Those of us who are regular readers of the Sounds and Fury blog have a great little article to read today. "A Call for a Return to Hierarchal Sobriety" is an interesting post - though the writing style is (uncharacteristically) so dense as to be cryptic, the content of the post is well worth the effort.
Normally I would just post a link to this interesting article - but in this case I thought I might act as some sort of translator, and perhaps inspire some modest discussion on my own site about his subject. In his post, Douglas talks about the division between (as he puts it) "artifacts of high and popular culture".
We must, he argues, deliberately discard the postmodern idea that all art is created equal, of equal value and borne of the same tree. There is a major qualitative difference between "popular" and "high" music that must be acknowledged. He is careful not to say that one form is better than the other, only that they are different.
Douglas is onto something about this difference between "high" and "popular" music. As he describes it, "high" art aims to be "transcendant" (Douglas' word), while "popular" art aims to be well, popular. This is a good place for a quote:
...such works ["high" art] always contain secrets which are given up only slowly and by repeated visits, and then only to the most searching and probing eye or ear, the greatest works seemingly having an almost limitless store which are never divulged entirely no matter how long and deep the searching and probing. There can be no meaningful aesthetic comparison between works that occupy such a realm with works... [whose] hallmark characteristic is their perceived quality of aspiring to the widely accessible here-and-now entertaining; works which by their very nature contain no secrets, or containing them, give them up almost all at once.
I must be careful to reiterate that this is not a value judgement on popular music (I'm happy to make such a judgement elsewhere, but not in this post). Instead, Douglas is pointing out a key distinction in the aims of "popular" and "high" music, and that this distinction is great enough that we can hardly compare the one with the other. Apples and oranges, you might say.
My argument comes in when we look at the borderlines. In this paradigm, how are we to take much of Rossini? Broadly speaking, it is musically and dramatically simplistic material, that achieves a place in the operatic canon chiefly because of musical style and difficulty, and year of composition. This is not music that aspires to "transcend" anything - one might almost call it "Italian Musical Theatre". Douglas brings up a comparison between "West Side Story" and "Der Freischutz." (as popular and high art, respectively) Would he feel the same way if Bernstein had composed in 1890, or perhaps in Italian?
I would argue that while Douglas makes an important distinction, we should recognize also that not all "classical" music aspires to "transcendence of the quotidian world of experience", just as not all non-classical music aspires simply to mass appeal. I happen to think that West Side Story was written with more serious and "transcendant" goals in mind than "HMS Pinafore" or "L'italiana in Algeri". As was Rent, for that matter. Much of Rossini, and certainly most of Gilbert and Sullivan was written for "mass appeal", without any higher aspiration. I won't even bring composers like Shostakovich into the picture, who often wrote for "mass appeal" for their own survival. Or the various early Italian oratorios that were very clearly written for mass appeal (pun intended).
While I applaud A.C. Douglas for making his distinction, I don't believe that such a generalization is effective - even a generalization hidden among paragraphs of obtuse academic writing. I lean more towards a description of modern popular music as a cousin to other popularistic musical periods. The French chanson, for instance, had a good century of composition without producing more than a handful of notable pieces in the grand scheme of things. These songs too, were strophic, and simple in structural, melodic, rhythmic and textual content. Perhaps, as Douglas suggests, this is due to a difference in musical goals; I think it is more due to a difference in musical tastes. Our generation, like that of much of 18th century France, is not interested in music that aspires to "transcendance". We are interested in pieces that are fun, catchy and dance-able.
Too bad.
Note: This post was edited to remove unnecessarily acerbic comments. Don't know where they came from, but they've been deleted.
