Karl Miller:

>And speaking of the classical market...I am reading a book "Who Needs
>Classical Music." Anyone else out there reading it?

No surprise to anyone who knows me: the argument strikes me as
ultimately specious.  Johnson tries to argue for the "intrinsic aesthetic
quality" of classical music over popular forms.  I admit he gives the
argument a new spin: he distinguishes among music we use for entertainment,
for utilitarian purposes (military marches, for example), and music we
encounter as art.  Unfortunately, given the right circumstances, classical
music falls under all three categories, as does popular music.  Beethoven's
Fifth can be background (scandalous as that may sound), "mere" entertainment
(and, boy, does *that* ever betray a terrible attitude toward the delight
art gives), utilitarian (background for a commercial appealing to "upscale"
tastes), or art.  Son House's "John the Revelator" can be seen in the
same way.

The problem with all the attempts I've encountered to argue "this is
better than that," rather than "this differs from that in these ways,"
is that the most the writers seem able to establish is the latter.  The
rest is drumbeating and patting oneself on the back that one is not like
other men.  I happen to like the music of Anton Webern, Son House, Pierre
Boulez, Vaughan Williams, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen,
Gillian Welch, Elliott Carter, and, yes, Beethoven, Bach, and the rest
of the concert-hall boys and girls.  I have never found any principle
that tells me one is better than another, except my degree of like or
dislike.  I don't congratulate myself on my "catholicity" of taste, since
I'm essentially pleasing myself.  I also don't see why I have to justify
my taste to anyone else.  I can often explain why I like something, but
that's as far as I can go.  I do recognize that certainly music works
differently than other music.  Classical music tends to go on longer
than pop, just as novels go on longer than lyric poems, and thus resorts
to different principles for maintaining coherence.  Is the novel inherently
better than the lyric poem?  Doesn't it depend on which novel and which
poem, and whether we can make a reasonable case?  If we take Anna Karenina
and Blake's "Tyger," does it make any sense at all to compare them on
the basis of "inherent quality?"

Steve Schwartz