-
The Mole in Don Draper
June 17, 2013 | 35 comments
-
What Maisie Knew
June 12, 2013 | 97 comments
-
Frances Ha
June 10, 2013 | 2 comments
-
Love Is All You Need
June 4, 2013 | 0 comments
-
The Great Gatsby
May 31, 2013 | 13 comments
Conservative Tastes
The Art of Discrimination
How casually our age compares Bach and Beethoven to Lady Gaga.
Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times, greeted the New Year by ranking, in order, the top 10 dead classical music composers since J. S. Bach, who not quite unpredictably landed in his top slot. The piece had something of the journalistic gimmick about it and was perhaps a way of attempting to ameliorate what Mr. Tommasini’s own paper had called a few weeks earlier “the Classical Music Recession.” It may not be coincidental either that music critics — as Michael Johnson pointed out in The American Spectator online — were also feeling the effects of that recession in many parts of the country as their jobs have been eliminated with alarming frequency. But the gimmick was irresistible nonetheless.
Bach was Mr. Tommasini’s terminus a quo because, in setting out the ground rules for his little contest, he had seemed to feel that he needed an excuse for excluding more antiquated composers like Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez. “The traditions and styles were so different back then as to have been almost another art form,” he writes, rather unpersuasively. Likewise, the designation of “Western classical music,” so inadequate in so many other ways, was useful for excluding George Gershwin or Duke Ellington without offending their many admirers. Furthermore, his requiring the inhabitants of his pantheon to have assumed room temperature precluded any offense to living composers with a self-conceit of ranking, once they are given their due, alongside Bach and Beethoven — who, naturally, came second. “We are too close to living composers to assess their place and their impact,” writes Mr. Tommasini — which may or may not be true but which I suspect has little to do with the exclusion.
Of course he gets it wrong, if not all wrong. So, equally of course, did Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment (2003). There, in a time frame that extended as far back as to Monteverdi, if not to Josquin, Mr. Murray gave the top slots to Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach rather than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. Yet he would also have considered it a matter of some remark that seven of Mr. Tommasini’s top 10 are also in Mr. Murray’s — the other four, since you ask, are Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Wagner — and that probably as many would be in yours or mine (though they might well be a different seven), if we were so ill advised as to draw up such a list ourselves. This indeed, namely the fact that the list was not his own but represented a consensus and that, therefore, the idea of “greatness” is not merely subjective but corresponds to something real and permanent and even (dare we say it?) objective in a properly cultivated taste for music as for the other arts, was the very raison d’être for Mr. Murray’s list. Mr. Tommasini, by contrast, treats his as being frankly and unabashedly subjective, apart from an incidental mention of his disagreement with “a reader (‘Scott’) who questioned the whole notion of greatness in music.”
Neither he nor the New York Times can be quite unaware that “Scott” is not just some mononymic e-mailer with time on his hands but a spokesman for the whole cultural tendency of our time, which depends on a firm if usually non-explicit denial of the very idea of greatness in art. That is the salient feature of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Just as modernism is inconceivable without the worship of the artist-hero that it inherited from romanticism, so postmodernism is inconceivable with it. “Greatness,” like everything else (see “Taking ‘Offense’” in The American Spectator of February 2011), can only exist within quotation marks. Shakespeare and Jersey Shore and Batman comics are alike reduced to being social and political signifiers, so there can be little point to distinguishing between them further. The only intellectual stardom remaining belongs to the clever critic, who has found the way to persuade you of the massively counter-intuitive truth that these otherwise various artifacts are equivalents, at least in the only system of value — inevitably a political one — that is allowed to mean anything anymore.
In other words, Mr. Tommasini has no theoretical basis for his continuing to cling to outdated modernist assumptions about musical greatness, yet he seems oddly unashamed about it, as do others who would doubtless recoil in horror at the idea that they were lending credence to conservative tastes and their highly reactionary canons. Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, for example, fulminates against the bumptious self-comparisons of Bono (now at work bringing Spider-Man to the New York stage) with Rilke or Blake and the rapper Jay-Z (whose latest star turn is in “Monster,” Kanye West’s music video celebrating necrophilia) with Dickens or Shakespeare. These and similar imbecilities which are the product of our “habit of analogical exaggeration” must have something to do, thinks Mr. Wieseltier, with the “culture of references in which we live. The common analysis of poems and novels and paintings and songs is now in terms of other poems and novels and paintings and songs, so that the experience of a work of art is preempted by names for it, by an associative shorthand for perceptions that we have forgotten how otherwise to describe, by a loop of allusions that assure us of our in-the-knowness and arm us against any disruption of it. It is a way of playing a game.” It is also a way of highlighting the essentially parasitic quality of postmodern culture.
ANOTHER WAY TO PUT IT would be to say that Rilke and Blake and Dickens and Shakespeare are now brand names much more than they are writers to be read and understood. New writers and artists and the critics who are their camp followers engage in what, in other contexts, is called “associative marketing” by trying to identify themselves or their products with these established brand names. But although that tactic depends on the popular attachment to a sort of fossilized version of the “greatness” game recently re-popularized by Anthony Tommasini, it also arises naturally out of the leveling spirit of postmodernism which implicitly denies that there is any such thing as greatness in the arts — and does so precisely through such comparisons as these. The charge of intellectual snobbery is so terrifying to us, it appears, that we will not only allow Jay-Z his self-claimed place alongside Pound and Eliot, but we will sacrifice Pound and Eliot themselves to the comparison by reducing our critical engagement with them to a catalogue of their hypertextual linkages.
Leon Wieseltier feels the necessity of deprecating that same charge against himself by readily agreeing, by way of clearing his throat, that “it is not at all blasphemous… to suggest that an heir of Rilke or Dickens may arise among us” before going on to the inevitable “But”—
But nothing will stunt our reach more than the corruption of our ideas of quality. Lowering a standard is certainly one way of meeting it, but the glory is lost with the strain. The teaching of Rilke, Blake, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Franklin is not: relax, or be yourself. It is: brave the distinctions. The offense in those inflated comparisons is, quite simply, that they are false, and their falsity creates a climate that degrades the very ambition that they pretend to honor. This crap damages the culture. It takes more than the recollection of a rough childhood to make a book Dickensian, and the acceptances and transfigurations of Rilke — which have nothing to do with “the costs of feeling” — are larger and harder than Peter Parker’s struggles with young adulthood, even if the poet never walked up the side of the castle.
“Brave the distinctions” is a good way of putting it, and distinction is near of kin to greatness. Taste itself is a matter of making distinctions — or “discriminating,” to use another politically loaded word. And until we learn to discriminate again, the Classical Music Recession, which must owe something to a vague sense on the part of audiences that Bach and Beethoven are just more primitive versions of Lady Gaga, will never be over. Nor will we be quite free of the scourge of multiculturalism whose death Roger Scruton announced, perhaps prematurely, in our December-January issue (see “Multiculturalism, R.I.P.”) and which proceeds from the same politically correct refusal to make necessary discriminations among cultural phenomena. The casualness with which we treat those discriminations must also be connected, I feel sure, with the liberal sneering that went on over the new Republican majority’s decision to kick off the 112th Congress with a reading of the Constitution. “Originalism” is their great bugbear partly because they depend upon a legal equivalent of the “habit of analogical exaggeration” to render our founding document irrelevant to what they want to do. It doesn’t do to look too closely at what the Constitution actually says if you want to make an easy identification of its carefully written strictures with progressive good intentions. It’s time for us all to join the House majority by defying the spirit of the age and braving the distinctions.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (31) | Leave a comment
More Articles by James Bowman
More Articles From Conservative Tastes
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/03/29/the-art-of-discrimination
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
Current Issue
- Of Weiner and Women
- Overheated Frauds and Fools
- A Panoply of Beauties
The Spectacle Blog
Democrat Dan Maffei Blames Budget Cuts for Girl’s Rape, Mother’s Murder
Robert Stacy McCain | 6.18.13
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
Dee See| 3.29.11 @ 6:44AM
"Understand, the middle, indeed, ALLLL classes
except the ultra-rich capstone types, are being
systemtically stripped of culture, religion, identity, nationality, memory itself. The aim is,
over the generations, to create a new sudra/plebian class. Out of nowhere, into nothingness, and ready for anything."
-ALAN WATT
(essential online coverage)
Talking with a doctor not lon ago about music.
He told me "People who hate classical music
generally hate their own memory. Memory
itself."
------TRUE
Appleby| 3.29.11 @ 7:31AM
Once the classical education became an object of mockery and scorn by people who mistake universities for vocational schools, this kind of list had to deteriorate to *Ten Names Of Composers The Hoi Polloi Can Recognize*.
I do not recall who said it, but someone did: *When an audience at a concert applauds the opening bars of a composition, it is applauding itself for having recognized it.*
I also noticed, way back in the 1960s, when attending the updated Romeo and Juliet movie, that every time a character spoke a line that had become a cliche, the audience laughed... innapropriately, stupidly, and putting their own ignorance on public display.
Fortunately I had parents who, although they had not finished high school, knew the classics of literature, music and history. Fortunately those islands in the dark ages of Lady Gaga and other trash still exist.
Hillel| 3.29.11 @ 7:33AM
Circa 40 years ago, a reader of High Fidelity magazine,tired of comparisons between the Beetles and Schubert, asked the magazines critics to to a song by song comparrison between say The Beetles "Abbey Road" and Der Wintereiser.
As I recall, the editor replied NO!
Martin Owens| 3.29.11 @ 7:56AM
Lady Ga-Ga?
Seriously?
Somebody with a name that literally means
"I'm mentally ill and can't control it",
compared with Brahms and Bach?
Can she read music?
Can she read, period?
tdiinva| 3.29.11 @ 9:35AM
The answer is yes she can read music, she can write music and can when she wants to sing she can do it quite well. She is also literate. To understand Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) you have to understand popular music. She could have played it straight up and been just another Sara Bareilles or Katy Perry. Sound alike singers of catchy but unimaginative tunes or she could create a persona to replace an aging Madonna. There is only so much demand for original musicians like Sarah Mclachlan, Natalie Merchant or Alanis Morrrisette; popular singers with a distinct, recognizable style. She chose style over substance and is laughing at both the critics and consumers all the way to the bank.
Occam's Tool| 3.31.11 @ 12:49AM
Belive it or not, Lady Gaga is a classically trained pianist. Juilliad, I believe. But she likes money and fame.
Lullabys, Legends and Lies| 3.29.11 @ 8:17AM
I want to rip my hair out when I listen to what's considered to be popular music today. You don't think it can get any worse than it has been, but a few years later, you're looking back and missing how bad Madonna was. It really can't get any worse can it? Oh, just wait!! Now I've never been the biggest Classical Music fan, but I'd listen to that over today's "Crap-Music" is a second, Bach Rocks in comparison. The reason Lady Puke-Puke is popular today is that she wears weird cloths, and says stupid crap, and her music is clild like and not hard to grasp, and she's a Superstar? It give me a headache!! We're dumbing ourselves down continuously in every way!!
Petronius| 3.29.11 @ 9:40AM
I would place Turlaugh O'Carollan ahead of Bach because he was two generations before, but then, I know too much. And I find Au Ver Bois by Jannequin less taxing than Benedicta es by Josquin. De Lasso trumps Monteverde on some days. Great.
Multiculturalism is synonymous with anticulturalism. See Rank Ignorance in the Spectator of London, 15 July, 2000. So long as there are more than two people with discerning tastes, the world will not be fully Simpsonized.
YeloStalyn| 3.29.11 @ 9:54AM
Greatness in art is much like the rules of where you put flatware on a table... at the end of the day a fork is a fork is a fork. If you prefere a special one for your salad... bully for you. If not... your meal will taste the same. To belittle something because it does not fit in the box of "old" (more accurate than "classic" most of the time) does not take away from its value. Note that that does not mean they are the same. "Watchmen" (the graphic novel) is exceptional and great in so many more ways than a number of "classic" stories (not all). But it's not trying to compete with Virgil or Dante. To compare them is, like the author said, a fallacy. But to dismiss them because they don't compare is just as brain-dead.
That is not to say that anything or everything is "great" but it is to say that Bach is not an objective end-all be-all of music. If it were a truth outside of subjectivity I would have seen a performance of his work by now... as would most people (rabble or not).
Mind you... I agree that not just anything is or can be great but there is far more worth listning to, reading, or watching than what the often self- aggrandizing "intellectual" class deems as "good" (although these can and often do have "worth" in experiencing them).
"Art snobs", I find, are often people with little else to offer their company in terms of social graces and decency and must then prove their "worth" with their "discriminating" taste. Often forgoing the great and wonderful, tasteful bacon cheeseburger for a fancy french pastry or some such non-sense.
Now I want a bacon cheese burger and to listen to "Ode to Joy".
Evanston2| 3.29.11 @ 12:58PM
YeloStalyn, Well said. Though you're much more even-handed than I. Personally, I believe different types of music, etc. are apt depending on the circumstances. As such, the term "great" is determined by the context. I am usually a fan of Mr. Bowman but I find the premise of this article to be idiotic -- that there is music, or any other art, that is distinctly "great" in any context. I don't mind the insults of "art snobs" but I do mind the injury: I wish they would stop stealing from me via taxes, making me subsidize NPR, CPB, museums, plays, etc. for all their "great" content. Then I might have more money for "great" cheese burgers!
Mick Lee| 3.29.11 @ 10:33AM
Some of us take great offense at throwing The Beatles in with Lady Ga Ga. The Beatles thought music mattered. Lady Ga Ga thinks her music is disposable.
Ok. The Beatles weren't Bach. The Beatles themselves never claimed to be. They dealt with popular song and they claimed nothing more. Those who pair The Beatles with the Classical greats do a disservice to both.
Who Knows?| 3.29.11 @ 11:05AM
What is the object of subjectivity if not to---judge?
About a week ago, ABC presented the results of a People magazine etc poll of the “greatest” movies, in the regular suspected categories.
I was especially amazed when “Grease”, a phony “musical” about the 50’s, was third.
Omitted completely from the top five were “My Fair Lady”, Oklahoma”, “South Pacific”, and I’m sure there are other “classics” I don’t now recall.
Anybody who wants to expand their popular music education should become a regular reader of Mark Steyn.
He regularly provides his erudite take on popular songs and composers on his website. For an avid music lover like moi, it is quite a “trip” to get up to speed about old songs, like say, Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”.
I majored in mathematics. Surely the most rewarding part of such a study was (and, IS?) approaching some hard subject, and spending as much time and attention as needed to “get it”---and, the harder the better: if successful!
Just so with regards to all kinds of fluctuating sound waves, or human created music.
Part of the dumbing down of Americans is that retarded development has become the new normal. How true this is concerning music!
I’ve long thought that despite the increase of the human population, in absolute terms the number of people who “get it” concerning classical music is probably not growing much, if at all.
It takes EFFORT and TIME to receive, say, a piece by Gorecki, and surely even a now old fart, Bruckner---repeated hearings are de rigueur! (By the way---even a tyro could not help but be blown away by Gorecki’s third symphony)
Call me an elitist---but, perhaps it’s just the karmic human way, for some to appreciate classical music: indeed, to observe and understand it ALL. Or, at ALL.
Finally, in my humble classical musical listening experience, that began around 1960 with the Prelude and Love Death from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, I don’t think there is anything as near to Enlightening music as Beethoven’s Late String Quartets.
Every human should be FORCED, in my view, to sit still in a dark non-distracting clean well lighted place and listen to them all!
Up, up and away! In my beautiful balloon! Gorecki fills the air, right NOW!
YeloStalyn| 3.29.11 @ 11:30AM
But if it is subjective it is by its very nature not a truth that is univeral. If it is subjective that classical music is better than my prefered 90's grunge then I am just as discriminating to say that my 90s grunge is far more superior to your classical Mozart and you just "don't get it."
That may be becuase of age... I'm a bit on the younger side of things. But the point still remains that subjectivity ensures me of always being just as right as you on the subject.
That is the great thing about art. I don't have to like Pollock to like "The Death of Marat" (or maybe in some else's case the reverse).
What makes art less enjoyable is when it is implied that I should like this over than and a failure to do so is somehow a sign of my inferior "art" intellect. Not that you are implying it, but often is is there inteded or not (and I am not taking offense... just making a statement. I'm in a rather good mood today). Maybe I just think Picasso got lazy and unimaginative rather than "cutting edge" and that Cubism is not an "outside the box" art philosophy but rather an excuse for someone with no real artistic talent to call themselves "an artist" much like... say... Lady Ga Ga? Or simply that his works look like a grade schooler puked crayons on canvas.
Who Knows?| 3.29.11 @ 12:50PM
In a way life is a cosmic game.
There are finite and infinite games. Read “Finite and Infinite Games – A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by James P. Carse, 1986
His first words lay it all out---
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
So, regarding subjectivity and “classical” music or “popular” music, only infinite games are truly possible.
Who could WIN any game concerning what series of noises that cross one’s eardrums into the brain is THE best, whether Beethoven or grunge?
And, time DOES seem to go on and on and on, even as old humans exit and new ones enter, no?
Ah, my own accelerating understanding, ITSELF, is succored by plucked memories, such as---
When Pavaroti and Joe Cocker, or some rock “star” singer, did a “duet” together. Who was “better”, subjectively, even?
One dude with a honed voice with trained POWER, or another one needing a microphone to amplify his?
When it comes down to it, music, just like everything else we experience, is a test, and its True purpose is NOT just to distract us in our enclosed Narcissistic ignorance.
Even on a mundane level, one can usefully ask if this music or that music is life affirming, uplifting or angry, say, like most rap “music”.
Me, I always prefer to feel GOOD! And, this FEELING GOOD filter has, over time, certainly resulted in a whole lot of what I previously, at a younger age, loved and listened to, forever banished from my bubble of hearing being.
Oh, once in a while, I MIGHT turn on a rock and roll oldie station, or be tempted to buy one of those golden 50’s record, er CD, collections regularly hawked on TV.
But, soon enough, the childish yearning escapes into banal thin air, like the very music itself, and just playing a “mediocre” offering from the local classical radio station is enough to assuage my nostalgic interest.
Terminally, there are four options we each constantly face---
Get better, get worse, stay the same, or understand and transcend.
Most people are either staying the same or getting worse, over time, wrt anything, and only a few are getting better.
Observe and understand.
Brian Mc| 3.29.11 @ 11:06AM
Yes, I may agree that Bach was the greatest "Classical" composer. But I will argue that the greatest composer, period, to my dying breath, was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theopholis Mozart. As a side note, I will never underestimate the impact the Beatles have fostered across the world...a gift that keeps on giving. The spiraling downward to the basest 'cultural' tone popular music can muster ensures folks will be humming Beatles tunes well into the future.
JP| 3.29.11 @ 11:53AM
One Hundred Years from now people from many different parts of the planet will still listen to Chopin, Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. People will still read Dickens and perform Shakespeare.
But, in 100 years few will remember the Beatles, or Gershwin, or U2. Fewer still will read Roth, Bellow, Hemingway or Guenther Grass.
Who Knows?| 3.29.11 @ 12:15PM
Right on.
When Gustav Mahler was creating his massive symphonies, the public did not appreciate them much.
He predicted that over time, people would “grow up”, so to speak, and LEARN to love them.
Ah, so---thanks to Leonard Bernstein, especially, who championed him, these days Mahler IS recognized as one of the best composers.
ALL his symphonies are fantastic---even Das Lied von der Erde!
Steve A| 3.29.11 @ 12:09PM
This conversation begins & ends with Cindy Lauper. She is the yardstick by which all others shall be measured & found lacking.
albert constantine jr.| 3.29.11 @ 11:26PM
I harken back to early 1985, when Time and Newsweek ran competing covers featuring Madonna and Cindy Lauper, comparing their roles as "divas" in pop music and predicting their continuing role in influencing the culture. While "Time After Time" and "True Colors" may have charted for Cindy since that time, her career hasn't exactly matched Madonna's in its trajectory. Perhaps if she featured "She-Bop" in a Madonna-like orgy in her live performances, she would have continued to occupy the perverse niche that Madonna went on to hold solo, before passing the torch to Lady Gaga.
Sarah| 3.29.11 @ 12:45PM
A few weeks ago, my husband was hunting for a classical piece that he had heard in the background of a movie. He was going to different sites where you could download music from, and hitting the preview buttons to try and find this elusive piece. As each one would play, I would do my best from across the room to name the piece and the composer. I had heard previously at least 75% of pieces, and could accurately name both title and composer 50% of the time. My husband was astonished. But to me, that's just how I grew up - listening to them, or actually playing them myself.
Modern music is very rarely innovative, at least on the pop side of things. And Lady Gaga, though she may be classically trained, has chosen the quick and easy route. A catchy tune is not the end-all, be-all.
Mazzuchelli| 3.29.11 @ 1:19PM
No Gershwin? Au contraire. Rhapsody in Blue is one for the ages.
jgo| 3.29.11 @ 2:08PM
Speaking of which, when was the last time you saw volumes by Hutcheson and lord Kames in your local public library?
NaturalBorn Texican| 3.29.11 @ 2:43PM
Lady Gag Gag - just another ordinary girl getting her..........her what? Her weirdness going???
So called celebrities like her just make me weary. But the empty - headed people who scream and cry over people such as her and put those people on a pedistal.............please. There are not words to describe them.
Real entertainment comes in small, exquisite doses any more. So-called celebrities today are simply exibitionists who aren't afraid to make jokes of themselves.
BLEH!!!!!! Get a REAL life!!!!!!!!
big bob| 3.29.11 @ 3:59PM
So, we find ourselves immersed in a philosophy of music discussion. Reminds of my aesthetics class during my graduate conducting days at one of the well-known Big Ten universities. This has always been fascinating to me, as I maintain that because music is so personal, every generation must find the one following it to be, well, "rebellious". So it was in some ways with Papa Haydn and young Mozart. But I digress.
Actually, we start with J.S. Bach, (there were several other 'Bachs' as many know, sons, etc.), because to go any farther back in history does require a certain awareness of context. I remember struggling through music history classes trying to distinguish between Josquin desPrez, and Ockeghem, since I had been a French horn player and my ear had been refined with the classic repertoire onward in history. The madrigal singers all loved those tests, but we hated them, and other than an appreciation for that era, probably never really gained an ear for that contrapuntal style of the midevil to renaissance music.
So it is in spades with today's listeners. Since most are not playing in bands or orchestras during their junior and senior high educations, they have never really learned to develop and ear for "serious" music. They use music as a background "muzak" in many cases, paying attention to those which are truly catchy in rythm or lyrics, or some other dynamic. But in reality, most of today's listeners have no concept of WHY Beethoven was hated, no, loathed in his time. Nor do they understand that Stravinksy's ballets initiated riots that rival Wisconsin unions during our times. Most teachers who teach "band" find themselves prepping for contests, and very little teaching goes on, rather it is rote memorization of music and lots of refinement, similar to drum and bugle corps of the summer. Orchestra programs have it better as there are no extant marching symphonies!! (but give it time) So where should we expect our kids and their peers to magically learn how and why the "greats" are in fact great? I personally consider Leonard Bernstein the closest thing we will see in this country to an historical figure. While not in the league of, say, Stravinsky, he is certainly of note.
I also consider Beatles historical, and so did my music history professor, as he used "Rocky Raccoon" to demostrate Strophes and verse construction.
Were I to ennumerate the greatest composers, I would look to those who were able to be identified as the ones who best illustrated the end of one era and the beginning of another. No time to discuss the reason for that approach, but suffice to say, the one who can take one style and take it to its extreme, say as Beethoven did in the 9th symphony by introducing voice in the symphonic setting, that composer is pushing into the next envelope. Im guessing we have few in the general population who can adequately discuss the reasons for one versus another being considered great as opposed to very good. But unless we have a true renaissance in music education, our taste for "serious music" will be dead in years, not decades.
YeloStalyn| 3.29.11 @ 4:18PM
It seems as though there is two different discussions going on... and this may well explain the enternal struggle between "art snobs" and the "great unwashed." (or, if you prefer, they can both have positive names... either is fine so long as you are fair).
On the one hand you have the "art snob." He understands the mechanics of the music. He grasps the complexity of the composition and the skill needed to bring it all together. To him, there is an objective "fact"-like characteristic to music. The wit of changing from one movement to the next or the introduction of this instrument here rather than there and the overall effect on the piece etc. Certainly it takes a "trained ear" to grasp these things with any real seriousness (which I don't have but appreciate).
Then the "great unwashed" with their, as someone put it, rebellious "muzak" and noise. They bang on cymbals, yell, scream, or otherwise butcher the "science" of music... but it is this primal, unrestricted "art" of music that makes them successful. They (and granted, not all... there are many bands and singers who are not artists) write lyrics and riffs that catch and move you. To quote Clint Black of Country and Western music fame, "Ain't if funny how a melody can bring back a memory? Take you to another place and time. Even change your state of mind." And that is the point of modern music. To "pinch" you and jolt you. Not to carry you away on a long story or adventure. Rather to make you feel... happy, sad, angry, indiffernt... whatever.
So... the question is now "What is great?" The "science" of music of the classics? Or the more emotion filled music of the masses? Is music an artform of expression or is it a thing to be "mastered"?
Neither is wrong... but they are exclusive means to "judge" music. That seems to be where the breakdown is... at least from where I'm sitting... in the conversation.
The same can be said with more traditional color and canvas types of art... where ironically I fall more on the "classic" side of things.
big bob| 3.29.11 @ 8:59PM
Fair enough. But the reason these composers are put in the "great" category has to do with far more than just structure. If it were pure academic, cognitive "stuff", colleges would all be very popular, because they are full of that sort of music. YeloStalin, since you are a self-avowed "non-expert", you may not have a lot of exposure to the classics in context. But that does not mean you cannot enjoy them! The reason they are great vs. really good is indeed subjective. Some will say Mendelssohn was great, but others will say he was only above average. No one argues about Mozart? Why is that? Why isn't Salieri in the same category? Vienna was completely enthralled with Salieri. The movie, "Amadeus", while quite embellished, was true in essence, not in details. Yet I doubt if you have ever heard anything from Mr. Salieri. Understanding the specifics helps to clarify WHAT is great. But anyone can grasp the beauty. That's why they lasted so long and are still being played today. There is beauty there that everyone can grasp, even if they can't tell why. I was talking about the lack of ability to even process this sort of music because it is so rarely played. And when our kids DO listen, to hip hop,etc. it IS muzak to them. That, in fact was my point.
For the record, nothing is taken away from the bird, (Charlie Parker). But that is akin to comparing baseball to track and field. It's really not possible except in very general terms.
YeloStalyn| 3.30.11 @ 9:41AM
You are right... I am not an "expert" in the science of the music. But to claim that there must still be somethign compelling about it.... or "great"... is where we differ.
You claim it as a truth. If that were in fact true... then everyone would like it and find it "beautiful." I do have SOME idea of music (amature guitar and bass, some concepts of basic music theory, etc.... well more than MOST people but WAY WAY WAY below anyone who actually finds themselves enthralled by it) but still do not find much "beautry" in most of the classical compositions. There are certainly a few I like... but not eough to even remember their name or composer. The fact that there are more people who do NOT prefer classical music outside of the "science" of it is proof enough that it's "beauty" is not a universal and to make such a claim is, with no real intent to offend, rather haughty.
I would prefer the beauty of the In Rainbows album from Radiohead or even the unnitelligble lyrics of Sigor Ros (they're fom Iceland... I have no clue what they are saying) with their softly flowing music over Wagner six ways from Sunday. Even though there is a Wagner piece I do like (but like I said, not even enough to remember the name).
I would almost be willing to wager that the reason they have "lasted" is because peopl feel compelled to "fit in" in the "in" crowd and put it upon themselves to "acquire" a taste for it... just like nearly everything else the "in" crowd goes for.
somnolence| 3.29.11 @ 5:17PM
No one is mentioning the spontaneous composers like Charles Parker, who took Gershwin's melody of "I Got Rhythm" and could make it his own 100 different ways. A lot of great musicians can sight-read and have beautiful clarity and tone, but they can't swing to save their soul. Parker, Mingus, Monk, Davis, Gillespie, and Coltrane in my opinion rank up there with Bach, Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Liszt and Schubert. There, I just named my favorite classical PENCIL composers. There is a difference.
YeloStalyn| 3.29.11 @ 6:00PM
Obviously not of the same "refinement" as the likes of Coltrain et al but I keep thinking of Jimmi Hendrix's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" from Woodstock. No one left in the audience... it's muggy and muddy... and there he is just bending the song and notes as he goes making it his own.
Dee See| 3.30.11 @ 12:25AM
----BTW how about some much needed retro-coverage of the FACT that 'Pop Culture' since
the 1920's has been designed and implemented
by the dirty old men the likes of H G Wells and Bertrand Russell and funded by the Rockefellers
et al --
It's aim ----to reduce the public to a sudra class
without memory, without relgion, without family,
without nationality, without identity.
A new sudra/plebian class out of nowhere and into
nothingness ---and ready for anything.
ODDER STILL the fact that David Rockefeller
and his third genration EUGENICS minnions
have not been prosecuted for capital crimes
against the republic, sovereignty and humanity
at large.
YET ODDER STILL ---it isn't even mentioned...
Charles Dennison| 3.30.11 @ 4:56AM
One man's trash is another man's treasure?
If sitting in a honky-tonk, gripping a beer bottle; and listening to "A Tear in My Beer", or "Stand By Your Man", one might say, "Wale Hale, that there is some classic music!"
Shaking one's "booty" in a crowded club, gyrating to "I Will Survive" or "Last Dance", one might think the world of music died after the Disco Era.
Seeing the youth driving around in a car (usually going nowhere) - mind you, said car must have the correct rims and tinted windows - with a thundering bass that is audible from 250 feet in bumper to bumper traffic; one must surmise the youth obviously feel the desire to enlighten others regarding the genius of their favorite tribal screaming, profound street wisdom spewing, see-how-many-groups-I-can-alienate, bands/singers.
A quick look at the collection of music videos online can easily show how many prefer visual or graphic over sound or quality. They seem to think you must see the performance in order to justify the lack of true musical talent.
If sitting in an old country church with only a monstrously heavy, painted (several coats) white, upright piano; listening to "Just As I Am" or "It is Well with My Soul", one could easily believe that the entire world has collapsed into depravity since these songs are now held in derision.
Hey, just sayin'...