Pulitzer follies

Greg, I agree completely with your beefs about the New Pulitzer (cf. New Coke). For the record, though, those solicitations aren't pegged to the new guidelines. They've been mailing those out for years; they must've just added you to the list.

Maybe they added me after I slagged them at some public function. Or am I giving both them and me too much credit?

Another problem in artistic competitions that involve both "popular" and "classical" music (besides the obvious ones about competition not being good for art) is in the very different distribution systems for the different kinds of music.

We can make a credible judgment of the best popular music of a given year by the end of that year, whereas we can't even make a credible list of the new concert music of a given year by that year's end.

Good point, Steve. It's something I've said a lot. Ask serious classical music listeners or even classical music professionals what the five best new works of the past year were, and nobody could do it, except maybe artistic administrators of orchestras, or people who work for music publishers. This stuff just doesn't circulate; even news reports about it might not; and there usually aren't recordings.

But I wouldn't minimize the extent to which this can also happen in pop. There's a lot of fragmentation in pop, a lot of the currently fashionable "long tail effect," a lot of people in alternative rock circles who make a fetish of obscure music. So you'll find a lot of albums without all that much buzz, and people even so saying that they're among the best of the year. But this is a footnote. Certainly you'd get agreement on a lot of releases (just look at the annual Pazz and Jop poll at the Village Voice).

The Pulitzers do avoid this. In theory, at least, the prize is given for a nominated work, meaning for the work itself, as the judges assess it from submitted materials, and not for the composer's reputation or the work's success. We all know that this is a theory that doesn't always work out in practice, but still, sometimes it does work as advertised. Certainly when Lewis Spratlan and Paul Moravec won the Pulitzer, that was because the judges liked the nominated pieces. Neither composer yet had (and I don't mean this with any disrespect; it's certainly no comment on their ability) a Pulitzer-sized reputation.

Well, now you completely lost me, Greg. If you don't feel classical music deserves some kind of protected status, then why on earth are you worried about "the future of classical music"? What muddle-headed thinking! Jeez.

I have a large collection of jazz and an appreciation for (though I don't collect) alternative rock, as my son's in a band, so I have no beef with other musical formats getting recognition. But the Pulitzers have always been about classical music, and to make them co-equal with the other forms of music for the prize doesn't diminish the prize in any way, but it certainly changes it. For one thing, why not just let the marketplace decide what's good, through pure popularity metrics? Isn't awarding Green Day's "American Idiot" redundant? It already won the prize of lots of sales.

First, you say you'd rather watch a movie than go to most classical music concerts, and then you tout this dopey stuff.

Honestly, I'd hate to depend on you and this blog to solve the attendance problems at classical music concerts. You don't even seem to favor any kind of special treatment or segregation of classical music. So what's the point?

Oh, and you really pissed me off with your gratuitous swipe on Haydn's operas (in the Hartke article). It's obvious you don't know jack about 'em.

But I guess if I asked you to stick to talking about things that you know about, there wouldn't be this blog, would there?

Bye-bye.

Really? Bob Dylan? Even after all of the albums that have been released this year

Thanks for the Wikipedia link. After I jumped from it to the entry for the Dylan album, I found this, from my long-ago editor at the Village Voice, Bob Christgau:

"Modern Times," he says, radiates "the observant calm of old masters who have seen enough life to be ready for anything."
That's exactly why I like it. Plus no end of musical subtleties, which take more than one or two hearings to understand.

The chief idiocy of the system is that you have to pay $50 or $75 or some such sum to submit a nomination (I've stopped looking, and just throw away the envelope unopened). If they got rid of the fee, they'd get a wider swath of nominations, and the competition would get more interesting.

Hi,, Alex, and what a good point. I imagine they want to weed out applications they might think are frivolous or unsuitable .But they could just as well do that with a prescreening panel.

At least they've done us one service. We now know what a presumption of seriousness costs.

I think Groucho Marx had it right when he said that he would never want to join an organization that would have him as a member. When looking at past winners, I have but one question/remark: "Leo Sowerby?" And he won it before Ives did!

Awards shows often get it wrong. If we think of the Pulitzer prizes as a highbrow awards show, we'll be less disappointed.

In the 1960s many musicians began to entertain the idea that pop music could be art. One of the grandest, and most artistically successful manifestations of this impulse was finally brought forth a couple years ago: Brian Wilson's [b]Smile[/b]. I can imagine the Pulitzer people had this work specifically in mind when they made the proposed rule changes. Certainly it deserves some kind of prize, Pulitzer or not.

If I thought that extending the Pulitzer eligibility to rock albums would encourage the creation of more works of the same kind and quality, I would heartily endorse the idea. But [b]Smile[/b] was the product of a unique time and set of circumstances that a mere prize is not going to be able to bring back. As has been said elsewhere in this discussion, pop music has financial success as its prize.

Greg, you yourself, in your reply to Steve Hicken, have articulated many of the reasons I believe that the opening up of Pulitzer eligibility is going to be a futile exercise. Ultimately it will only increase by many orders of magnitude the number of political balance issues (do we give it this year to a grand old man or to a newcomer? to a tonal work or an atonal one?...) which already exist.

"Pop music has financial success as its prize." All of it? All of it equally?

Actually, I think it ranges all over the map. Some of it is made dishonestly to make money, some of it is made honestly -- meaning that the people involved really love the music they make -- and makes a lot of money. Some of it contents itself with making less money. What do you think Neil Young's financial calculations are? Or Robyn Hitchcock's? Or my favorite pop musician last month, Clark, an electronica guy on the Warp label, who sells no more than 5000 copies of each album he makes?

Pop is a huge, complex world. I don't think it can be reduced to simple generalizations.

And financial success isn't a prize in classical music? The leading conductors, for instance, get paid millions of dollars each year. Not much, maybe, compared to the top pop stars, but I bet Robyn Hitchcock would take it.

I do agree that it would be hard for the Pulitzer prizes to judge music fairly. The political judgments, just as you say, would be overwhelming. And yet...if they wanted to do it, they'd do it. And we'd all squeal with annoyance when they announced their choices, just as we do at every other awards show. But they really could do it, if they really wanted to.