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.