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This quote from G.K. Chesterton (from his work, Orthodoxy) is quite provocative:

... oddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. This is also why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure for ever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal; the centre is not central. Hence the fiercest adventures fail to affect him adequately, and the book is monotonous. You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons. The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad world. The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what an essential lunatic will do in a dull world.

Rather turns Flaubert's famous maxim about normalcy in artist livelihood — "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work" — on its head, usefully. Namely, that truly "violent and original (or creative)" work is better able to be absorbed by audiences when it happens to main characters that are regular and orderly (or at least seemingly so).

For non-literary arts, such as music, the transfer of this would best apply to the main musical themes/melodies (which composition elaborates and bends through the course of the entire work). In other words, better to choose simple, grokkable themes, and then develop those "violently and originally" than to start with difficult or complex themes, which, in turn, leave less room for violent and original elaboration, because these already are that way.

I agree that it is easier for audiences to resonate with art that's initial gestures fall into the realm of the expected, recognizable, and to some degree conventional and customary. Such is simply how human perception works; we require an already-bushwacked path, to feel safe treading upon it. Or, in short, the idea here is to start common, make weird.

This, as it happens, in a major reason I think people by and large did not resonate with Joshua Bell's subway performance. He started with "odd", so to speak. The only aspect of his performance that partook of anything held in common was his attire — the ubiquitous "street performer". But even the choice of attire didn't help the audience response, as the article clearly shows. The particular works Bell performed (what Dan in the podcast referred to as "the message") clearly in this case were not held in common, nor were either his name or his mere face. Whereas, as I said in Part One of the recent podcast, if he had performed covers of pop tunes, that may not have been as sophisticated an aesthetic choice, but almost certainly, more people would have been caught by the tones, in terms of musical recognition, at least. The wheels would have been greased, as it were, to invite the commuters to stop for a moment. At which point, Bell could have hit them with a Bach or Schubert, perhaps to better result. That is, if by "better" we mean "more people actively listening", which is only one of several possible definitions, of course.

Exit question 1: do all disciplines of art have their own versions of "covers" as music does?

Exit question 2: do all disciplines of art have their own versions of "normal characters", as Chesterton described, as literature does?

Labels: Custom and Convention, Memory and Imagination, Sign and Symbol