Tear this wall down

I don't know what to think about classical music anymore. Tyler Cowen linked up to this grimly fascinating CBC article on a new use for classical music:

The headmaster of the school where children are forced to listen to classical music as a punishment for bad behaviour said infractions of school rules have dropped by about 60 per cent since he began the special detentions.

"What he's saying in effect is children don't like classical music and we will exploit this fact by using it as a punishment against them," O'Neill said in an interview Wednesday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show.

The state school system seems to have abandoned the idea of educating children about great culture, he added.

The piece allows room for the possibility that classical music isn't simply a hammer to lower on the ne'er-do-wells. Potentially, at least, it opens of a more expansive mental framework in which to meditate upon their wrongdoings. Still doesn't seem like an encouraging development, does it?

This is only a touch more fodder for the sea of hands wringing themselves raw about classical music's future, or lack of it. A few years ago, I would have nodded in mild solidarity at the wringers, if not wrung a bit myself. No longer. The constant, non-voluminous but still punishing stream of cries about the large-scale destruction of Western aesthetic refinement have worn me down. Perhaps audiences aren't growing much, but their whining:action ratio certainly is.

The suspiciously anechoic cries "Classical music lives!" are no more reassuring, especially when they herald such wan innovations as occasional performances which deign to allow the players to dress down as low as business casual. While the younger classical advocates make sound points about the forbiddingly fussy/rich/formal/reverent/inattentive/elderly/dead nature of the classical listening culture, I suspect nothing's going to change until the music itself breathes the vitalizing air of the human sphere.

Now, if classical music and its listenership remained absolutely unchanging, effectively frozen in time while the non-classical tumult swirled frenetically around it, that would be one thing. But the situation's worse than that; a poisonous, deadening "art = what's pretty" mindset has risen up around it. The classical radio station I most often listen to rolled out a suite of slogans not long ago that include "Less Stress, More Strauss", "Less Hassle, More Handel" and "Less Violence, More Violins". The deal about art refining the soul seems to have fallen out of favor; I guess palliating the quasi-Sisyphean agony of filing TPS reports falls more in line with its current ambitions. (I often tell a borrowed anecdote which seems apropos. During one of Madelaine's life drawing classes, the model suddenly trotted over to the radio and turned it off, citing the inexplicable fact that the 20th-century piece that had just begun wasn't "relaxing." Imagine it spoken with the confused indignation of someone who had opened a can labeled "beans" and found anchovies.) I do understand the attempts to place classical music in more accessible contexts, but that's only half the job done. I would submit that, as long as the material itself remains walled off from literally every other current in music — it's no accident that record stores, if you remember those, tended to wall off classical in its own ghetto, unmistakable for the "everything else" section — interest will continue fading. The relatively unchanging, isolated nature of classical music inhibits just the sort of hybridization and exchange that would stave off its cultural marginalization. It's been going on since well before I was born, but I still find classical music's self-imposed asphyxiation disheartening. There's something to be said for experiencing works as they were rather than as our ever-shifting aesthetic currents would modify them, but I'm seriously beginning to think that's not a tenable long-term practice. Then again, some seem to get off on the separation — elevation, if you like — away from the choppier, faster-rushing streams; the asphyxiation seems more and more auto-erotic all the time. I talk about this fairly often, and some object: couldn't classical music's engagement with the outside world could produce potentially unsavory results? That, to my mind, is the price you pay. And isn't that the very nature, and the excitement, of artistic experiment? Ditch the possibility of rolling snake eyes, and you lose some of the appeal of rolling the dice in the first place. That's why so much of the classical music experience has turned into a no-stakes casino, with all the thrills that delivers. The fear of the splintering of the canon is real, but I say let it splinter. If you need those bajillions of recordings and all the near-fungible musicians making $9,000 a year out of Juilliard, they'll be around. I'm rooting for the pounding flood of interestingness to clear out the cobwebs and then some.

Comments

[Adam]

You might have already read this, but this is the first chapter from Alex Ross (New York Times music critic, author of The Rest Is Noise)'s new book, Listen To This. Quite a long read, but it touches upon a lot that you raise, and rails pretty passionately against those who attempt to safeguard classical music from the 'potentially unsavoury results' you mention.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/16/040216fa_fact4?currentPage=1

[Dave]

So what is "Classical Music"?

1. Music performed by certain instruments (an orchestra? A piano? A harpsichord?)
2. Music written by composers starting with Bach and ending with Beethoven?
3. Number 1 AND Number 2

I'll posit that there are only two kinds of classical music fans:
a. People who want to signal sophistication. The degree to which these people force themselves to listen to the stuff as a signal of authentic fandom is the important bit.
b. Musical historians.

(b) likes definition #1 and (a) likes definition #3.

I recently started listened to the Vitamin String Quartet and I have concluded that I typically enjoy these modern song arrangements more than I enjoy just about all music written for a string quartet during the classical period. Furthermore, I generally enjoy the original rock/pop renditions even more.

So I think today's artists make better music than Mozart could ever have dreamed of making. AND I bet that if you arranged all those classical melodies into today's rock/pop instruments, they'd bomb on the charts. And NOT because the producer doesn't "get it", but because they're genuinely inferior songs.

Is that so crazy? Is there a single other artistic or scientific endeavor in which we genuinely sit in awe of the ancients for doing something we can't blow away today? Nope.

Thoughts?

[Dave]

Correction:

(b) likes definition #2. Definition #1 only tickles (a) types who are bored with #3.

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Potentially, at least, open a more expansive frame of mind in which to reflect on their wrongdoings.

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I don't listen classic music but sometimes I can liste bethowen.

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