[One of the things I keep going on about -- one of those Big Ideas that
seem to strike me about every twenty years -- is how, in almost every
century but the twentieth, so-called "vernacular" music, either folk or
popular, has invigorated art music, and vice versa.  This post expands an
article I wrote for the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center.]

Many American films and cartoons of the 1930s touch on the culture wars
between colloquial, vernacular musicians and "classical" ones.  Among the
best is the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera.  In it the Marx Brothers
wreck a performance of Il Trovatore.  The plot pits classical villains and
snobs against young lovers and regular (or in the case of Harpo, Chico,
and Groucho, highly *irregular*, but lovable) folks.  The formula gets
repeated, usually much less successfully, any number of times, until you
wind up with the classical composer as monster:  blackmailing sensualist
Claude Raines in Deception and Jack-the-Ripper Laird Cregar in Hangover
Square.

How this antagonistic divide came about is less clear than the fact
that it *has* come about and, as far as the history of music goes, fairly
recently.  As late as the 19th century, composers and audiences alike made
few distinctions between classical and popular.  To which side, for
example, do the works of Johann Strauss II belong?

We may also say that the split exists more in the minds of the general
public than it ever did with composers from different sides of the
tracks.  Indeed, they've listened to one another throughout history.  The
Renaissance teems with masses based on folk music.  Haydn and Beethoven
delightfully arrange British "popular airs." Stravinsky, Ravel, Hindemith,
Weill, and Copland flirt with jazz and find their way to musical modernism.

On the other side of the tracks, we note that Cole Porter and the
American folklorist and composer John Jacob Niles both studied at Vincent
d'Indy's Schola Cantorum.  Despite the myth of him "warbling his native
wood-notes wild," Gershwin studied with a whole faculty of comosers,
including cutting-edge modernist Henry Cowell.  A host of jazz greats
like Duke Ellington and Lester Young listened to Debussy and Ravel.  The
founders of bop and post-bop turned to Bartok and Schoenberg.  Benny
Goodman inspired Copland.

It unsettles me when this sort of two-way commerce doesn't take place.  As
much as I like the music of Anton Webern, it bothers me that, in contrast
to most major comosers of Western music, it sounds hermetically sealed, so
that nothing "low" or "impure" sneaks in.  It means to me that he's simply
not listening to anybody but himself, while most great musicians --
classical and vernacular -- are always on the alert for a vibrant sound
they haven't heard before.  Musicologists have built careers on finding
the folk music in Haydn's music, for example, and Mozart stole from (and
*transformed*, of course) everybody.  Brahms spent many years arranging
German folk music, as well as writing his own.

On the other hand, people don't listen to classical in the numbers that
they listen to rock, and the classical market, people tell us, apparently
ages and shrinks.  This is just as limiting.  Music doesn't begin and end
with neo-punk.  Ironically, the radical turn-off has happened just as
music's creators are beginning to talk to one another again.  For at least
20 years, classical musicians seem to have ignored rock and the vitality
that comes with it, but it turns out that rock had eluded them.  Young
composers have begun to incorporate such groups as Led Zeppelin and the
solos of Jimi Hendrix, for example, into their own work.  Wynton Marsalis
recently won the Pulitzer Prize for Blood on the Fields, a work that owes
as much to Bartok as to Parker.  Frank Zappa, probably the only composer
so touched, wrote cantatas bassed on doo-wop *and* Edgar Varese.

Apparently, it's time for pop to aim for symphonic reach and for symphonies
to dance.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING:
   Bernstein, Adams, Kernis, Schiff, Larsen, Harbison, Torke, Moran,
   Argento, Daugherty, Rouse.  Dance Mix; Baltimore Symhony Orchestra/David
   Zinman.  Argo 444 454-2.

  Bernstein: Prelude, Fugue and Riffs
  Copland: Clarinet Concerto
  Stravinsky: Ebony Concerto
  Gould: Derivations for Clarinet and Band
  Bartok: Contrasts
  Benny Goodman (clarinet), Columbia Jazz Combo, Columbia Symhony
  Orchestra/conducted by the composers; Joseph Szigeti (violin), Bela
  Bartok (piano).  CBS Masterworks MK 42227.

  Lokumbe:  African Portraits.  Hannibal Lokumbe (trumpet) and others.
  Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim.  Teldec 98802.

  Zappa: We're Only in It for the Money.  Frank Zappa.  Rykodisc USA 10503.

Steve Schwartz