Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

This contradiction therefore constitutes a central place in the several themes that play themselves out in the following considerations. Since it is a thesis of these discussions that art lies at the center of such questions, teachers of the classical music tradition have a stake in helping to provide thoughtful, energetic, and healthy responses to the challenges with which these questions present us. Such activities will also help insure the maintenance of our position as an important voice in these undertakings.

This is especially important since, nearly two hundred years later, we have failed to learn the lessons about knowledge that Goethe’s play teaches us. Like the old Faust at the beginning of the play, we have denied our passions and continued to seek knowledge, not for itself, but to gain control over this messy, indeterminate world. We have worshiped science, the most powerful tool for “world mastery.” Over many generations, Western culture has built its own Edens, constructed its own “worlds.” (We know their names: the Copernican, the Newtonian, the Einsteinian, the quantum-mechanical, universes, etc.) Each generation tells itself that “at last we’re getting it right; at last we’re getting an understanding of reality as it ‘really’ is.” Now (we have told ourselves) we can realize our utopian dream. We have, in truth, uttered the words that Faust himself declared to be the harbingers of his own doom. For he himself says to Mephistopheles the following:

Faust: If to the moment I shall ever say: