What they made me realize though, is that ideas of the value and endurance of art are tied to our world views. The Faust legend has very little appeal to someone who believes that Christianity is only one among many competing superstitious ways of understanding the world. After you take out the struggle between Christian sin and virtue, the story become nonsensical. This is especially so when you consider that many of the vices that damn the characters in both versions became pillars of Western civilization over the past 150 years.

Even the core concept behind the myth seems problematic to me, because it is inherently moralistic. The basic premise is that of over-extending and being punished for it. In the case of Faust, the over-extension is in terms of Christian morality: dealing with the devil and so forth. The closest recent parallel I could find is the sub-prime mortgage fiasco in the US. That seems a question of over-extension, the hedge fund speculators having dealt with the devil of questionable investments. In our case, however, there’s a lot less gnashing of teeth and a lot more people trying to solve the problem. Punishment, moreover, is largely absent from any discussion I’ve seen, since it would be ludicrously unproductive. (Granted, Goethe starts hinting at the punishment problem in the end of Part 2 when the angels steal Faust’s soul away from Mephistopheles at the last minute. But Part 2 leaves the core of the myth behind anyway, and Goethe refused to have it published during his lifetime, so…)

The value of the Faust myth to art has become historical at best. Increasingly, I think all art follows this path. Faust as an idea served a purpose. It was useful to a Christian society trying to come to grips with the problems in its beliefs. But what would a Confucianist scholar contemporary with Goethe have thought of it? Or would it have made any sense framed by Buddhist morality? Would it have survived in a non-Western literary canon? Even for Christians living today, is it particularly inspiring?

When we make art, perhaps we should keep this specificity of purpose in mind. After all, when art does seem to last, the reality is that it’s been reinvented: the music Mozart wrote for his patrons’ parties is not really the same as the Mozart that is now part of the Top 100 Relaxing Classical Hits collection in your car CD player. The reasons it has survived have nothing to do with why it was successful during Mozart’s lifetime.

So let’s forget about immortality and lasting art. Sure, I’d like people to keep on enjoying what I make long after my death. But that’s not something anyone can control; it’s purely at the whim of historical fancy. And given the exponential increases in the amount of art being made, our abilities to store it, and its accessibility, it seems to me this vision of creating lasting art is becoming increasingly problematic. Art becomes more disposable, more individual, more subjective by the minute. That, in the end, is what Faust really has to say to us today.

I guess basically, I don’t believe music holds any value whatsoever. It’s just organized sound. People imbue it with value, however, when they use it. At times in history (e.g. the industrial revolution, the Cold War), certain uses of music have been so, well… useful, that people have developed musical canons around them. These people couldn’t see how something as useful as the appreciation of, say, Beethoven or the Beatles could be arbitrary, so they took the music to have fundamental value and canonized it. To make things worse, people with political agendas have always fought to have their music included in the canon as well, and when they had power, they often succeeded. This leads us to the convoluted thing we call the musical tradition.

But I think people are wising up to the situation. That’s why the record companies’ profitability has been in free fall over the past few years. I think part of the reason for the change is sites like MySpace: there’s just more access to more music, and when faced with an endless supply of musical variegation, it becomes harder to argue for inherent value. So people are more willing to create their own value, or at least adopt value from someone (person/media source/corporation) they consider an authority on the subject. And there are way more someones claiming to be authorities now than in the past.

So why should I write the kind of music that I write when I can get just as much value from listening to Justin Timberlake? After all, my dislike for Timberlake’s music obviously shows that my faculties of musical appreciation are inferior in some sense to many other people’s–they like him and I haven’t figured out how to like his music yet. Maybe if I practice listening to Timberlake I’ll learn to love it, as I had to practice listening to Beethoven and Mozart to learn to love that music. Then maybe I’ll finally reach true musical fulfillment.

The reason, I guess, is that most people don’t think of music as valueless, although in my mind it most certainly is. I create the music that I do because I want to hear it, plain and simple. However, the other people who hear it will find value in it for any number of reasons and often tell me about that value. That is fascinating to me, to learn about how other people imbue value. And what better way to do it than through something that I have a strong value relation with, such as my own music? Definitely not art for art’s sake. More like art as undefined, if art even exists… I simply like to see what comes out of the lack of meaningfulness.

Oh, and there’s also the problem that I write the music I want to hear and nobody else does. If you think you can write the music I want to hear, please do! Then I could be a lawyer or do something else that pays well and just enjoy the fruits of your labour instead. Sigh… the fantasies of the composer.