Alan D
Group: Members
Posts: 3670
Joined: Aug. 2004 |
 |
Posted: Dec. 08 2007, 12:44 |
 |
| Quote (arron11196 @ Dec. 08 2007, 13:24) | | Hmm, maybe i'm just missing the point then. |
I don't think so, Arron.
I think your idea of Tubular Bells as 'the Great Experiment' is an excellent starting point, here. My own feeling is that MOTS is the latest of several extensions of that Great Experiment, based on the extended question: "I wonder if I can do something weird and wonderful like this... with an orchestra?".
Personally I can't see what the fuss is about. People don't complain about the reappearance of some of the same characters in the Harry Potter books - that's part of the whole idea, the whole adventure. When Cezanne keeps on painting the same mountain it doesn't mean he's out of ideas - it means the original idea is inexhaustible.
So with Mike Oldfield. The new work is capable of standing brilliantly alone, vivid and fresh, for anyone new to his music. But for those familiar with the back catalogue there's the additional knowledge of the great adventure that lies behind it, and that led to this point.
This is how artists work - and I mean great artists of all times and all mediums. Constable's great landscapes - the masterpieces that people travel from all over the world to see - almost all derive from a couple of sketchbooks he filled around 1813/14, of a few places within a few hundred yards of each other. Turner painted Norham Castle at intervals throughout his working life (all based on the same original sketch), his efforts culminating eventually in the most famous, final version which is one of the most outstanding achievements of Romantic art. Elgar had no qualms at all about taking whole chunks from his earlier 'Arthur' suite and building them into the plans for his 3rd symphony. Vaughan Williams frequently used similar musical ideas in his symphonies. Ted Hughes built up his book What is the Truth? using poems that had sometimes been written years earlier. This re-use of old material isn't even slightly unusual in any form of art, by the greatest of artists.
The problem arises because in pop culture only the instantly appealing, the new, the novel, the quirky, or the unexpected, counts for anything. Pop culture is driven by the refusal to be bored by yesterday's music (and bored we will largely be, because the fundamental nature of a pop song is mainly like that of a firework: it entertains briefly, then disappears). For that very reason, it dates as fast as it's made. There's nothing basically wrong with that - just as there's nothing wrong with newspapers or fireworks. They're here for today. Tomorrow we want something different.
It's Mike Oldfield's misfortune, perhaps, to straddle the two. He's a great artist, much of whose work is seen as belonging to popular culture. But mostly he doesn't fit there. Some of his work fits - like the contrived 80s pop songs and a little bunch of pot-boilers. But the real Mike Oldfield, the near-genius and creator of stunning new kinds of music, is a real artist, doing what real (great) artists so often do - ransacking their old stuff to explore it in new ways.
The day he stops doing that will be the day he either becomes purely a pop musician, or becomes the greatest musical genius the world has ever seen. Neither is likely.
|
; then the theme from the movie Halloween, by John Carpenter, also is 
, but when people started hearing him using it again and again and again, they said it was a trademark of Rossini's style. They never said any of his overtures was a 'rework' of a previous one. 
