D. Stephen Heersink wrote:

>First, classical music is elitist, and we have no need to make apologies.
>Just as computer programming and architecture requires a high degree of
>specialization and appreciation by those relative few, so too classical
>music is appreciated by those relative few who take the time, effort, and
>inspiration to embrace it.  Classical music just isn't a populist or mass
>byline.  It's affecienados are required to take a silent stance against
>many of modernism's pop highly-charged culture, especially silence,
>something which Vroon rightly observes is not enculcated into today's
>television markets. ...

I am confused by this line of reasoning whenever I read it.  First, much
of what is now classical music, but by no means all, was popular music, or
drew heavily from it.  It also drew heavily from popular culture in the
form of writers and painters.  Hoffman is the inspiration for a great deal
of music.  He was, also, a popular writer.

Conversely much of the most popular entertainment is derrived rather
directly from classical music and its ideas on art.  Cinema is nothing,
if it is not a technological form of Wagner's idea of an all encompassing
art for which is composed of the cooperation of many different art genres.
It also relies heavily onc classical styles of music for its sound tracks.
This year's biggest grossing movie will, I assure you, have a classically
styled soundtrack.  So did last year's.  And the year before that.  The
last I checked, cinema was alive and well as popular entertainment.

Elitist is the wrong word.  Particular is the right word.  It is not a
matter of being an elite, but of being particular, of desiring particular
traits in ones music.

The source of my confusion is this: how can someone stand on a soap box
and proclaim that he is a member of some kind of artistic or intellettcual
elite, and be so singularly uninfomred about the history of the artform
that he bases this claim upon? I don't think that the history of opera and
ballet as popular, sometimes even populist forms, the story of the piano
craze, the story of the waltz and so on should be outside of the knowledge
of a reasonably well read classical music afficinado.

I'm all in favor of discussion about the meaning of calssical music, but
it must be based, not on particular views of the use of classical music,
but on an understanding of its place in the entirety of culture.

Every aspect of popular culture, of elite culture, of every subculture
from mass market to snob cultures exist in classical music.  The world
of classical music is inhabited by people, and the needs of the people
who inhabit it are not startlingly different from those on the outside.
Perhaps the description of classical music as anti-modern elite might
apply to traditionalist musicians - people who play nothing after about
1890 and never listen to recordings.  But largely you would have to dig
such people up in a more literal sense.  Classical music has its old line
conservatives, its iron clad high moderns, its snag out hipsters and many
other types as well.  As long as people with different ways of being, with
different needs come to it, it will continue to have a range of types and
needs.

What classical music does ask is a problematic question.  Some time ago it
could be said that classical music was the music based on structure and
form, but I find that jazz lovers are much more intellectual about their
music, and as versed as the average classical music lover was expected to
be some five or six decades ago.  Far larger a percentage of them play, or
attempt to play, and far more of them seem to have some grounding in
theory.  In a discussion of jazz lovers, I seldom find myself having to
explain why I-IV-V is old news, or what the difference between modal and
tonal logic in a piece of music means.

Instead classical music presents itself as a tradition, one that goes back
farther than we know, and continues forward in various, often fractious,
guises.  It is this sense of oldness - a rather Romantic, with a capital
"R", notion.

- - -

What Vroon presents us with is not conservative - because it has forgotten.
To forget is to fail to be a conservative.  The correct word, to be an the
elitist snob I am for a moment, for Vroon and the entire line of reasoning
which spews forth from his pen, is *reactionary*.

Now there is a large difference between conservative and reactionary.
A conservative believes in the preservation of the past, because the very
fact that that past survived shows that in it adheres wisdom and accordance
with nature.  The reactionary believes that his gut reaction against a
trend or fact is justification for his acting against it.  The difference
between these two is constantly confused.  Reactionaries would like to have
us believe that their ideas come from time immemorial, and those on the far
left would like us to believe that conservatives are no more than moderated
versions of the reactionaries of this world.

But there is a distinct difference.  A conservative is quite happy being
distracted by teh Waltz' of Johann Strauss, he need not pay attention to
every note, partially because he is busy paying attention to his partner's
decouletage.  A conservative will happily admit that some of the
masterworks filter down to the general public, and that the spirit of
authenticity which the average person strives for is attained through
high art, because authenticity can only be gained through a level of
reflectiveness which low culture avoids.  A conservtive, in short, does not
disdain the common, but he does wish to refine it away from its lamentable
tendency to leave the lilly ungilded.

A reactionary sees a society filled with jostling people running from job
to home, concerned with nothing that does nto profit or please them, and is
appalled.  They need to be shaped up, or at the very least barricaded out.
Martino called for bouncers at concert hall doors.

I've been warned before not to tell would be conservatives that they are
frauds, for that is what Vroon is, and have been warned not to tell people
who fancy themselves as the avant garde that they are conservatives hewing
close to an artistic program begun before my grandfather was born - but
such it is.  I've been told over and over again that I should pick a party
line and adhere to it, but there it is alcoholic cannot stay away from the
bottle for very long.

- - -

If classical music is to survive it is because it is a vocabulary for
expressing and enacting.  If it is to flourish it must make the case that
this vocabulary is worth the demands it makes.  If it is to be remembered
it must show people it fills their needs, whatever those needs are.  Vroon
has his needs, and I've no objection to him listening as he likes to what
he likes.  But as English lives because it serves the needs of the many,
and through doing so increases its power, so too must the tradition of
music known as classical live by serving many ends, and beings stronger for
it.  It would do us all a great deal of good if we would stop putting on
airs about being some kind of elite and call ourselves what we are - people
who love music and have found in this particular world musical structures
which are capable of supporting that love.

Stirling S Newberry
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