Divergent Paths: Music and Literature

Let's start with something that caused me to rethink the history of literature over the last one hundred years:

Hilary Layne is an incisive critic of literature with many worthwhile videos. But this one is on another level. She uncovers a massive and long-standing project to redefine and therefore dilute the meaning of the word "classic" in literature. In so doing she re-evaluates the whole "middle-brow" project where publishers issued many older works in new accessible formats for the masses. Watch the video for her detailed argument. What I want to do here is compare the parallel history of classical music.

One comment on the clip: Hilary is brilliant in uncovering the clever way that publishers finessed the use of the word "classic" in order to promote modern authors as "classic." Which they are not. The true definition of the classics are those works from the ancient world that truly form the foundation of Western Civilization such as the philosophers, playwrights, historians and poets of Ancient Greece and the poets and historians of Rome. The Lord of the Rings, while a fine work, is not a classic. Nor is Madame Bovary or Crime and Punishment. These are modern novels. She also included Dumas and Cervantes in this category. My question is, where do the classics end? Is St. Augustine classic (probably yes). How about Dante? Or Shakespeare (I'm guessing probably not). But a few comments on where the dividing line is would have been helpful.

But the big question here is how different the history of music has been from the history of literature. Mind you, one thing they have in common is the financial support of the CIA and other US agencies for the avant-garde post-WWII.

The crucial difference between the history of modernism in music and in literature seems to revolve around the commercial aspects. Modernism in literature was supported by publishers because there was real money to be made once they marketed it as "classic." In music, however, the term "classical" has a quite different application, namely to the lighter, more transparent musical language of the Viennese composers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, in recent years the term "classical" in music has come to refer to any of the composed music dating from around the year 1,000 AD to the present as opposed to popular, folk or world music. The least profitable niche in the music "industry."

Apart from a few isolated promoters like Diaghilev, there was no-one who saw modernist music as being exploitable for profit and that has pretty much remained the case for the last 100 years. Instead, there were lots of critics who condemned the new dissonant music of the 20th century. It took the efforts of many composers, historians and scholars to install the avant-garde in all the musical institutions even though the music was largely ignored by the general public. And still is. Contemporary masterpieces like The Rite of Spring or the symphonies of Shostakovich or the music of Arnold Schoenberg has become well-loved among the cognoscenti, but still doesn't make any money.

The music world has no "classics" in the literary sense. The music of the ancient world, along with perhaps 90% of the literature, has been lost. The notation to enable the composed music of Western Civilization has only been available for the last thousand years and for the first five hundred it was awkward and inefficient. So what do we have that could be considered classic, that is, works of incontestable, objective aesthetic value? Given the historical differences, perhaps we could make a strong case for from the music of Léonin and Pérotin up through Machaut, Josquin, Du Fay, Monteverdi and so on up to Bach. And one would strongly want to include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. From then on, the music begins to resemble the modern novels by people like Dostoevsky that Hilary Layne admits to liking, but not admitting them as classics with objective value. I guess I would be ok with that.

Comments? Objections?