Modernism footnote

Or, really, not a footnote, but a huge piece of art history that had no equivalent in classical music.

I'm in Pittsburgh, doing some work with the symphony. I had a day off today, and went to the Andy Warhol Museum, and was just blown away. It's easy to think of Warhol's work as 80% concept, 20% realization (in the form of a compelling art object), but that's just not true. The color, design, and presence of his pieces (the Mao series, for instance) is really stunning. Reproductions don't begin to do them justice, and when I saw many of them in a single afternoon their force really hit me hard.

And so where was pop art in classical music? You can find a few examples, here and there, but almost all of them would be in music not designed for the mainstream classical concert hall. So basically pop art never happened in classical music. And it especially never happened in the '60s, when Warhol was doing it.

Why not? The simplest answer would simply be to say that the classical concert hall was too respectable. There's an air of sanctity around classical music, and it was even stronger 40 years ago. You just couldn't start doing riffs on Elvis songs, or on Campbell soup jingles. (If that's what the musical equivalent of pop art might have been.) You could do high modernist pieces, like settings of Mallarmé by Pierre Boulez. The mainstream audience may have hated that, but at least it was respectable.

And why did respectability matter so much? Again we come back to the conservatism of classical music. Which, I suddenly realized, is easier to explain than I thought it was. Classical music -- at least as it's currently practiced -- is built around large institutions, like orchestras and opera companies. These are expensive. They take a lot of money to maintain, money that has to renewed year in and year out. Thus the institutions can't afford to alienate people who might give the money. And therefore they're conservative. Of course they also need a large audience, so that makes them conservative, too.

Warhol, by contrast, could just go out and make any art he wanted. (I guess I haven't yet explained why museums showed it, museums also being large institutions, that need lots of money to exist. But maybe they're not as conservative as classical music institutions because the art itself is less conservative.)

Classical music would be much better off right now, if we'd had pop art of our own.