Music: State of the Art

     In the following decade, I concentrated on learning more about positive music. In fact, I spent ten years of my free time in study, meditation, and listening to positive music. Then in 1979, I began performing publicly, and I recorded my album Celestial Ascent. I also began speaking publicly about positive and negative music.
     My message of positive and negative music has been difficult for me to get across to people over the years. Not many understand that it is the music itself that I am talking about, not just the words, and that music has a definite effect upon living things. Meanwhile, I have watched the state of music in the world plummet. I had already had my excursion into negative music. Mine lasted several years. Now I was witnessing a long, slow decay of music in the world around me, and people seemed to be unaware of it.
     Music is an art. It is a very special and very sacred art. Being as aware of this as I am, it is highly disturbing to experience the place that music holds in the world. What I would do if I could only help people experience the kind of feelings that I experience when I listen to music! How painful it is for me when I talk with young people today who are convinced that minimalism is something to be taken seriously, or that John Cage’s music is actually worth listening to. How sad it is for me to see young people in their teens, twenties, thirties and even forties who listen adoringly to totally inferior music, garbage, if you will, and believe that they have somehow discovered the Holy Grail! How amazed I am when I talk to people who somehow believe that musicians smashing their instruments on stage is a normal and enjoyable part of a musical experience!
     Yes, I realize that not all contemporary popular music is bad. I hope my readers realize that I am not on a campaign against contemporary music! I’m not. The only thing I am trying to get across in an essay such is this is my viewpoint, and how I experience music. I am not trying to stop any kind of music, I am not fighting it, nor am I even challenging it. Instead, I want to say: “There is more… much, much more.”
     The other day, a younger friend of mine who has always been wrapped up in pop music asked me if I liked Bob Marley.

     “Sure, he is OK,” I said.

     “OK?” he retorted. “He’s GREAT”.

      “No, Beethoven is great. Bob Marley is OK,” I answered

     I was trying to make a point. My friend had been listening to me preach Victoria, Franck, Wagner, Palestrina, Beethoven, and Bach for fifteen years, and yet somehow, he had never gotten it. To me, one good experience with Wotan’s Farewell from the end of Die Walküre, and this, and other music like it, would become one’s music of preference. After an experience such as this, one would discover that Madonna, Britney Spears, and U-2 just don’t deliver that much.
     So yes, my heart aches as I watch the young people around me who are absorbed in the pop culture, be it that of the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, or whatever is au couran, and have never truly experienced the great works of musical art. Instead, it’s Fionia Apple, the Cowboy Junkies, the Cranberries, Shania Twain, or what-have-you.
     It is time to understand, to teach, to finance, and to reform the Art of Music. It’s time to understand that Jimi Hendrix was not a God and that music wasn’t born with Led Zeppelin and John Cage. A change is in order. It is possible, and it will occur. But it will take dedication, time and money to make it happen.