Promotion

I agree with A.C. Douglas when he writes:

. . .much as one wishes it were not the case, classical music is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever even marginally be, an object of mass or even widespread appeal no matter how vigorously and assiduously it may be promoted.

And, as Douglas adds, this "applies, mutatis mutandis, to all the arts of high culture," including literature. Where Douglas goes wrong, in my opinion, is in further claiming that serious art is, "by its very nature, a fundamentally elitist enterprise, and should never be viewed or promoted as anything other."

Art is "elitist" only if an "elite" audience can be defined as "small" or "self-selected." If Douglas means to suggest, as I suspect he probably does, that those who appreciate serious art are for that reason, or because of some preexisting set of chararcteristics, a superior caste, I cannot go along with him. I defer to no one in my enjoyment of the products of what Douglas calls "high culture," but there is nothing about my preferences that makes them objectively "finer" than someone else's preferences. Where would such putatively objective standards come from, except from the practices of those who also enjoy serious art, who have enjoyed them in the past and have passed along both the standards and the works of art and literarature to which they have been applied? Those of us who accept these standards might like to think of ourselves as an "elite" because we have put in the time and attention required to understand their relevance, but this only means we like to spend our time on certain kinds of music or certain kinds of writing rather than others, not that we're privy to secrets that others can't share.

I do agree that it's futile to "pander" to audiences who don't otherwise seem to care about classical music or lyric poetry or abstract art. If the actual audiences for such endeavors are small, what, finally, is the problem? Only when a subsidiary cultural "industry" grows up around these pursuits, an industry that must have its financial needs met, does it become crucual to sell more books and fill more concert halls. Plenty of people might be led to appreciate classical music or serious fiction, but not through artificial efforts to reach the People, which only distort the very art supposedly being defended.

Comments

[Walter Ramsey]

"Better" or just "different"? The frustrating question that is all the rage today. For a definitive answer on the subject, read Henry James, "The Ambassadors," which describes a world - hopefully not lost - where people actually -can- be more cultivated, and better, and not just "different."

[Dan Green]

Boy, if you can say the world depicted in The Ambassadors is "better," you and I already inhabit different worlds.

[Len Edgerly]

While in the Caribbean recently, I heard an example of how differently these questions of culture look from a different vantage point, in this case the non-fine art community of island hip hop. The FM station on St. Thomas, JAMZ 105, in the middle of a driving rap song would play a snippet of a British-accented man saying "Excuse me, could you possibly rewind and come again?" The effect was humorously to marginalize the Brit's world and to assert the primacy of hip hop.

I do believe there are qualities in any art which we can value for their ability to call forth the best that is human in both artist and audience. Those qualities have to do with hard work, innovation, delight, and enthusiasm honed by sustained passion and attention. Thankfully, no one culture has a monopoly on those qualities, and art remains the royal road to reconnnecting us across differences.

[birnbaum]

There is something misleading about Douglas’ assertion.

By the time the masses had the leisure time to pay attention to non folk music, which required more structured settings and such (orchestras and large ensembles, appropriate venues), radio was available and was more inclined to deliver so-called pop music. —though the Met Opera was regularly broadcast nationwide, as was the New York Philharmonic and that icon of culture, Arturo Toscanini. Opera in Vienna was a popular entertainment back in young Mozart’s time, well into the19th century. Suggesting that there is something about orchestral music and its devotees that inherently excludes large numbers of people is unverifiable and just plain arrogant.

How is it that some compositions can actually become "hit" records. I remember a movement of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto (Elvira Madigan), Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarthustra, (2001) and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (Apocalypse Now) all achieved pop status. And in the lamented by gone free form FM radio days, adventurous radio jocks thought nothing of intermingling all manner of musics. Did they have mass audiences? Probably not, but there is no reason they couldn’t have significantly larger numbers of listeners.

Here’s the thing people who enjoy music and for whom it is a central pleasure in life don’t go around fencing off large acreage of fertile for themselves and their snotty cronies like the Michael Gambon character in Open Range. Nope— Emimem and Bela Bartok, Robert Johnson and Julian Bream— are appreciated non-denominationally.

Mutatis mutandis indeed.

[Ray Davis]

I've been an underground comics fan, a Restoration literature fan, a 1970s science fiction fan, a Renaissance song fan, a Hong Kong movies fan, an atonal twentieth-century academic music fan, a rural blues fan, a James Joyce fan, a Leslie Gore fan, a Howard Hawks fan, and a Language Poetry fan, among other things. Treating each enthusiasm as its own area of study with its own band of passionate enthusiasts has rewarded me far more than trying to figure out which representatives of each belong to the High, Low, or Middle Arts and then treating the clumps en masse. Even "classical music" seems an absurdly broad category.

I'm also a fan of late Henry James. But I wouldn't live in any of those books if you paid me. (If you paid me what I'm making now, I mean. If you paid me four times as much, OK, sure.)