Tim Horwood <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>My theory is that when music started to be recorded it became a product.
>Once labelled as a product it was at the mercy of salesmen and marketing
>men and it was a short step to putting it in categories to make purchasing
>easier.

Close; but no cigar.

Music became a product in the 19th century; when cheap sheet music
became widely available.  Composers from Beethoven onwards (& especially
the Strauss family, to use Steve's original eg) could generate increasing
healthy incomes producing solo & vocal miniatures for this market; & this
beer money was still being paid in significant sums right up to the
immediate post-WWII period - only the shock of Bill Haley & the subsequent
rise of the singer/songwriter as recording icon changed the rules.
Ghettoisation was present from the start in the sheet music field
(Gottschalk famously bylined his most commercial entertainments Seven
Octaves to differentiate them from his more aesthetic scores); but even in
the most prentious branches of 19th century romanticism there was seldom a
sense that popularisation was something which needed to be inherently
avoided - hardly surprisingly, since romanticism derived from a form of
democratic nationalism; even if romanticism itself wasn't always democratic
or nationalist.

The deep division of art into critical & venacular modes is strictly a
post-Great War/WWI-vintage concept; & is based on the rather ridiculous
conceit that popular romanticism was one of the main causes of that war
(& therefore had to be rejected per se).  True: many romantics - Elgar
immediately springs to mind - found their popular melodies coopted to serve
the war machine; but the extension of this abuse to being a root cause of
the conflict suggested that these aestheticians (mostly based in neutral
Zurich; & therefore distinctly divorced from both the carnage & causes of
that bloody war) suggested these great artistic thinkers were suffering
from serious delusions of political mediocrity; but the prejudice embedded
itself in the aesthetic mind pretty quickly through highly academicised
schools like NeoClassicism & Surrealism.  The increasing availability of
good recordings from the electric recording period onwards no doubt
reinforced this prejudicial division; but was much too late to have been a
root cause of it.

That said, this division is more a branch of one approach to 20th century
art-music than its aesthetic core; & frankly, not generally representative
of the good stuff.  When a serialist like Skallkottas, a romantic like
Vaughan Williams & a neoprimitif like XIAN can all find ways of integrating
contemporary venacular & personal aesthetic, the rejectionist museum men
were hardly likely to produce much art worth considering.

Live in peace
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