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We live in such a varied culture. Hard for anyone to keep track of more than a small part of it. But sometimes something comes along that you just can’t miss, and don’t want to…
If you’ve been living in our wider culture, you know why I’d be blogging now about Beyoncé. I’ll get to her in a bit.
But first something I’ve been pondering for a while. How will we know when classical music is back? How can we tell that it’s roaring back into the center of our cultural world, taking the place we’d like it to have?
One answer
Well, as I’ve suggested before, if classical music came back, our concert halls — all of our performance spaces — would be filled with an excited new audience.
And as I’ve also said, we can’t easily imagine how that would happen, for many reasons. We’ve never seen it happen. We think (wrongly) that our culture is too dumb to give classical music any large audience. Or we’re afraid of the change a large new audience would bring.
But if it never happens, how do we think classical music will survive?
Even harder to believe
But here’s another measure of success. We become part of the cultural conversation. As Angels in America did some years ago (surging out of theater into the middle of the AIDS crisis). Or as Brokeback Mountain did (bringing new acceptance of gays).
Or as Prince and David Bowie immediately did when they died (we relearned how much they meant to so many of us). And of course as Hamilton is doing now, mashing up hiphop and Broadway to make us see both our past and our present in a different light.
Could that happen in classical music? Certainly it used to. Maybe you know some of this, but…
- Verdi’s operas rallied Italian patriots.
- Handel’s opera performances were big news in 18th century London, if only as gossip.
- Pelléas et Mélisande was so powerful a cultural event in 1902 Paris that Proust — who rarely left his bedroom — had a special telephone installed, so he could hear the performance in bed.
- Wagner upended culture.
- Leonard Bernstein was a household name, because…well, he was Leonard Bernstein, as famous on Broadway as he was at the New York Philharmonic.
Today Philip Glass is a household name, even the punchline of a knock knock joke. But apart from him, can we imagine anything like what I’ve just listed happening now?
That’s a brain strain. But how can we imagine classical music coming back if we don’t get to this place?
Enter Beyoncé
If we’re going to compete in our culture — if classical music is going to take the kind of cultural place it used to have — then we have competition. And our competition is everything else happening in our culture, everything our hoped-for new audience already cares about.
So here comes Beyoncé. And specifically her new album Lemonade, first seen in an expanded video version, a stunning one-hour film shown on HBO.
To say this has attracted both attention and acclaim would be an understatement. (Go here for a summary of reviews, and here for an especially strong one. Though there’s more.)
The video is powerful, even searing, and beautifully filmed. The music goes to unexpected places, sounding raw, sometimes, and sometimes minimal.
Why this matters
We in classical music — and in the arts more generally — may not think Beyoncé is part of our world. But we’re living in hers, and many of the people we want to reach are (this week, anyway) riveted to her.
And so we have to ask ourselves: Can we compete?
Here’s a facile answer. We don’t have to compete, becasue we’re art, and she isn’t.
But that’s an empty boast. First because she — even if she’s not in the arts — is just as much art as we are
And secondly because, whether or not you think she’s art, she executes better than we do. Presents her music and her visuals far more strongly.
So maybe, if we can’t compete, it’s because — in some crucial ways — we just aren’t as good.
More coming on this.
“So maybe, if we can’t compete, it’s because — in some crucial ways — we just aren’t as good.”
Yikes. I like your candor. Someone has to say it.
Should classical really concern itself with “competing” with manufactured and/or commercial music? Is it a necessity? Were any of the composers of the 20th Century concerned with how they presented themselves to the mass market? Beyonce causes division among critics. Stravinsky pushed the boundaries so much he started riots amongst his audiences. Classical is still here.
Executing what Beyonce does when you have some 74 collaborators for material, on top of all of the other musical talent and legal/marketing support, is easy. She’s one credit in a long list of names on the latest record. To hope that classical will compete with pop surely negates its desire to pursue new boundaries for the sake of music, and instead changes its aim towards satiating a public who probably know next to nothing about music other than what they feel or think is good music in accordance with their own listening, often limited in judgement, caused by a restricted palette formed by the radio they tune in to?
For a better look at this idea, I’d refer you to the BBC Radio 4 short, “Who Killed Classical Music?” by Gabriel Prokofiev, a British DJ/composer and, yes, grandson of Sergei Prokofiev.
This is an interesting post as always! One general observation: Simply because something is a financial and populist juggernaut doesn’t automatically bestow profundity upon it. Things move cyclically, and thus inevitable forces sometimes manifest on a smaller scale, that being the only possible pathway of pertinent artistic evolution.
Morton Feldman once observed that composers battle for the primacy of their individual visions in the current time as Brahms and Wagner — his comparison — once battled in the past. It is mostly a silent battle of pencils and pens on manuscript paper and/or keyboard typing into computers coming before the actual recordings and/or performances of those efforts, and who will actually hear them.
What denotes importance in our time? Is it KUSC here in Los Angeles, perhaps the largest classical music station in America, playing almost entirely European composers of the past? Is it WKCR New Music in Manhattan playing almost exclusively improvised music and some of the same minimalistic composers over and over?
When I lived in NYC in the eighties, one “Transfigured Night” host on WKCR decided to have me as a guest for four hours from 1 to 5 AM, and this was repeated on two other occasions. But now there seems to be a lack of individuality among hosts, and they do what is expected and predictable and presumably sanctioned officially or unofficially by the music department at Columbia University.
We live in reactionary times whereupon our leaders have chosen to maintain the status quo of fossil fuels for energy despite science having proven that this course imperils the world itself. I perceive a similarly inflexible mindset in the way such stations as KUSC and WKCR cling to the past, presenting limited perspectives that undermine the imaginations and spiritual and intellectual growth of listeners. (I am only referencing the New Music Department at WKCR, not being familiar with the other departments.)
The liner notes of my current album “Moonrise and Rain-Mist” open with a quote from Helen Vendler’s “Our Secret Discipline”: “…the life of thought has no time for the rules and constraints of “civilized” stasis.”
https://youtu.be/wljawotBptk
Beyonce’s Lemonade is garbage. Show Biz frenzy. Gaudy and self-indulgent. Classical music has been around for centuries, yet is constantly touted as almost dead or already dead. It doesn’t need to “come back” because it’s here every day. Just check out the Berlin Philharmonic or the LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel.
It must be a wonderful feeling, to make huge judgments on complicated subjects in just a few sentences, in a tone of utter certainty. Kind of fun for one person doing it, but if we all did it, life would be like kids arguing in a playground> “You did!” “I didn’t!” “You did!”
So many serious people in the arts (not only me) have loved Lemonade. You may have seen it yourself — can’t quite tell from your comment — but have you read any of the critical discussion of it? Maybe not. There’s also the question of who you are, and who the video is for. Women, first of all, black women especially. Doesn’t mean others can’t get into it, but people unlike you have a head start.
As for classical music, I’ve been working professionally in the field for 40 years, and the fears for classical music’s survival are relatively new. Weren’t voiced at all in any large way till the 1990s. They then were fed by some tangible realities — falling ticket sales, aging and shrinking audience, and now a deep-rooted pattern of expenses outpacing revenue. “Structural deficits,” as the executive director of one of the leading US orchestras called it a decade ago. His orchestra still has them, as do many others.
Your confidence at pointing to two orchestras and saying they prove classical music is healthy…well, to be honest, that reminds me of the Republican senator who came onto the floor of the US senate with a snowball, saying that snow was proof that global warming wasn’t real. You and he, it seems to me, are at about the same level of analysis. Which is to say, not much at all. Do you know much about the backstage operations of the LA and Berlin philharmonics, and are you sure they may not be having troubles you don’t know about? Or, if they’re not, do you know where other orchestras stand?
Greg, I solidly agree with your post. It prompted me to watch Lemonade, which I had recorded but hadn’t watched yet, so thank you! It would be hard for anyone to create such an effective film-song cycle, even given a $1.3 million budget. Most pop can’t deliver one of the things I most value in the classical tradition — the long arc of development, the cumulative deepening of feeling through the accumulation of material. Well, Lemonade delivers, starting with one person’s broken heart and gradually bringing in generations and some of society at large (Schubert, anyone?). And this is coming out of the pop music wing of popular music, not the art music wing of popular music! The bringing together of poetry, visuals, fashion — even Tchaikovsky — is very effective art. Popular music might not be the greatest, but it is good, and good enough to make classical music superfluous for most people. Late at night these thoughts set me to brooding and listening to Josquin.