From: lee@wang.com (Lee Story)
Subject: Re: FCC Deregulation? Re: Sorry State of Classical Radio
Organization: Wang Laboratories, Inc.
Date: 7 Apr 92 14:32:34
	<1992Mar29.132219.479@cgh.cgh.com> <salem.701935471@pangea.Stanford.EDU>
	<1992Apr6.050909.3446@cgh.cgh.com>
	<VANCE.92Apr6095204@kyoto.speech.sri.com>

In article <VANCE.92Apr6095204@kyoto.speech.sri.com> vance@speech.sri.com (Vance Maverick) writes:

   Basically, I agree with you about government support for art.  I may
   envy the level of support for elite music activity in Canada and
   Europe, but that doesn't mean I think my own government should
   undertake anything similar.  Remember the Mapplethorpe exhibit
   obscenity trial in Cincinnati?  The jury decided there was no
   obscenity, but in an interview after the trial, jurors said in effect
   "The experts told us it was Art, and they must know".  This is exactly
   how the arts should not be supported -- by beating the masses into
   intellectual submission.  (Sorry, getting off the subject here.)

This doesn't seem off-subject at all.  The counter-argument is that
if the government doesn't tell us what to appreciate, the market
will (see below).  Either way you pay to be channelled toward approved
styles.  (Personally I don't think the NEA should have a nickel!)

	  For the last thirty years or so, academic music departments
	  have been preoccupied with serialism.  This can't have helped the
	  long-term popularity of classical music in our culture.  I hope that
	  emphasis is shifting, because in the long run, the battle lies with
	  the young, and in the schools.

   This is really orthogonal to the issue you're worrying about.  The
   teachers who have the chance to instill a love of classical music in
   schoolchildren aren't coming from Ivy-league graduate programs in
   composition.

Well, the Ivy League music departments may be orthogonal to pop music,
but serial music is just as interesting as the Eagles or Pretenders or
whatever.  Why should the academics change their craft to attract a
wider audience, when there are obvious alternatives:  convince the
business interests (where "pop" originates) to promote serialism or
whatever as the new pop culture, or be content with their exclusive
little audience of cognoscenti.

Of course people listen most often to music which uses the general styles and
idioms they're familiar with.  This places a heavy damper on the rate
at which styles can change and still find an audience.  It also means
that marketeers have motivation to promote minor variants of
already-popular styles (like rock) and thus to further reinforce their
popularity.  It also means that well-meaning "classical music education"
is doomed from the start.

As to "serialism" and the never-ending debate about "classical" music:

If music is classical if and only if it is the preferred music or
academics (viewed historically), then, since academics are motivated
toward rapid change (visible innovation translating to tenure
appointments), their music will never be even fairly popular at the
time it's written.

If music is classical when it is the historically most-appreciated
music of a culture, I certainly don't see why we should call Webern's
or Boulez's works classical and Cole Porter's or Richard Rodgers's
not.  (Though it's depressing to me how the heavily-marketed rock
recordings have driven most earlier---and to me greatly
preferred---American popular music out of most record shops!)

If we dismiss the above approaches, and decide that music is classical
if it is "superior" in some identifiable way, we're in a real quandry,
because there are absolutely no objective criteria (trivial mechanical
criteria like "proper" voice-leading or other stylistic consistency
are ethnomusicological criteria but not *musical* ones) and we must
turn to the already-dismissed academics or to the equally-dismissed
approval of the audience.  To demand an "educated" audience is to beg
the question.

( Personally and presently I prefer Byrd, Haydn, Beethoven, Berg,
Weill, Rodgers, Porter, Sondheim, Tatum, Prokofiev, Bolcom, and
Flagello, and am rediscovering and old love affair with Brahms---but
any CD publisher would go broke pretty quickly if he used my tastes as
his litmus test :)
--

------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Lee Story (lee@wang.com) Wang Laboratories, Inc.
     (Boston and New Hampshire AMC, and Merrimack Valley Paddlers)
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Newsgroups: rec.music.classical,comp.music