Guest post by Noah Bradley

AI has caused a bit of a fuss in Art. Classical music has long subsisted on a few immortal masterpieces a century. Before long, will we be swamped?

I think most people would agree that classical music is an art of a different kind to pop music, advertising, and cooking. To compare Beethoven and Michelangelo is fair enough, but Beethoven and fried chicken less so. The word we have for the former kind (the latter would be “pre-concert KFC”), is “high art” which sounds perhaps a little pretentious, so we shall simply call it “art”.

With Beethoven as a starting point, it becomes clear that Bach is really the same sort of thing, and that Stravinsky is too. And Hucbald of St Amand? Well not really. Nonetheless, it has been traditional to lump all four of them together; sharing as they do, a place in the history of European music.

Of late, it has seemed rather arbitrary that Hucbald gets to be associated with “classical art”, whereas Ravi Shankar doesn’t. So nowadays (because of its extraordinary refinement) we call that type of Indian folk music “Indian classical”, and classical “Western classical”. I believe this has muddied the waters, and I shall explain why.

This takes us to 19th-century Munich, where “kitsch” was invented to describe paintings that were very clearly not art (it has since taken on another meaning). The difference between “art” and “kitsch” the theorists say, is that kitsch doesn’t need a soul; it doesn’t need refinement or sincerity, only lustre.

Which brings us to our first distinction, that real art has a soul, and that if something is utterly soulless, then it is not art. I can hear a soul in Bach, but in a (average) pop song, only lustre. Now our second distinction; that there are two types of art- one where you can feel cultures, and another where you can feel individuals. The first type is called “folk art”, whereas the second type doesn’t really seem to be called anything.

There is a bit of a grey line, because in a work of art you can sometimes feel a culture and an individual. In other cases it is simpler: of all the great cathedrals of Europe, none are by a single hand. They were also designed according to tradition- one of the main precepts of folk art.

But isn’t it common to hear it said that Mozart and Haydn sound rather similar? And isn’t Bach unimaginable without the heavy air of Protestantism? Well even if Mozart and Haydn share twinkly melodies, simple harmonies, and regular symmetry, they both have their own, separate, heartbeats. The trappings of the eighteenth century or the atmosphere of German Protestantism is not what moves us; what does is the soul of the individual.

If all this sounds terribly abstract, it is a comfort to know that it is true in practice. No computer, no matter how many instructions you give it, will ever make a real work of art. It is all mediocre because the surest route to mediocrity is copying. Composers who do nothing but copy, do not write art, they write kitsch. And if in Saint Hildegard you can hear the cold damp air of Eibingen Abbey, and not her own heartbeat, then maybe she is a folk artist. But it is important not to confuse clarity of thought with mediumship, and I only hope to make such subjective judgements a little clearer.

Noah Bradley is a young composer, writer and polymath, deeply passionate about the art of music. He has written for Music Teacher magazine and InterludeHK