Appreciating culture is one of the most difficult yet rewarding experiences. There are so many pieces of art across so many decades that one does not know where to start unless given some kind of guidance. I chose J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs in order to evaluate culture and its values.
One of the greatest composers of all time was Johann Sebastian Bach. His music is greatly revered as some of the best even to this day. I listened to his Well-Tempered Clavier as interpreted by Glenn Gould. In each of these two volumes there are twenty-four couples of a prelude and a fugue in all different keys, both major and minor. The preludes were rather simple and usually light. On the other hand, the fugues were masterful, like a tower being built on just one little piece of music.
This was only for piano, and the duration of both CDs was about three hours. Even though having piano as the only instrument may sound excruciating, the relative lightness and small duration of the pieces means that the works in the Well-Tempered Clavier go by relatively quickly. There is also considerable variation between the pieces, so one does not get bored or tired.
I found this to be greatly uneven, yet beautiful as a whole. Some pieces were extraordinary, but some others were rather flat and monotonous. Overall, it was a very interesting experience and I enjoyed it, unlike many other pieces of classical music. This was mainly due to Glenn Gould’s astonishing technique and Bach’s composition prowess, which made some passages almost make me break out in tears.
This experience was truly moving. I would love to listen to more music like this. Even though I did find some pieces disagreeable, there were many priceless moments that seemed to completely lift my spirits, something that does not happen often. Just because of this, I find it to be a complete masterpiece.
In terms of literature, I read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. This book tells the story of a family in the South of the United States of America in the beginning of the twentieth century. They seem to have had substantial money at one point, but now they are in decadence, both economically and morally. The book is divided into four chapters, each one narrated in first person by one of the children of the family.
This use of stream of consciousness is disorienting and bewildering at points, since the characters are a person that suffers from Down syndrome, a suicidal intellectual, promiscuous young lady and an overly pragmatic, cartoon of a capitalist. The author attempts to take us into the mind of these characters using many different literary techniques that make for a very peculiar read.
This book was fun, yet very difficult to read. I liked the challenge, but I did not like the experience very much because I did not understand what was going on most of the time. I thought it was an interesting portrait of the characters and the epoch, yet not much else. Nevertheless, at the same time, I also felt that something important was happening, even though I could not really describe what.
This was unlike anything I had ever experienced, yet I would not necessarily like to go through it with other works of art again. I would like to know what the author’s purpose was in writing this, as he does not seem to want to convey the story at all. Theoretically, I understand that this is a very important and significant work of art, yet I do not really partake of this opinion. However, it could have been that I did not understand it, and that the importance of this form was actually related to the themes.
Also, I saw The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme. This is the movie that made the character of Hannibal Lecter famous. It is bleak and very claustrophobic, by a grey and blue color scheme and many close-up shots. The main character is actually Clarice Starling, the police officer that takes the case of a man that is kidnapping young women in order to peel their skins off to use it as fabric for a dress. Dr. Lecter knows a lot about this criminal and helps Officer Starling catch him in a very twisted game.
This movie is a very interesting thriller that I believe basically every teenager and adult would like. It has astonishing performances by both of the main characters, and there is considerable suspense throughout the whole movie. Nevertheless, even though I enjoyed it thoroughly, I am not sure that I appreciated it as much as I did the others, even though it was film, which is my favorite presentation of art.
Even though it entertained me, I did not feel a more superior aspect of my self being engaged by this movie. Here, I think this was my greatest lesson: just because a contemporary piece of art is good does not mean that it is a masterpiece of art in the grand scheme. I realized that the classics were actually a compilation of the best that our society had to offer across many centuries. This gave me more enthusiasm to seek what the real classics were, not just the best that had come out in the past decades.
In conclusion, even though all pieces of art were interesting and a glory to behold, they are very different in and of themselves. They taught me that there are many different expressions of art and that they have various qualities along the ages. Perhaps, culture has been declining since the seventeenth century. I definitely believe that the greatest piece I perceived was Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. In fact, I felt that everything after that paled in comparison to this great piece. Values have definitely been changing, and perhaps entertainment is now a more significant factor than it was before. It seems that artists were freer to focus on their artistic merit than on pleasing a crowd.
As a whole, the question of what art is still very important. These are all very different works, yet they all produce something in the perceiver. I think that one of the main benefits and characteristics of art is its ability to touch the spirit in a way almost nothing else does. This may be the reason that art seems to be diminishing in quality: as culture seems to ostracize spirituality, art and its appreciation also goes down.
Works Cited
The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Perf. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. Orion, 1990. DVD.
Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Well-Tempered Clavier. Perf. Glenn Gould. Sony Classical, 1994. CD.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1956. Print.
