Bert Bailey writes, anent my meanderings on this subject: >In the discussion of this topic, a while ago Jon Johanning had said, in >reply to a remark I made about the price of concerts: > >>...if you think classical concerts are more expensive than rock concerts, >>you don't have kids who frequently hit you up for the requisite cash. > >No, I think both are out of the reach of most, and thus overpriced. No doubt, it would be wonderful if music and the other arts were a lot cheaper than they are. It's a scandal, IMHO, that good music and many other things that make life worth living are priced at what the market will bear while fat-filled fast food for the stomach and TV fast food for the mind are priced cheaply enough for the general population. But without major government subsidies, that's the way things are. >Brian Wilson, Fats Waller and Elvis P and C are/were no slouches in >'crafting' their works just as they want/ed them. Of course, it's a >different sort of craft, less learned, etc. -- but no less worthy. >Why not, instead, dump on Mozart for failing to inspire us to shimmy and >shake, or Bingen and Schnittke for not knowing, I dunno, how to rap? Unmet >expectations like these amount to something very like a category confusion, >IMO. This is a point which I often try to make, in my bumbling fashion: CM and pop music (while both are kinds of music in the broad sense) are really trying to do very different things, which is why they have (generally speaking) very different audiences. Popular music generally aims at appealing directly to people with no particular interest in music as such (the "craft" of music), but who want a nice, lively, steady beat to dance to, a hummable tune to lighten their days, or a moody blues to help them mourn a lost lover, or whatever. This kind of music doesn't require a very great musical genius to produce. In fact, the rock music that developed out of the 60s milieu made a virtue of being unpolished, the direct voice of the "people," who were too poor to take fancy music lessons or go to expensive schools where hoity-toity "music appreciation" was taught. It became fashionable to think that anyone who demanded a higher level of musicianship than the average person could acquire in a couple of weeks of learning to strum basic guitar chords was a rotten traitor to the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world. I happen to think that the level of musical craft represented by CM is by no means a betrayal of progressive politics, but I don't want to get into that argument here. The point is that the percentage of the population who cares enough about musical craft to get hooked on CM is and always will be small. >You also addressed a point I was trying to make about CM's widespread >access for non-fans of CM by saying: > >>Classical CDs generally cost exactly as much as popular ones. > >Assuming that this was so (and I'd side with Ray Bayles's posting that >it's not) ... I guess I'm not informed enough about the market for pop music recordings to enter this debate. I realize that "singles" are available, which is not the case in the classical market. And of course the coming of MP3 threatens to cause the bottom of the market for pop recordings to drop out completely in the near future, whereas the sound quality of the compression is at this point completely inadequate for CM (see the discussion above on musical craft). On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to be within range of a good CM radio station, or have a local public library with a good CM collection, you can manage very well making your own tapes. >My money, instead, is on some kind of reciprocity: TV arose within a >world view that no longer holds in very high regard CM (and some other >harder-earned pleasures). All the same, how so? Just what's the connection >between the much less widespread access for all of CM *out there* and TV >now being a key determinant of what becomes part of the public attention? I agree that there isn't much evidence that TV itself narrows attention spans, and hence destroys the ability to sit still for long pieces of classical music. At the same time, a public that is used to associating the term "music" with 3- or 4-minute songs will obviously need a big reorientation in thinking to grasp something like a Mahler 2nd. (Not much good for tapping your toes to, either.) I think that the problem with TV is that something about the TV watching experience itself doesn't comport well with the CM experience. The advertising executive Jerry Mander, in "Four Arguments for the Abolition of TV" (I think that was the title of the book) described an interesting experiment someone once performed in which a TV camera was set up on a beach, facing the ocean, and the rolling waves were broadcast for several hours. No one could stand to watch it for very long, even though most people enjoy the actual experience of relaxing on the beach for hours. I get the same feeling from being forced to watch a televised concert over a couple of hours, even though I would thoroughly enjoy being in the hall itself. Therefore, to the extent that the general public gets used to living more and more of its life vicariously through TV, it is less and less able to relate to things that can't be televised well. Jon Johanning // [log in to unmask]