[Dixielandjazz] To what extent is Classical Music (and Trad Jazz) marginalized?

[Steve Barbone]

Not specifically OKOM, however it could well have been written about OKOM.
The parallel is striking. Classical Music, Trad Jazz, will they go the way
of Greek and Latin which were once the mainstays of cultural education, but
now largely forgotten? In is an interesting read.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 


Classical Music Imperiled: Can You Hear the Shrug?

NY TIMES - By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN - July 2, 2007

The sounds of a dying tradition are painful, particularly if the tradition¹s
value is still so apparent, at least to the mourners, and still so vibrant
to a wide number of sympathizers. Those melancholic strains can sometimes be
sensed only on the edge of awareness, sounding like faint drones, heard only
in moments of silence. But they are all the more distressing if the imminent
demise seems a result of previous carelessness or willful neglect.

To what extent do you think classical music has become marginalized?

That is how I often think of the Western art-music tradition ‹ the classical
tradition ‹ these days, and though I once tended to whine about its problems
with cranky optimism, now even a stunning performance seems like a spray of
flowers at a funeral.

O.K., this is a bit too melodramatic. There is no need after all to act like
an extra in ³A Song to Remember,² or any other cinematic biopic from an era
when names like Chopin or Beethoven could still command box-office
attention, an era when émigré film-score composers imported the symphonic
tradition into Hollywood.

I also don¹t idealize the idolatry that once enshrined the long 19th century
of music (roughly 1785-1915) that forms the heart of the Western art-music
tradition. But it is astonishing how little is now sensed about what might
well be lost with it. And traditions do come to an end. The reading of
ancient Greek and Latin ‹ once the center of an educated person¹s life ‹ now
seems as rarefied as the cultivation of exotic orchids.

The title of Lawrence Kramer¹s new book, in fact, is exactly right: ³Why
Classical Music Still Matters² (University of California). It is the kind of
title that would not have been used a generation ago, when debates about the
musical scene might have involved titles more like ³Why Contemporary
Composers Don¹t Matter² or ³Why Audiences Are Stuck in the Past.²

What has changed is not how much the tradition means to its devotees, but
how little it means to everyone else. From being the center of cultural
aspiration, art music has become almost quaintly marginal; from being the
hallmark of bourgeois accomplishment (³Someday you¹ll thank me²), music
lessons have become optional attempts at self-expression; from appearing on
newsmagazine covers, maestros now barely rate boldface in gossip columns.

Prescriptions have been plentiful, but so many years have gone by without
significant music education in the schools and musical commitment in the
homes, and so many ears have gotten used to different sounds and minds to
different frames of references, that the question has changed from ³What can
be done?² to ³Why should anything be done at all?²

Why, in other words, should we care? After decades of arguments asserting
that different cultures just have different ways of expressing themselves,
that distinctions and assertions of value are tendentious, and that Western
art music deserves no pride of place in a multicultural American society, it
may be that even the problem is no longer clearly seen. The premises have
shifted.

Unfortunately I don¹t think the answers Mr. Kramer gives will make the
difference, if any answers even can. Mr. Kramer ‹ who teaches English
literature and music at Fordham University and whose lyrical and suggestive
studies of music and 19th-century culture have been fascinating
contributions to recent musicology ‹ sees the problem clearly enough. But in
trying to explain the value of this repertory and its unique status he
writes more like an introverted lover than an extroverted judge, more like
someone gazing at its marvels from within than someone determined to
articulate its virtues to a skeptical outside world.

³No other music tells us the things that this music does,² Mr. Kramer
writes, but those things don¹t entirely become clear in his retelling. This
is not his weakness alone. When proselytizing for a nonverbal tradition,
something is always lost in translation, and Mr. Kramer is sometimes too
precious and allusive, given the magnitude of the task.

Nevertheless it is worth giving him close attention, and getting acquainted
with his modes of expression (³Classical music allows us to grasp passing
time as if it were an object or even a body²), because of the strength of
his insights. He sees the ways melody (a ³treasured, numinous object²) and
its troubled fate become the focus of attention in so much of this music,
the ways dramas of loss and recovery seem to be played out again and again,
and the ways music and film reveal each other¹s preoccupations.

He suggests, for example, why Rachmaninoff¹s Second Piano Concerto plays so
central a role in the film ³Brief Encounter.² (It portrays ³a deep
subjectivity immune from manipulation or constraint by external forces,² he
says, expressing the yearning of the narrator who recalls her star-crossed
love affair.)

In Mr. Kramer¹s explorations, though, one thing becomes clear: how many
kinds of narratives can be extracted from the classical repertory. Theodor
W. Adorno¹s criticism serves as a model, examining music as an emotional,
intellectual and political drama in sound. A Beethoven symphony becomes an
account of attitudes toward political authority and war, or an exploration
of subjective feeling in a threatening world. ³An American in Paris² by
Gershwin has an ³undertone of dissatisfied reflection² underneath the
³prevailing high spirits,² suggesting the fading spirit of the Jazz Age. The
music Mr. Kramer calls classical becomes a kind of philosophical program
music, recounting complex interactions between ideas and feelings.

The music¹s ability to sustain these kinds of readings ‹ and be illuminated
by them ‹ is a more profound achievement than it might seem. Music of this
period is shaped in the form of a narrative. Even technically ‹ in terms of
harmonic movement or (as Mr. Kramer suggests) melodic processes ‹ a
19th-century composition is literally a story in sound, telling the
picaresque adventures of a theme. But it is a story so abstract that it can
attract extraordinarily different metaphorical retellings. It reaches so
widely because of this openness; it reaches so deeply because of its taut
construction.

The stories this music tells ‹ which involve, as Mr. Kramer notes, tales of
fate and circumstance, loss and confrontation ‹ are dramas in which
listeners have found their personal experiences and sentiments echoed in
sound. Many compositions are public demonstrations, displaying all the grand
scale and force of communal ritual, and were written for the newly
developing concert halls.

There, for the first time, the bourgeois audiences could hear something of
their own lives enacted in symphonic splendor ‹ the dramas of desirous,
independent citizens, yearning, struggling, loving, brooding, recognizing,
regretting, learning ‹ ultimately bound into a single society by the more
abstract society of intertwined sounds reaching their ears. Those musical
stories are still our own, although in the tradition¹s waning years we may,
unfortunately, no longer feel compelled to listen.