Steve Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>: >[One of the things I keep going on about -- one of those Big Ideas that >seem to strike me about every twenty years -- is how, in almost every >century but the twentieth, so-called "vernacular" music, either folk or >popular, has invigorated art music, and vice versa. This post expands an >article I wrote for the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center.] I think that this phenomenon took place *especially* at the century in which we were born. At the 20th century the "contamination" between popular and "classical" music was much more spontaneous and bi-directional than at the 19th century, and it produced much more diverse fruits by the way. >(...) As late as the 19th century, composers and audiences alike made >few distinctions between classical and popular. To which side, for >example, do the works of Johann Strauss II belong? Artists as Beethoven and Berlioz (and almost all the Romantics) were very grumpy concerning those distinctions. As representants of the intellectual bourgeois class, they were absolutely conscious and proud of the absolute superiority of its Art in front of any folk or popular output. Of course, they had also an idealized mindframe about what the popular is; you know: gentle shepherds playing the fiddle, a merry round of peasants dancing after the storm and all that stuff: "very pretty and inspiring, Sir, but please keep all this far from gentlemen like us". Remember that passage at Berlioz's "Memoires" in which he reflects at the Piazza after the Roman Carnival, or some of the Schumann's advices addressed to the young music students... >We may also say that the split exists more in the minds of the general >public than it ever did with composers from different sides of the >tracks. Indeed, they've listened to one another throughout history. Yes, but not always. Many 19th century composers simply let pass some folk music (in a harmless, aseptic state) into their works just in order to get an exotic or coloristic touch. >The Renaissance teems with masses based on folk music. It's known that many Renaissance masses were based on previously known secular melodies, but those melodies were not what we could call properly "folk". The majority of them were melodies from courtly music pieces (a repertoire quite elitist and unaccesible for the peasant or the lower classes at the cities). The same occurs at Medieval times. In fact, almost all the Medieval and Renaissance secular music was conceived by and for some precise social-cultural environments that were very far from being part of the majority of the people (clerks, courts, the higher bourgeois class at the cities, etc.). >It unsettles me when this sort of two-way commerce doesn't take place. As >much as I like the music of Anton Webern, it bothers me that, in contrast >to most major comosers of Western music, it sounds hermetically sealed, so >that nothing "low" or "impure" sneaks in. It means to me that he's simply >not listening to anybody but himself, while most great musicians -- >classical and vernacular -- are always on the alert for a vibrant sound >they haven't heard before. Until here I agree to the general point of your post. I cannot discuss the fact that this "bothers" you, since it's a subjective or emotional reaction, and you are entitled to that. But I just ask: why *should* that two-way commerce take place always?. There can't be a music that simply doesn't needs it at all?. Isn't it good (for the diversity of the Universe, at least) that some composers seems hermetically sealed to folk or popular music, especially when the general stream of aesthetics seems to take the opposite course?. >Apparently, it's time for pop to aim for symphonic reach(...) Haven't Emerson &Co. done it yet?:-) Pablo Massa [log in to unmask]