gray opposes black and white - instead of extremes, it offers averaging; gray is also "average" (in the sense in which the composer Yuri Hanon uses this word in his Average Concert); gray is muted, "removed", dim; gray is the background that has become a relief from the background in the music of the new dilettantism, we can observe the poetics of gray.

In the new "gray" music, one can see how this principle becomes dominant, it becomes the main content of the opus, its "pathos": the "poetics of gray" can be observed in individual pieces by Giacinto Shelsi (A I TSI for amplified piano, 1974), quiet, slow, "gray" in color pieces by Klaus Lang (berge.traume for cello and choir, 2003), and even some opuses in general far from the described direction by Beate Furrer (Voicelessness for piano, 1986).

The fundamental difference between impressionism and the new "gray" music is that impressionism made the insignificant significant: you can admire female figures against the background of a garden, raindrops on glass or shades of light and shadow on the surface of a puddle – all this is beautiful as a play of colors, "superficiality", and the new "gray" music admires the insignificant in its insignificance, without trying to make it significant.

The American composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) can be considered another precursor of the "new dilettantism"; the most important in our context should be considered his departure from the cult of technology.

By the middle of the twentieth century, compositional technique had reached its absolute power among other parameters of composition: having lost the traditional means of "binding" the material – tonality, regular rhythm, a stable system of genres – composers found themselves faced with the need to establish a new law, a new coordinate system every time (often in each of their next works). As a result, there are an unprecedented number of ways to create music that exist simultaneously.

Theodor Adorno, in the Philosophy of New Music, describes the problem of technicocentrism as follows: "Composition is now nothing more than the solution of technical riddle pictures, and the composer is the only one who is able to read them, who understands his own music. What he does lies in the realm of the infinitesimal. It is carried out as a performance of what music objectively requires of him"^{[16; 88-89]}. As Vladimir Martynov correctly notes in this regard, technique becomes for the composer the same "out-of-the-box reality that for the composer of music res facta was the structure of the Gregorian antiphon or the polyphonic chanson chosen as the basis for the polyphonic mass"^{[17; 107]}. And further: "The composer only winds up the spring of a certain mechanism, which begins to work on its own and the work schedule of which the composer must obey when composing his opus"^{[17; 107]}.

Technique in the music of the twentieth century – both in the form of an already existing technique, which the composer simply follows, and in the form of a technique invented by him for a particular composition – has become something like a transpersonal canon, something unconditional, initially implied: without a specially selected technique, the academic opus of the twentieth century simply cannot exist.

In Morton Feldman's work, technicocentrism has cracked: in his literary texts, he ironically speaks about the seriousness of his colleagues, while his music is based on fundamentally different grounds. The circumstances of his meeting with John Cage are symptomatic: "At that first meeting, I brought John my string quartet. He stared at the notes for a long time and finally said, “How did you do that?I thought about my constant quarrels with Volpe and how a week earlier, when I showed my composition to Milton Babbitt and answered his questions as intellectually as possible, he said, “Morton, I don't understand a word of what you're saying.” So I answered John in an unsteady voice: “I do not know how.” John's reaction was amazing. He jumped up, let out a high-pitched monkey scream and yelled, “Isn't this magical? Isn't that wonderful?! It's so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he did it!”»^{[13; 464]}.

Feldman is extremely critical, but with his inherent irony, of Boulez, a composer who has become a symbol of technicocentrism: "Of today's composers, Boulez has done the most to restore prestige to the system – Boulez, who once said that he was not interested in how the play sounded, only how it was made. No artist would say that. Philip Gaston once admitted that when he sees a painting done, he gets bored. Preoccupation with doing something, systems and structures, perhaps, characterizes today's music. It is this concern that in many cases has become the true content of musical compositions"^{[13; 465]}.

In Russian music of recent years, the line of "new dilettantism" is also becoming more and more noticeable.

Such, for example, is the piano piece by Sergei Zagniy (b. 1960) take your time, Chepaev. Its insignificance is already in the genre: the composer writes out the text, but not the vocal line (the text is located right inside the piano part). By itself, this gesture already creates a situation of uncertainty: it is unclear whether it is necessary to sing, as well as who should do it.

The insignificance appears even in the text – Chapaev is written for some reason with a small letter, and even with an "e". That is, not the Chapaev, apparently, but the little one, the one in whose world there is not always a place for a feat. The pianist sings softly by default, that is, it is not even a song in the full sense of the word. The words should be both audible and inaudible, rather it is singing to oneself – such a nostalgically pop–up jukebox in memory.

Take your time, Chepaev,

After all, no one can be happy in a hurry, never

Take your time, Chepaev,

After all, no one can be happy in a hurry, never

Thus, we are not looking at a play or a song, but maybe not a play or a song. This type of coexistence of text and music is related to the Sati method: he also often accompanied the notes with words that either had to be spoken aloud, read to himself, or completely ignored. So Sergei Zagny, following Sati, either jokingly or seriously, but quietly and lyrically, with nostalgia for jukeboxes, urges us not to hurry; this can also be perceived as a kind of manifesto, because the new slowness is an important trend within the new dilettantism.

Another example of the "poetics of the insignificant" in new music is the composer's epic Kirill Shirokov (b. 1991) "everyday melodies" for any suitable instrument or voice. These are extremely short one–voice pieces that can be played on any instrument or hummed, or both at the same time - the words "sing" and "play" in this case seem too loud. "Everyday melodies" has become a long–running project for the composer - he has been writing them for several years (since 2011), and it seems that he is not going to stop. An important feature of this self-expanding opus is that the "melodies" are invariably recorded by hand, often hand-drawn musical notation:

The importance of the visual aspect for the composer is indicated by the fact that Shirokov regularly posts scanned sheet music on social networks – turning it into a game observed in real time. In addition to the visual embodiment of insignificance, there is also a peculiar irony about the romantic image of the composer, in a burst of sudden inspiration, recording the theme of the symphony on a napkin. There is no longer a symphony, no composer, no inspiration, but only a napkin and a post-sentimental reflection on this lost image. The composer is self-deprecating here, as if embodying Morton Feldman's maxim "for art to win, its creator must be defeated"^{[19; 29]}.

In some places, the signed non–intelligible text – similar to what was in the considered play by Zagnia - also reminds of the text inside Sati's music. After the techno-centrist avant-garde "frenzy" of the second half of the twentieth century, this kind of project looks like a quiet riot; as well as a musical realization of the famous maxim of Alexander Vvedensky "respect the poverty of language. Respect poor thoughts."

"The trivial has waited for rehabilitation" ^{[20; 301]} - Tatyana Cherednichenko proclaims in her work dedicated to the direction of new simplicity (and from today's optics it is obvious – the emergence of metamodern). This thesis can be attributed to all the considered works of the "new dilettantism", which, for all their external dissimilarity, are based on a feeling of exhaustion of the concept of the "perfect musical opus", which has been in effect for many centuries. Today, a work written in the highest sense of the word "professionally", filled with intertextual allusions, unusual timbre solutions – does not work, does not work, does not make sense. This is what Feldman's words are about: "The circle has closed, the obsession with "order" in music has led to a dead end. To get out of this impasse, we now have to resort to the most radical break with the historical process"^[26]. Having lost the old meanings, the musical art of the metamodern demonstrates in the phenomena of the "new dilettantism" a different beauty that lies far away from the composer's mainstream: after the second avant-garde, such a complete technical "disarmament" of the composer looks like a radically new musical logo.