So, yesterday’s post…about a delicious pop music reference in the Lifehacker blog, which — just so you know what a major production it is — according to Wikipedia has a staff of 18 people, is updated 18 times a day, and has editions in four countries outside the US)…my point was that references to pop music in our culture are ubiquitous, and we in classical music have to make them ourselves. If we want to live in the same world as the new audience we’d like to find.
More evidence for that
Yesterday I was watching Ari Melber’s show The Beat, which runs on MSNBC weekdays at 6 PM. MSNBC of course, is a major news and politics channel, which you wouldn’t think had any pop music connection.
But Melber loves hiphop, and, not for the first time, quoted a hiphop lyrics to make a political point.
But that wasn’t all…
One of Melber’s guests was Al Sharpton, a familiar political figure, a Baptist minister and longtime African-American activist, who among many other things has a weekend show on MSNBC.
Talk had turned to a hot new book by Chris Christie, about his time with Donald Trump. Trump had him over for dinner, Christie says, and without asking what Christie wanted, ordered the same food for both of them. Including scallops, which Christie can’t eat.
Melber and his guests laughed at that, saying it shows a way some people wield power.
Which led to some teasing. Sharpton is well known to have been a great friend of James Brown, one of the legendary names in black music.
“Did James ever make you eat what he ate?” Melber asked, with a smile. After some affectionate sparring, Sharpton said, “Let’s just say we often ate the same menu.”
No need, in the outside world, to explain who James Brown was, or why it was fun to bring him up just then.
And that’s not all…
Another big pop music fan is Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist.
Though music isn’t what his Times column is about, he used to post at the paper about his favorite artists, and then created an independent blog called Friday Night Music, about the music he liked. Mostly indie bands and singer-songwriters. For instance, here.
Krugman, by the way, isn’t a young guy. He’s 65. And if he likes indie music, wouldn’t plenty of older people in our prospective audience…(no need to state the obvious conclusion).
Again, the lesson we should learn — the world swims in a sea of pop music…references to it crop up everywhere, among people of all ages…
“Again, the lesson we should learn — the world swims in a sea of pop music…references to it crop up everywhere, among people of all ages…”
Well, isn’t that depressing 🙂
About Krugman: sixty-five year old people are now the baby boom generation – Woodstock, rock ‘n roll, indie music. And even with the older generation, you have Elvis, swing, and jazz. We don’t have to piss off the base to try something new.
I can’t imagine a world in which “classical music” (when will we ever get a better term?) becomes as popular or as well-known as “pop” music in this country.
As a rough parallel, consider literature. How often do we see people on TV making casual references to Finnegans Wake or Wallace Stevens’ poems (aside from the Snow Man, perhaps, but you hardly ever see that pop up in the mass media, either.) But literature on this level is readily available these days to anyone who is interested. It would be nice to get more people interested in such stuff, but don’t ask me how.
“Classical” music is hugely accessible on YouTube, for example. When I was a kid, if you told me that in my Golden Years there would be a medium that would let you hear and even see “movies” of performances of just about any piece you wanted in the comfort of your abode, I’d have thought you were crazy. The opportunities people have to learn about “classical” music today on the internet alone are fantastic. And you don’t have to be a Richie Rich to do it.
I think it’s time to spend less energy worrying about the unpopularity of “serious music,” or whatever people want to call it, and concentrate on just keeping the performing organizations, especially orchestras and opera companies, financially viable. We can’t sit by and see them disappear. (Of course, we need to get people off the internet and into concert venues to help do that, but I think that people getting familiar with the music on YouTube, etc., is a first step.)
So why do you think these organizations are having financial problems? The unpopularity of classical music is one of the reasons. I remember the marketing director of a major orchestra saying something to me during the last decade, when his orchestra began running regular deficits. He said that their decline in ticket sales (which they’d never admit to in public) by itself was enough to have caused the deficits. Though there are other (growing) problems as well.
But beyond that, it’s really time not to take for granted that classical music is art on an unquestioned high level. One problem the field has had for quite a while is that artists in other fields don’t care about it. You don’t see an outpouring of poets, painters, conceptual artists, playwrights at orchestra concerts, no matter what the programming is. Classical music has moved away from all of our culture, including the most artistic, most elevated parts.
And, for whatever this is worth, in past generations it was much more present in our culture than it is now. Go back before WW II, and half the music on the radio was classical.
As one straw in a complex wind, Kate Bush (whose 11-concert return to live performance in London a few years ago sold out in 15 minutes) used Molly Bloom’s monologue from Ulysses in her 1987 song “The Sensual World.” She wasn’t given permission to use the actual text, and so wrote something parallel to it, but then in 2009 was given permission, and since then has used it in the song. To call one of the biggest stars in pop music an outlier would miss the point. The question being not just what things from elevated literature pop people have used, but what’s the artistic level of what they’ve created on their own? And what in our culture are they speaking to, compared to what classical music speaks to?
I think the key for classical music is in fact to get smarter, get more artistic. Which may slowly be happening, but I think a problem about the current concert and opera experience is that it’s not artistic enough for people exposed every day to art in other areas, including popular culture. Long story!
It’s the usual “high culture/low culture” bullshit. “High culture” people assume that people who appreciate vernacular culture are stupid and shallow. As a manic classical music fan myself, I’d argue that most people at serious pop music concerts relate to the music in a more serious, meaningful way than most people at mainstream classical music concerts, who just let the music wash over them and then congratulate themselves for being so cultivated.
Indeed, I’d argue that the reason most of the mainstream classical audience rejects New Music is that you HAVE to relate to relate to New Music seriously as what it is; it doesn’t have the patina of age that permits audiences to ignore what the work actually IS and just pretend it’s “nice” (which is about all they can stand from art, apparently).
I’m with you there, Barry. When I was a pop music critic, I regularly, almost always, when I went out, saw artists who were alive, engaged, and had audiences who were the same. And I thought the pop (terrible word) world in general was more creative than what I’d been used to in classical music.
When I said that recently to an open-minded person who works in classical music, she asked me why I thought it was more creative. I asked her what she thought. After a moment, she said, “It’s less constrained?” Well, exactly. A lot of rules in classical music, not so much encouragement for doing things your own way. In pop, it’s taken for granted that you can do that. Luckily, the classical music situation is changing! May take a while to seep up to the big institutions, but change is definitely in the air.
And, just to be clear, I personally DO think that much contemporary classical is “better” (whatever that means) than most vernacular music. The problem (as you’re saying) is getting all these serious pop fans (which includes, as you note, most of the visual artists, dancers, authors, and theater people around now) to listen to music that can give them what they’re getting out of serious pop music — but more and better. They don’t believe such classical music exists (or that it is supplied in surroundings they wouldn’t find odious). They’re wrong, of course — but that’s not THEIR fault.
Well, I agree that there are people who might like some new classical music, but don’t know it exists. I’ve seen that happen, including once when I was on a radio show, played a Michael Torke piece that I thought people who liked indie rock might like. And in the elevator as I left the radio station ran into someone young who worked there, and said I was absolutely right. She’d loved the Torke piece.
But if we’re going to rank things, I’m afraid I’d rank current pop music higher than contemporary classical music, on the whole. Certainly I get more deep artistic enjoyment from it. Why that is would be a long discussion. Which of course would have to touch on musical values, which I think are very high in the pop music I like, though they’re different from what’s important musically in classical pieces.
But over and above that, pop music has a connection to the world. Tells us about the world we live in, in the context of an active community of people (aka everyone we’re likely to meet outside classical music) who listen to it. And — so important — who create it!
Whereas current classical music really doesn’t play out in the wider world. I’m hard-pressed to think of a new classical piece that, regardless of whatever impression it made inside the classical world, that had any great meaning outside, since Einstein on the Beach in 1976. I think it’s fair to say that if you were involved in the edge of the arts (at that time a very wide edge, encompassing many kinds of music, dance, theater, performance art, visual art, and more), you HAD to see it.
So from this point of view, new classical pieces are looking for their meaning. Even when one is wildly applauded, as Mason Bates’ Steve Jobs opera was at its premiere, that’s applause inside the bubble. Doesn’t mean people outside would applaud, or in fact pay any attention at all.
And this I think hurts new classical music artistically. It’s just not being fed by artistic impulses with deep roots in the world, isn’t part of an artistic communication among people of many kinds, isn’t written in musical idioms that the world widely shares. I’m not saying it has to be wildly popular. Note that I said Einstein on the Beach made its impact among people in the advancing edge of art. But that edge was important then, big, exciting, and growing steadily bigger, until eventually it broke out into the wider world.
I don’t want to spin my wheels with any more general comments, so I’ll just return to my own experience. When I listen to Bob Dylan’s last 10 or so albums (leaving the weird Xmas one out), I get more musical and artistic pleasure than I get from, well, really, any of the new classical things I hear. I may like or even love (Caroline Shaw) some of them, but Dylan, for me, touches a much deeper vein. Nor is he alone, in that huge nonclassical music world.
Oh, one more thing. I know why you say vernacular music. But the term doesn’t seem to fit a lot of what’s out there, outside the art music sphere. Look back on what I wrote, quoted, about My Bloody Valentine. Hard to describe that out-there artistic work as vernacular! Vernacular music, to me, is a faintly disparaging term, like outsider art. I’d rather skip labels, and just say “music.”
“When I listen to Bob Dylan’s last 10 or so albums (leaving the weird Xmas one out), I get more musical and artistic pleasure than I get from, well, really, any of the new classical things I hear. I may like or even love some of them, but Dylan, for me, touches a much deeper vein. Nor is he alone, in that huge non-classical music world.”
You’re setting the bar high, Greg, as well you should, by comparing composers to Bob Dylan. It was precisely a realization of this discrepancy in artistic quality that caused me to reject a scholarship from a leading graduate composition program and instead head out on my own because I didn’t wish to be compromised by what I found to be a misguided milieu. Serialism, minimalism, and the avant-garde all ultimately bored me unlike the finest jazz, Indian classical, and rock-pop, not to mention composers who proposed writing in styles of the past.
Following my instincts, in 1984, I began using a combination of hardware and software eventually named the Meruvina in its subsequent incarnations, recognizing that this new musical medium was paramount. Recently, I came across a statement from British musicologist Nick Collins affirming the direction I took: “Where the 19th century saw a rush of composer-pianists, now the 21st brings the era of the composer-programmer…”
A marked preference for the sounds and colors of acoustic instruments, including many from world cultures, over abstract electronic sounds, is the major difference between myself and others who use computers and technology, together with how I feel its necessary not to have any musician, including myself, interfere with the music in any way during performance. And in terms of composition, the forms and flow I follow mostly come from jazz, Indian classical music, and rock-pop because, as you indicate, that is the milieu we have lived in that’s real in America.
That’s not to say one may not be inspired by European classical music. With so much music from myriad times and places one may turn to, I’ve only recently been captivated by the superb keyboard music of Robert Schumann and Domenico Scarlatti, the latter having a profound influence on Ludwig van Beethoven that remains largely unacknowledged.
Bob Dylan worked as hard at his craft as Beethoven, Charlie Parker, or Nikhil Banerjee. He made the time to develop his musical gift, creating a unique musical universe of his own. That is the most any artist may hope for, and if others find meaning in it, that’s icing on the cake, though too much approbation can be unhealthy, too.
In 2016, I wrote about how ironic it was that the two most advanced living practitioners of the English language, Bob Dylan and Helen Vendler, were worlds apart because Dylan’s style of singing, in particular, was anathema to certain persons (guessing that included Vendler), and Bob’s lyrics are inextricably bound to his music, so the profundity of what he does has been lost to those persons, the lyrics by themselves only presenting half the story. My essay was sent to a number of leading literary figures, and, entirely coincidentally, of course, Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature later that year.
http://www.azuremilesrecords.com/thoughtssosublimehelenvendlerinvents.html
Thanks, Michael! Good to hear from you. And of course I agree. Thanks for contributing so much to this discussion!
For anyone who doesn’t know Michael’s music, I’d recommend following the link he gives, and listening to it. It’s unique, extraordinary, absorbing, exhilarating. A major discovery for me, when Michael contacted me some time ago about hiring me as consultant. That’s when I first heard his music, and — I mean this very seriously — there’s nothing else like it.
Michael and I did work together, on his presentation of himself to the world. I was happy to help him. [Reply revised, after Michael volunteered that I could mention that we’d worked together.]
Sorry for the long delay in responding. I’d just say that most of the contemporary classical music I’m talking about happens outside the bubble — not in Zankel Hall, but in garages and warehouses in Brooklyn. I know we’re not allowed to use the term “indie classical” any more. But, for all the success some of those people are (rightfully) achieving (I think I recall Missy Mazzoli remarking that you can’t call her “indie” anymore when she’s been commissioned by the Met), most of the music that roughly falls into that style/scene — I’m thinking of people like Varispeed/ThingNY — doesn’t get “applauded” by even the “progressive” part of the mainstream classical audience. It barely gets acknowledged. It has its own separate rapt audience.
Now I get that none of these guys and gals is having the kind of impact on general culture that “Einstein” did. But that’s my point: this is music that, while it might not change any worlds, would be liked by people who are into contemporary art and dance (and pop music, or whatever you want to call it) — if only they had a way to know it even exists. But they don’t.
Agreed! That’s the kind of new classical music I most want to hear.
But still I might say that it’s catching up with the great stuff outside the classical world. Not that it’s automatically superior. I don’t want to beat any dead horses, though. Happy to agree with you here!
Not that you care, but I see your point. There’s no question the music I’m talking about is vitalized by its creators’ involvement with pop music.
Barry, hope I didn’t give the impression that I don’t care! I do. I love talking with people, learning new things, getting new points of view. Maybe I’m rushed sometimes, and don’t communicate my interest enough.
I like what you say here. Thanks. It’s an excellent truth! And important for the bigger issues we’re talking asbou.