Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>:

>[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.]

I think that this phenomenon took place *especially* at the century
in which we were born.  At the 20th century the "contamination" between
popular and "classical" music was much more spontaneous and bi-directional
than at the 19th century, and it produced much more diverse fruits by the
way.

>(...) 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?

Artists as Beethoven and Berlioz (and almost all the Romantics) were very
grumpy concerning those distinctions.  As representants of the intellectual
bourgeois class, they were absolutely conscious and proud of the absolute
superiority of its Art in front of any folk or popular output.  Of course,
they had also an idealized mindframe about what the popular is; you know:
gentle shepherds playing the fiddle, a merry round of peasants dancing
after the storm and all that stuff:  "very pretty and inspiring, Sir, but
please keep all this far from gentlemen like us".  Remember that passage
at Berlioz's "Memoires" in which he reflects at the Piazza after the Roman
Carnival, or some of the Schumann's advices addressed to the young music
students...

>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.

>The Renaissance teems with masses based on folk music.

It's known that many Renaissance masses were based on previously known
secular melodies, but those melodies were not what we could call properly
"folk".  The majority of them were melodies from courtly music pieces (a
repertoire quite elitist and unaccesible for the peasant or the lower
classes at the cities).  The same occurs at Medieval times.  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 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.

Until here I agree to the general point of your post.  I cannot discuss
the fact that this "bothers" you, since it's a subjective or emotional
reaction, and you are entitled to that.  But I just ask:  why *should*
that two-way commerce take place always?.  There can't be a music that
simply doesn't needs it at all?.  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?.

>Apparently, it's time for pop to aim for symphonic reach(...)

Haven't Emerson &Co. done it yet?:-)

Pablo Massa
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