after taking the performance making class some observations have dawned on me (me being a slightly post-layman pre-amateur music lover). the modern music history, especially the emergence of "new music" is largely trying to liberate music from it's present "elitist" form, i.e. granting the access to a body of esoteric means and materials to only a handful of trained professional/affluent amateurs. new concepts have been introduced, new instruments and new ways to play them are added to the repertoire. housewives who make sounds on household itmes and toys are now considered serious musical groups. there are objections to the trend, of course. but the objection comes surprisingly, from laymen (of course, or extremely conservative musicians) more often than from a well-informed and trained musician. the concept of serious music as being elitist by definition is so deeply rooted in a layman that its abolition seems ridiculous. more than once have i heard such statements "this can't be considered music" or "it's like a license to doing anything on earth by calling the music modern" from laymen in reaction to a contempory piece. isn't it a little ironic when the laymen who would potentially benefit from the de-elitization of music object the most readily to this process? same goes to modern art, i have to add. the rate at which an art piece is dismissed without being scrutinized upon is astonishing.

maybe we have been tuned to a certain form of audio/visual stimuli, and it'll take us much longer than a few hundred years to start appreciating something new? maybe that just proves that the artists are always on the frontier of the society. i wonder.