February 2008 Archives

Here's something lovely and true about popular culture, from A. O Scott's New York Times review of a new movie, Be Kind Rewind. In this film, a video store loses its stock, and - so they'll have something for their customers to rent - the staff of the store remakes classic movies, in their own homemade way. Which leads Scott to write:

Commercial pop culture is, too often, understood as a top-down enterprise, its expensive, disposable products passively consumed by the public.

And yet at the same time that stuff is capable of inspiring a deep and durable sense of ownership. The movies we love belong in some profound way to us, and part of us lives inside them. Sweding [the term the video store staff make up, to describe what they do] is Mr. Gondry's way of making that rather abstract sense of connection literal, of suggesting that even if we are not strictly speaking the owners and authors of the movies we like, well, then, perhaps we should be.

It goes without saying that this is a naïve, utopian point of view. The travestied films in "Be Kind Rewind" are the intellectual property of large corporations (as is Mr. Gondry's movie), and you can be sure that teams of lawyers were consulted and paid before the Sweding went very far. But "Be Kind" hardly pretends otherwise. Instead it treats movies as found objects, as material to be messed around with, explored and reimagined. It connects the do-it-yourself aesthetic of YouTube and other digital diversions with the older, predigital impulse to put on a show in the backyard or play your favorite band's hits with your buddies in the garage.

And the deep charm of Mr. Gondry's film is that it allows the audience to experience it with the same kind of casual fondness. It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact "Ghostbusters" in your neighbor's kitchen. It's inviting, undemanding and altogether wonderful. You'll want to see it again, or at least Swede it yourself.

And the moral, for this blog, of these lovely Scottish thoughts? They were printed in the New York Times. They're not revolutionary. This is what people read about popular culture, out in the real world. This is how they think about popular culture. How can we - we in classical music - go out to them, and tell them that they're wrong?

(I'm sorry if some people are bothered when I talk, in this context, about the "real world." Classical music lives in a bubble, and we'd better come to terms with that.)

I said I'd talk about a Dana Gioa speech in this post, but instead I'm going to spend some time (in this post and the next) with other things that classical music people - and arts advocates - wrongly say about pop culture. Maybe some of this might seem a little bit arcane, but remember: These are the ways that the high-church crowd keeps popular culture at bay, or tries to. So all their arguments have sharp (though hapless) teeth.

Some years ago, a very fine classical music critic with a major newspaper told me that pop musicians "take no care with what they do." I think those were his exact words: a trifle odd, somewhat stuffy, mildly awkward.

I said, "But if you read the pop music writing in your own newspaper, you'd see how wrong you are."

To which he answered, just a little sheepishly: "The pop critics at the paper say that, too."

Which continues the discussion I began in my last post. Too often, hardcore classical music people don't understand popular culture, and believe silly things about it. This hardcore purist got caught. Don't let it happen to you!

The silly thing this critic believed was that pop music is sloppy and careless, that nobody involved with it cares about quality or fine details. What other silly things - about pop culture, and, in this post, specifically about pop music - have people said?

***

Here's a good one, from Julian Johnson's book Who Needs Classical Music?

Our collective fascination with the imagery of youth and youthfulness effectively dissolves any boundaries between the cultural diets of children, adolescents, and adults. Seven year-old children and thirty-seven year-old adults are equally fascinated, it seems, by a musical culture defined almost exclusively [my emphasis] by the images of singers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven.

Tell that to Bruce Springsteen, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and countless others, who sell records, attract large crowds, and get widespread media coverage, none of which Julian Johnson apparently notices. (Well, OK, he's British, so maybe we'd have to rejigger some of my list.) Johnson might as well saying that the sky is green. He's a respectable academic, a lecturer in music at Oxford . His book is published by Oxford University Press. He argues that classical music has, in the end, a transcendent ethical value. And yet he says things about pop music that are irresponsible, by any ethical or academic standard, things that aren't even remotely true.

Or how about this? Someone I know, an accomplished classical musician, told me that pop music is simple-minded. I gave him counter-examples. Fine, he said, but there's something even worse -- all pop is immoral. He never listens to pop music, and doesn't know anything about it, so basically he's making all of this up. He can't even cite examples in defense of his views.

Someone else I know, a violinist retired from a major orchestra, told me he thought that all pop music had just two moods - a lively mood, and a quiet mood. At least he put this almost as a question - maybe, he seemed to imply, he was wrong. I honor him for that, but still he believed in what he said, and maybe didn't quite realize that he sounded like an American going to China, and saying, "All Chinese look alike."

Twice, serious classical musicians, both young, told me that pop music is so simple that all you hear are tonic and dominant chords. This can't be true, since a lot of pop music (like most of the songs Tom Petty sang at the Super Bowl) is modal, so it doesn't have tonic or dominant chords. And some pop music (Joni Mitchell, anyone?) really does have complex harmony. But the big mistake here is to equate language with thought, to assume that serious thought requires complex language. This proceeds, of course, from the fetish the classical music world has for analytical detail in classical music, as if fancy harmony proved that classical music is complex, and therefore superior.

Pop music works in a different way, dancing its meaning with rhythmic inflections far more nuanced than anything classical musicians know how to play or to analyze, and with endless varieties of pure, sheer sound. It communicates, in other words, with body language just as much as with logic, something which - getting fancy here - upsets the mind/body hierarchy that disfigured western thought for millennia, and which orthodox classical music analysis still blindly reflects. (On the mind/body hierarchy, and how jazz and pop unhorse it, see a terrific essay by Michael Ventura, "Hear the Long Snake Moan," in his book Shadow Dancing in the USA. Some striking praise for this book is here.)

And finally, there's this. Pop music is commercial, created only to make money, then rammed down our throats - and for proof of that, we all should read Theodor Adorno's famous thoughts about the culture industry. Famously wrong thoughts, I might add, quite discredited by now. Yes, there really is a culture industry, and yes, it does work in some of the ways Adorno described (which is one of the many reasons he was such an important pioneer in cultural theory). But there's lots about popular culture that he didn't understand, for instance that popular culture is also spontaneous, and that - starting in the '60s, but also before - it generated its own critique of corporate control. (Well, he died in 1969, so maybe he couldn't have seen that, but he clearly didn't understand that decade. He was, in the end, a good bourgeois, and when German students started demonstrating against him and his ideas - and especially when women bared their breasts at him - he was greatly disturbed.)

Adorno, let's not forget, is the guy who said jazz musicians don't really improvise. He didn't know much about any culture that wasn't high culture. He certainly didn't understand that, with the birth of rock & roll, new trends in pop music started with ordinary people, evolving spontaneously, from the bottom up, and that the culture industry either resisted these trends, didn't understand them, or jumped on the bandwagon only after the trends had proved themselves. And yes, Adorno couldn't have seen all that (since, again, he died in 1969). But this only shows once more that his theories were forged many decades ago, so it's tricky to cite them in defense of anything you might want to believe right now.

(I also find the appeal to authority quite curious. We should believe something just because Adorno said it was true? Then what about his classical music theories? For instance that Schoenberg is the model composer for our time, because the dissonance in his music is a form of frozen pain, and that pain is the only correct response to the world as it is now. See Adorno's famous book, The Philosophy of Modern Music. An appeal to authority doesn't really work if you're going to cherry-pick, accepting some Adorno theories while ignoring others that have just as much to say about things you greatly care about.)

Next: curious views of popular culture, apart from pop music.

I want to write about something serious, something which - I think - is one of the most serious problems facing mainstream classical music today.

And it's this. Classical music organizations are eagerly doing outreach and education, trying to rebuild the audience and cultural clout that they used to have. These efforts are passionate, intense, and deeply committed. The people engaged in them love classical music with all their hearts, and believe - again with all their hearts - that other people can love it, too.

But there's one step they don't take. They don't ask what the world outside is like. They don't ask about the people they're trying to reach. Who are these people? What culture - what tastes, interests, commitments, longings - do they already have?

This doesn't make sense. It's like launching a marketing campaign in France, and forgetting to notice that the people who live there speak French. No large commercial company would make that mistake. Big commercial concerns do marketing research, trying to define the markets for their products, so they won't launch campaigns that are doomed to fail. Which of course doesn't mean they're successful all the time. But classical music institutions, from what I've seen, don't do much to guarantee any success at all. (See an addendum at the end of this post for my comments on the research they do sometimes manage.)

What they miss - in my view - is gigantic. They don't understand that our culture has changed, and that classical music (as it's presented in the classical music mainstream) can't have the same meaning, or the same appeal, that it used to have.

In particular, the people engaged in all this outreach miss some fundamental truths. Or, at least, truths that no one who wants work with cultural problems in today's world can afford to ignore:

Meaning in our world today is largely expressed through popular culture.

Popular culture is no longer shallow, brainless, or trivial. Some of it is, but much of it isn't. In particular, popular culture long ago evolved its own form of art, its own forms of expression - movies, music, TV shows, much more - that ask probing questions in a serious, artistic way.

Smart people involved with popular culture have a highly nuanced, often dark (or at least partly dark) view of the world. They thrive on complexity, and fine, textured detail. In fact, they demand these things.

(Just look at three of the nominees for best movie, in this year's academy awards: Juno, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. And here's a brief story, which I've told many times in conversation and public appearances. Years ago, when I'd defected from classical music and worked as a pop music critic, and later as music editor for Entertainment Weekly, I had a girlfriend with no high art background. But she'd often say she wanted to hear classical music. One morning, while we ate breakfast, I put on some Handel. She listened for a while, and then said, "Why isn't classical music more noir?" Referring, of course, to film noir, the complex, dark, and morally ambiguous crime films of the 1940s and '50s, whose aesthetic now lies near the heart of our culture, though you won't find much of it in the classical music world. Some of it, though, did slip into classical music, and so in response to my girlfriend, I put on the suite from Berg's opera Lulu. "You mean noir like this?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Like that. Why doesn't more classical music sound like that?")

In popular culture, people make art for themselves. They play in bands, make films, design clothes, write fiction, make mashups of other peoples' art, and much, much more. They take that for granted. They want to participate in culture, to make culture themselves, not just absorb it passively.

Smart people in popular culture are culturally curious. They want to find things they haven't known before. They'll try almost anything, and, very often, if something's not popular, if it's a niche taste that few people have, that's a plus. (See, for instance, the vogue for curling after the last Winter Olympics, and the comment of a new curling fan, interviewed by the New York Times: "This is so cool. Plus it's a very obscure thing to say you do."

There's more, but that's a good start. Most of the lovely people involved in classical music outreach - and I really mean "lovely," as a compliment to them - don't seem to know the things I've just outlined, or at least they don't talk about them, and don't seem to bring them into their work.

Which leads - again in my view - to mistakes. The first mistake is to put down popular culture, not necessarily by mounting any overt attack, but by making casual remarks: "People today have short attention spans." "We live in a culture of instant gratification." "Our culture doesn't encourage curiosity, or thoughtful reflection." Classical music, of course, is offered as an alternative, or, even more strongly, as an antidote. We need classical music (or so the message goes), because it requires serious listening, and serious study, and because it encourages thinking, curiosity, and inward reflection.

But then what happens when you talk that way to the kind of people I've just described? They'll think you're crazy. Or - which in a way is even worse - they'll readily agree, thinking that you're down (just as they are!) on people who listen to pop music crap, or go to see the kind of empty blockbusters that play in the multiplexes near my country house. Imagine how they'll feel when they find out you mean them, that their taste for Bjork or Grizzly Bear somehow proves that they don't know how to think, that they can't pay attention to anything for very long, that all they care about is instant gratification.

Though there's a more nuanced way to make the point. You could say, more expansively, that these people, these people whose home base is popular culture, do have intelligent taste - and that this means they're ready for classical music! Which, in a way, is true. They like intelligent music of all kinds, so why not classical?

But there can be problems.

Problem one: You keep telling them, or at least implying, that classical music is better than other kinds of music, so if they follow your lead, they're upgrading. They might not think that.

Problem two: When you talk about classical music (and I'm sorry for this), you don't sound smart enough. This is an endemic classical music problem, and it seems like a paradox. Classical music is supposed to be artistic and brainy, but discussion of it - except by scholars - is often less intelligent than the best (and, again, non-scholarly) discussion of pop. Read any good rock critic to see what I mean, for instance just about any book in the 33 1/3 series.

So (continuing with problem two) I've heard an irresistible man in the opera education biz, one of the most delightful public speakers I've ever heard, introduce a short concert of opera excerpts, sung by singers in his company's young artist program. One of those excerpts was "O mio babbino caro," not exactly a profound piece. The irresistible man unfortunately made himself resistible, by carrying on about the aria as if what it's about - a girl doing a number on her father, playing dumb but stubborn, to get permission to marry the guy she loves - was endlessly charming and remarkable. As if, maybe, it was something out of Noel Coward.

But it wasn't. It's just a simpleminded Puccini aria. (Nothing against Puccini, whom I love, but he's not exactly profound.) And if the now all too resistible gentleman was talking to people whose home turf in culture is something like The Sopranos, he'd lose them. He'd lose them, in fact, after two or three sentences. They're used to art that's more complex and layered. If he introduced Puccini as something adorable, like an adorable old movie (something, maybe, like Grand Hotel) - and, most important, if the singers sang it that way, with as much style and class as those old movie actors had (which, no coincidence, is more or less the class and style that graced opera singers of past generations) - then he could have made his case.

But I'm not sure he sees the distinction. Like many good people in classical music, he thinks that classical music - of course including his opera excerpts - is just wonderful, and that its artistic status lies beyond question. So the unfortunate fact that, as people in today's culture would see it, he's presenting classical music as middlebrow entertainment, something not too far above Celine Dion in Las Vegas (but a lot less showy), doesn't occur to him.

It's such a shame. And, to go back to where I started, it's a real problem. How can we bring smart new people to classical music, if we present it in a way that's far beneath their culture and intellect?

Next: This problem isn't limited to classical music. It infects more general discussions of the arts, and especially shows itself in otherwise eloquent calls for arts support. So in my next post, I'll take apart a much-circulated speech by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to show why his mistaken assumptions about popular culture lead him down a dangerous path.

,***

Footnote: Some smart classical music marketers in fact do market research. And there have been studies, quite beyond any immediate marketing need, of why people do or don't go to classical performances. But the studies ask the wrong questions, I think. They focus too much on specifics. One common thread in the backgrounds of people who go to classical concerts is that many of them studied a classical instrument. (Whether there's a cause and effect relationship is of course a more complex story.) Or people who don't go think ticket prices are too high, or can't get childcare. Missing in much of this, maybe most of it, are larger cultural questions, the cultural profile, so to speak, of people who go to classical performances, and people who don't go. What cultural assumptions do both groups make? What are they looking for when they choose their art and entertainment? What would a concert of Mozart and Brahms mean to someone whose normal culture is films like Sweeney Todd and No Country for Old Men?

This is a big subject. We've discussed it here before. (Here, for instance.) I myself don't like the "vs" part, since I enjoy pop and classical music more or less equally, with no thought of pitting one against the other.

But I can see that many people don't think that way. In a recent discussion in my Juilliard class on the future of classical music, some of the students defined the value of classical music by saying that it was spiritual, or that it had a great range of emotion. I realized that in saying these things, they were also making statements about pop music. They were implying that pop music isn't spiritual, and doesn't have a great range of emotion, beliefs that in fact became explicit, once we started talking about what they said. Why should it be crucial that classical music can be spiritual, or can have a wide range of emotion, if pop music also does these things?

Parenthetically, I'll add that defining classical music as spiritual -- or at least saying that a spiritual component is a crucial part of it -- leads to at least one problem. What makes one classical piece different from another? If they're all spiritual, and that's what matters most, why should it matter which ones we play?

But here's another thought I had. Often, when I talk about some pop song that means a lot to me, or meant a lot to someone else, I'll be told that this is because of the words. And rock criticism -- at least in a superficial reading -- can encourage people to think this, because it normally doesn't talk about music in the purely musical ways that classical music criticism does (along, of course, with classical music theory, and musicology). It's easy to believe that the lyrics and the cultural impact of pop songs is more important than their music, and that rock critics believe this, too, whether they know it or not.

But here I cry foul. We'd never apply the same logic to classical music -- to a Schubert song, let's say. Suppose I said that Schubert's "Erlkönig" made its impact largely because of the words, because of the wonderful poem Schubert set to music. People in the classical music world -- maybe the same ones who say that pop music gets its impact mainly from the words -- would say I was crazy. "Erlkönig" is great music! That's what they'd say. If they were scholarly, they'd trot out settings of the same poem by other composers, to show how much better Schubert's setting is, and thus prove that the impact of the song comes from the music.

But then shouldn't we extend the same courtesy to pop? If the words of a pop song get to us, shouldn't that be -- using the same logic we've just used with Schubert -- because the music makes the words matter? I smell a double standard at work here. In German lieder, the music is important, because we've defined it in advance as great music. In a pop song, the music is less important than the words, because we've defined the music in advance (however covertly) as not very good. Or at least not very good compared to classical music.

Enough of that. Let's at least fight these wars on level ground.