American Art

There are major junctures in history when previous artistic achievements abruptly stop, and a new period begins.  In Western music history over the course of twenty centuries since the birth of Christ and previously for ancient Greece, style periods emerged.  Commonly they are known as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern or Twentieth Century.  I am learning their are sub categories of each of these stylistic periods.  That is the beauty of Western music history, of which millions have made their passion studying.  Phd's would be nought if these intricacies of musical expression were not abundant.  American music history has its own eccentricities, and because it is a young many of them have yet to be formed.  Jazz has done well to study and organize its music, although it more accurately could be named African American Classical Music.  It should be, suggests jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan.  The history of jazz music in America necessarily must embrace our nation's deepest scars.  Many of them are from slavery.  The practice of slavery and the evolution of its reaction, the Civil Rights Movement, both intricately are entwined in the formation of jazz music.  Jazz should be thought of this way.  There is much more going on than Americans see or hear.  The importance of America's personal cultural heritage, which is documented in jazz music, is threatened.  Fascism through a projection of communist rather than democratic ideals is growing.  Our traditional American Republic is under siege.  The suppression of art and more particularly personal opinion and expression threatens to create a stark, militaristic, oligarchical nation not unlike the rest of the world.  America always has been a torch of freedom for everyone, but this way of life now has become threatened.  The internet, technology, and the computer sector have aided in this fracture.  Traditional human behaviors and the art forms which represent their passions have been stymied.  While the internet has created new business models and now monumental wealth, also the internet has extinguished previously viable forms of business and artistic expression.  In particular American popular music, film, and television have suffered.  The juncture of which I speak in America is where traditional methodology has been replaced with internet and computer methodology.  All three pinnacles of American artistic achievement, music, film, and television have been crippled.  They have been crippled because each all ready has evolved to its highest form.  American history is short compared to Western history, and only in the future will we discover this truth.  We all ready have lived through the Golden Age of Television, the Golden Age of Motion Pictures, and a Golden Age of Popular Music.  These landmarks were achieved by pioneering, emboldened, and impassioned desires to make America better.  Often they were championed by the Jewish faith, and Jews who have been persecuted by Fascism.  It can be said that great art is a reaction against evil.  It can be said that great art is affirmation in the face of adversity.  Perhaps these things are true, but it is not difficult to understand whence came the great art of America.  We open our eyes in the morning everyday and stare into the void.  There is nothing left to do but create.  The internet has proven fruitful for human pleasure, but now it is beginning to destroy it.  Humans cannot live in cyberspace.  Our needs are physical, spiritual, and emotional.  While the iPhone cleverly can mimic human inclinations, it cannot provide them.  It is inevitable if the American way of life is to persevere, then its methodology must sustain.  Software cannot and should not replace brick, mortar, flesh, and blood.  It cannot create music played upon a stradivarius, sung by the human voice, or swung with human desire and faith.