musical genres in your head
Oct. 23rd, 2006 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI found this quote from Science in a cranky classical music blog:
I am pleased to see opera listed as a separate genre from classical music, as jazz is. Some classical music publications have a jazz section, on the grounds that tastes are likely to overlap - they're both elitist minority-taste forms of art music - but it feels odd to me, not so much because I don't like most jazz myself as that it and classical have quite different aesthetic natures. (The existence of successful hybrids does not disprove this.)
But so does opera. Opera is a hybrid of classical music and theatre, and different from either. Its differences from theatre have often been discussed (opera famously does not always operate by solid dramatic rules of plot and story), but not its differences from classical music. But it is plot-driven in a way that even the most blatant program-music tone poems aren't - the construction is different, it doesn't use blocks and recapitulation the same way (compare Wagnerian leitmotifs with Till's theme from Till Eulenspiegel) - and it has a "smell of the greasepaint" about it that's quite alien from classical. This is obvious enough to me because I'm not that fond of opera either, but even when I do like it, it tickles a quite different part of my brain than classical does, the same way as folk music (which I enjoy with an indiscriminance I'd never feel for classical) tickles yet another different part.
I itch whenever classical and opera are thrown together indiscriminately, the same way I itch when fantasy and horror are thrown together. They're as different from each other as either is from science fiction, and while it's balanced enough to discuss all three as "fantastic literature" or something, I find it grotesquely imbalanced to remove SF and treat the other two as if they were one thing. (The big difference is: fantasy elicits the sense of wonder, as SF does. Horror elicits a sense of horror; that's why it's called that.)
The other thing is that this article provides empirical data to support what we already know, that musical tastes have perceived social and personality connotations. I'm sure my musical tastes say something about how my mind works, and if they say less about my social caste (San Francisco Symphony program books are filled with ads for investment banks and fancy wines), they might be perceived as saying something.
Our local paper published yesterday profiles of the mayoral candidates, including a few personal questions of the "What's your favorite book?" sort. Such questions have become popular to put to political candidates recently, but not because they give irrelevant but welcome personality and human interest to the candidates. No, it's for the suposed insights into their political being. And the candidates know this, and the answers come with spin. (When Mr Bush said that his most revered political philosopher was Jesus, he was not only giving a spin answer, he was - judged by his subsequent behavior - almost certainly lying.)
And this applies to the question about "your favorite musician and your favorite style of music" that the mayoral candidates were asked. One said, "The Beach Boys and '60s rock," and the other said, "Earth, Wind & Fire, and Chicago" (is Chicago a style? I thought it was the name of a band). And these may be true answers, but can you imagine what would have happened if one of them had said opera, or classical, or jazz? In the middle of a tightly fought race, it'd be asking for a whisper campaign to paint you as an elitist snob.
So if I were a candidate, and were trying to avoid any answer that marked me either as an elitist snob (classical), or out of touch (electric folk), or too conventional for words (the Beatles), and had to name a pop musician that everyone is likely to have heard of, I'd have to say: Enya (whom I first heard of when she was a member of a then-obscure Irish folk band: how elitist), and for a genre, that brand of female singer-songwriters that someone once brilliantly dubbed New Waif Music, about which I've written before. And no doubt I'd never get elected with those answers either, but that'd hardly be the only reason.
As stereotypes might suggest, [persons] with the most education were also the main fans of opera, classical music, and jazz. For example, 8.5% of the classical music lovers had Ph.D.s, compared with 1.4% of those who favored disco music. And classical music lovers' incomes averaged $66,000 compared to $44,000 for lovers of popular dance music. Classical music buffs were also inclined toward intellectual fare, such as current-affairs magazines, whereas the rap/pop crowd favored magazines about cars, women, or celebrities.The original is behind a subscription wall, so I haven't read it and don't know the context, but two things occur to me:
I am pleased to see opera listed as a separate genre from classical music, as jazz is. Some classical music publications have a jazz section, on the grounds that tastes are likely to overlap - they're both elitist minority-taste forms of art music - but it feels odd to me, not so much because I don't like most jazz myself as that it and classical have quite different aesthetic natures. (The existence of successful hybrids does not disprove this.)
But so does opera. Opera is a hybrid of classical music and theatre, and different from either. Its differences from theatre have often been discussed (opera famously does not always operate by solid dramatic rules of plot and story), but not its differences from classical music. But it is plot-driven in a way that even the most blatant program-music tone poems aren't - the construction is different, it doesn't use blocks and recapitulation the same way (compare Wagnerian leitmotifs with Till's theme from Till Eulenspiegel) - and it has a "smell of the greasepaint" about it that's quite alien from classical. This is obvious enough to me because I'm not that fond of opera either, but even when I do like it, it tickles a quite different part of my brain than classical does, the same way as folk music (which I enjoy with an indiscriminance I'd never feel for classical) tickles yet another different part.
I itch whenever classical and opera are thrown together indiscriminately, the same way I itch when fantasy and horror are thrown together. They're as different from each other as either is from science fiction, and while it's balanced enough to discuss all three as "fantastic literature" or something, I find it grotesquely imbalanced to remove SF and treat the other two as if they were one thing. (The big difference is: fantasy elicits the sense of wonder, as SF does. Horror elicits a sense of horror; that's why it's called that.)
The other thing is that this article provides empirical data to support what we already know, that musical tastes have perceived social and personality connotations. I'm sure my musical tastes say something about how my mind works, and if they say less about my social caste (San Francisco Symphony program books are filled with ads for investment banks and fancy wines), they might be perceived as saying something.
Our local paper published yesterday profiles of the mayoral candidates, including a few personal questions of the "What's your favorite book?" sort. Such questions have become popular to put to political candidates recently, but not because they give irrelevant but welcome personality and human interest to the candidates. No, it's for the suposed insights into their political being. And the candidates know this, and the answers come with spin. (When Mr Bush said that his most revered political philosopher was Jesus, he was not only giving a spin answer, he was - judged by his subsequent behavior - almost certainly lying.)
And this applies to the question about "your favorite musician and your favorite style of music" that the mayoral candidates were asked. One said, "The Beach Boys and '60s rock," and the other said, "Earth, Wind & Fire, and Chicago" (is Chicago a style? I thought it was the name of a band). And these may be true answers, but can you imagine what would have happened if one of them had said opera, or classical, or jazz? In the middle of a tightly fought race, it'd be asking for a whisper campaign to paint you as an elitist snob.
So if I were a candidate, and were trying to avoid any answer that marked me either as an elitist snob (classical), or out of touch (electric folk), or too conventional for words (the Beatles), and had to name a pop musician that everyone is likely to have heard of, I'd have to say: Enya (whom I first heard of when she was a member of a then-obscure Irish folk band: how elitist), and for a genre, that brand of female singer-songwriters that someone once brilliantly dubbed New Waif Music, about which I've written before. And no doubt I'd never get elected with those answers either, but that'd hardly be the only reason.
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Continued...
Date: 2006-10-24 06:40 pm (UTC)The foolishly dogmatic thing to say would be that there was nothing in common between opera and classical concert music. But I avoided saying that. I believe, though, that lumping them together as parts of the same thing has caused great harm and misunderstanding of both.
Well. Will you really claim that Fidelio is more different in kind from the Ninth than either is from, say, the "Moonlight Sonata?" If so, then I can't really argue with you; we are listening with very different ears.
But even if you do make that claim, there is (obviously) a "same thing" to which all three belong, which is "music." They belong there alongside jazz, rock, folk, reggae, even (gawdhelpus) rap.
I will go further and suggest that the most important division, before even getting to genres, is between "art music" and "popular music," and that most, if not all, genres have members which fall on both sides of that divide. Yes, there is such a thing as "art rap."
This may actually be a trichotomy: sacred or ritual music may belong outside of both "art" and "popular" music.
I suggest that there is a fundamental similarity in the intentions and attitudes of composers, performers, and audients of "art music" that is independent of genre, and ditto for "popular music." This matter of "intentions and attitudes" is why sacred/ritual music may be a third ur-class.
This, of course, just makes the meaning-space I referred to above more complicated than ever...
Re: Continued...
Date: 2006-10-24 09:45 pm (UTC)I'm not that familiar with Fidelio. But I will say that to enjoy a Mozart opera, I must listen with different expectations and protocols than I use when listening to his symphonies or his piano sonatas or his Requiem, all of which are similar in a way the operas are not. To put it in a vastly oversimplified manner, they are all built architecturally. Operas are built dramatically. That's a huge difference, as huge as the difference Scott McCloud postulates between art that's built from the inside out and from the outside in, a difference equally hard to prove by pointing to specific points in the narrative.
The "same thing" of "music" to which all these things belong is on a larger scale. They also belong together on an even larger scale in the category of "art." But those are not the scales which we're discussing. Come on. On a narrower scale, each and every work of music ever written is unique; otherwise why write it? Each and every performance is unique too, or why give it? That's not the scale we're talking at, either.
The proof of the irrelevance of the scale of music comes with the mind-experiment of listening to every type of music in the world with the same expectations. That will lead to a lot of frustrations. Fidelio would be a lousy three-minute pop song. A three-minute pop song would make a lousy Beethoven opera, too.
The distinction between art and popular music (which is part of, but not all of, the reason for the distinction I just made) is a totally different line that cuts across all of this.
But if you want to talk "intentions and attitudes," I say there's a fundamental dissimilarity in the intention and attitude of writing music for the theatre from that of writing music for the concert hall.