I've been reading the Brahms book by Swofford.  The romantic concept of
music as high art (and the highest of the arts) is the underlying reason
why we have a "classical" and a "popular" tradition today, and why there
is a canon of classical European music.  If music is high art it is worth
preserving, and the best art is most likely to last in this value system.

With the massive amount of ephemeral music "in the style" produced
for amateurs (Liebhaber) in 19th century Europe (and to some extent by
European-trained musicians in America)--to which Brahms himself contributed
(pseud.  G.W.  Marks) there was already a real distinction between music
"designed to last" and workaday music.  What was different from the
situation today, is that superficially the two styles weren't that
different.  It was more a matter of "content." The best music was music
that communicated something (this more or less started with Beethoven whose
music (at least the "heroic" compositions) says unequivocally, I have
something to say, and I am saying it.) This something was the higher state
of existence that can't be fully described or defined by words or even by
everyday experience.  The aesthetic experience is the gateway to the other
world.  And when we return from Olympus we are the better for it.  This
must be presumed to be the case otherwise what would be the reason for
existence of such music? Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Comparing this with the situation that obtains today, in a market-driven
entertainment industry, I might observe that the the classical repertoire,
rather than being the cream of a culture's musical output, a repertoire of
which the rest of the music is either a pale imitation or reflection, or
an art with low standing (e.g.  the urban "gypsy" music that Brahms knew
so well, and that perhaps only he could use as a source of inspiration
so knowingly--with Liszt it was always more of an exotic side trip, I
think--but it was in Brahms's bones)--rather than this, classical
repertoire has been reduced to a rarified art form for the intellectual
elite, and is largely irrelevant to the mass of society.  By contrast,
the lower forms of musical expression--lower only in the sense of social
guilt-by-association--and here you can make, as Swofford does, a very good
parallel between the urban gypsy music of the 19th century and early
jazz--"club music" to put it euphemistically--these lower forms through a
vast complex process involving the development of recording, mass marketing
and a "star" system of career-making became the dominant musical culture.

While we who love the classical canon can still taste of the ineffable
much as our 19th-century counterparts did, it ain't quite the same.  We
carry the burden of the "historically informed" in a way that they were
only just beginning to.  We know we are listening to a music that is
paradoxically both for all time and OF a time.  That's a very curious
situation.  But not an UNUSUAL situation.  You could say the same thing
about any kind of artistic effort that is part of a "canon." Moby Dick,
the Iliad, Guernica, Sistine Chapel, Hamlet, etc.

To me it raises the question, what is there in an art work that transcends
its style, which we may presume to be linked to the time from which it
comes? Is it "content"? Perhaps, (I add darkly), this is the postmodern
dilemma...

Chris Bonds