Cultural Wars

Just want to save this quote from Greg Sandow from this post:

In that essay, you'll find AC's passionate belief that art created in the high-culture realm aspires to transcendence, while things created in the realm of popular culture -- however powerful or affecting they might be -- don't have that aspiration. Thus high and popular culture exist in separate aesthetic realms, with the high-culture realm ranking higher in the all-important hierarchies of life.

He's talking about A C Douglas who's long been one of my regular reads. We'll see if ACD launches one of his salvos in response. Whether or not Greg has correctly stated ACD's position, though, this distinction plays right into a conversation I've been having with Jonathan West down in the comments to this post.

When Jonathan is playing Debussy on the horn and I'm playing Dixieland on the banjo, we're both making music, but in very different ways for very different audiences, and my sense is that figuring out that distinction will help me be a better musician as well as music therapist.

As a side note, I made a comment on Greg's post complimenting him for not falling into the trap so many bloggers do of listening and talking only with those they agree with and dismissing the rest.

And In This Corner . . .

There's something of a flame war going on in the musical blogosphere. In one corner there's Greg Sandow, whom I've linked to a number of times. Championing the opposition is Heather Mac Donald in this essay. It's got people riled up. One blogger I follow regularly (and think of as normally mild mannered) allowed as how Greg is a "windbag"(!) a ways down in this multi-topic post.

I see it all as froth on top of the tidal shift in the culture of music making brought on by the advent of recorded music. There are good points to be made on both sides of the issue, which has to do with whether or not classical music is losing its audience. A lot of music specialists can talk a long time about music without ever mentioning the audience, because the music itself is what they are about. For me as a music therapist, it's how the audience is experiencing the music that's the salient point. So I find this discussion very interesting because of all the talk and conjecture about the audience. It's also interesting that the discussion has tinges of what's usually associated with discussions about politics and religion.

Pliable over at On An Overgrown Path touches on this subject from time to time as well. In this post he quotes composer Jonathan Harvey:

'Young people don't like concert halls... and wouldn't normally go to one except for amplified music. There is a big divide between amplified and non-amplified music... The future must bring things which are considered blasphemous like amplifying classical music in an atmosphere where people can come and go and even talk perhaps.. and certainly leave in the middle of a movement if they feel like it. Nobody should be deprived of classical music, least of all by silly conventions.'

Networking Chamber Music

The folks at Sequnza21/ - The Contemporary Classical Music Community have just started up a site to facilitate and encourage the playing of chamber music. Here is the post announcing the site and explaining it a bit, and here's a link to the site itself. 

This is a terrific idea, and I've joined up to see how they go about it and what the response will be. These are all very high level folks involved in this, but it would seem that there's something like this that might be done to help amateur players better connect with each other to make music, and to hear others doing the same thing.

To my mind, this is a great approach to dealing with the issues Greg Sandow talks about.

Greg Sandow

Instead of posting here, I've been following the "audience" discussion on Greg Sandow's blog and writing in to him on his contact page. Click that link and scroll to the bottom to see that brief exchange. 

There seems to be some tendency on the part of music professionals to see the "audience" as an amorphous group needed mostly to keep them in a job. I think any performer can tell you a story of other performers dismissing the knowledge or taste of an audience (and other musicians!). The term may have gone out of style now, but a few decades ago some music was called schmaltzy, and anyone who liked it was some kind of rube. Then there's the whole épater le bourgeoisie thing that still has its adherents. 

It seems to me the answer is not one kind of music, but offering lots of different kinds of music and styles of performance to appeal to the various audiences out there not being served. If this whole topic is of interest to you, click on the Sandow link over on the blog list to follow the ongoing discussion.