Billie Eilish, or as I think of her, the "Slough of Despond," has a new album out. Here is the first track:
For some odd reason, I started to wonder if the free marketplace is really the ideal location for the fine arts. Should we be buying and selling fine art as if it were frozen fish sticks? I throw that question out for my commentators. But let's take a brief trip through history for some clues. Also, since I don't know a heck of a lot about the other art forms I am going to focus on music.
The classical music traditions of Western Europe had some distant roots in the music theory of Ancient Greece and the chant traditions of the Eastern Roman Empire, but the proximate origins were in the monasteries of the Church. Have a look at the first volume of Taruskin's Oxford History for the fascinating tale of how notation actually grew out of an administrative theological problem of unifying the chant traditions. The relevant point is, while secular music (about which we know almost nothing at this point in time) was part of the ordinary marketplace, liturgical music was not. And that was the stuff that was written down. All the important advances, the staff line of Guido of Arezzo (a monk), the counterpoint of the Notre Dame composers and so on, were associated with church musicians. Ted Gioia makes a big deal out of the development of the love song, primarily in secular contexts, which is fine, but that was a minor niche. Opera, while it started as a noble diversion, did become an entertainment driven by market forces, just as pop music is today. But alongside that were the chamber music and orchestral traditions that were supported exclusively (at first) by the aristocracy, only becoming middle class entertainments in the 19th century.
Looking at the situation today, government cultural programs have taken over from a vanished aristocratic class in their support of music that could not be viable in a free marketplace. This includes contemporary composition, of course, but also orchestral, chamber and opera performances, all of which are too expensive to be supported by box office receipts.
Alongside that we have a hugely profitable pop music sector that earns billions of dollars in the free market. Unfortunately, the quality is poor. Let's see what Rick Beato has to say:
Actually, the headline oversells the clip. But he sees a lot of poor quality stuff. I think that a hard look at motivations might be illuminating. Isn't it pretty clear that while today's pop musicians pretend to be expressing their inner profundities, the truth is that they are just chasing numbers. Which is why most pop music today is a feeble mirror of all the neuroses of their listeners. There is a really good quote from Frank Zappa that I can't seem to find. It is something about the standards of pop music are based on the musical tastes of a 14 year old girl in Cucamonga. Here is one that I did find:
"The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It's not based on beauty, it's based on hype and it's based on cocaine. It's based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air." --Frank Zappa
Sure, there is lots of great pop music, but that sure doesn't seem the direction it is headed today.
Here is a piano piece, Darknesse Visible (1992), by Thomas Adès based on a lute song by John Dowland:
I do think that the current state of pop is not only caused by technology and societal changes. Perhaps behind closed doors the pop industry has an agenda based on the abuse of freedom and the destruction of tradition and prosperity. To me, mainstream pop of this day and age is a reflection of greed, corruption, and degeneracy.
ReplyDeleteProbably in the next 20 years, we would all have to live in a very oppressive regime where the only types of music and noises allowed are pop, hip hop, and anything that feels artificial and cookie-cutter.
Ah, greed, corruption and degeneracy, the three virtues of the 21st century.
ReplyDeletea caveat Taruskin put in early in Volume 1 was to point out that just because X or Y appeared in the literate musical tradition doesn't mean that style of music hadn't been around for generations (even centuries) before someone in a European country decided it was worth committing that style of music to a written form. One of the least plausible elements of Gioia's "subversive" history is the bottom-up shake-up revolutionary stuff being resisted and then co-opted by The Establishment (which is the implicit but useless catch-all in his approach). Adorno, no less, wrote that "high" and "low" were continually exchanging ideas in various earlier eras of the arts. Dwight MacDonald even hinted at this idea. Charles Rosen, no less, contended that in the symphonies of Haydn, the operas of Mozart, and the lieder of Schubert during a brief span of the 18th and early 19th centuries erudite composition fused with the virtues of street song defined the Classical Era (Beethoven symphonies could sometimes count, too, for this point).
ReplyDeleteAs I've read more music history and surveyed music across periods in "the great tradition" it seems to me that there were scholars and even polemicists who recognized that "classical" and "pop" had a more synergistic and mutually beneficial set of relationships up through the 19th century.
Now I have a polemical idea about WHY the 19th century marked a sea-change in which pop was considered too vulgar to be fused with "classical" and it's a mixture of Raymond Knapp's observation about German Idealism and Wagnerian art religion on the one hand and the racist biases in musicology that Philip Ewell pointed out on the other. We've had almost two centuries of "classical" and "pop" having partisans who refuse to accept that these traditions are part and parcel of a common trans-Atlantic musical cultural nexus and the results have been the detriment of both "classical" and "pop". It seems to have been when trans-Atlantic popular music was developed and refined by African diasporic traditions that it became more and more common to insist on the canard that "high" and "low" musics couldn't mutually benefit each other in classical music contexts. I admit this is my polemical hypothesis about where pop AND classical music have tended to go wrong, it's why I was unhappy with the Wesley Morris piece in the 1619 Project for the NYT. William Grant Still and Scott Joplin and William Levi Dawson and other composers wrote good music that has become part of the classical canon but in the case of Joplin he's a sufficiently liminal figure we could expand upon and extend the possibilities in ragtime into other potential styles. But that's the drum (one of several) I beat at my blog.
The exceptions in rock and pop almost prove the rule. The Beatles had Stockhausen on an album cover and Hendrix famously said he aspired to develop a Bach/Handel/Muddy Waters/flamenco sound. Glass had his Bowie-derived symphonies (though I personally can't stand Glass).
The free market is a wonderful place for the (current) fine arts if you are a buyer. If you have a bit of taste acquired through looking at a wide variety of art you can pick up very well done creative art for a relatively small price and sometimes a pittance. Really the only true free marketplace is the auction house for critically established art. Elsewhere the 95%ters seeks reassuring formulaic art while the remaining 5% are willing to buy less formulaic art works at a low price. This is not a new development as it was just lack of money in the past that left the 95%ters with no ability to buy such things. To be fair the 95%ters do have standards and don't celebrate any old formulaic art but they are not looking for a more creative aspect.
ReplyDeleteHowever even in the pop music world of Billie Eilishes we have an increasingly narrow path to success either through trust fund kids or family connections in the music biz. Britney Spears and Olivia Rodrigo came out of the Disney franchise, Eilish has a brother in the music biz while Lana Del Rey and The Taylor have rich families as did Carly Simon back in the day for that matter. That's not to say that these artists are talentless; they generally have something about them that makes the music making machine view them as worth investing in. But outsiders need not apply. So it's becoming like any closed shop.
As I said before we are facing an environment where the more creative non formulaic artists will have to have enough money to pursue it as an avocation. So the formulaic and non formulaic arts are now sharing the foundation of affluence to play that game.
As Scott Timberg put it when he was still alive, the point for him was not that Swift was a bad songwriter or musician as that the rags to riches vibe some of her early press stories generated belied her being the fifth generation of a line of investment bankers and financiers. THAT was the part Scott Timberg objected to. He didn't object to her playing a PR game of chicken with Apple Music about their grisly royalty rates, which inspired him to write a piece at Salon called "Dear Taylor, sorry I ripped on you. Please keep using your powers for good." It was one of the last pieces I remember reading from Timberg before his suicide.
ReplyDeleteHis point, though, pretty vividly reinforced Maury's observation about how much insider connections have been part of recent success stories. Taylor Swift isn't my favorite but I frankly find her music less aggravating (i.e. insufferable than the usual four-chord soul bro balladeers I've heard in the last ten years.
The late Roger Scruton said that financial and cultural elites generally tend to call the shots in the arts and that's why he believed they needed to make good music (plenty of people differed with his idea of what that entailed) but Scruton at least had no illusions about the implications of his literal elitism. He knew he staked out an elitist position so his complaints about cultural production amounted to, "Given that elites make fine arts why are they settling for so much of this garbage?"
I don't tend to follow the arts but with the likes of banksy and Damian Hirst and Jeff Koons I can't really see that I'm missing out on anything when I could read manga instead.
"Given that elites make fine arts why are they settling for so much of this garbage?"
ReplyDeleteThe Hatchet: Scruton didn't realize that current elites have worse taste than the average member of the public not better taste. They are not even the M. Jourdains that Moliere made fun of in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme but people who just chase after celebrity.
Scruton's elitism was pretty idealistic.
ReplyDeleteIronically, as I've been reading through books assessing his influence and legacy I've seen a rift between conservative political philosophy and Anglican orthodoxy on whether or not Scruton's contribution was ultimately positive. Political conservatives, unsurprisingly, regard Scruton's contribution to political philosophy and aesthetics to be formidable. Orthodox Anglicans, by contrast, regard his aesthetic positions as unpersuasive and predicated on a lacklustre-at-best understanding of the dogmatics of Anglican Christianity he regarded chiefly as a cultural/ethnic legacy rather than a confessional one (that a big chunk of the African Anglican communion is not in agreement with London is not a big surprise for those of us who keep tabs on this).
I think in the long run SCruton's political and aesthetic philosophy has basically nothing significant to offer despite his popularity among conservatives, and I write that as a moderate conservative in both politics and as a professing Christian. Scruton's Anglicanism comes across as what we low church Protestants would call the "bedside Baptist" variety, however sincere it was.
I wasn't trying to single out Scruton for being disconnected from the current reality since many people are across the political spectrum. To be fair it is a quite unusual situation we are in currently where the elites are not the socio-cultural leaders but rather the followers. This has bled even into the sciences where Kim Kardashian was recently a featured presenter of breakthough science awards. I was just pointing out that given this situation the old coterie of arts patronage is kablooey and therefore to pursue the arts as a serious endeavor increasingly requires affluence, whether through insider status or outsider financial independence.
ReplyDeleteOr you could just work in creative directions--and didn't we used to believe that a lot of that came from outside the elite classes? I'm a firm believer that artists in whatever genre should be doing art, not chasing awards, grants, ratings or royalties. Because that is how art is actually created. That other stuff we used to call kitsch. Incidentally, while we are talking about conservative thinkers, Paul Johnson, while mostly regarded as a historian wrote a fine History of Art showing fine taste and balance.
ReplyDeleteBartok quipped that competitions were for horses and not artists and I admit to being a Bartok fan. :)
ReplyDeleteYet Adorno's comment in Aesthetic Theory seems apt, too, that the price the arts have paid for liberation from throne and altar is a crisis of basic legitimacy and social purpose from which no variation of art for the sake of art has rescued it. Taruskin's comment about the pluriformity of Baroque era arts and music has stuck with me, there we could observe dozens of forms and styles and genres in music and no sense of "crisis" about the sheer variety of styles that are retrospectively and retroactively regarded as "Baroque". The reason? The social purpose and function of all those genres of music was given, and there was not yet a dogma of art for the sake of art to force the question of "Why, really, does this stuff get made?"
IT's been ages since I read Paul Johnson but I read a book by Jed Esty on The Future of Decline where he pointed out that Johnson's prediction that overextension of military activity combined with a failure to get the welfare state elements streamlined would probably be what very slowly and eventually destabilized the United States as a hyper-power. It's been literally decades since I read The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers but if it's the same Paul Johnson then, yeah, I'd say he's shown a capacity for taste and balance on a couple of fronts from what I've been able to read of him.
Bryan,
ReplyDeleteTo whom were you directing your comment? If me, how can people work in creative directions if they have to make a living outside the arts? Charles Ives had a physical/mental breakdown trying to juggle serious music composition and running a successful business. Unless one has a very easy but well paying job, it doesn't seem likely that people will stick at creative efforts that take extended concentration and effort while working 9-5 at something else. You yourself could not make a decent living in the arts years ago and did something unrelated. It's only gotten worse.
My point is also not about chasing awards since the old elites only gave awards to themselves. But a system was created whereby patronage allowed less affluent artists of whatever field to sustain themselves financially in other words make a living at it as The Hatchet notes. Celebrities are the cultural leaders but fat chance of getting them to support the arts except for celebrity parties like the Met Gala.
I read somewhere recently that, up until the 21st century, artists made a purposeful effort to study the past and revere tradition and the great artists, whereas now we don't bother.
ReplyDeleteA simplistic notion, sure! But in the 21st century, I sense an almost contemptuous attitude to the past, of disrespecting where we (I'm talking about our inherited Western culture) have come from. "The patriarchy is to blame for all the ills of the present, and so on and so forth"). If the bourgeoisie created modernity (sounds like something Walter Benjamin would say, and perhaps he did), then right now we are dealing with modernity's fallout. Forget post-post-modernity, right now we are living in a post-religious Western world. We have liberated ourselves from the dogma, oppression and general evils of the aristocracy and the church and now bask in the Arcadian fields of apathy, strumming on our out-of-tune ukuleles.
Really good comment threads this week. Let me see if I can tie some of this together.
ReplyDeleteThe post was making the general claim that, for most of western history the fine arts were only peripherally in the marketplace. Half of the significant music was sponsored by the Church and much of the rest by the aristocracy. In much of the last hundred years government has stepped in to support economically inefficient art forms like dance, theatre and music. The visual arts have the advantage of producing physical objects that can be sold for high prices. Alas, music, dance, etc, do not so some form of patronage is needed.
Thanks Wenatchee for the critique from Adorno that "the price the arts have paid for liberation from throne and altar is a crisis of basic legitimacy and social purpose from which no variation of art for the sake of art has rescued it." This is a telling one. Yes, music in particular has struggled to find a social role. The use of classical music for weddings and funerals, etc. illustrates two things: it has only a minor role in modern life AND that popular music lacks the gravitas to accompany a number of social contexts.
Yes, Maury, I was responding to your comment that "to pursue the arts as a serious endeavor increasingly requires affluence, whether through insider status or outsider financial independence" because I hope it is not true. To me pursuing an artistic vocation based on affluence, insider status or outsider financial independence rather compromises the whole endeavor. I suppose this would require some serious sociological research, but it seems to me that a lot of the really creative people have fallen into none of these categories. Genuine creative work is something of a cottage industry, you do what you can with the resources you have and much of the time you are just really poor. That, I think, is typical. Our perceptions are distorted by the celebrity stories we are constantly fed.
I complain about the poor living I made as a concert artist, but the fact is, I did make a living doing it for nearly three decades. I retired from that and now am in a field where I make much better money and have time to continue my creative work. The compromise I made was not to tailor my efforts to a marketplace, but to conceive them as being entirely non-commercial.
Anonymous, good summary. Yes, by rejecting the rich traditions of the past, we have indeed manifested new forms of triviality!
Anonymous, Adorno called it half a century ago about the problem of art for the sake of art bringing with it a crisis of purpose that could never be solved. Either the arts would be propaganda for the state and its interest, the aims of capitalism, or it would become hermetic technocratic formal exploration bereft of any social purpose.
ReplyDeleteLeonard Meyer was, I think, right to identify more than half a century ago that there was no established "style" and that a polystylistic steady state in which all styles, forms and genres would co-exist was the new norm. He advised fellow academics that waiting for the next new dominant style was going to be a mistake, particularly if the new style that would prevail was integral serialism. But he was consistent enough to propose that democracy didn't mean everyone would like the same style, rather, democracy permitted the freedom for everyone to enjoy the style they liked.
But for partisans of the arts that often comes across like the triumph of the lowest common denominator. Meyer might have proposed a question, if that bothers you then is what you want actual freedom or "quality"? The patronage systems that ensured quality were not interested in what we would now regard as artistic freedom. THe arts and artists may have themselves in a kind of self-imposed double bind wanting the perks of the old patronage systems (strong sense of relevance and purpose) but the liberties of the not-as-old art for art's sake systems (I should be able to do whatever I want as a free artist) without grasping the double bind of it, that freedom comes from a lack of necessity and necessity brings with it constraints.
What the comments back and forth have possibly unintentionally danced around is what Scruton would've said is nobliesse oblige. Back in the day when there were elites and everyone knew it there was a commensurate understanding that the nature of being elite was to be a patron of the arts and to be open to giving patronage to artists who were not themselves elite.
In that sense a Esterhazy duke giving Haydn a contract awarded Haydn a contract but the contract had a lot of strings attached. Haydn had a few moments where he wrote the Farewell symphony to remind is employer the orchestral musicians did have wives and children they wanted to visit from time to time, for those up on their Haydn lore.
My last comment crossed paths with yours, Wenatchee, which I only saw after I posted mine.
ReplyDeleteWhat I see is that there still are creative artists that are somehow finding solutions to these seemingly insoluble problems. Philip Glass simply worked at menial jobs to support his composition until finally, in his 40s, he started getting enough commissions to quit. Steve Reich managed to find enough private patrons to help him along until he became well known. Every artist, if they are serious enough about what they do, will find some way to do it. Or not, yes there are failures as well. But becoming a mere panderer is not success. Of course, not all musicians are interested in this kind of project. Lots of fine musicians want to make good music on a different level. I always think of Ringo, who hoped that he would make enough money playing with the Beatles to open a hair salon. Well, he did, and along the way, made some very good music.
Bryan,
ReplyDeleteSomehow we are talking past each other. I don't want to belabor things but I also think this is a critical issue. In the past, even the fairly recent past of 50 to 30 years ago there still existed a classical music system whereby Philip Glass, Steve Reich John Adams and anyone else you can mention could still access for players, funding and occasionally performances. That system is disintegrating at least in the Americas and none too healthy in the UK. You yourself noted your former school where you taught is galloping away from classical music. I have contact with a number of younger classical musicians here; it is a desperate situation for most of them. Many have different day jobs and play a very limited repertoire as a result. Many of them play pop music not classical at weddings etc. Regional/local orchestral jobs are limited, infrequent and basically gigs.As for composers I also know talented under 40 composers (Millennials) who barely can find oddball high school teaching positions. As for any college music professor that tries to write music that a regular audience might like they are marginalized by the academic community.
In the current situation The Hatchet and myself noted that even pop music is becoming an insider game of connections and family wealth. Where are the Gen Zer composers of tomorrow going to go to get even occasional grants, players and performances particularly if their music has some unfamiliar elements to it? How exactly, without enough money to have reasonable time to devote and pay for players and even small venues, are people going to make a dent in this situation? There are a zillion pop artists on Bandcamp and other sites. The good bad and indifferent are all mashed together on the same site. How do you separate them? Streaming companies are constantly deleting lower streaming number artists and also replacing them with computer generated music that is royalty free. So Steve Reich the 3rd have at it.
Maury, we aren't exactly talking past one another--from what you say I am realizing that due to my move to Mexico, I am simply twenty-five years out of touch with what is going on in a lot of places. Where are you based? Yes, I see declines in places I used to be employed, but I see other institutions that I am familiar with doing well, such as McGill University and the Salzburg Festival. But I suspect I am really not up with how bad things have gotten in most places. I suppose I have the advantage that no matter how bad things get in much of North America, it simply won't affect me.
ReplyDeleteSo thanks for insisting on your point, which was a very important one. I think you have mentioned solutions before, do you still think they are valid?
Thanks for your reply. I'm speaking from the US East Coast so I do have occasional contact with what is left of the US classical music establishment such as it is these days. Yes the very top institutions and music festivals will present a facade of normality for some time but they really can't survive if everything else has fallen apart. It's like termites - all of a sudden the big house collapses. The situation is quite different than even in the World Wars because a large establishment just went on partial hiatus for a few years. It is like pop music which was hit for a couple of years but now has bounced back. And during the pandemic pop music sales rose. The infrastructure was not disassembled.
ReplyDeleteYes we did discuss certain possibilities during the pandemic but the indifference of the music establishment when it wasn't gleefully laying off orchestras sort of shook me. That's why I upset you by saying unfortunately there is a developing split between the affluent and the non affluent in terms of having even a limited life n the arts. Artists don't band together very well but there is always an advantage in numbers. I just don't think the cats can be herded that way. But I am open to anyone's thoughts. I just don't see anyone thinking about solutions just wringing their hands. The only small thought I had was for classical ensembles to become much more nimble at playing diverse venues. Pop groups do this very well. That's where this discussion started with adding the guitar.
Bryan by the way since you mentioned your hideaway in Mexico, didn't Neal Cassady die there? Is there a plaque or grave site?
ReplyDeleteWow, yes Maury, not only did Neal Cassady die in Mexico, but in the very town where I live. And I never knew it. But I'm not familiar with him or with the Beat generation. He died in 1968 and I moved here in 1998. But I will look around and see if there is any plaque or anything.
ReplyDeleteI would be very sad if the decline of classical music in North America continued as it has, but I stopped focussing on trying to solve large-scale problems like that a long time ago. What I do try and do is pursue the vocation as I see it as best I can. I don't think that classical music is in decline on the European continent, but they have other more existential problems that will likely have a long-term effect: demography and immigration, for example.
He died in the local hospital in your town. Not sure if it is still there or replaced? He was found by the railroad tracks unconscious. He was in the Grateful Dead orbit along with the writer Ken Kesey. The Dead wrote a song about him on Anthem of the Sun. Of course he was the character Dean in Kerouac's On The Road.
ReplyDeleteAs for the state of classical music here it is beyond either of us. It's just that it is more in my face than it would be for you. I was just trying to point out that Glass et al did not get by in splendid isolation but still had a functioning system to access when they could. If the system becomes moribund one can still create something noteworthy, but it would go nowhere without financial resources. The other option would be to move to the European continent but one would need a decent resume and some connections for that to work. Some musicians here are already doing that.
Yes, I gathered that from the Wikipedia article. We have one public and two private hospitals here and I rather doubt any of them were around In 1968. San Miguel de Allende was pretty small back then and the then-hospital might well have disappeared or been repurposed.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is likely the case that, as you say, 30 to 50 years ago there were more paths to success in classical music than there are now. But what we need is for someone to do the basic research as it is not obvious. For example, Caroline Shaw, becoming quite well known, was born in 1982 and attended Rice, Yale and Princeton then won the Pulitzer Prize. I guess the question is, are there paths for people who are not so greatly gifted?
Yes, I concluded towards the end of my career that as I had been educated in Europe, I should have pursued career opportunities there instead of in Canada, where there were very few opportunities.
With respect to artists like Caroline Shaw etc. the most elite institutions are still functioning at some static level, trading awards and prizes. Shaw first trained as an orchestral violinist and then moved into composition at the usual Ivy League universities. There is an area between the NYC environs and Boston, including the Ivy League universities within, that contains what I would call the current academic classical music world in the US. Boston is a bit shaky because most of the performance energy is in HIP Baroque there IMO. It's easy to do research. Just go to the websites of the Ivy League Music Depts.
ReplyDeleteIf you drew a triangle with Glass, Adams and Crumb at the points you could fit most of the compositions within it including Shaw's. Interestingly, I would say that the younger generation is doing "safer" music than even what those 3 did. The New Agey aspects are more pronounced including vocals and a lot of it is exotic percussion oriented. There are also a fair amount of interactions with jazz rock and rap but from a position of weakness rather than strength. What I mean by that is in the past classical composers would often incorporate popular melodies or even forms into their music but making them conform to classical structures. Now it is the reverse. Shaw has done some things with Kanye West. Her Narrow Sea sounds like less adventurous John Adams to me.
Where will all this be even 20 years from now? Hard to be optimistic about it since it is completely invisible to the outside world even from Boston to NYC.