The Nine Muses, by Carlos Dorrien, at Grounds for Sculpture park, New Jersey
This comes from AEON magazine, where one find many provocative new insights on how we and the world work, and could work… In fact, musical modernism exacerbated the idea that musical artists had to specialize–you were a composer, or a performer, or a historian, but rarely expected to be recognized professionally for credible expertise in all these –or other– disciplines. This is gradually changing. The most forward looking music departments and schools are considering interdisciplinarity, which does not eliminate the need for intense and rigorous stages of training in any single discipline. Consider the cases of Stephen Hough or Andrew Shenton, for example. The concert circuit shows more and more interdisciplinary works that examine a theme from different artistic angles, especially in works by living composers. Sometimes the result stands as unusually insightful or even original. This article briefly explores why this is the case. I did not quite expect that extreme specialization may have been a result of early stage capitalism!
