MUSICAL ATTITUDES: FOUR TYPES
ALONG TIME ago someone-was it Marilyn Monroe?-tried to put a little system into our understanding of what music is by observing that the difference be tween popular and classical is that "classical has no vocal." Don't laugh; it is a modestly useful distinction that permits us to separate the bulk of popular music (popular song) from the bulk of classical (symphonic and other instrumental works). The tidy mind, however, mother-henning all the exceptions, rejects so gross a simplicity be cause it doesn't account for everything: jazz, for example, is a largely instrumental popular music, a lot of classical music does have a "vocal," and opera-well, just what is opera . . . a popular music written by classical composers? Where such coarse-screen generalizations really break down is in the borderline cases; for these only subjective judgments, adulterated with bile, bias, and unlovely ambition, will suffice. This suggests that it might be more useful (it is certainly more provocative) to take a step back from efforts to classify music itself, to deal instead with the fundamental issue-our subjective attitudes toward music. These attitudes, it seems to me, are of four types (making a system of categories twice as precise as Marilyn's), which can be described (from one extreme to another, and throwing in a bit of hyper bole for effect) as:
Type I: There is no music but folk-that is, popular-music. All else is the effete, epicene nattering of bourgeois elitists, a cacophony of boringly cerebral, impotently "mathematical" noises unrelated to the natural visceral outpourings of an authentic culture. Disingenuously political or piously sentimental, this position has at least one interesting flaw: whether natural outpouring or impotent cerebration, very little music is either written or performed by impudent, sneering aristocrats.
Type II: There is popular music and there is classical music, but they are drawn from different wells, they have nothing to do with each other. A tempting hypothesis, weakened perhaps by the fact that most of the evidence seems to be of the negative kind: the inability of "crossover" artists (and this is not to question their sincerity) to play or sing idiomatically in foreign territory, the failure of composers to borrow convincingly-in either direction-across the line. Thus, classical singers are out of their depth in popular song, jazz clarinetists speak Mozart with an accent, classical themes make the most tawdry popular songs, and pop transplants in classical bodies trigger immediate immunological reactions.
Type III: Popular music and classical music are two different things, but they ex ist in symbiosis, they feed upon each other. Adolphe Sax invented his horn for "classical" purposes-but where would jazz be without it? The forms, if not the specific melodic and/or rhythmic content, of much popular music have classical roots.
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and others found inspiration in popular dance forms; Schubert, Brahms, and others transformed (some say successfully) folk song into classical lied; Gottschalk drew heavily on folk sources for his piano works; symphonists from Haydn to Mahler simply appropriated folk (popular) themes.
Type IV: There is classical (or "art" or "serious" or "learned") music; all else is bad copy, degraded form, and juvenile mewling, inept at best, appallingly silly at worst, and beneath the notice of adult minds. Like rock, of course. One trouble with this thesis is that it is impossible to trace the degenerative process, to "prove" that a given popular piece had its genesis in a classical model. (In this, music is quite unlike such arts as architecture, furniture design, and painting, where such influences are easily traced in folk artifacts.) For myself, I find that I vibrate somewhere between Types II and III, depending on the particular case at hand. Steve Simels, at least from his column this month, would appear to be a strong Type II. What about you?
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Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)