Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>:

>>>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.
>>
>>Yes, but not always.  Many 19th century composers simply let pass some folk
>>music (in a harmless, aseptic state) into their works just in order to get
>>an exotic or coloristic touch.
>
>"Just to" I quarrel with.  Why go to folk music at all?

Right:  "just to" is a bit unfair.  But why go to folk music at all?:
to look for a sort of utopia.  A middle class utopia, by the way.  Perhaps
we may agree in the fact that at 19th century, there was a highly idealized
(ideological if you accept the word, or at least "filtered") vision of
folk music.  That was part of a bigger illusion:  that of an ancient and
uninterrupted national cultural tradition, just as those modern Arabians
who claims themselves to be the grand-grandsons of Mohamed the Prophet by
their mother's side.  However, Dvorak's Slavonic Dances is folk music
passed through a hundred bourgeois (read urban) filters.  Musicians of 19th
century intended "Folk music" as a matter of (supposed or not) *ancient*
peasant traditions, rather than a repertory of cultural behaviors of the
lower classes of the society (peasant or urban), which is what our times
generally intends for "folk" (though this concept is a bit "demode" now).
However, at the XX century, the notion of "folk" or "popular" music becomes
much more complex since the irruption of mass media culture.

>Elgar, after all, remarked, "*I* write the folk music of this country."
>They dip into folk music because there's something they can use and
>because, among most Romantics, it isn't tainted with the smell of the
>decadent bourgeoisie.  It springs from the noble, healthy peasant.

That "noble, healthy peasant" is one of the major products of the
bourgeois mind (many historians doubt seriously that this sort of elf have
ever existed:-) That fantasy comes almost from the first times of Humanism,
from the first signs of self consciousness of the bourgeois intellectual
class as separated equally from the rich-bourgeois-businessmen class as
from the low mob of urban poors.  Romanticism is the latest way in which
the urban intellectual bourgeois class expressed this fantasy:  they
"constructed" an ideal model of peasant, whose "purity" was attributed to
the fact that he lived far from the urban environment, where the two demons
(riches and poors) reigns.  Most of the Romantics surely never talked more
than two words with a true peasant of their times.  What they knew about
their music is only what was filtered from country to the big urban
centers, adapted for the use of the urban people.

>I strongly recommend an article by Alain Frogley, "Constructing
>Englishness in Music:  National Character and the Reception of Ralph
>Vaughan Williams," Vaughan Williams Studies, Alain Frogley (ed.), Cambridge
>University Press.  You could object that VW is a 20th-century composer, but
>the English got going a little later in these things than the rest of
>Europe.

I've never been in England, nor had a conversation with a native
Englishman, but I guess that they never had a strong necessity to
*construct* Englishness.

>>In fact, almost all the Medieval and Renaissance secular music was
>>conceived by and for some precise social-cultural environments that were
>>very far from being part of the majority of the people (clerks, courts,
>>the higher bourgeois class at the cities, etc.).
>
>It depends on which country, which part of the Renaissance you consider.
>Josquin, after all, wrote and arranged frottola.  Much of Hassler's stuff
>is folk based, as are Isaac and Senfl.  Not to mention the "Western Wynde"
>masses in England.

The frottola was a *courtly* type of music:  it was born, raised and
died among courtly people.  But you are right:  there's a music that (I
guess) was shared "universally" by the three medieval social orders and the
embrionary bourgeois class (after XI-XII century):  religious music (not
all of it, of course).  Some liturgical chants or pilgrim songs may have
been known perhaps at all social classes since there was a certain social
homogeneity at religious customs, especially after the 11th century.

>>Isn't it good (for the diversity of the Universe, at least) that some
>>composers seems hermetically sealed to folk or popular music, especially
>>when the general stream of aesthetics seems to take the opposite course?.
>
>I have no idea about how aesthetics stream.

I mean:  "Isn't it good for artistic diversity that some composers keeps
trying to create an hermetic language when almost everybody seems permeable
to folk music (as occurs today)?"

>*Should* folk music always influence art music? Of course not, and
>I believe I mentioned great composers for whom this doesn't happen,
>and there are always composers whom nothing helps.  However, I believe
>that folk music over the centuries has proved itself a vital source.
>If you don't use, you'd better have something pretty good of your own
>to take its place.

The advice is equally good for those who employs folk music as a source
of inspiration or whatever.  A flourishing "two-way commerce" (as you
described it) doesn't excuse you of not having anything good of your own
to say.

>>>Apparently, it's time for pop to aim for symphonic reach(...)
>>
>>Haven't Emerson &Co. done it yet?:-)
>
>Don't know.  Never heard them.  I *have* heard quite a bit of Zappa, who
>seems to me the most successful of those musicians who've tried to bridge
>rock and classical.  Actually, I doubt Zappa's conscious agenda was that.
>He wrote what he had to write.

In the case of Emerson &caetera, one could say that they had a little more
conscious agenda concerning classical music.  I invite those who knows
better the music of this group to correct or improve this assertion.

Pablo Massa
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