High Culture vs High Demand

Adam Kirsch wrote a piece for the New Criterion recently that got reprinted in the Wall Street Journal: High Culture, Not High Demand. The opening makes a strong point.

Kindle and Spotify give us a degree of access to “the best which has been thought and said” that a Medici or a Rockefeller couldn’t have bought at any price, while simultaneously reminding us that almost no one cares.

For instance, if you search for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Spotify, the most popular recording of the most popular piece in the classical repertoire is the one made in 1984 by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic. The first movement has been streamed about 1.5 million times, the third about half a million (which tells a story in itself). By contrast, the hit song “Driver’s License,” by the teen pop star Olivia Rodrigo, was released in January 2021 and by the end of May it had been streamed 800 million times. . . .

And don't even think about Gangnam Style! One of the benefits of growing older is that you can make comparisons over fairly long stretches of time based on your own experience, thereby avoiding all the distortions of the picture offered to us by the mass media, or by academic historians. From my own experience, the interest in high culture among young people has diminished considerably over the last fifty years. Another quote from the article.

How many Americans pay attention to serious contemporary literature, art, or music? An estimate of one-half of one percent of the population—1.6 million people—would surely be on the high side.

The Wall Street Journal just has a brief excerpt. Here is the whole piece: Culture as counterculture. Some further excerpts:

Today’s pop lyricists don’t poke fun at Beethoven and Tchaikovsky because young listeners no longer recognize those names as possessing any cultural authority or prestige, if they recognize them at all. It would make as much sense to write a pop song called “Roll Over Palestrina” or “Rock Me, Hildegard von Bingen,” since all composers are equally unfamiliar to a mass audience. 

Like the disappearance of a certain species of frog or insect, this is a small change that signals a profound transformation of the climate—in this case, the cultural climate.

This is kind of reassuring:

Another way of putting it is that high culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream. Popular culture—television shows, pop songs, memes—is every American’s first language, the one we acquire whether we want to or not. Learning to understand and appreciate high culture is like learning a second language, which requires deliberate effort (and which Americans are famously averse to doing).

Welcome to The Music Salon, a counterculture blog. And here is a countercultural envoi: this is Les Ombres du temps by Henri Dutilleux with the Radio France Orchestra conducted by Mikko Franck.

Let me add just one more quote from the article:

In twenty-first-century America, certainly, high culture appears deeply subversive. Plato’s Republic teaches contempt for democracy as surely as King Lear teaches contempt for humanity. The Goldberg Variations are useless in the strict sense—they can be put to no use; they do nothing to make the listener more effective or a better citizen. Indeed, the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself—which makes it the exact opposite of money, our usual standard for measuring worth.