Art Music and Popular Music

Recently, in writing of Leonard Bernstein, I mentioned Bernstein as a composer who bridged an admittedly arbitrary (but sociologically real) divide between “high art” music and “popular” music.

Bernstein was not the first or only composer to do this. On further reflection I realized that there at least three types of ways in which different composers have bridged or blended the “high” and the “popular.”

One important side issue is that there are at least two different ways of conceptualizing the popular, the popular in the sense of folk culture and music or in the sense of modern “pop culture” or “mass culture.” While this can be an important distinction, as I said, here it is a side issue. Whether thinking about folk or pop music, these musics can be incorporated or combined with art music in a number of ways.

First, some composers have drawn on popular music as source material for the production of art music. In some cases, this takes the relatively straightforward form of simply arranging or orchestrating folk or pop songs, such as with Berio’s “Folk Songs” or the arrangements and orchestrations of Duke Ellington songs by Luther Henderson, as performed by Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on the album Classic Ellington. In other cases, the melodic and other content of folk or pop material might be thoroughly varied and transformed to produce art music with less clear (though not to say unclear) connection to the popular source material, e.g. some of Bartok’s use of Hungarian folk music, or the use of folk melodies in Dvorak’s Symphony #9 “From the New World.” Of course, the use of one sort of music as source material for another sort of music is a two-way street. Think of Malcolm McLaren’s “Madame Butterfly,” Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” or David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” (the latter two from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack).

Second, some composers have also drawn on popular music as source material but in ways that present popular music in recognizable form but in collage with other material. Charles Ives was an early master of such music. For example, in “Central Park in the Dark,” written as a sort of musical evocation of a place, recognizable bits of popular tunes occasionally enter and fade upon the theme of the piece, just as one might catch momentary passages of music coming from neighboring saloons while on a stroll through the park in the early 20th century. (There’s one musical moment in particular where, through the indelible influences of other elements of pop culture, the recognizable strain of an early 20th century pop tune inevitably evokes for me the thought of the singing frog from the old, but later, Warner Brothers cartoons, “Hello, my baby, hello, my darling, hello, my ragtime gal…”) Some of contemporary composer Osvaldo Golijov’s music works in a similar vein, e.g. the use of Latin American folk music in his “St. Mark Passion.”

Third, some composers draw on popular and art music traditions (rather than particular pieces as source material) simultaneously to produce music that is ambiguously new popular music and new art music. This is where much of Bernstein’s work fits, most famously West Side Story (though I tend to think of his Mass in the prior category). Another example would be Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. (Today, though still popular in the sense that large numbers of people still enjoy them, the genres of Broadway-style showtunes and jazz are no longer typically thought of as “pop music,” and they tend to always occupy an ambiguous position between art and popular music. What Bernstein and Gershwin succeeded in doing that was a bit different was creating new music that was simultaneously taken seriously [even if not by everyone] as opera and/or art music and as popular music, as opposed to participating in a genre that today resides fuzzily between popular and art music.)

Leonard Bernstein and Meaning in Music

Leonard Bernstein has several pop culture faces. To some, including myself, who grew up in the 1980s, he was first off a name shouted out in an R.E.M. song, perhaps followed by the question, “Who the hell is Leonard Bernstein?” (I wonder how much of my liking of Bernstein’s music might be attributable to positive associations with the R.E.M. song.) To some (not mutually exclusive with the first group), he was an important mid-20th century American composer who bridged a gap between popular music and entertainment and the Western “high” art music tradition. To some, he was one of the greatest and/or most important conductors of the 20th century. He was also an important mid-century music educator, especially through the public television series of “Young People’s Concerts” he conducted with the New York Philharmonic.

I recently watched one of these “Young People’s Concerts” on DVD that focused on the theme of meaning in music, with Bernstein talking to the children in attendance at Carnegie Hall in between musical examples.

The issue of meaning in music is difficult. Music is capable of meaning – it affects us, which is the result of a semiotic experience, but what is communicated and what the effect of music is is not directly translateable into linguistic meaning. (Food and taste generally, as well as smells, present similar situations. Foods and smells are meaningful not just because of symbolic associations we might have with them, e.g. the Thanksgiving Turkey or the smell of a rose, but also because of the associations with the direct physical experiences of eating or smelling.)

Bernstein’s basic argument is something I agree with – the meaning of music, however hard it may be to define (precisely because it is non-linguistic) is intrinsic to the music and does not derive from anything extrinsic to it, such as a story or title associated with a piece. He argues that while we might associate stories or titles with music, such associations are essentially arbitrary.

He uses the example of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony, specifically the movement titled “By the Brook.” Bernstein agrees that the music is capable of evoking a mental image of a gently babbling brook, but argues that the music could equally evoke “Swaying in a hammock” if differently titled. I agree, even if I find Beethoven’s “Backyard” symphony with its “Swaying in a Hammock” movement amusing but difficult to imagine having been written, but also immediately reacted that the music could not evoke “Riding on a train” or “Falling off a cliff.” Those titles and mental images just wouldn’t fit the music.

He gives another example using the “Great Gate of Kiev” movement of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” He argues that the “strong chords” of the music fit that image, but could equally fit the flowing of the Mississippi river. In saying so, he’s almost making an argument that there is a necessary iconicity between musical elements and any non-musical elements potentially evoked by the music, but then undermines this by insisting that there’s no real connection between music and image. I agree that the “Great Gate of Kiev” music could evoke the Mississippi River, but I can’t imagine it evoking “By the Brook,” much less something like “Mowing the Lawn.”

The association between music and extra-musical meaning (if any) is arbitrary in the sense that any given piece of music could potentially be associated with a variety of images. “By the Brook” could evoke “Swaying in a hammock.” But association of music and extra-musical meaning is not purely arbitrary – the range of potential associations is defined in part by the range of phenomena that share some iconic relationship with one another, that is that have some clear and systematic relationship of similarity with one another.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928 - 2007

The important German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen has died. Stockhausen, especially with his works of the 1950s through the 1970s, was one of the more influential composers of the past few decades, influencing music across multiple genres, including contemporary classical or art music, jazz, electronic musics and sampling of all sorts, rock and pop.

The following is from the New York Times:

“In “Song of the Youths” (1956), he used a multichannel montage of electronic sound with a recorded singing voice to create an image of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego staying alive in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. In “Groups” (1957), he divided an orchestra into three ensembles that often played in different tempos and called to one another. (My inserted note: As with any creative and original person, the sorts of things Stockhausen did were not completely without precedent. Much of what he did is anticipated, albeit with a decidedly different flavor by the earlier 20th century American composer Charles Ives, e.g. the use of musical montage, or the division of orchestra into different ensembles playing at different tempos but relating to one another in his “Universe Symphony.”)
Such works answered the need felt in postwar Europe for reconstruction and logic, the logic to forestall any recurrence of war and genocide. They made Mr. Stockhausen a beacon to younger composers. Along with a few other musicians of his generation, notably Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono, he had an enormous influence. Though performances of his works were never plentiful, his music was promoted by radio stations in Germany and abroad as well as by the record company Deutsche Grammophon, and he gave lectures all over the world.
By the 1960s his influence had reached rock musicians, and he was an international subject of acclaim and denigration.”

The following excerpts are from Bloomberg.com:

“Paul McCartney and John Lennon of the Beatles were Stockhausen fans, and the group honored the composer by using his image on the cover of its 1967 album, "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'' The single "Strawberry Fields Forever'' showed Stockhausen's influence.
He inspired some of the music by Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis and Brian Eno. His groundbreaking electronic beats found echoes in long compositions by Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream in the 1970s. Of classical composers, Igor Stravinsky was an admirer, though not an uncritical one. Stockhausen's music was compared to Arnold Schoenberg and Oliver Messiaen before him. He went on with Pierre Boulez to offer a vision of the future.
Stockhausen was seen by some as the greatest German composer since Wagner. To others, his music was empty and devoid of merit. Conductor Thomas Beecham was asked, ``Have you heard any Stockhausen,'' and said, ``No, but I believe I have trodden in some.''

“His breakthrough came in 1956, with the release of ``Gesang der Junglinge'' (Song of the Youths), which combined electronic sounds with the human voice, the Guardian newspaper said.
In 1960, he released "Kontakte'' (Contacts), one of the first compositions to mix live instrumentation with prerecorded material.”


For more on Stockhausen, see “Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is Dead” from Yahoo News, “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer, Dies at 79” from the New York Times, and “Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pivotal German Composer, Dies at Age 79” From Bloomberg.com. I recently wrote of Stockhausen, albeit briefly, in my post, “Mythic Music: Stockhausen, Davis and Macero, Dub, Hip Hop, and Lévi-Strauss.”

Research, Teaching, and Music Performance

The other day I had a very nice conversation with a graduate student I work with. This particular student is just beginning field research for his thesis, a thesis which, in a nutshell, will address issues of booth rental and wage labor in hair salons, a topic that taps into debates in political economy going back at least to Ricardo and also rich with interesting ethnographic detail. This student, like a lot of, probably most, ethnographers is using a combination of participant observation and flexible, open-ended interviews.

He noted that he was pleased by how his first interviews had gone, also noting the highly flexible quality of the interviews, with interviewees often taking the conversation in interesting and unanticipated directions, but also that he felt confident in working in this highly flexible and even improvisatory setting because of a significant amount of preparation for his field work that he had engaged in along with me and other members of the committee.

I drew an analogy to certain aspects of teaching. Specifically, there is a performative quality to research methods like participant observation and flexible, open-ended interviewing that has something in common with the performative quality of some teaching, e.g. leading an effective class discussion. Effectively leading discussions requires preparation and organization – you have to know your stuff, but I find that the most effective discussions are true conversations that can often lead in unexpected directions. There is improvisation, but based on sufficient organization and preparation that I’m confident enough to set aside preset plans and follow an interesting lead. (This doesn’t mean that anything goes in class discussion – or open-ended interviewing – some comments are outside the domain of relevancy, are too tangential, and require reigning in, though it can sometimes be difficult to tell in the moment what is too tangential and what not.) Not all teaching works this way, though. Sometimes a thoroughly preplanned lecture is the best and most efficient way to communicate information to a class – there can always be room for questions and clarifications, but within a plan.

Then, another analogy struck me. Some research (in this case, participant observation and flexible interviewing strategies) and some teaching (e.g. leading class discussion) is analogous to jazz performance, while other research (e.g. more controlled interviewing or survey research) and other teaching (e.g. delivering a preplanned lecture) is more analogous to classical performance.

Jazz performance is highly improvisatory. When performed well, though, jazz is not chaos or noise, but based on thorough preparation and practice that allow a skilled musician to dispense with rigid adherence to formulae to play freely. The same is true with skillful performance of certain research and teaching strategies.

With some exceptions (typically highly delimited and occurring either in music from the baroque period or earlier or from very recent classical composition), classical performance is highly scripted rather than improvisatory. The musicians follow a definite score. Something like survey research tends to work similarly, with attention paid to following a scripted questionnaire and attempting to control as much about the research environment as possible so as to limit as far as possible the number of variables that might contribute to the production of the different question responses.

In both cases here, classical performance and survey research, though, even within the highly scripted context, there is nuance and interpretation to performance. Different performances of the same classical works can sound quite different based on subtle differences in interpretation and performance of the music’s details, producing highly different results. With something like survey research, there is an art to getting people to respond to questions, and doing so without either inhibiting or overly influencing respondents’ replies through the details of posture, facial expression, or a wide variety of vocal qualities. (As an aside, the film Kinsey presents several examples of such things to be avoided by interviewers in a formal research setting. In the film, we learn about Alfred Kinsey as a person via several scenes in which he trains students in interview techniques by having them interview him. It’s an innovative way of delivering exposition about the subject’s life in a biographical film without slipping into the clichés of biopics. Along the way, it’s the only movie I’ve ever encountered that seriously explores social science research methods.)

Khrennikov

My initial reaction upon reading a recent obituary of Tikhon Khrennikov in The Economist (September 1) was a reaction I often find myself having when encountering obituaries – surprise that the person was still alive, or rather had been right up until just now. In this case, my surprise is not surprising, given that Khrennikov was 94 and is probably best remembered, outside of Russia at least (and quite possibly there as well), for events a half century or so ago. The two composers his name is most associated with, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, both died decades ago.

My second reaction, after reading the entire obituary, was to rethink what I knew about this complex individual.

I had previously encountered Khrennikov in narratives of the careers of those two most prominent Soviet composers, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. In such narratives, Khrennikov usually appears as Stalin’s stooge in his position as secretary of the composer’s union. As the Economist obituary points out, “he read out a draconian speech which condemned Shostakovich and Prokofiev for their formalism, accusing Prokofiev of ‘grunting’ and ‘scraping.’” Here, Khrennikov served as mouthpiece for Stalin (something he did not deny, only claiming later that this famous denunciatory speech had been written out for him to deliver), and while the official denunciation did not derail the careers of either composer, it did for a time affect their output (e.g. Shostakovich suppressed some of his own work until after the death of Stalin, and there is a good deal of debate about the extent to which his non-suppressed works of the late 1940s and early 1950s reflect acquiescence to Stalin and the campaign against “formalism” or winking irony), and one can only wonder at the chilling effect such denunciations of major figures must have had on less well known and more vulnerable artists.

Khrennikov was a stooge, and he did help to give a veneer of cultural legitimacy to Stalin’s policies and practices, as well of those of later Soviet leaders (he remained secretary of the composer’s union until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991). But he was no Eichmann – he didn’t facilitate the worst abuses of a totalitarian regime as many in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union did. On the contrary, in a context of severe restraint on his possible actions, he did much good. He was no Eichmann both because his actions didn’t facilitate anything so serious as death camps or the gulag, and because he didn’t just follow orders. As the Economist obituary states:

“He was part of a ruthless system; but he did not deliver up Jewish composers to Stalin’s goons, and did not write negative references when the party demanded them. (Instead, he would say that the composer had been warned of the dangers of modernism, as if the lesson was already safely learned.) None of the composers he had charge of was killed; very few were arrested.”

The last fact is particularly striking, especially given Stalin’s personal interest in the arts, especially music, and the personal attention he turned to purging music of “formalism.” Contrast the fate of composers with that of the many Soviet writers who were purged or died under mysterious circumstances.

The standard narrative of Khrennikov is easy to deal with – he’s the bad lackey to be reviled, and it’s easy to feel righteous in condemning his actions. When a fuller set of details of his life is considered, he becomes more difficult. For me, this fuller narrative raises uneasy questions about whether I would act the same in his shoes. He did much that was not admirable, but he went about doing the not-so-admirable in an admirable way, providing cultural legitimacy for Stalinism and facilitating the attack on some artistic expression to be sure, but also effectively keeping his office from facilitating purges of composers and even more privately fostering at least some degree of freedom of expression for composers in association with an artists’ compound he ran.

Jazz is not America's Classical Music

I’ve encountered many who are champions of jazz who are fond to say that “Jazz is America’s Classical Music.”

The main reason for this is to stake a claim that jazz is just as worthy of aesthetic contemplation and every bit as serious a “high art” as classical music. For much of the twentieth century most saw classical music as clearly “high art” while jazz was just as clearly “low art.” Even today, when jazz is not so regarded (ironically in large part because it’s not popular entertainment music), classical tends to carry more prestige.

Race is involved as well. One major reason why jazz carried lower prestige, at least through the mid-twentieth century, was because of the common perception of jazz as black music (see my earlier post, “Art, Black Art, and Seriousness in Bebop”).

To claim jazz as America’s classical music is to argue that jazz is a distinctly American form of art music (and it is that – or at least was – it’s no longer so specifically American), to place it on the same aesthetic level as European classical music, and to make a case for the centrality of race and black experiences in American art and life in general.

Jazz and classical do have some things in common. They both tend to be associated with high standards of performance to a greater extent than with “popular” genres. Classical is generally regarded as “art music,” as has jazz for at least the past several decades. (All music is art in the sense that it involves the production of an existing object with distinct physical [sound waves] and aesthetic qualities. Jazz and Classical are “art music” in the sense that sociologically they tend to be performed in contexts where their aesthetic qualities are overtly emphasized – though also always in contexts shaped in important ways by political, economic, and other social factors.) Both have a generally recognized canon of composers and performers (something obviously true of some other genres as well).

There is an American Classical Music – And it’s not Jazz

Despite the similarities, there are other clear differences. Both “Classical” and “Jazz” can be difficult to define (and adding to the ambiguity, both terms can be used to refer to either the music of a specific period of time [as in “Baroque,” “Classical,” “Romantic,” etc., and “Jazz,” “Swing,” “Bebop,” etc.] or to broadly defined genres persisting over long stretches of time) – and that’s not my main goal here. Suffice it to say that most have a general sense of what falls into either genre (there are exceptions, e.g. is Terry Riley’s In C classical, jazz, or something else; is Miles Davis’ and Gil Evans’ version of “Concierto de Aranjuez” on the Sketches of Spain album jazz or classical; is Porgy and Bess jazz, classical, opera, or a “musical” – or does it depend on the specific performance?), so I want to focus not so much on providing absolute definition as presenting one or two important distinctions.

Jazz has from its beginnings been a music that emphasizes improvisation. The degree of improvisation varies considerably. In some cases, only a soloist improvises and within highly circumscribed limits, while in others the whole ensemble might simultaneously improvise, but whether in the form of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens or Ornette Coleman’s free jazz, improvisation has been central to the music.

Jazz has been a hybrid genre from the start, drawing on multiple pre-existing musical traditions (something true of any genre really – but jazz’s hybridity is an important part of many people’s conception of the genre). Two of the most important sources for the jazz tradition were ragtime and the blues, with the result being that most jazz shares with ragtime syncopation and a playfulness with rhythm, and often draws on the pentatonic scales of blues.

It would be a mistake to argue that syncopation, much less experimentation with rhythm generally, are not part of classical music. Just think of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or much of Ravel’s work, or even the much earlier piano works of Chopin, where the left and right hands often have slightly offset rhythms. But syncopation is a much more crucial component of jazz – what makes the music “swing,” and the eight tones of each major and minor key or the twelve tone rows of serial music are quite different from pentatonic blues or jazz. Finally, while improvisation was often emphasized in the Baroque, from the mid-18th century until quite recently, improvisation was essentially absent from classical music.

There is an American classical musical tradition that includes important composers such as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Cage, Philip Glass, Jennifer Higdon and many, many others.

To refer to jazz as “America’s Classical Music” does two unfortunate things. First, it misconstrues the nature of jazz and misrecognizes what’s unique and important about it. Second, it marginalizes America’s tradition of actual classical music.

Jazz Doesn’t Need to Be America’s Classical Music

As I said earlier, to claim jazz as America’s classical music is to argue that jazz is a distinctly American form of art music, to place it on the same aesthetic level as European classical music, and to make a case for the centrality of race and black experiences in American art and life in general.

I endorse each of these basic claims. Jazz is a distinctly American form of art music, though one distinct from classical music. It does have the same aesthetic worth as classical music, without having to be classical music (and thus losing what makes jazz jazz – this is also to say that when it comes to aesthetic appreciation, I see no reason why jazz and classical can’t actually be separate but equal). Given the centrality of black musicians in the history of this distinct art music, jazz does mark the centrality of race and especially of black experiences in American art and life in general.

None of these claims, though, depends on claiming that jazz is classical – if anything, such claims distort and undermine the realities of jazz.