The great song versus the great chance: Artistic ambition and cultural authenticity

“ Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides—this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly open talk—I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse for the artist. ”

“ He strove for the diapason, the great song that should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people, wherein all people should be included—they and their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day and gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity—a true and fearless setting forth of a passing phase of history, un-compromising, sincere; each group in its proper environment; ”

“ Great writers may all be known by their solicitude about authenticity. A common incident, a simple phenomenon, which has been a part of their experience, often undergoes what may be called "a transfiguration" in their souls, and issues in the form of Art; while many world-agitating events in which they have not been acters, or majestic phenomena of which they were never spectators, are by them left to the unhesitating incompetence of writers who imagine that fine subjects make fine works. ”

“ It is useless to take opinions on trust, to retail them, to adopt them; they must be formed, created, truly felt. The work of a sincere artist is almost certain to have some value; the work of an insincere artist is of its very nature worthless.
I mean to try, in the pages that follow, to be as sincere as I can. It is not an easy task, though it may seem so; for it means a certain disentangling of the things that one has perceived and felt for oneself from the prejudices and preferences that have been inherited, or stuck like burrs upon the soul by education and circumstance. ”

“ The ambition which Boswell had, and which he expressed so freely, is peculiar in some ways for the end desired, but it is not essentially different from that of other artists.
He who publishes a book, affecting not to be an 'authour',9 and professing an indifference for literary fame, may possibly impose upon many people such an idea of his consequence as he wishes may be received. For my part, I should be proud to be known as an authour and I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. ”

“ I have vowed to save you from yourself, give you to public life; but I doubt if I could bring myself to rip the grave-clothes and show the corpse, if my own career were not so dear to me, the delight in song, in art, in holding great publics spellbound, in reigning a queen of sorts—and a singer’s time is brief enough! ”

“ The museum also conjures up selective images of Bob Marley and the wider Trench Town community, though in a slightly and uniquely different way from that of the murals seen throughout the community. Similar to the murals, the Culture Yard also represents a form of landscape inscription—one that claims to be representative of Trench Town and the community’s contribution to Jamaican music and culture in particular. Yet still, the Culture Yard, like in the case of the murals, seemingly plays into popular conceptions and stereotypes of the place. ”

“ The public merely asks for what it can understand, whereas the true [pg 150] artist ought to aim at an achievement which cannot be measured by popular standards. How, then, can popular applause be reconciled with the true artist's aspirations towards the ideal? Bach never sought applause, and held with Schiller:
Kannst du nicht allen gefallen durch deine That und dein Kunstwerk,
Mach' es wenigen recht ”

“ No doubt Marley’s ascendancy to international stardom helped place Trench Town on the world map. However, Marley is just one of the many other reggae artistes that came from the community, including the likes of reggae pioneer Joe Higgs, Delroy Wilson, Leroy Sibbles, Bongho Hermon, Alton Ellis, Jimmy Cliff, Ken Booth, Dean Fraser, and the I-Threes and vocal groups such as the Heptones and the Abyssinians. In order to not pay homage to these and other reggae icons the risk of painting a very skewed and “media-centred” representation of the community runs. ”

“ It has been plain to me as a teacher, and it grows stronger every year, that all success in singing arises from a comprehension of the ego within us, and the cultivation of these attributes bearing directly upon singing and music. Three only of those attributes may be considered now.
First,—ambition. What would you become? Yes, a musician and singer. Consult one who knows your body better than you and enough of your mind to judge well, and if he says you may become one, plan your life work to making your ambition gratified. Aim high. But few persons lack the capacity of singing well. ”

“ Success in singing art songs comes through the ability of the artist to bring out the psychic, poetical and musical meaning of the song. There is no room for cheap vocal virtuosity. The great songs bear the sacred message of the best and finest in art. They represent the conscientious devotion of their composers to their loftiest ideals.
I have mentioned three songs which are representative, but there are numberless other songs which reveal the intimate and personal character of Schumann's works. ”

“ This confirmed me in my resolution of adhering, for the future, entirely to nature. She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters. Much may be alleged in favour of rules, as much may be likewise advanced in favour of the laws of society: an artist formed upon them will never produce anything absolutely bad or disgusting; as a man who observes the laws, and obeys decorum, can never be an absolutely intolerable neighbour, nor a decided villain: but yet, say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression. ”

“ There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of the “moral” sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs. ”

“ However, from our study of comparative music elsewhere, we may make one statement with certainty, namely, that an African music does not exist. There must be almost as many styles of native music in Africa as in Europe—varieties differing not only broadly in general form and structure, but also more minutely in the intervals and rhythms which are employed.
I have been informed by travellers in West Africa that surprising differences occur in the degree of development of musical-279- art even in closely neighbouring regions. In one district hardly any music is to be heard at all ”

“ Assuredly the road to all artistic greatness is the road of sincerity—truth to one's own emotional sense of what is beautiful. And just to that degree in which the artist or poet allows himself to be made insincere, either by desire of wealth and fame, or by religious scruples, just to that extent he must fail. ”

“ Not less does ambition completely transform a human being, for a woman thirsting for fame can work where a man equally resolute would faint. He despises ease and sloth, welcomes toil and hardship, and shakes even kingdoms to gratify his master passion. Mere ambition has impelled many a man to a life of eminence and usefulness; its higher manifestation, aspiration, has led him beyond the stars. If the aim be right the life in its details cannot be far wrong. Your heart must inspire what your hands execute, or the work will be poorly done. The hand cannot reach higher than does the heart. ”

“ To most it must be—if greatness at all—greatness thrust upon them, greatness the result of long and patient effort to attain perfect development. Indeed, even those with the most complete natural outfit can only reach the highest results of which they are capable by long and patient application. Those who do not believe in attainment only through labor would do well to abandon an art career, as there is already a great deal too much poor speaking and bad singing. ”

“ ARTIST’S AMBITION.— The Greek artists, the tragedians for example, poetized in order to conquer; their whole art cannot be thought of apart from contest: Hesiod’s good Eris, ambition, gave their genius its wings. Now this ambition demands above all that their work should preserve the highest excellence in their own eyes, as they understand excellence, that is to say, without reference to a dominating taste or the general opinion as to what constitutes excellence in a work of art ”

“ What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ”

“ Susie, I have attained my growth. I can never be a real artist and no one living can ever know the bitterness of my disappointment. I do not believe in the immortality that you do, and this was my only chance to live beyond the brief hour of my life. If I could only have won for myself a place among the great names that the world will ever honor, I might with more content let the candle of my existence flicker out when it must. But I have learned to-day what I have often feared—that Christine Ludolph must soon end in a forgotten handful of dust. ”

“ It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion as others have done before them. The question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. ”

“ Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar. ”

“ I profoundly believe that no born artist would sacrifice her career—which is merely the insatiable activities of the gift resident in her brain—for any man, give him anything more than the temporary effervescence of her woman’s nature. To some accident of organism I owe the purely mechanical gift of a voice; my brain, my will, the peculiar circumstances of my life, have made me a great actress, a great artist. That I do not hate you for shattering the dearest delusion that can possess the human mind, is the final proof of my all-embracing love for you. ”

“ Europe, we continue to strangle whatever native genius springs up. Is it not a tragedy that the American artist feels the imperative need of foreign approval before he can be assured of his attainment? Through our inability or unwillingness to judge him, through our cultural humility, through our insistence on the objective standard, we drive him to depend on a foreign clientèle, to live even in foreign countries, where taste is more confident of itself and does not require the label, to be assured of the worth of what it appreciates. ”

“ The sphere of the true artist who can touch and sway the popular heart seemed beyond her ability. By voice or pencil she had never yet attained it. She had too much mind to mistake the character of the admiration she excited, and was far too ambitious to be satisfied with the mere praise bestowed on a highly accomplished girl. She aspired, determined, to be among the first, and to be a second-rate imitator in the world of art was to her the agony of a disappointed life. And yet to imitate with accuracy and skill, not with sympathy, was the only power she had as yet developed. ”

“ Stains the white radiance of eternity,
[10] and although the light beyond to which the artist lifts his eyes is of unchanging purity, the myriad hues through which it is transmitted yields to each separate vision the impress of an individuality which no after achievement can challenge or destroy.
But there are recurring seasons in the history of every art when the worker becomes unduly conscious of the medium in which he labours, and correspondingly forgetful of the truth he seeks to interpret. ”

“ Our age, when compared with former ages, has but little occasion for great works, and that is the reason [48] why so few are produced: [1] —the ambition, activity, and spirit of public life is shrunk to the minute detail of domestic arrangements—every thing that surrounds us tends to show us in private, is become snug, less, narrow, pretty, insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less happy on account of all this; but from such selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built on grandeur, without a total revolution, would only be less presumptuous than insane. ”

“ SUCCESS has always been the greatest liar—and the "work" itself is a success; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer, are disguised in their creations until they are unrecognizable; the "work" of the artist, of the philosopher, only invents him who has created it, is REPUTED to have created it; the "great men," as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed afterwards; ”