When Urania was young/ All thought her heavenly/ With age her eyes grow larger/ But her form unmaidenly

Sunday, June 27, 2004

Starts like Rock, but It's Me

When I was sitting in the box at the Kennedy Center, glum from a split of Korbel champagne, listening to the bright young apprentice conductors do, in turn, Brahms, Debussy, Barber, and Tchaikovsky, I thought how odd the brackets around "classical" music are. The gap between the size of its audience compared to popular music is huge - and despite the best efforts of Leonard Bernstein working from one direction and classically-trained Rock Progressos on the other - these are not two voices in the same conversation. And then subtract out what I think may be the majority of the audience - those whose tastes begin with Vivaldi and end with, oh, maybe Mahler, along with a few outliers like the Early Music Movement, some Stravinsky and other tonic Russians like Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, Camina Burana, a few works that have made it into film, like Barber's Adagio for Strings. Maybe there's more - literate people know who John Cage is, and Philip Glass. But still.

But it's not dead - many composers work within the tradition, the conversation, even now. Like contemporary poetry in America, its economics lie almost solely within a framework of foundations and universities, and in the hearts of a few amateurs like my friend Steven, who decamped to Berlin permanently because he could hear something new every day. And, of course, if you need a full orchestra and and airplane motor before your marks on the paper becomes sound - well, this is fascinating to me. The gap in theater - something requiring similar resources - between successful theater like Cats and Les Miserables on one hand, and Stoppard and Shepard is nothing like the gap between Madonna and Glass. But theater itself is no longer a mass art, beyond school Christmas pageants.

There something important here, apart from the usual blah-blah about state support of the arts, but I'm not there yet. Back later on this topic.

What?

1 Comments:

Blogger Beth said...

I remember what I was a-gonna say now: Sinjun was a music major. Think he even got his Masters in it. Before he began rocking out with me to The Shins and suchlike, he used to say "Crank it up", when like Brahms was playing.

I think he and Rock may be Made For Each Other.

9:15 PM

 

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