I'm not sure if very much research has been done on this, but if you look at music history you get the sense that, as far as written music goes, popular music slowly emerged from the shadows over the period from 1500 to 1800, then took a steeper ascent in the 19th century before positively exploding in the 20th century. And since World War II the climb accelerated. A nice graph of popular music sales from 1800 to 2020 would be really useful right now--it would look something like the climate change "hockey stick" graph:
But while that graph remains controversial, I doubt that, if we had the numbers, the music one would be. According to Forbes the highest-earning musicians in 2019 were Taylor Swift at $185 million and Kanye West at $150 million. The Beatles are still making a lot of money today, but back in the 60s they probably only made a few million a year--amounts are hard to find. Before the Beatles popular musicians earned relatively little.
Popular music has mastered all sorts of techniques for monetizing success and in the process the music has come to resemble an industrial product. We even refer to the music realm as the "music business" or "music industry."
So what does this have to do with the transmission of culture? All cultural traditions and practices need to be transmitted to each new generation or they will be lost. Some cultures seem to be pretty good at this, others not. Reading about music in Java I was struck by how, since Indonesian independence, there have been extensive efforts made to preserve and even spread the unique culture of the Javanese gamelan orchestra. I am at a loss to cite counterexamples, though I'm sure there are many. Cases where the traditions have not been preserved and are lost to us, are, well, lost to us and we may not even be aware they ever existed.
Perhaps the cultural tradition that I am most keenly aware of that has, I suspect, been almost lost to us, is that of poetry. I expect some pushback on this. I certainly don't know the whole story, but it is my strong impression that if we go back a few generations there was a general awareness of poetry among nearly everyone and specific competences among a small percentage. Maybe 10% of the population could recite one or more poems from heart. Perhaps 5% even wrote some poetry. Over the last fifty years or two generations, I think this has all gone away. No-one encourages (or forces!) public school students to memorize poetry and they certainly don't read it or write it to any extent whatsoever.
One of the things that got me thinking about this was the Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society that I watched recently. The message in that film, which takes place in a private school in the 1950s, is that you can kill the passion for literature by approaching it in a too-analytical manner. That was one stage in the internment of poetry in a cold, cold grave. The more recent stage is that educators simply decide that most literature is too difficult or too reactionary or too racist to bother teaching so they will focus on just those works that perfectly fit their progressive narrative. Oh, and analysis, this time called "deconstruction" is back with a vengeance.
The situation in music seems rather different. The higher educational system seems to be functioning at high efficiency. Sure, you may complain that Juilliard keeps cranking out unfeeling virtuosos, but they are doing it very efficiently! The problem is that all the university music departments and conservatories in North America are cranking out more highly-trained musicians than the market can absorb. There are not enough audiences.
That problem, the lack of listeners who really enjoy classical music, is one that lies rather lower on the educational ladder: good listeners are ones that have been exposed early enough and often enough and with some understanding and context to classical music and therefore develop a taste for it. The fact that music programs have largely disappeared from the school system is likely one of the main reasons why the classical audience only comprises 2% or perhaps 3% of the music market.
This is a vicious cycle: music programs are deemed less and less important as fewer and fewer administrators are musically aware themselves.
It doesn't take much to lose a cultural tradition. What may seem like a rock-solid institution today like the Metropolitan Opera or the LA Philharmonic can disappear in a couple of generations if neglected. I think the pandemic is revealing to us the fragility of the performing arts. Will they recover? More importantly, will they flourish and be handed on to future generations?
Wim Winters is making an interesting effort with historical reconstructions of tempi in Beethoven and others. Here he is playing a bunch of Haydn sonatas on clavichord.
I don't think poetry is dead or MIA and I don't think music conservatories have much to do with music culture. It is true that cultural confidence for lack of a better word helps determine the energy with which a society promotes its culture and social activities. Detachment is more the province of science than the arts.
ReplyDeleteTo take the conservatories first, music performers are athletes of a special kind. Let's call them aesthetic athletes. Their craft depends on motor learning and execution. I was Milstein in my mind but my hand was just my own playing the violin. Yes there is an incalculable cognitive and emotional aspect to music performance but in the end all that must be translated into motor performance. So modern society is set up for athletic performance but has no use for cultural effort at the same level. But American rap music and pop music has still a worldwide audience.
As for poetry, there is plenty of poetry now but it is sloppy poetry. i made the point previously that younger people I meet view careful rhyme schemes and even good voices as artificial. But song lyrics and rap lyrics are poetry by pretty much any standard we could apply. Some rap lyrics and some song lyrics have a bit of cleverness to them as well. What is missing is again the effort needed to have technique and content better balanced.
In the distant past rhyme scheme and meter were more intricate and careful because poetry was sung or chanted to communicate a story to illiterates as with Homer, the Beowulf poet etc. Even the troubadours sang their intricate poetry as a social game although it was merely lyric mostly. It was the trouveres who took the fateful step of making poetry more of a literary genre. As literature rhyme schemes and meter are rather beside the point and get in the way of reading. So people have acquired a taste for reading prose rather than in reading poetry or hearing poetry chanted. Shakespeare is the last redoubt of poetry but mainly because it rests in spoken dramas with great characters. Even back in civilized antiquity the romance novels of the Romans and Greeks had a wide public audience compared to poetry.
Without an education system approximating the old trivium and quadrivium it is hard to see the current cultural situation changing mush for the foreseeable future. So classical music and poetry have to exist in the current framework as best as they can.
Thanks Maury for your view differing with mine. I think what we lack are some solid data on things like how much engagement people, especially young people, have with cultural goods like poetry and classical music. I am relying on my own life history for my supporting information and it is skewed because I moved from Canada to Mexico so I am comparing apples and oranges. There certainly are poets who have a public presence in Canada, well one at least! Leonard Cohen, is considerably celebrated these days and he is certainly a genuine poet. However, he is most celebrated because he is also a pop star with decades of successful albums.
ReplyDeleteI have read in various places that music classes in public schools have been declining for decades, but I don't have any good data on that.
You are certainly correct that classical music and poetry have to try to survive in the current environment, but I think we can improve things without actually returning to the trivium and quadrivium!
I contended that for the cultural situation to improve something like a return to the trivium and quadrivium was necessary, not that classical music and crafted poetry were doomed without that happening. They simply have to find their way without any expectation that this cultural environment will change, even within those domains, or will help them or care whether they survive.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am not personally researching analytically these two areas, I do make a point of talking to younger people and also visiting online music or literary forums where they hang out - or at least the under 50 crowd hangs out. It's not that people are stupid, they just have little knowledge of these subjects from school or their friends/online. But classical music is still far ahead of classical poetry. That is pretty much extinct among the under 40 cohort who nevertheless know song lyrics and rap. I have more optimism about classical music than classical poetry making it for the reasons outlined above. If any kind of crafted poetry survives it will be as music lyrics.
That's pretty much what I was getting at: for younger people today, with the exception of song lyrics, poetry is largely a dead art.
ReplyDeleteYes but poetry started out that way so it is just full circle. Poets need to go with the flow and write poetry with music if even something like sprechgesang. To the point that poets may not know how to write music I think they better learn at least how to notate unadorned melody or speech rhythm. No one is going to support literary poetry for the foreseeable future. The arts are in an age of iron and better realize it.
ReplyDeletePoetry isn’t a dead art. Poetry readings in big cities draw a sizable audience, and young people are even trading poems on Instagram. The problem is that since the 1990s, the poetry that draws the largest active following of young people is "slam poetry" (i.e. the genre that derived originally from poetry slams). The poems tend to be strident, concerned with social or racial issues, they draw much from hip-hop, and their narrative voice is the clearly same as the poet himself/herself. There is little love in this community for poetry of great abstraction like, say, Paul Celan – you’d go over like a lead balloon if you got up on stage (or posted on Instagram) the sort of poetry that flourished about literati for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
ReplyDeleteI was not aware that live poetry readings had a current audience, thanks Anon!
ReplyDeleteI am surprised that so many comments are responding to my brief comments. I think I should do a couple of posts on poetry and see what happens.
Slam poetry is a major component of hip-hop culture, and while it does not get the media coverage of the music or visual aspects, it has massive grassroots popularity. Poetry has never been healthier in my lifetime. Whether or not you consider abstraction to be a necessary component of poetry is up to you; to me, an active and participatory art form is by definition healthier than a dead or entirely academicized one.
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