My condemnation of twentieth century Western classical music has upset a few people, and I have been asked to further clarify my position. I will do that just slightly here, but I will explain my position further in a much longer paper.

I think it is necessary to understand just what our position as a civilized society is now that we are entering a new millennium. During the 20^th century, great progress was made in the development of our modes of communication and transportation. In short, technology was the product of the twentieth century: trains, planes, cars, phones, TVs, great weapons of war, and the web itself. Coupled with the great progress that we have made curing disease and saving human lives with medicines and surgery, technology has made the lives of many easier, more comfortable, more informed, and healthier.

However, now that we have reached this seeming pinnacle of success, it is clear to many that in reality, we have reached no pinnacle at all. The arts of the twentieth century in fact portray the fall of man over the past 100 years. Society is degenerating, coming apart at the seams. Except for our technology, we really have little to be proud of.

I look at contemporary American “culture” for example. If you were to portray it in a book and give it to people in the nineteenth century to read, they would be shocked and dismayed. This book would be about a people that had little moral fiber left. Intercourse had evolved into all kinds of perversions, all of which were filmed and made available for viewing on the large screen that dominated the homes of each member of society. Many families broke up in rage and hatred, and many children had only a single parent to live with. A great deal of time was spent in front of the “big screen” where hour after hour, violence was presented, and children played out this violence with ‘toy’ weapons. Meanwhile, music was piped into all of the vehicles, stores and homes, and this had degenerated into a cacophony of unspeakable garbage. Additionally, a lot of the music no longer was based on melody. “Singers” (who were no longer trained in the art of singing) mouthed foul words and were filled with hatred and anger.  And good food was no longer in evidence as people lined up at the counters of dirty little huts to indulge in patties of tasteless dough topped with processed cheese and canned tomato sauce, or to indulge in greasy and unhealthy paddies of processed cow meat that had been squeezed between buns fabricated from flour from which the basic, nutritious part of the wheat berry had been removed. Large quantities of an unhealthy, addicting beverage were consumed daily from plastic and aluminum containers that had nasty chemical reactions with this toxic beverage. Women’s breasts rarely fulfilled the function of feeding infants. Instead, babies drank hideous formulations from canisters, and breasts instead became objects of focus and fascination. Cities were polluted with fumes from the vehicles that choked the roadways, the drinking water was polluted, and people no longer prepared their own food. Finally, the dominant religion had become divided into hundreds and hundreds of different sects, all professing to have the “one truth,” but most without enough truth to feed the basic needs of man.

I apologize if I sound too pessimistic, too negative, but it is time for us to take stock of the awful state of civilization. We need to accept what we have become, because we are the ones that can make it better. And I pray that as we move into the twenty-first century, we as individuals became more awake, and that we learn the truth of this great life that we are living, this world that we live in, and that by learning the truth, we shall become aligned with the great positive forces that lie beyond our half-blinded eyes.

In general, the classical music that has been produced by our twentieth-century society is a music based on negativity. Not all of the music produced by our classical composers was negative, but negative music was the keynote of the century, with negativity spreading to popular music in the 1970s. The end of the century culminated with such a distortion as Marilyn Manson… music that is fully and openly corrupted. As the twentieth century ended, we calmly watched our children as they united with the energy of music such as this, and as they deformed their bodies with tattoos and piercing.

But back to the subject at hand. What do I think about the composers of the twentieth century?