Music and Value

Last year a commentator alerted me to the brilliant scholar and critic Pierre Ryckmans who used the pen-name Simon Leys. Since then I have been slowly working my way through his collected essays: The Hall of Uselessness. Except for the outstanding quality, one of his essays, titled "Writers and Money" is very like something I might have written for this blog. He modestly says that his essay has no other purpose than to quote Hilaire Belloc on the topic. Let me offer a slightly abbreviated version:

...there is no relation between the function of letters and the economic effect of letters, there is no relation between the goodness and the badness of the work, or the magnitude of the work, and the sums paid for the work. It would not be natural that there should be such a relation, and in fact, there is none.

The truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market. That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very bad writing sometimes has a market ... Writing important truths sometimes has a market; writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgements sometimes has a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the quality attached to writing. It never has and never will ... The relationship between the excellence or the usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a purely capricious one.

This is a truth that has often eluded me. I have long puzzled over the fact that, despite their enormous commercial success, the Beatles actually created some music of high quality. On the other hand, despite their enormous commercial success, musicians like U2 did not. In the classical world, a composer as brilliant and original as Igor Stravinsky has long enjoyed an enviable success and prominence while other brilliant and original composers like Olivier Messiaen, while well-known, are much less celebrated.

The classical music world is perhaps slightly less capricious than the popular one, or at least it used to be. Music critics used to perform the role of bringing musical talent to the awareness of the public as Robert Schumann did with Chopin. But that occurs less and less often as the machines of marketing take over. Typically what we read and see in the mainstream media is no more than an uncritical puff piece serving as promotion for an upcoming album or tour. Also typically, musical value is these days reduced almost entirely to the sole criterion of sales figures. Artists that sell a lot of copies are celebrated and ones that don't are scarcely noticed. This is starting to erode aesthetic standards in the classical world as well as marketing and promotion take their inexorable toll. The only amelioration is in the area of grants and awards that are sometimes based on sober aesthetic evaluation (but often not).

On the other hand, I keep seeing hints and traces of the objectivity of aesthetic judgment. A simple anecdote: yesterday I was in a meeting with several people and before the meeting began we were chatting about some upcoming chamber concerts. One person, a non-musician, said how much she liked Brahms. I disagreed, saying that his music was over-worked and tedious. She looked quite surprised as, well, Brahms is really well-known, how can you be critical? Then another fellow, a jazz pianist, interjected saying that he agreed about Brahms. To which I said, "more evidence of objectivity in aesthetics!" I have noticed this over and over that musicians often have an unstated common judgement about performers and composers and particular pieces that differs from that of the general public.

Some examples? Most musicians that I have talked to rate Haydn just as highly as Mozart, something not the case in the public view. They rate Debussy over Ravel as well. There are very well-known performers that are known to most musicians as simple hacks, but I will forgo mentioning their names!

I don't want to overstate the case, but objective aesthetic judgment is not a chimera, even though it is not always easy to sort out. If you go back and read the Hilaire Belloc quote you will see that the simple fact of good and bad in an objective sense, underlies his whole argument.

How about an envoi? We haven't had any Messiaen for a while. This is his Catalogue d'oiseaux, Book I, for piano, with the score. Yvonne Loriod is the pianist.

How about another one? This is the Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé by Léo Delibes sung by Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa:

Delibes is not nearly as celebrated as the composers he influenced, including Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Tchaikovsky.