Spinoff topic: Who Needs Classical Music?

Steve Schwartz:

>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....
>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?"

My all-time "favorite poem" Wallace Stevens' "Table Talk," includes the
lines "Life, then, is largely a thing / Of happens to like, not should."
Thus far I agree with Steve.  And in general, I would say I prefer poems
to novels, though maybe not Blake to Tolstoy, because I don't always
understand Blake.  (Way back in the 12th grade a teacher had his revenge
on what he considered our dreadful and uproarious enthusiasm for "Gunga
Din" by requiring us to explicate a Blake poem.  We weren't up to it
then and I have not gone back to that poem since.) For me the difference
in my appreciation of poems and novels is that I can "lose myself" in
an appealing novel but "find myself" in a striking poem.  Novels take
much more time to read than poems, though, as symphonies require a lot
more time and attention than songs, so I don't read many of them.  No
doubt this is a partial explication of why songs are more popular than
symphonies.

Since this rather closed self-selected group does in general like
symphonies, and since we clearly like to discuss them or see them
discussed, to the degree we have time and skill to articulate that, I
would say we have a common interest in both explaining our preferences
and doing whatever we reasonably can to see to it that symphonies (just
to speak of one classical form, for convenience sake--I actually prefer
concertos!) continue to be available to us by way of performances or
recordings.  Now here we are going outside the realm of aesthetic taste
and appreciation to the social and economic.  That in turn relates to
the vexed and obnoxious topic of charges of "elitism," so often leveled
at those who like classical music.  If taste is simply personal preference
then, unless one willingly accepts the status of snob, a loaded charge
like this can be considered a hurtful insult.  Hence one reason for the
kind of counterattack I take folks like Johnson to be making.

But there may be more to be said.  A long time ago (in a career-dependent
situation, as it happened) someone introduced a distinction between
"aesthetic value" and "artistic value." This puzzled me exceedingly at
the time, but after long reflection I decided that this may make sense
if the former is directly connected to individual taste--what some music,
say, can "do for one" and the latter notion much more connected to the
degree of skill and inventiveness that someone might hear or learn to
hear in the music itself.  I assume that both of these are worth discussing
and that the latter in particular might be subject to rational considerations
focused on works, or maybe even genres, rather than simply on individual
taste or social opprobrium of one sort or another, and thus move discussions
like this forward a bit.

Jim Tobin