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Posted September 22, 2002
Fine Art Music, Not Classical —
and Not Popular, Either!
Wirkman Virkkala
Sequenza21 bills itself as the contemporary classical music weekly.
As such, it is an invaluable website that deserves greater attention from music lovers. But I have no intention of praising unreservedly; yes, I have some nits to pick:
- I dislike the term
classical music
when applied to any music after Schubert or before Haydn.
- I especially dislike it when applied to recent music.
Contemporary classical
is annoying, in part because if flies in the face of the core meaning of classical.
- I don't like many of the other terms to describe what composers are now composing; I prefer, instead, the term
fine art music.
- Fine art! Intelligent people regularly distinguish between minor arts and fine arts in disciplines other than music. Further distinctions, such as folk arts and popular arts also make sense. Popular music is by and large simple, striving usually for one or two effects per piece. Such music is closely tied to words, and pop styles can rarely sustain themselves sans lyrics. Which is why, perhaps, many critics regard jazz as another stream running parallel to
classical music
; jazz can sustain quite lengthy pieces (though jazz musicians usually limit themselves to a 3-7 minute time slot) and captivate our attention for long periods of time. Jazz often achieves the status of a fine art, having built on popular and folk traditions, but sometimes aided by extensive confrontation with fine art music.
- Though I prefer fine arts to popular and folk arts, most of the time, there is much to be said for the popular arts. I don't even decry TV as a medium (the great pop art medium of our time), having shown much of value... Even the sitcom form, extremely limited as it is, has produced some masterpieces (say, at least a dozen episodes of Seinfeld). Music is similar. There's much in rock, for instance, to be admired. But like most pop art, it is best in small doses. No small amount of it is good, but only when taken in small amounts.
- Criticism is often humanistic, not aesthetic. This is one reason why critics enamored of
classical music
often fail to appreciate popular art: they are stuck on the genius of composers, not on the beauty of particular works. The more attuned they are to beauty wherever they find it, the more chance they will appreciate music of folk and popular traditions. As for me, I think it helpful to blur the lines between the popular and the fine art traditions, especially when going back in music history. Guillaume de Machaut was a genius, for instance. But take his best virelai and ask yourself: is it really that far from a pop song or a folksong? Discuss.
- Still, my preference for musics above that of the pop song is pretty strong. Why? Partly this is a result of my limited taste for the human voice. Part of it is my impatience for combining words and music. I can take about three songs per week. The rest of the time I want to hear music... but this is an idiosyncrasy. (Actually, it is a refuge from words. Don't you get tired of words after a while? Don't you need a respite? So why listen to a dozen songs with their usually misbegotten literary pretensions?)
- My own humble efforts at composition have never gone beyond the miniature. So I think of myself on no higher a level than that of a pop songwriter, certainly not up there with Stravinsky, Ravel, Rautavaara, or Tcherepnin... This said, though the style of my music often edges closest to Stravinsky or Tcherepnin.
- A brilliant miniature like any given dance in Saudades do Brasil is, perhaps, not obviously greater than the best pop ballad, say by Irving Berlin or even Paul Simon. But Darius Milhaud has something that Berlin and Simon do not: an ability to write longer works worth listening to, and a great diversity of music styles. Which is why he nudges into the ranks of the great composers, and Paul Simon does not. All I'm trying to suggest here is that the critique of art and the critique of artists are not the same...
- One of the saddest aspects of today's popular music is the extent to which its culture does not honor and encourage the nurturing of creative talent. Girls scream over rock stars, guys want to be part of a band. Performance is all. Rock 'n' roll, for all its putative strengths as a rebel culture, often rebels against learning and creative excellence. This may be a result not of any inherent artistic limitations, but its cultural ones. Rock 'n' roll is largely the crucial element in the permanent counterculture that is teen culture in the public school. And, it follows naturally, in the juvenile imaginations of the bulk of America's adult population. Such folk are not particularly interested in achieving excellence, but in (dare I sound so stodgy?)
acting out
their anguish and energy.
- A sly critic once compared three popular music forms in America, relating them to sex. Rock, he said, was pre-coital; Country, post-coital. But Jazz was the Real Thing. One way to distinguish fine art music from folk and pop arts is by its lack of being easily categorizable by an analogy to sex. Music has its roots in song and dance, and both song and dance are closely related to humanity's mating habits. Fine art music transcends this.
So, back to Sequenza21, and to music that lifts the mind away from the onslaught of words and the biological fixation on sexuality. Alas, this weeks' lead article is about an opera entitled Dead Man Walking! Not sex, but death, lingers in the imagination.
But then, it's not opera I love, but music, pure and absolute and utterly apart from the stuff of literature, utterly apart from humanity's understandable obsessions with procreation and death.
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