Dead weight

Another reader, Jason Stewart, contributes some provocative thoughts (along with a compliment to me, for which I'm grateful):

Saving

The key to saving classical music is to let go of all the dead weight in that genre. There are so many hour-long classical "masterpieces" out there that don't have any more to say than a three minute pop song. People are bombarded by these musical barbiturates on the classical station, and the truly great works are being passed over because of the "guilt by association" factor. If we make it so that the virgin listener is more likely to be exposed to the exceptional, more people will recognize this music as exceptional and value it accordingly.

 

Of course, this is easier said than done. It requires discretion to choose what to keep and what to get rid of. I think the key to doing this properly is to replace the culture of pseudo-intellectual intimidation with the kind of thoughtfulness you show in your columns. I can't keep track of how many times I've seen well formed criticisms of a "masterpiece" (music, painting, poetry, etc.) countered with knee-jerk accusations of philistinism by people who should really know better! Many people in the arts are so confident in their own taste that they don't feel obligated to question it or defend it. They just shove what they deem valuable down other peoples' throats. Under the circumstances, who could blame the public for losing its appetite?

 

Defending

 

Many people factionalize themselves by the music they listen to. Back in school, some kids would fashion themselves after their favorite musicians, and they could spot fellow fans by their clothes and hairstyle, and entire groups of friends were held together by their love of a certain popular genre. This is stupid. The world is so filled with excellence! To focus all of your attention and love on one art and a few performers will stunt your development as a human being, and you will miss out on a lot of pleasure in the process.

 

Great pop musicians may not have that much professional training (if any at all), but they make up for it with persistence, and belief in their own innate talent. Pop is also a young person's game, so they've usually got things rattling around in their heads that more experienced musicians have long since forgotten. It is also music of the times, so pop musicians have some common ground with their audience right out of the starting gate. Pop has something to say, and great pop says it well.

 

Classical music also has something to say. Even though the great classical composers are decades and centuries behind us, we still perform their works and hail them as geniuses. I'll admit that part of this is just thoughtless tradition, but the greater part of it is truly earned. Why do we still perform the religious works of a devout Lutheran like Bach in a world of waning faith? Why do so many Jewish conductors and musicians aspire to perform the operas of the rabid anti-Semite Richard Wagner? These men, and men like them, had their own trials, their own circumstances, and their own screwy ideas just like the rest of us, but what sets them apart is that in their art, they were able to boil it all down to something meaningful and communicate it with the kind of clarity and detail that just can't be done in a short pop song.

 

Neglect the old masters of any art at your own risk.

I'd add that classical programming often gets too scholarly. Pieces are played for historical or analytical reasons, without anyone asking whether the resulting concert makes sense as an evening out hearing music. The worst case I've ever heard was at a festival of early American orchestral music. One concert -- featuring pieces by Chadwick, McDowell, and Busoni (not American, but he wrote a piece with alleged Native American themes in it) -- sounded to me as if it should have been a collection of musical examples, illustrating a lecture. Except that then the examples would just have been a few minutes long, which is all anyone would have needed (especially for the endless Busoni piece) to get the point. The Chadwick and McDowell pieces might have been OK on a concert with other, more compelling music. But this program, taken as whole, was gigantically boring, no matter what historical interest the music might have had -- and the festival, unfortunately, was put on, not for a specialized schoarly crowd, but by a mainstream orchestra for its regular audience.