Historicism enlivens and emboldens the human spirit. It defies the conventions of time and place and celebrates the union of art, science, and scholarship. It offers a vision of the past through the lens of the present, shedding new light on the familiar and unfamiliar alike. It empowers the artist with the freedom to invoke a multiplicity of forms and styles which alone can express the immeasurable variety and richness of human thought, feeling, and experience.

Unlike the reactionary music critic, the perceptive historicist does not subscribe to the belief that only traditional art is good art, nor does he hold with the modernist who insists that creativity is tantamount to innovation or personalism for their own sakes. Always ready to explore uncharted aesthetic territory and ever-receptive to the possibility of discovering unknown artistic resources, the historicist acknowledges his intimate relatedness to the past and refuses to be circumscribed by any temporally restrictive ideology. Constantly observing and studying the structures, styles, media, and techniques mastered by artists of all ages, he forges from these distinctive creative modalities without prejudicial attachment.

The historicist knows that to abjure history in the interest of cultivating originality is as futile as it is rationally indefensible, for the greater the extent to which one can access and incorporate the finest ideas and sentiments of others, the richer one is both as an artist and a human being. The achievements of history nourish and inform only those who dare to acknowledge them--not those who remain in an artificial state of cultural amnesia and choose to operate in temporal isolation. Because conventional linear time is nothing more than a subjective construct based on limited sensory perceptions at a certain physical scale, the historicist artist envisions time as a multidimensional reality wherein past, present, and future are coextensive and accessible through a variety of cognitive processes. Historicism constitutes more than theory, philosophy, or style, for it is a natural and perduring attribute of human creativity whose value resides less in the products of artistic labor than in the clarity of the individual artist's perception of the truths he seeks to communicate.

Suppressed for nearly a century by modernist ideology, the reemergence of historicism has been nothing if not inevitable. Indeed, any attempt to manipulate human consciousness by breaking with history is almost certainly destined to fail. Shih Huang-ti once tried to abolish the past by burning books, imprisoning an entire nation within a "Great Wall" to repel outside cultural influences, and proclaiming that history itself began with him--China's first emperor. His grandiose scheme failed, and unlike the god he proclaimed himself to be, he died in mortal ignominy. The world of art, like Shih Huang-ti's captive empire, is not immune to human errors and abuses committed in the name of both progress and tradition. Historicism, at its best, represents a "middle way" which ensures both continuity and transformation.

A human being is to a large measure what he has been. Deprived of his past, a man is left without memories, without an identity, without a name, without even the knowledge to accomplish the most basic tasks. Remembrance is the fount of human consciousness, and if its waters are pure, they may be poured into vessels old or new without losing their ability to quench man's thirst for self-knowledge. But beyond remembrance, is there not a quality of awareness independent of the individual observer, in whose creative movement all is encompassed without being encompassed, whose ceaseless flow is the origin of every original?

The question enfolds the answer.

proteus@newmusicclassics.com