Bert Bailey writes, anent my meanderings on this subject:

>In the discussion of this topic, a while ago Jon Johanning had said, in
>reply to a remark I made about the price of concerts:
>
>>...if you think classical concerts are more expensive than rock concerts,
>>you don't have kids who frequently hit you up for the requisite cash.
>
>No, I think both are out of the reach of most, and thus overpriced.

No doubt, it would be wonderful if music and the other arts were a lot
cheaper than they are.  It's a scandal, IMHO, that good music and many
other things that make life worth living are priced at what the market
will bear while fat-filled fast food for the stomach and TV fast food
for the mind are priced cheaply enough for the general population.
But without major government subsidies, that's the way things are.

>Brian Wilson, Fats Waller and Elvis P and C are/were no slouches in
>'crafting' their works just as they want/ed them.  Of course, it's a
>different sort of craft, less learned, etc.  -- but no less worthy.
>Why not, instead, dump on Mozart for failing to inspire us to shimmy and
>shake, or Bingen and Schnittke for not knowing, I dunno, how to rap? Unmet
>expectations like these amount to something very like a category confusion,
>IMO.

This is a point which I often try to make, in my bumbling fashion:  CM and
pop music (while both are kinds of music in the broad sense) are really
trying to do very different things, which is why they have (generally
speaking) very different audiences.

Popular music generally aims at appealing directly to people with no
particular interest in music as such (the "craft" of music), but who want
a nice, lively, steady beat to dance to, a hummable tune to lighten their
days, or a moody blues to help them mourn a lost lover, or whatever.  This
kind of music doesn't require a very great musical genius to produce.  In
fact, the rock music that developed out of the 60s milieu made a virtue of
being unpolished, the direct voice of the "people," who were too poor to
take fancy music lessons or go to expensive schools where hoity-toity
"music appreciation" was taught.  It became fashionable to think that
anyone who demanded a higher level of musicianship than the average person
could acquire in a couple of weeks of learning to strum basic guitar chords
was a rotten traitor to the working class and the oppressed peoples of the
world.

I happen to think that the level of musical craft represented by CM is by
no means a betrayal of progressive politics, but I don't want to get into
that argument here.  The point is that the percentage of the population who
cares enough about musical craft to get hooked on CM is and always will be
small.

>You also addressed a point I was trying to make about CM's widespread
>access for non-fans of CM by saying:
>
>>Classical CDs generally cost exactly as much as popular ones.
>
>Assuming that this was so (and I'd side with Ray Bayles's posting that
>it's not) ...

I guess I'm not informed enough about the market for pop music recordings
to enter this debate.  I realize that "singles" are available, which is
not the case in the classical market.  And of course the coming of MP3
threatens to cause the bottom of the market for pop recordings to drop out
completely in the near future, whereas the sound quality of the compression
is at this point completely inadequate for CM (see the discussion above on
musical craft).  On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to be within
range of a good CM radio station, or have a local public library with a
good CM collection, you can manage very well making your own tapes.

>My money, instead, is on some kind of reciprocity: TV arose within a
>world view that no longer holds in very high regard CM (and some other
>harder-earned pleasures).  All the same, how so? Just what's the connection
>between the much less widespread access for all of CM *out there* and TV
>now being a key determinant of what becomes part of the public attention?

I agree that there isn't much evidence that TV itself narrows attention
spans, and hence destroys the ability to sit still for long pieces of
classical music.  At the same time, a public that is used to associating
the term "music" with 3- or 4-minute songs will obviously need a big
reorientation in thinking to grasp something like a Mahler 2nd.  (Not
much good for tapping your toes to, either.)

I think that the problem with TV is that something about the TV watching
experience itself doesn't comport well with the CM experience.  The
advertising executive Jerry Mander, in "Four Arguments for the Abolition
of TV" (I think that was the title of the book) described an interesting
experiment someone once performed in which a TV camera was set up on a
beach, facing the ocean, and the rolling waves were broadcast for several
hours.  No one could stand to watch it for very long, even though most
people enjoy the actual experience of relaxing on the beach for hours.  I
get the same feeling from being forced to watch a televised concert over
a couple of hours, even though I would thoroughly enjoy being in the hall
itself.  Therefore, to the extent that the general public gets used to
living more and more of its life vicariously through TV, it is less and
less able to relate to things that can't be televised well.

Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]