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Posted March 25, 2005
Early rock was a rebellion against swing, swing a rebellion against the Tin Pan Alley and jazz that came before. Of course, it may not have been the musicians who were rebelling, but the lemmings of fashion. But what made the fashion was a sense of new direction, a revolutionary mindset more than willing to discard the past.
I don't think this is a new development. Even the fine arts have not been unaffected.
Until the 19th century got fully under way, with the Baroque revival started by Mendelssohn and company, most fine art music appreciation, performance, and composition was driven and burdened by the play of fashion. Remember how J. S. Bach was widely ignored for being old-fashioned
? He had his admirers, of course (genius usually finds a few appreciators), but he was not the stunning success that Telemann was, or Vivaldi was before him, or, later, Rossini. Remember Beethoven complaining about the fashionable simplicities of Rossini? Beethoven struggled for acceptance, considering that his work demanded so much of listeners, was often too breakthrough
oriented for an audience with more conservative standards of what was fashionable. Hummel, meanwhile, was doing quite well, also pushing the envelope of classicism, ushering in the Romantic age, just not so radically as Beethoven.
Fashion is a fixation on following group movements (hence my lemming
crack, at the beginning). Something is in
if enough people think and say it is in.
It's awfully strenuous on the fashion makers (consider reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell for some relevant analysis), and certainly to those creative artists who are trying to lead taste in different directions.
But something happened in the 19th century that has blossomed into a whole different approach. That was the historical, museum-interest, the dedication to the best
in any period. Starting in the 19th century, fashion was giving way to a different mindset, more broadminded in one way, more closeminded in another. The Cult of Greatness split off into two directions: the fashionable worship of the avant-garde, and the humanistic worship of The Classics.
The name classical music
does not refer to what became known as the Classical Period (Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven, with Boccherini thrown in along with a few others). It refers, instead, to the humanistic Museum Movement of worshiping and keeping The Classics alive.
Fashion is not completely foreign to that mindset, of course (Is Mahler truly a great? Nielsen? Sibelius? Bruckner? how some answer these questions often reveals more a fashionable sentiment and standard than a humanistic attitude or aesthetic standard). But the broadmindedness associated with a curator's instinct for wide appreciation and historical perspective tends to cut against the grain of fashion. In a sense, everything is out,
nothing is in,
but in another sense The Great Works or The Great Composers are always in.
There are two basic schools in the museum movement of music appreciation: the humanists focusing on ranking composers in terms of greatness and not-so-greatness, and the aestheticians ranking of works in terms of greatness. (It's a troubling fact that some works by Great Composers are obviously not-so-great, and even more troubling when an unknown or obviously minor talent pulls out a breathtaking Masterwork.)
The fashion of Newness, on the other hand, kept on going into the 20th century with competing aesthetic programs, most of them advocating some sort of cutting edge
philosophy, that music must always progress
in some uniform way, pushing an envelope
of technique. This was sparked, in a sense, by the amazing brilliance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which shattered previous standards of consonance and dissonance, and brought rhythm into the limelight. Had it not been composed, it is worth considering what would have happened. The work broke so much new ground, and was even named after the season of rebirth, that an efflorescence of new and advanced music
was inevitable to follow, and to gain cultural ascendancy. A lot of not-so-good and even bad music coasted on the success of The Rite of Spring.
And much of it was of a strain that Stravinsky himself opposed — Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and other serialists and expressionists — until he converted after his enemy's (Schoenberg's) death. Stravinsky's conversion to serialism was a very unfortunate move for music, I've long thought. For it gave The Mandate of Heaven to serialism, which for about 25 years ruled fashion in the Academy, even as it lost touch with the Museumgoers in the concert hall. It basically divorced the cultures completely before losing the Mandate in a post-modernist burst of competing aesthetic programs. There is no dominant paradigm today, except the very lack of a dominant paradigm.
We're now in a post-fashion, super-museum culture, as far as fine art music is concerned. I say super-museum
because the attitudes of Classics Worship and curator culture dominate the appreciation even of recent fine art music. Basically, it puts contemporary music in a sort of ghetto that cannot quite be ignored — but which is ignored most of the time any way. It's the Ghetto of the Unproven.
In times past, newness was a central fascination, in part driven by fashion. Now, it's indulged in sort of as a guilty unpleasure, a duty, by many concertgoers and musicians.
That's the post-modern culture of fine arts in general, as I understand it. It's especially unfortunate in music, especially since much simpler styles dominate the culture, with a strong fashion fixations, if split by genre (with rock, rap, and country and others dominating the CD shelves in a way similar to how mystery, romance, and sf dominate the paperback racks; the difference is that music is a lot more popular than reading). We live in a culture dominated by Popular arts, a sort of hyper-marketed industry promoting folk and second-rate talents, but appreciated by many as first rate. It's a sort of mockery of Classics Worship, you might say it's a black sabbath compared to the museum acolytes' rites. I sometimes try to bring the two cultures together, note similarities, and such. But my disgust for the culture of pop music often overshadows the music itself, some of which is actually quite good. The popular arts are almost as corrupt in culture as politics itself, with cultural meanings that are often hard to prescind from the aesthetic experience. (Try taking rape and murder out of rap; try taking drug abuse out of rock'n'roll; try taking lamentations over failed adulteries out of country. The subject matters of the lyrics of these musics are a lot harder to ignore than the meaning of the Latin Miserere by Allegri I'm now listening to. Further, while most music listeners have successfully pried religious music from Perotin to Pärt from its religious functions, it's often a lot harder to take the Kid Rebel theme out of rock, or the Drunken Slut/Redneck theme out of country.)
Query: can there be classics in pop music? We here talk of classic rock,
but the insistence of marketers no more makes a classic than their categorization of an easy-to-listen-to strain of pop makes smooth jazz
jazz. In pop, there are no classics. There are only hits and standards. And ear worms.
Fashion can't help have some play in aesthetic culture, no matter the tradition — fine art or popular art or folk art. And fashion probably spurs some people on as much as it crushes others. But fine art music has sublimated fashion in a general curator culture. This makes it tough on New Stuff.
And the result is: less is the pity.
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