Can you be offended by classical music?
Now, they say you need to be cultured to appreciate classical music. But then think of the irony: you also have to be highly “cultured” to be offended by classical music. For example, if you spend this Friday night at the recital studio for this concert:
you’ll hardly get “offended” as everything will sound just like every other “classical music” concert you’ve been to. But then if you read a bit and “culture” yourself before attending the concert, you’ll see that it’s possible to “hint” stuff, like working long hours (as in Farewell), or I’m better than you (as in Barber), or in the case of Pulcinella:
taking your boss’s request too emotionally (to the extend of creating a new strain in your industry, e.g. neo-classicism).
If this is not your stuff and you simply want to bring your wife, husband, boy friend or girl friend to a lot a lot of aria, then pay more for:
and get your entire year’s dose of Verdi. 🙂
Concert details: The Offended 18th Century, Viva Verdi. Get your tickets from SISTIC.
To be ‘cultured’ is to be less receptive to primitive or simple phenomena, i.e. like being stimulated by monotonous rave music. To be ‘cultured’ is to be amenable to detail and profundity whether by music, art, philosophy and the ‘finer’ things in life that focus on the finer elements comprising a phenomena, and which leads to a more profound and insightful development of our personas. To those who aren’t able to appreciate the finer things in life, it is not because they have ‘their own preference’ or ‘taste’, but it is because they have yet to develop to a level where they are able to appreciate detail. Unfortunately, these days, many people tend to confound ‘being cultured’ with ‘being western’ whilst forgetting that that which comes from the west may emerge from uncultured sources.
Agreed. But then it is hard to live by this definition of being ‘cultured’ because going by the amount of possible combinations of details in the world, if everyone is cultured in their own way we won’t be able to share anything other than then blatant obvious (or the waymy housemate calls it: the lowest common denominator) because we all appreciate details in our own way.
The unfortunate ‘western culture’ (where classical music is an instance of) has at least brought people together to observe certain interesting human behavior and share some ‘finer’ stories, much like fables from the middle east or idioms (成语) in Chinese etc. It forms a common platform for us to go beyond subsistence and plain scientific facts to observe the colourful rainbow of life itself.
So maybe it’s sufficient to take my meaning of ‘cultured’ as being a light-hearted intention of being ‘not-ignorant’? 😉