In my February column I wrote some words on the idea of classical music which
seem to have disturbed a few readers who thought that I was forecasting the
doom of all such music.
Far from it! I meant the category, "classical," on which so much of the recording industry has so long been based, even unto its corporate setup. Also "popular," which complements classical. I didn't mean the music itself.
The very idea of a special, separate body of "highbrow" music, much of it from earlier times, all of it intended somehow for the music connoisseur, is paradoxically quite new--newer by far, indeed, than most of the music which it includes. This "classical" idea began to flourish around the turn of our century. Now it is beginning to fade away again.
Of course, there was "highbrow" music before, and popular music, too.
But in the first place, as I said in February, it was largely contemporary (as we would now say), composed and produced by living composers. And, second, there wasn't any special name for the highbrow end of it, beyond the useful descriptives--concert music, chamber music, church music, and so on. The same with music for lower brows. All music was popular in some sense, otherwise it would not have been played at all. The Viennese waltz was enormously popular in its time. Now, of course, it is classical.
Classical is going out for two pleasant reasons, both positive. It started on a very limited basis, mostly opera excerpts on the early 78-rpm discs. Now it has grown so enormously that its coverage is getting out of hand. A million kinds of classical! Moreover, we are all becoming, to an extent, connoisseurs. As classical has grown in variety and in sheer volume, so have we also grown. I wouldn't say that the average listener is any musical genius quite yet. Most of us prefer our music in the background-or the very loud foreground. Nevertheless, we understand and enjoy far more kinds of music than our grandfathers ever could, simply because we hear so many.
Classical music, then, is blending into other categories, crossbreeding with pop, spreading into a thousand new corners. So are we as listeners.
It's like book publishing in the paperback and book club age-but do we ever hear of , classical and popular books? Publishing, which is a lot older than recorded music, dispenses with all such terminology, except perhaps in those hefty sets of "great classics" which get bought but are seldom read.
Instead, we have best-sellers in all areas, from fancy fiction and nonfiction to the hardest core, without any oversimplified big categories. Books range from ,highbrow to bottom-brow and, seamlessly, all the way between. So, in plain fact, does our music. Why bother, then, with classical and popular? Mainly, I think, because we always have.
That is, since around 90 years ago, when records began to sell.
The biggest point I made in February was that the idea of classical music belongs basically to us, who are involved in recording and sound reproduction, not to the much older "live" music business. The idea of classical music began with those early operatic discs and has determined the very shape of the entire recording industry, along with those later offshoots radio, hi-fi, and even, to some extent, television. Before we began, there was no such thing as classical, though "live" music was everywhere.
Ask a friend in 1880 whether he liked classical music, and you might have heard a very odd answer, "Oh, yes, I do like Viennese music, Haydn and Beethoven." Composers of the "classic period," as we now say, would then have been called "classical." Moreover, the friend might continue, "But I really can't abide these dreadful new operas by Wagner, and that Russian man, Tchaikovsky! All hideous noise, without any sort of taste or harmony." If you had similarly asked do you like popular music?, the answer could have been a puzzled one, "Well, of course, I would not listen to any unpopular music if I had my way. But I do find the Philharmonic concerts delightful whenever I attend, and they are very popular." Getting nowhere rapidly, as you see.
We can be rather specifically technical about the beginning of classical music. It was based on the all-out, patent pooling of rival disc systems, around 1901, when the recording industry ground itself to a halt due to rival lawsuits for assorted infringements. The patent pool is still a great way out of a commercial impasse if each contestant owns some useful, protected technology that the others need. The modern disc (and for a long time the cylinder) began our industry with that memorable patent pool, after which there was only one type of phonograph record (not counting Edison's vertical-cut discs and, of course, the cylinder) with features that were accessible to all manufacturers.
Within a couple of years, the first great wave of celebrity opera recordings appeared, soon making use of the elegant and expensive 12-inch discs at very fancy prices. (Some single-sided records, playing four-plus minutes, cost as much as $7.00 at the time, which is a sum scarcely imaginable in terms of the present dollar.) So "classical music" was born, on records. It was for a time more likely to be called "Great Music" or "Immortal Art" or, more directly, "Great Artists," but the idea was there. Even I can remember the awe with which those precious records were received by the discriminating public. Somehow, their very fragility, their very short playing time, added to their value. The many collectors of these old discs still share in that feeling today.
It wasn't just the "discriminating" public, either. Opera singers were far bigger stars, back then, rather like pop stars today. We still have dishes named for them-Clams Caruso, Peach Melba. And the first million-selling artist was Caruso.
Strange that, for purely technical reasons, "classical music" was at first pretty much limited to opera excerpts.
You couldn't record anything else! And it's odd, too, that much of the opera music at that time was actually contemporary, or not far from it. Puccini was in full flower; Verdi and many others were recent composers by a few decades or so.
And then, still on acoustic records, came the first tentative string quartets, brief excerpts from symphonies, bits of ballet music, items from the famous concert tone poems. The Boston Symphony (reduced) recorded in 1917. My very first classical record experience was that not-so-highbrow piece, Scheherazade, about the young prince and princess. So classical music began to grow a bit, defying the medium, anticipating what was to come with electrical recording.
I might say, at this point, you know the rest. But do you? I have previously described the astonishing explosion of "classical" electric recording, which began as soon as the new possibilities of the microphone were realized and ran right on straight through the Great Depression. This was the great period of classical music, its time of real impact. It was at that time that I began to collect records and I know all about the feeling. I spent hours in cramped, airless record-store cubbyholes where you could actually play all the records you wanted, if you could stand the sonic competition from other, unsound proofed booths next to you, and if you survived the total lack of ventilation. In my later years I have come to understand that these difficulties were not accidental. Some people just wouldn't quit unless they were about to faint from lack of oxygen.
When WW II broke out, classical music on records, being suddenly restricted, became even more precious.
Somehow, it came to represent civilization itself, so dreadfully imperiled. People hauled ancient phonographs or gramophones into fox holes, down air raid shelters, into clandestine retreats along with the forbidden record player or radio. (See Hans Fantel's "A Christmas Gift of Music, Long Ago," Audio, Dec. 1981.) By the war's end there was an immense emotional backlog of need which had to be satisfied when the lights went on again. It took several years, worldwide, just to replenish the stocks of prewar recordings on the same old electrical-shellac 78s. Thus, the first great expansion of classical music spread onward right into the late 1940s. And then-we ran straight into a new world, combining tape recording and the new LP record. And FM radio broadcast.
Who can forget that heady, early decade of the LP, when the classical repertory was expanded a hundredfold to cover enormous quantities of music not previously available--and, for that matter, seldom heard in any "live" concert hall? This was the second great boom in classical music. The sound was still pretty poor on most LP records, and the incidental noise was mostly dreadful--not much better than the worst of the old 78s. But prices were low, unbelievably low for the new long-playing time, a thing we had never heard before except via radio broadcast. And then came stereo--which turned out to be a multi-pronged stimulus, not only to rerecord most of the music on mono LP but to improve the whole reproduction chain in the process of adapting to the new-type stereo groove.
That was a splendid decade for classical music, the '60s! But we did not really get back into stride in terms of audio quality until the 1970s. And so-on to the audiophile disc, Direct to-Disc, digital and so on. The expansion of classical repertory goes on today but the audiophile recording hasn't done much for it. Stick to the tried and true. Necessarily, the impetus towards more repertory is slowing down--we have such immense, unthinkable quantities already. And so classical falters. And loses meaning. It's happening everywhere.
Why do I now hear Mozart, or more often, fake Mozart, out of every loudspeaker, be it in the supermarket, bank, or on the radio? Because Mozart is "in" and the sound of Mozart is pop, not classical. Same with Vivaldi. Also Bach. The "beautiful music" services abound with pseudo-classical "Romantic" music, concertos, symphonies, all copied from the real thing. Is this classical? Not remotely so! See definition, beginning of this column. Music by all sorts of classical composers (as we call them) is now heard in varying degrees of, shall I say, pop-ness, from highbrow straight down to no-brow.
Okay, and I don't mind. It's an inevitable step forward towards a wider musical viewpoint for all of us. And just as well. The classical idea, born with recordings, has served its time and is on the way to retirement.
No end to this heady process. We find Professors of Jazz in many music schools and conservatories; there are academic courses in Third Stream music, midway between the old pop and classical categories. Hard-core porn movies have Beethoven sonatas on their soundtracks (I heard one), Kurt Weill's most recently recorded work is a very serious and dissonant choral piece, George Gershwin takes up a column and a half of small type in the Schwann Record & Tape Guide classical section, right next to Gilbert & Sullivan. Classical music, you understand, is simply diffusing itself out and away in all directions. A good thing, I'm sure, and about time.
Symbolic P.S.: Recently, Schwann's computer erased the entire works of Mozart from the classical section, all by itself. Mozart had to be reconstructed by hand. That's typical.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Nov. 1984; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
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