Ragazzi sings
classical repertoire, “pop” songs and world music. Here is a fun article from
the February 5 San Francisco Classical
Voice, an online magazine for classical music lovers, considering what
constitutes “real” music or “high” art. What if it’s (gasp) entertainment?
For your amusement,
here is the URL if you want to read readers’ reactions to the article: http://www.sfcv.org/article/classical-what-if-its-gasp-entertainment
From SFCV:
It just may be time to give
up on one of the most exhausted, long-lived cliches about classical music: that
it is “high” art, uniquely deserving respect and support for its greatness.
Otherwise, we risk smothering the thing we love and missing avenues to pull it
out of its financial doldrums.
The last few years have been
difficult ones for classical music in America, if by that term you mean the
fortunes of the opera houses and symphony orchestras that usually symbolize
“classical.” Almost everywhere you look, organizations face budget battles,
cutbacks in programming, worries about the future.
As SFCV has been
continually reporting, however, renewal is arriving through the back door:
smaller, more mobile groups that are light on overhead and also generally do away
with one or more of the rituals that define so many classical concerts. A few
months ago, the readers of Greg Sandow’s blog began to weigh in on classical organizations that were
“breaking the mold” in one way or another: Choice of venue, interest in new
music and in popular and world music, and discarding old rituals of
presentation and concert etiquette were the common themes in that series of
posts. And one of the things that most impedes our getting to that place is
adherence to high art ideals.
“High” art as an idea has
gone through several definitions in the centuries of writings on aesthetics,
but the most current usage refers to art that is the most autonomous
(individual, thought-provoking). It still heavily depends on the idea of a
genius author with enormous insight, grappling with the big issues of human
existence. In presenting art of this sort, performers should efface themselves,
to let listeners focus on the greatness of the musical work.
The classical tradition is made of entertainments seasoned
occasionally with philosophy.
An immediate problem crops up
with this definition, which is that it’s too restrictive: It would probably
exclude Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, Ravel’s Bolero,Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore,various
capriccios espagnole or italienne, all
the so-called “light classics,” and much more that features dancing, slapstick,
sentiment, and moonstruck romance. The classical tradition is made of
entertainments seasoned occasionally with philosophy.
You can try to liberalize the
definition — for example, by declaring that classical music’s complexity and
craft qualify it generally as high art, while other music is too simplistic to
stimulate our brains. But this definition is significantly compromised by
modern neurological studies and in the generally observed phenomenon that quite
a lot of great classical musicians, not to mention numbers of eminent composers,
think of great “popular art” musicians as their equals. (See a related story.) If highly trained musicians don’t believe in the “complexity
divide” and, in fact, “cross over” all the time themselves, then it’s not easy
to maintain intrinsic value differences between “pop” and classical — you end
up simply comparing unlike traditions and stating a preference.
Most of us are looking for an emotional connection, a hit of
adrenaline, indulgence in fantasy, an experience that resonates with our lives.
Many works with high cultural
prestige violate the implicit and explicit rules of high art: Think of Charles
Dickens’Christmas
Carol. His little prefatory statement — “I have endeavoured in
this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or
with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it” —
emphasizes entertainment over the message that, in the text, the author
delivers with a heavy hand and much sententiousness. Dickens was exactly right:
We love this great story for itself, not for the improvement it has made in our
minds. Scrooge’s nephew says as much, arguing for the value of Christmas:
“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have
not profited, I dare say.”
In the end, the biggest
problem with “high art” is that it is irrelevant to the way most of us approach
culture. Most of us are looking for an emotional connection, a hit of
adrenaline, indulgence in fantasy, an experience that resonates with our lives
as we live them — that’s entertainment, in the wide sense of the word.
Sometimes we can get that by contemplating sublime things and the deep-set
psychology of human beings, and sometimes we can get it by cutting a rug.
When classical music
presenters think about the value of their productions, they need to proceed
from this idea of entertainment, rather than from the notion that their core
audience is made up of superior human beings who are willing to forgo
entertainment for enlightenment. Many of the musicians and executive directors
I’ve talked to already think in this fashion, asking the question where that
entertainment value is coming from, not only whether the music will be
satisfactory. And if that means that “high art” distinctions are driven out of
critical discourse, so much the better.
Michael Zwiebach is the senior editor/ content manager for SFCV. He assigns all
articles and content, manages the writing staff and does editing. A member
of SFCV from
the beginning, Michael holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of
California, Berkeley.
