When we guess (and best of all know what will happen), it's the norm. And it is good for us in the arms of the norm, calmly. But the norm reduces the critical attitude to reality. And there is a danger that the normal, good, benign can turn, if you lose vigilance, into the malignant. Ordinary and habitual should be experienced all the time by borderline, complicated cases. Because our life is complicated. If we lose the feeling of this complexity, we stop seeing the mechanisms that drive the world. And then it is easy to manipulate us. And to know the complex, we need sophisticated tools.
Complex art is on guard. And the experiment - that is, working with the unknown - moves us forward and inward. Complex music is akin to fundamental science in some ways: there is no immediate return, what physicists and theorists do is not easy to understand. But the history of science teaches us that there is still a return, just with a huge time lag. And the result - maybe, somewhere aside, unexpected, side by side, but it will be. A complex person forms a complex culture and is formed by it. And simplification leads to barbarization.
And you need to understand that the consumer and customer of complex music is not necessarily a refined music lover. For example, in Germany, where the situation with complex music is relatively safe, its existence is paid for by a simple burger, who understands that his taxes should go including the complex, new, strange - as a cure for barbarity. At the same time, he understands that he does not have to love this complex and strange thing. It just has to be. It changes the landscape, and not only the cultural one: social, economic.
- Everything is interconnected. I will not make a discovery, saying that a modern German citizen was created by a complex post-war German art. Remember the post-war quotes of British and American politicians: a German nation cannot be reared, it is a herd that always demands a Kaiser or a Führer. As we know, this did not happen. And modern music was one of the factors in the transformation of German society.
Of course, Darmstadt alone would not be enough. Moscow lacked the efforts of one Kapkov, and Russian new music, one composer's academy in the city of Tchaikovsky, led by Dmitry Kurlyandsky. It is important that this happens everywhere. For there to be a social consensus: yes, society needs it, and it is ready to pay for it. In Germany it took decades, but it works.
I remember how Friedrich Dalhaus, director of the Goethe Institute in St. Petersburg, could not understand why his predecessor had arranged a concert by a popular opera singer with a reliable program - Mozart, Verdi... Why pay the Goethe Institute for this, that is, in fact, as a taxpayer? The singer has an impresario, and the public at large has to flood into her performance, which is also a completely commercial project. And Dalhaus, to his credit, arranged quite different concerts: for example, the German ensemble of contemporary music plays Russian composers living in Germany, and before the concert - a meeting with them and a conversation about how today the two cultures influence and interpenetrate each other. This idea cannot be recouped, but there are places like the Goethe Institute for this purpose.
Or recently, as a curator, I was doing a musical project for the French Institute based on letters from Russian emigrants who became heroes of the French Resistance. The theme is heavy, and the lyrics of the musical compositions used their latest letters from concentration camps and the Gestapo. How can this pay off, who should pay for it? And on the other hand, what kind of music should there be that corresponds to this theme? We were talking about the boundaries of the usual... In this project, you are willingly or unwillingly approaching the boundary of the incomprehensible. What is being a prisoner of a concentration camp or a Gulag? We are facing something really scary, outrageous, unknowable. It's impossible to just call and illustrate this phenomenon, it needs to be infiltrated, at least tried. As we know, the history of art is a process of cognition of the world, including such radical manifestations of it, where the cognitive process becomes more acute.
Brodsky has an essay "Catastrophes in the Air", where he talks about Russian literature of the XX century. There he notices that Solzhenitsyn in "Cancer Corps" describes the situation of prison interiors quite routinely, as Turgenev described some manor house. He does it as if in a foreign place. And this, according to Brodsky, does not work, because the nightmare and schizophrenia of the camp experience - in the subtleties that Solzhenitsyn neglects, and in the tone of their presentation.
For example, there is a line in the state institutions following any Soviet man somewhere at eye level, separating the dirty green paint of the walls from the dirty white whitewash. I remember when I first saw her in the army barracks, I finally realized that I got it. You can be different in the army - cunning, cruel, strong, weak. But for the next two years, the army will be able to do so for the next two years.