On the Extinction of the Lowbrow in Musical Taste

The Transcontinental was intended to be primarily an arts and culture blog, but truth be told, dear readers, I have always been too lazy too keep up with the latest goings-on in the music/arts blogosphere.

Although this has likely cursed me to never make any of those top 50 classical music blog lists, it does offer me one advantage - the benefit of hindsight. I can read stuff, stew about it, forget it, remember again, forget again, and then, when I feel like it, trot it out to fill up some time during a slow afternoon.

So it is with the whole recent classical blogosophere dust-up about musoc.org. What got me thinking about this again was this post by Daniel Stephen Johnston, which linked to this post by Matthew Guerrieri.

Now back in July, when this came up initially, I had read the pieces by prominent critics and bloggers about musoc.org, which denounced musoc.org's "mandate" and explaining why musoc.org is so problematic and perhaps threatens classical music itself. For reasons that will become clearer later, this rhetorical strategy is a clear representation of the classical blogosphere middlebrow consensus.

This is the same "consensus" that CBC used to market their changes over at CBC Radio 2, which was to stereotype classical music lovers as a small cabal of ignorant fools who have been denying others the opportunity to listen to Leonard Cohen at 8 in the morning. Moreover, in denying others, they have denied themselves of the wonderful richness that is music outside of the Pachelbel-to-Elliott Carter classical stranglehold.

When you think about this, the reaction to musoc.org is rather curious - the very people whose professional lives are devoted to writing about classical music are those who are also first to denounce musoc's mandate. To them I ask - why are you so scared of musoc.org? Is it that it plays to some kind to horrible stereotype of the classical music snob, the straw men and women used all these years by the music industry as a trope to help define popular music as mass entertainment?

I admit there is some truth to this fear. I am often frustrated by the fact that, often, when I have a conversation with someone about music, and it invariably comes up that I listen/play to classical music, the immediate reaction is to look at me suspiciously and get somewhat defensive. Maybe this is really just a Canadian thing, but I suspect that this happens quite a lot to other classical music musicians/lovers, and as such, we have all taken on a kind of defense mechanism to reduce the inherent social conflict that comes with being someone who enjoys the music of Brahms.

But you scratch this surface just a little and you start to see that the issue for classical music critics and bloggers isn't merely one of taste, but also one of class. Someone who enjoys caviar simply must also enjoy a ham and cheese on white bread. Someone who enjoys Schubert Lieder simply must also enjoy Def Leppard, not because these things are any good (on either side of the equation) but because it's very impolite to portray mass culture as something less than high culture.

And what is even more remarkable about all of this is that there is now a website that it actually devoted to the analysis of this very strong pull towards the middle: Joshua Glenn's hilobrow. This website, which is part of the reason I have returned to blogging, helps to provide the kind of critique the classical music blogosphere needs right now, perhaps more than ever.

To be clear - I am not saying high culture is better than mass culture. What I am saying is that people on the high culture side of things feel a very great tendency to say out loud, and often, that they think mass culture is just as good as high culture. Indeed, Greg Sandow has pretty much sewn up a corner of the blogosphere by constantly proclaiming that the problem with classical music isn't just that it's the aesthetic equivalent of popular music, but that classical music must learn from popular music in order to survive.

I have wanted to critique Sandow's entire approach without the sneering condescension that most attacks on him constitute, in part because I believe his work is more representative of a theme as much as the sneering attacks how. Moreover, Sandow makes certain aesthetic assumptions in his work where he equates aesthetic value with economic value, but what has been lacking is a way of unpacking some of that in a way that avoids a purely economic reduction.

Hilobrow has given me the vocabulary to begin that critique (thank you again, Joshua Glenn!). So taking a page from Glenn's site, I would argue that Greg Sandow is the biggest representative of middlebrow attitudes in the classical blogosphere. Indeed, his telos is to assert the middlebrow consensus. And if the classical blogosphere is any kind of indication, he is winning.

What makes musoc.ord so unsettling to everyone is that musoc doesn't give a crap about popular music or mass taste. This desire to drag the highbrow people down into the middlebrow is, as Glenn makes manifest on his site, a defining characteristic of middlebrow culture.

There are two interesting observations from this. Firstly, this pull is a one-way street: I can't recall the last time I saw a classical music critic or blogger denounce a popular musician for saying that they thought classical music sucked. Secondly, given where these kinds of criticisms of classical music are coming from, is it safe to say that classical music itself, culturally speaking, is far more middlebrow than it ever was, or than Sandow and allied critics argue it to be?

Indeed, if Alex Ross' central thesis in The Rest is Noise is that classical music has somehow lost its central place in the cultural life of the West, isn't that in part because the economic and social elites no longer consider most classical music to be a highbrow activity, and not because the highbrow musicians lost the public, a public they likely never really had to begin with?

This kind of analysis, and I know I am using Joshua Glenn's terminology rather roughly here, seems, at least to me, to make a lot of sense. So let's take a look at some examples.

Take John Lennon. I think he wrote some great songs, but I think he was completely off base and ignorant about classical music. In fact, his disliking of classical music seems the obverse of the straw-man classical music snob. However, culturally speaking, Lennon gets a free pass from everyone because Lennon is on the right side of that one-way street.

What's even more interesting about this is that the classical music middlebrow consensus is constantly wanting to reassure the (putative) lowbrow music listener that they too have taste, even though the vast majority of people don't listen to classical music. What they are really doing is making it clear that the middlebrows are still the arbiters of taste, even though most people's complete indifference to classical music, and the classical music community's intense, nearly overwhelming desire to proselytize, to convert, the lowbrows over to the fold suggests the complete opposite. (Perhaps it is the middlebrow's guilt towards not listening to enough classical music that also contributes to this kind of attack - but maybe that's psychologizing a bit too much!)

It seems that, culturally speaking, the goalposts with respect to music have shifted completely, and that who has been lost in all this is the lowbrow. (I think Carl Wilson's book on Celine Dion is perhaps the clearest argument for this fact).

With the lowbrow effectively extinct as a cultural force in this triad of brows, what we have here is a hegemonic middlebrow community enforcing norms, on the few remaining holdouts (and let's be honest, there are very few) of all that's left, namely highbrow music.

Musoc.org is fighting a rear-guard action to bring classical music back into the cultural highbrow, which is likely a hopeless task. In part this is because its status there has long been open to question (think of many of Beethoven's piano sonatas, who did he write them for?). At the same time, the classical music writers and bloggers who loathe musoc.org are trying to keep the classical music-as-elitist-strawman alive because it keeps them in business, it is an enemy that allows them to continue to fight.

At best, my hope is that musoc.org is something like The Chap, utopian and more related to the tenets of Surrealism than anything else. What it certainly isn't is a threat to classical music or its role in the cultural life of the world.

This also explains why figures like Boulez and Adorno figure so largely as villains in Ross' book, because they are both committed to finding a way to preserve highbrow music after the war. What I am beginning to suspect is that the flaw I felt in Ross' book, as much as I enjoyed it, was that the highbrow/middlebrow disctinction he sets up so well in the book is a false dichotomy, because classical music to nearly everyone means "Bach and Beethoven" and not "Boulez and Stockhausen", and that this is what classical music meant to people long before Schoenberg came along. (Nikil Saval actually argues this much better than I do around Ross' book at the n+1 site)

So where do we go from here? I am not sure, except that I am feeling more confident than ever that the answer to that question is nowhere.

Eulogy

I live in a neighbourhood of churches. In either direction, in order for me to catch a streetcar, I have to pass by at least one church.

Every day, at least three out of seven times a week, there is a funeral at one of the churches. So many mornings, I walk past a hearse, sometimes laden, sometimes empty. I pass by people in black, local people, who must have black clothes just for this occasion, because they wear the same thing. I see flowers, and people crying, holding each others hands.

This morning there was no funeral, so as I made my way to my local convenience store, the church sat there empty. When I got to the store, it was closed, which is odd. However, there was a sign on the door, which told patrons that the man who ran the store had died and that the store would be closed until further notice.

I had seen him only a few days ago, tending to his store. He has a nice man, a bit taciturn as I find many people in my neighbourhood, but helpful and generous. In healthy communities I think one can say that local businesspeople have the air of a local figure, someone of some importance to our lives even if we never think about them outside of their business.

But I think of him now, and my last encounter. I had gone in there to buy dog food, and they were out of food, so I left without buying anything. Context is everything - the triviality of buying dog food becomes that last encounter with someone, the last smile, the last good bye.

Soon, there will be another morning funeral, and I will know the body that lies in the casket, in the hearse that parks half on the sidewalk,and half on Grace Street.

Worst Pop/Classical Analogy Ever?

There's a piece in Torontoist today about the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. It's a great piece with one exception - the writer compares Gustavo Dudamel to Mick Jagger.

Mick Jagger? Really? Of all the musical celebrities that come to mind when you see Dudamel on stage, and an 65-year old British rocker comes to mind? I'm all for poetic license, but...no.

So how about...Justin Timberlake? He's young and talented, like Dudamel, and more importantly, all the Mick Jagger fans at the big SARS concert here years ago booed him when he came on stage!

Underground Supper Clubs?

I do fret for my generation and, dare I say it, my class...

I do so especially when I see something like this piece on "underground" supper clubs. It seems that the latest score in culinary adventure is to go to a dinner party.

Except it's a dinner party which has, through the magic of capitalism and advertising, been turned into a commodity. No longer will you have to have drinks and dinner with an assemblage of friends and acquaintances who've slaved all day to prepare your meal, no, you can now pay to sit in a room full of strangers vetted by a guy who called his "club", I suspect without a trace of irony, the "anti-restaurant".

Hey, Chris's Burgers, I have another name for the "anti-restaurant" - eating at home. Bravo for finding a clever way to make money while circumventing local public health and alcohol rules at the same time.

Seriously, is that what passes for dissent amongst our chattering classes? A dinner party you have to pay for and bring your own alcohol to strikes me as hopelessly déclassé.

Look, I know that one isn't supposed to snark anymore on the Internet, but these supper clubs are a nothing more than a bait-and-switch where someone takes something utterly ordinary, dresses it up in some "exclusive" or "elitist" way, and people flock to them.

This isn't exclusivity, it's kitsch. And that's a word you'll be seeing a lot more of around here.

Slap Chop

Is it just me, of does the guy in those Slap Chop ads on TV and everywhere else look a lot like Willem Dafoe? When I see these ads, which seem to play incessantly right now, I'm reminded of Orson Welles, who, in trying to fund his projects, would shill for frozen peas.

Nevertheless, one can imagine that if Dafoe needs some extra scratch to help fund the next Lars von Trier film, standing in for the Slap Chop guy looks like it would be an easy fit.

Before you all run away thinking I've sold my blog out, I haven't linked to the aforementioned Slap Chop, nor do I have any knowledge of its quality aside from the Dafoeganger's assertions. Just some random musings, which are better than never posting at all, right? Right?

Emergence

I cannot honestly say that my lack of posting has to do with being busy. I am very busy, but that has rarely stopped me before. Rather, I think that part of the reason why I'm not posting is the blogging for me is a kind of therapy, although I cannot put my finger on it, and I haven't really needed the therapy it provides me lately.

There is a very good reason for this - in the past two months, my skills as a piano player have increased dramatically. I have been practising and playing away pretty consistently now for 2 1/2 years, and I'm at the point that if I see an F# on the page, my hand just reaches over and plays it. I'm not longer "thinking" about finding the note - my hand is just there.

Do I always get it? No, but anyone who plays the piano who reads this blog, and I suspect those of you who do are far better keyboardists than I, will get what I'm saying - the mind concentrates more on nuance, while the body concentrates on execution. There is a kind of division happening, although the division reconciles itself in the outcome. I feel I am on the cusp of mastery.

So when I have a choice between writing on this blog, and playing Beethoven, I think you can appreciate that playing Beethoven wins. What is perhaps a little sad about this is that I feel that my mastery of writing, which has always been on the line, is slipping away from me.

I also feel I should clarify my use of "mastery". Am I claiming to be Schnabel or Pollini? No! I mean it more that if one takes learning something as the equivalent of climbing a hill, I feel I am on the other side. Now one always has to be careful about the other side of that hill - it can be treacherous, there is a risk of falling, but the practice of getting down the hill is a fundamentally different one from that of climbing.

Mastery, to me, is being on the descent. It's why I have finally started to look at the late Beethoven sonatas.

***

Now some of you may ask, why the alpine metaphors? I've been climbing. In fact, when I was in Alberta, I hiked up Mount Fairview. I had never done anything like this before, but the experience has the feeling of a wound that will never heal, and that is only stanched by climbing again. So next year I hope to scramble Mount Temple.


(This isn't a photo of Mount Temple, it's actually on the other side)

What does all of this mean for this blog? A few things have lately conspired to get me wondering what I'm up to here. There has been my desire to comment on stuff with vague political ramblings and linking. (It's interesting to consider the relationship between

However, perhaps most crucially, there has been this site: hilobrow, which I discovered via Crooked Timber.

I have to say, I absolutely love this site, not least for it's unrepentant defense of Theodor Adorno, perhaps the driest straw man in the entire blogosphere! (I mean, check out that Crooked Timber post, and pretty much every North American classical music blogger's post on Adorno. As much as I like him, I kind of blame Alex Ross for this. But that's not really an argument, so I will have to actually engage with that statement, as he is the big man on the virtual campus.

But not today (That will be on my tombstone...) Suffice to say that the anti-Adorno animus found on Crooked Timber is premised on the fact that he hated jazz and Disney. So many people say this to me that I no longer even find it funny, especially given many of those who say this to me never listen to jazz, in fact, I would go so far to say that they have no time for it. It's more a kind of shorthand to say "Adorno doesn't like kitsch and we do."

What exactly was Adorno wrong about?

I think that if I can faintly see a kind of vision for this blog, it is one that spends a lot of time defending Adorno. I think what the classical music blogopshere needs, more than anything, is someone willing to defend Adorno. I think that someone is going to be me. Unless I'm too late!

Really, just take a look at my blog title. Maybe writing about wine and talking about goulash and kitsch and Adorno would make this place just a bit more interesting, a bit more combative, and a bit more me.

The Left - In our Heads

They argue too much. With each other. Too much arguing, not enough lefting. I kid, sort of...but bear with me.

After a while, arguing feels an awful lot like doing stuff, but it's not, except when arguing is doing something. I mean, it sure feels like doing something - you get all hot and bothered, you have trouble sleeping because someone wrote a mean blog response to your blog post, and it goes on and on.

Blogging is an activity, isn't it? Changing people's minds, one hit at a time, right? Arguing is even engaging, right?

I love critiques. If someone could write a critique like Kant did, back in the day, when people just sort of up and stopped doing entire swaths of philosophy, because Kant came up and closed the door on it, and then padlocked it, these problems wouldn't happen, would they?

But we know that's not going to happen again because Kant, the conditions that made his critique possible and the ways in which we know things have changed so much that one can safely say that the door is no longer there to be closed. Got a problem with someone, no matter how outrageous? You've got a platform.

And so I, like many before and after me, hung out our shingles and tried to talk politics, and I really feel I tried. I joined the conversation.

But those blog commenters! What stamina! Who has the time to engage them? To incessantly be at them, to play bugbear to their troll?

How long did I last? Seven months? And now, the tepidity of my political entries, the thin gruel of my iconoclasm, are a point of shame for me.

So where is this strange rambling post going? It's going to the old saw of doing vs. thinking, of writing vs. building stuff. One sees, in the light of the economic colapse, the twilight of the left around the world. What gives? Was it really only a year ago that many of us thought that the moment would be siezed and we would be looking at a very different world?

But, and this is the kicker, was the problem really that everyone was too busy blogging about the collapse of capitalism to actually try to build something new? Remember people, comment patrolling is work! Blogging is work!

Back to the question though - I feel the answer is no. Most of us, in our own ways, are both in the online world and, perhaps unsurprisingly, eat and sleep and go to art museums and church and defecate like real people too, you know, like in Ulysses.

And I suspect a lot of those people, and a lot of bloggers, participate in the world. And we participate in the world by allowing governments and corporations to be who they are, because it's too much work to do things any other way. I think sometimes why I walk away from the online world is that there continues to be something strangely shameful about it, in that it reveals me for someone bourgeois enough to talk about my life and things I think about it in public, but never about the things I do in my life that affect actual people.

Maybe the issue then, and the issue in the post I linked to way up above is that somehow all this talk among the left, all these critiques, all these posts and forums, is that they all feel like statistics, as in statistical reports. We are all sitting around reading statistics everyday. And helping out in a soup kitchen doesn't help, because after a while the people you help also start to become statistics.

To sum up, blogs lack the taste of the real.

Blowing our Minds

When one reads this article, it's hard not to smack your head and think "of course, why didn't anyone really think about this before?"

Could this be the final copernican turn, that we are not the end of the evolutionary path? I hope so.

A Question to the Classical Blogosphere

Why is it that a disproportionate number of classical music bloggers have elected to truncate their posts for RSS feeds? Is it some kind of desperate desire to know how many people are reading them? Maybe the siren call of google ads tempts them too much to allow people access to their free content?

Really, I'm just curious.

Shrugging

There is a great essay right now in the New Republic on Ayn Rand. There is some wonderful writing in it, and the final paragraph is fantastic.

I think it's safe to say to my readers that I'm not fan of Ayn Rand, so the essay offered little to me in the way of contrary opinions. However, I have one concern with the essay.

It argues that Objectivism is the obverse of Marxism. However, Marx wrote a critique of capitalism. Communism is the outcomes of this massive analysis, and whether one likes it or not, has a lot of intellectual merit.

Rand, on the other hand, appears to have been simply, a deeply narcissistic person, and wrote a few books that allowed other narcissists to feel they had a moral basis for their own narcissism. I don't detect analysis in her work so much as a deep desire for the world to be as it was in her own mind.

Analysis of the world vs. Desire for world to be just like me doesn't strike me as terribly obversive.