Formulas

Isn't the existence of 'formula' or convention what powers all aesthetic production? Perhaps what makes a work 'great' in any art is when it uses convention or formula only as a path to transcend the formula. All classical period works rely on creating expectations and then smashing them with a surprise (for a clear example immediately in mind, think the first movement Beethoven's violin concerto which modulates from D Major NOT to a restatement in the Dominant but to a restatement briefly in C major, modulating immediately to B minor and then going on from there...)--the classical sonata form was itself a modified formula from the baroque ritornellos, etc. Or for non musical examples take Keats' odes or Shakespeare's sonnets.

The pop culture -- high culture divide doesn't come from formulas. Perhaps two ways to distinguish it are 1) commodification -- pop culture is geared towards mass production, with the goal of high sales influencing the content of the cultural product itself and thereby adulterating it or perhaps even making it more formulaic; and 2) the pop culture -- high culture divide (Perhaps better conceived with the terms high brow-low brow?)is not inherent in the artwork but in the exclusionary intent of its consumers: that is, 'high culture' can only be distinguished by its preference by the ruling class as a way to distinguish themselves from other classes.

This is why high culture in its many forms often requires a degree of connoisseurship -- frequent acquaintance with the music, education (both history and custom--think rules such as no clapping between movements), etc, that can help separate those with the resources to achieve this connoisseurship from those without. See the work of sociologist Paul DiMaggio for an examination along these lines of the creation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Fine Arts in the late 19th century.

Thanks, Alex. Very incisive. And I love how you invoked the bogeymen on both sides of the border -- the high-culture fear that popular culture is nothing but commercial crap, and the popular culture fear that high culture is nothing but snobbery.

These attitudes definitely exist. And there's truth to both of them -- popular culture can obviously be commercial, and there's obviously snobbery associated with high culture.

But now that we have these very clear definitions, we have to look at them very critically. Take the pop culture definition, in terms of commerce. We could ask: Is in fact popular culture so wholly commercial? And does commerce in fact have the effect claimed for it, namely cheapening the art?

I'm not sure either is true. Ever since the Velvet Underground (if not before), it's been easy to find people in so-called popular music who don't aim at all for popularity. The whole phenomenon of commercial music and its effects is anyway more complicated than the high culture view of it allows. The history of pop (in the rock era) is full of people who blasted out of more or less nowhere, and got successful commercially by changing the rules of the game. That's why you have Bruce Springsteen, looking back on how he made "Born to Run," and saying that he hoped he'd sell millions of records, while at the same time taking muuch more detailed care in the making of the album than he'd ever have to take if commercial success is all he wanted. Nor do you ever hear him (on the DVD about the making of the album) talk about any actual steps he took to make the music more commercial.

What happened, I think, was something else. After making two albums exactly as he wanted to make them, and getting more acclaim and selling a reasonable number of records (at least the second time out), he figured that he was due for a serious breakthrough. And what's wrong with that? He did it completely on his own terms.

But then high culture isn't only about snobbery. Proust, for instance, is genuinely difficult to read, if you haven't read many other serious novels. There are quesitons of language, style, meaning, ideas -- or simply very long sentences and paragraphs. Those might take some getting used to. And Proust certainly didn't write that way to make snobs like him. In fact, since a lot of his writing is about snobs, we can see from how he describes them that they'd never have liked his writing. That's one of the many points of his book. (To put this in a slightly vulgar way.) So high culture -- at least at its best -- might have a very deep artistic value.
And it can also have its commercial side. I'm thinking, for instance, of academic composers, with faculty jobs at American universities, dutifully writing atonal pieces in the '70s and '80s. They knew these pieces weren't going to be widely played, so the kind of commercialism we see in pop music obivously wouldn't affect them. But they did have a market -- other composers like them, who happened to control or influence grant money, faculty hiring, and performances on new music concerts. An academic composer could be quite successful in this market.

And then there are people who just love the quick commercial formulas, not because they want to make quick money, but because that's what they genuinely like. So in what sense would they be cheapening their work in other to be successful? They might even mess with the formulas, precisely because those formulas seem so natural to them.

It's complicated. It's easier to talk in generalities than it is to look at the real practice at both ends of this artistic scale, and see what kind of generalizations can be honestly made from the actual facts.

An interesting post.

When I heard Arriaga's symphony, I thought immediately of Gossec's hunt symphony. This could be minor artists using similar forms and idioms, or it could be one great artist paying sophisticated homage to another.

The distinctions in popular culture versus its highbrow counterpart can be either subtle or massive depending on what medium one speaks of; a sort of "artistic relativism" if you will. Clearly the differences between rap and poetry are clear, but music is not as clear because it is not nearly as based around concepts or ideas (although it can be, of course) as poetry is.

I believe that, when people complain about popular culture being "formulaic", they do so with implications about the content. To be sure, classicism and neoclassicism are formulaic, but only structurally. They work within a form. The common popcorn film is formulaic in content, as it works with the same content that others have worked with. Film, being literary in content, has much potential for expression and a critic can tell the difference right away; this ability is not so prevalent in classical and popular music.

Hi, Alfred. You raise some good points. I agree -- the common popcorn film is formulaic in content. But then so is any common 18th century symphony. It's really interesting to listen to symphonies written by composers who now have been forgotten. They're mostly no more interesting than the standard Hollywood blockbuster. They were the unchallenging entertainment of their time (and the audiences didn't even pay much attention, as at least they do with current films).

It would be interesting to specify what the differences are between rap and poetry. How oculd we define them? And is there anything -- maybe some of Rakim's raps -- that crosses the any line we could define? Some years ago, rap gave birth to a style called slam poetry, which is predominantly oral (I think), which might differentiate it from standard poetry. But still it's pretty well accepted in poetic circles.

I think these distinctions can be very slippery. It's easy to define the extreme cases -- "Pterodactyl,' the dumb horror film I saw part of on the Sci-Fi Channel yesterday, is pop culture crap, and Beethoven's late quartets are art. (If we want to make these distinctions.) But how do we know where to draw the line, for the many things that fall somewhere in the middle?

You know, it's especially absurd to point to film, of all things, as being an example of an art form where the difference between high and low is clear-cut. Are you freaking kidding me? Film is -- thankfully -- the one art form that is actually mostly free of the pointless meta-bickering about what is and isn't capital-A art that animates something like 90% of online discussions about classical music. Instead, film buffs actually like to talk about the merits of specific films, and everyone basically agrees that films should be judged on their own terms regardless of what kind of audience they are aimed at or how accessible they are or what genre they inhabit.

I mean, look at the usual list of Top 10 Movies of All Time -- you'll likely find nothing but a bunch of disreputable, formulaic, crowd-pleasing genres: a gangster flick, a samurai adventure, a comedy of manners, a fictionalized biopic, a mystery, a psychological thriller, a sci-fi picture...

Good point. I'm probably showing my age here. When L'avventura came out, it was derided, despite its special prize at Cannes. It went right over people's heads.
But back to your point. I think you've helped explain why I'd rather go to a movie than to most classical concerts.

In my opinion, any attempt to draw a bright line between "popular" and "serious" art forms will be fruitless. But don't take my word for it! In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, George Lakoff spends 600 pages demolishing the idea that rigid divisions between categories - in nature and in conceptual thinking - are meaningful or workable. What we can do instead is identify prototype members of a category, isolate the characteristics that make them prototype members, and then see whether and to what degree non-prototypes share them. These eternal debates about who belongs in what category won't be resolved because they can't be resolved. Now that does cause insecurity in people who identify with membership in one category or another. But that's how life is: You can cling to simplifications to understand things, or you can immerse yourself in and wrestle with the actual ambiguous substance of the world.

For what it's worth, if your prototype member of the rap category is Lil' Jon, it's easy to say that the rap category is distant from the poetry category, but if your rap prototype is Talib Kweli or Rakim or even Eminem, it becomes more difficult to elucidate the differences. As an actual enthusiast of both rap and poetry, I feel confident on this score.

Well, at the risk of broad-brushing myself, why, then, do the spandex-wearing (and PLEASE stop wearing that stuff!) trailer-mommas not listen to Vanhal, or Stamitz, or even Gottschalk, to keep it American? Why are they tuned only to top 40?

I can tell you why they're not listening to Vanhal -- he's a goddamn bore. A very nice man, apparently (unlike Kozeluch), but his music is really dull.

But now, seriously -- who'd ever deny that taste follows demographic paths? It's just that those paths are a lot more varied than the one in your example.

Besides, people in trailer parks (if we're going to stereotype them)...they listen to country, don't they?

I always thought the distinction had less to do with formula and more with intent: popular culture has the goal of being popular, other culture has the goal of, well, anything else (although popularity, if bestowed, is always nice). One of the reasons there's less overlap than in centuries past is the combination of mass electronic media and free-market capitalism: because the primary measure of popularity is now financial, market forces regard any popular artifact as a spike in demand, and a lot of imitative, formulaic supply inevitably follows.

And almost inevitably (or at least very often) fails. One of the delights of my days as a pop music critic was watching the major record companies fall on their asses, over and over, when they tried to predict (or manipulate) what would sell. Then something would come along out of left field and take them all by surprise.

The odd thing about popular culture, given the literal meaning of the term, is that a lot of it isn't popular. And an even larger chunk of it never really had the goal of being popular. In a response to another comment, I brought in Bruce Springsteen, and I'll bring him in again. There's a guy who certainly didn't mind being popular, and hoped he'd be popular, but didn't write his music with the idea of writing things that would be popular. Like any serious artist, he wanted to be accepted only on his own terms.
Which happened. But does anyone really think that if "Born to Run" hadn't sold any more than his first two albums did, he would be given up what he was doing, and started deliberately writing Top 40 songs? If you know even the slightest thing about him, you know that's crazy. He'd rather have sold no records at all.
And how would anyone account for "Nebraska," if we believe that the purpose of popular culture is to sell? That was a dumb album for Springsteen to make, if he wanted to keep his career momentum going. His record company just about shit bricks when he delivered it.

"[Springsteen is] a guy who certainly didn't mind being popular, and hoped he'd be popular, but didn't write his music with the idea of writing things that would be popular. Like any serious artist, he wanted to be accepted only on his own terms."

Springsteen is America's greatest Lieder composer--an interesting cross of Schubert, Wolf, Mahler, and good ol' rock'n'roll.

The "irreducible difference between high and popular culture" is simple -- if most people think it's high culture, it's high culture, and if most people think it's low culture it's low culture. And if opinion is divided, it's ambiguouos. This logic may sound circular at first glance, but actually what's going on is that the criteria we use for making the current judgement is based on which superficial criteria we used in the past and how that worked for us. Different superficial characteristics signify "high" or "low" and that assignment of meaning and our weighing of the different characteristics in our high/low judgement evolves memetically. Mozart is "high art" because his music sounds like other music that we've declared to be high art. Britney Spears is low art because it sounds like other music we've declared to be low art. Film is harder to pigeonhole in part because it's a new enough genre that we don't have as much of a history of making the distinction, so the highness and lowness signs are less clearly defined.

That was a redundant sentence of mine, saying "clearly" twice by mistake!

I've heard Rakim, by the way. Maybe being young and in the collegiate years has something to do with hearing rap more and appreciating it less, but I personally find the form of rap extremely limited. There is an expectance to rhyme on every line, and the rhythm never uses anything adventurous (one sees 3/4 every few blue moons).

Greg:

Since you sometimes resort to analogies between music and the visual arts, here's one: In essence, pop music is analogous to cartooning, the symphony to a fine painting.

I do a bit of cartooning myself (but I don't paint) so I'm aware of the distinction. In a cartoon, one reduces the drawing to the fewest lines needed to get the point across, whereas the fine artist has other aims.

Similarly, the classic rock 'n' roll song uses just enough forces, but no more, to express the various melodies, harmonies, descants, etc. in its arrangement. The purpose is to deliver the message of the lyrics, with the music either reinforcing or undercutting the message. (This is similar to the role of the small orchestra in opera, too.)

What bedevils critics is that, starting in the late 1960s, rock groups started confusing the issue. Now a ditty like "Lovely Rita Meter Maid," still cartoonish in its aims, is underscored by large forces including electronica and strings. Elton John upped the ante with immense orchestration on Madman Across the Water and so on. The examples are legion.

The result is as if, say, Mike Lucovich started doing his political cartoons in a chiaroscuro oil-painting style based on that of Caravaggio. There is a deliberate disconnect between aim and method, typical of postmodernism. The quandary is deepened when postclassical musicians such as Philip Glass, sensitive to the lack of any apparent direction forward or the impossibility of an avant garde in these postmodern times, begin appropriating the ideas of such quasi-serious rock compositions into their formal art music. An analogy might be Roy Lichtenstein's canvases that wrench ideas from comix out of context to create "fine art."

I think high vs. popular art is a continuum, not a dichotomy, but you've hit upon the fact that many compositions labeled as belonging to either category confuse the issue, either by adopting the methods of high art in the service of pop culture or vice versa.

Lindsey Eck
www.corneroak.com

Lindsay, that's a good way to formulate the distinction between high and popular art. Thanks. And thanks, too, for the insight about the continuum.
But I don't really think the distinction -- oir the continuum -- really exists. I listen to a lot of music that's designated high art, and a lot of music designated popular art. I don't hear a difference.
Let me make that clearer. I hear a lot of differences between one piece of music and another. But I don't hear any differences that I can trace to something being classified in one pile or the other. Some classical pieces feel like what people say high art is supposed to feel like. But so do some rock songs. And some classical pieces feel the way popular art is supposed to feel.
I think the distinction is purely cultural, a set of attitudes and expectations we impose on art from the outside. We -- as a culture -- started doing that around the start of the 19th century. The distinction absolutely did not exist before then, no matter how lofty -- or how base -- any artwork might have been in earlier days. In fact, it's not even clear that the concept of an artwork (as we know it now) even existed. One very long and smart study of that is Lydia Goehr's book, "The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works," which traces and critically examines the concept of a musical work of art, showing how it emerged in the 19th century. Lydia also questions whether the concept has any useful meaning -- or, in fact, any precisely definable meaning at all. This may seem silly if you just read my description of what she says. It's not silly if you read her book (though unfortunately the first part of it, where she critically examines the concept itself, is tough reading. She's a philosopher by trade, and is writing here for other philosophers.
But, you know, there's a simpler way to put this, Lindsay. You say that people in rock started confusing the issue when they made records that had some of the traits of high art. ("Lovely Rita" is the least of it. That's like a simple tune compared to other things.)
But why look at it that way at all? Why not just say that some rock musicians started making art? Why force them to stay in the cartoon category?
Or, even more simply -- is it really true to say that high art is like painting, and popular art is like cartoons? Does that accurately describe what's actually going on these days? Here the key book to read is Stephen Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You," a very strong argument that popular culture has gotten a lot smarter than it used to be. I've never seen Johnson's view refuted. I've never seen anyone even try. Yes, I've seen people make assertions -- but Johnson talks about popular culture in lots of detail, which its critics almost never do.

Greg, the book "Everything Bad is Good for You" is very apologetic. It omits negative traits about popular culture that are negative and only focuses on the positive. His book is akin to talking about the "positive traits of drinking alcohol", but forgetting to say that it's only in the form of red wine and only in the amount of 1-2 glasses per day. Additionally, most of the traits that he attributes to being positive are only slightly positive - watching "infotainment" television won't give one the same amount of information that one gets from reading a history book, thus one's time could be better spent. Here are some reviews that address Johnson's book.

Alfred, have you read this book yourself? The Amazon reviews are just brimming with hostility to it. In general, they misunderstand and misstate Johnson's points. The reviewers seem so hostile to popular culture that they can't tolerate -- or even understand -- a book that defends some of it.

The most famous part of Johnson's book (the part that was previewed as an article in The New York Times Magazine) is about the increasing complexity of TV shows. He charts this very dispassionately, with graphs that show the number of subplots in shows in the '70s, and the number of subplots in shows today. The best shows now are much more complex, much harder to follow. I've never seen anyone even try to refute this.

Stephen Johnson's alleged crime, if I understand you and these reviews, is that he likes popular culture more than you do. So how can you blame him for not criticizing it the way you do? He disagrees with you. I can throw your wine analogy back at you. If someone wrote a book on the healthy effects of alcohol (for which there's plenty of scientific evidence), would you expect them to include an entire chapter on the evils of drunkenness, and another one on the horrors of drunk driving? These things are already well known. They hardly need restating in a book that's about something else. Maybe if the author never even hinted that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you -- well, maybe then we could say his own attitude was bad. But what kind of crazy political correctness would it be to insist that he denounce drinking just because some people are afraid of it?

Okay, let's explore this a bit. Let me offer myself as an example. I'm a semipro rock musician with some classical background who owns a digital studio. I'm also engraver and musical amanuensis to an Austin-based post-Romantic composer of orchestral, choral, and piano concert music.

Right now I've almost finished recording a song called "The Ballad of Ricky Williams," about the nonconformist running back. In a few days, when I'm finished recording, I'll post this as a free download. (So much for the profit motive.) The lyrics are already posted here.

My goal in "Ricky Williams" is much the same as in my political cartoon referenced in the last post: I want to make a comic-ironic statement about a famous figure because I've come up with a take that I think is original, entertaining, and funny. The subject matter demanded a reggae treatment (with a hip-hop vocal bridge in the middle). In recording the song, I realized that it would be funniest if I made the music a close parody of classic reggae. (What prompted my post yesterday was that I realized, in editing my recording, that I was erasing individual percussion notes in an analogous way to the way I had erased lines from my cartoon the day before, and for the same reason: not to distract from the main point.)

Though I think I've come up with original (as in not plagiarized) chords and melody for the song, they are not original in the sense of taking reggae to some new dimension. That would ruin the whole purpose. I want people to recognize the Bob Marley allusion and connect it with Ricky's dreads and pot use.

My client just completed a piano suite whose movements allude vaguely to a program based on the idea of flight; it's dedicated to her son, a pilot. Now imagine the roles are reversed: I try to write a serious suite about flight using my rock chops, instruments, and studio, and she tries to write a novelty song about Ricky Williams.

Even addressing a "serious" subject, I'm still going to try to minimize the forces used in order to avoid pretension. As for using orchestral forces in the service of a comical pop-culture reference, I doubt it could be done effectively. Reggae, for example, used in an orchestral setting, would be a radical treatment of reggae and the audience probably wouldn't get the joke, which involves using the musical ideas of Marley and his compatriots, common folk who wrote radical lyrics about anti-colonial struggle and sprituality, in ironic contrast to a dreadlocked, overpaid celebrity who falls short as nonconformist hero because of his vanity and self-centeredness.

Several years ago, the National Symphony (I think) put on a PBS performance of black spirituals. It was all so feelgood liberal that few would dare to admit that the use of a symphony orchestra on such simple material ruined the songs because the forces were wasted; there was much unison writing but not enough harmony and counterpoint to justify the massive band. I was bored senseless.

Sure, Copland borrowed old folk tunes for "Hoedown," but the brilliance of that piece is the cunning, Bach-like modulation and the way irregular strophes are used to add sufficient complexity to the fiddle tunes to make it worth having a whole orchestra play them.

You're right, Greg, that the distinction between "classical" and "rock" is hopelessly muddled today. But for me this results from a misuse of the label "classical." I played a collection of such "new music" to a couple of rock fans unacquainted with the label or concept. Judging it against the popular music they knew, they didn't see it as a different genre, but they did see it as amateurish, weak, and pointless. It was a lot like rock, except it failed the most crucial test: it didn't rock.

The fact that the high-low distinction has been muddled in our time doesn't mean it never existed, though, does it? Consider Gilbert and Sullivan. I love their stuff but aren't their aims rather like mine in "Ricky Williams"? That is, the music serves the entertainment function and, if it happens to be fine music that's all to the good, but given a choice of comic effect vs. musical profundity they'll go for the comic effect. Whereas grand opera of the period notoriously subjugated the story and even the comprehensibility of the lyrics to the value of the music itself.

Put another way, it may be difficult and require considerable artistic skill and talent to create high camp. But camp (as critics have defined it) operates by exalting what is unworthy and rendering unimportant what should be highly valued. In my opinion, this renders camp an inferior, a "lower," approach than music that aspires to artistic seriousness. In our time, of course, a work of art can succeed as camp and serious simultaneously, but that's a recent development. Even then the audience gets it that the work is ironically operating on two levels; they don't really just accept it as a thing in itself divorced from all reference. (They understand it works on two levels; if it didn't reference either level, if there wasn't a knowing wink to the high-low distinction, it wouldn't work at all.) I guess I disagree that there never was any distinction. Or do you not recognize the grand opera vs. operetta division that separates Verdi from Gilbert and Sullivan? They may be equally valid, but aren't they two different things?

Wow, lots to think about here.
Your example loads the dice, I think. Your example is, basically, a cartoon. I don't mean that as a putdown. I'm just reacting to your description of it. Your piece (if I understand you) is quite properly a cartoon.
But that's hardly the only way to use pop music. Look at Springsteen's song "I Wanna Marry You," from "The River." It's a sweet vignette about a guy who often sees a single woman with kids, realizes she has a hard life, and fantasizes about saving her from it. These are working class people, so it's entirely right that Springsteen uses the sound of top 40 pop. That's the music the people in the song would listen to, the music that shaped the kind of fantasies they have, and the way they express them. But at the same time, like a lot of good art (and a lot of serious art songs), the song gets beyond the way its characters would express themselves, and says something touching and real.
The Pet Shop Boys have --- brilliantly -- used the sound of trashy pop in very serious songs. That's one thing that makes the songs so penetrating. They exist on many levels at once. They can (though this is one of the simpler things about them) subvert a lot of modern life, while at the same time faultlessly and sympathetically evoking the whirlwind we live in. (Once, in an airport somewhere, I heard their song "Rent" playhing as instrumental muzak. Really catchy, kinda trashy -- until, with a shock, I started singing the words along to the music.)
And what about a song like Van Morrison's "Madame George"? Pure art, created in a purely rock context. No pop-song references at all, except maybe (distantly) in the sound of Morrison's voice.
I agree with you about orchestras playing spirituals, or, for that matter, Duke Ellington arrangements. It often doesn't work.
But there are plenty of recent classical pieces that use pop successfully. Many pieces by Michael Daugherty -- "Le tombeau de Liberace," "Dead Elvis," many others. Michael loves pop culture, and embodies it with real love and understanding .Also a killer piece by Todd Levin, "Blur," which is techo for orchestra. It works because Levin really knows techno, and really knows orchestral writing. People don't laugh at it. In my experience, when it was done on a Pittsburgh Symphony concert I hosted, the audience just loves it. And the more you know techno, the more you're going to like it. (Even though it's also got a 12-tone row. It's a wickedly smart piece.)
Gilbert and Sullivan? Well, poor Sullivan thought his serious music (like his opera "Ivanhoe") was much more important than his operettas. But a completely different thing from Verdi? I don't think so, and the presence of operatic parodies in the G&S pieces shows that they're not so far from opera. They come up so naturally.
And would you say that Offenbach was an entirely different thing from Verdi? Maybe because his operettas are in French, they strike us as more classical. And all this music is classical today, G&S included.
It's very hard to look at "The Gondoliers," to really look at the score, and define what makes it an entirely different animal from Verdi. Maybe the influence of British music halls on the patter songs -- maybe that's a difference. But Verdi also draws on popular music of his time. And wait -- he WAS popular music in his time. Didn't barrel organs playing his music go up and down city streets in Italy? Didn't a really big barrel organ play the entire score of his opera "Giovanna d'Arco"? Didn't highbrow German composers of his time just despise him? (Until "Aida" and the Requiem, that is.)
I think that a lot of these distinctions exist mainly in our minds.

"Besides, people in trailer parks (if we're going to stereotype them)...they listen to country, don't they?"

Be careful Greg, Jerry Lee Lewis was "white trash" ;)

Mabye this distinction is useful for snobs wanting to distance themselves from other people, or for populists wanting to distance themselves from snobs, but why are so many of the rest of us still interested in this issue of "high" and "low"?

Hi, John. The distinction still lives, in the classical music world, and probably a very few other places. Even some of my Juilliard students believe in it, even while they listen to pop music more than they listen to classical. I think this high/low alleged distinction is one of the ghosts we have to banish, before classical music can join the contemporary world.