music & society
(Not to mention Tom)
July 2009 The Washington Post's esteemed music critic Anne Midgette has taken a potshot at musoc.org. Fortunately, she was firing blanks.
In her 'Classical Beat' blog she expresses her disapproval of this site's 'elitism' or anti-pop rhetoric (cf. the FAQ), which angers her to the extent that she feels like playing "Talking Heads albums really, really loudly" or ordering a copy of Miles Davis's 'Kind of Blue' album for the site's editors (whose anonymity, quite naturally for such a media-savvy personage, gives her the creeps). Talking Heads and Miles Davies, needless to say, are compulsory favourites for mature cultural relativists in the US.
Apparently, the "logical conclusion" of musoc.org's arguments are that "a bad recording of a second-rate Donizetti opera has more artistic merit than 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' or 'Mingus Ah Um'." To which musoc.org can only say (leaving aside the fact that nowhere does this site confuse art music with second-rate representations of art music), Sherlock Holmes himself would have been proud!
Of course, it's rather a shame that she only either half-read, half-remembered or half-understood musoc.org's position on elitism and pop 'music'. Nowhere does the FAQ (or any other page) say or even imply, for example, that "we're better, and everybody who doesn't understand us is an idiot"; in fact, musoc.org's view is quite categorical — people should listen to whatever they like, and enjoying art music confers no moral superioty whatsoever on the listener. She would have done well to read her Washington Post colleague Philip Kennicott's article, 'The Education of an Audience', in the latest edition of Opera News, which takes quite a similar view on the so-called 'elitism' of art music to those expressed on this site.
Ironically, Midgette likens musoc.org to a kind of cultural 'Big Brother'. Ironically because the mantle of intolerance is clearly worn by even the most understated members of the massing hordes of pop 'music' fans.
As Midgette expediently points out, 'classical' music (to use her preferred anti-elitist terminology) is "responsible, like any field, for some singularly vapid outpourings."
COMMENTS
A friend of mine, a former classical music critic, told me about your site, and I was delighted to see it. I share your view that we are in a dystopian period as concerns music. But there is no point in kidding ourselves about it and the opprobrium which awaits those who want some sort of standard in what they hear.
It is now clear that music criticism has contributed to the accelerated pace of music's slide. In my view not so much because it wants to acknowledge other music, but because it anathematizes those who want the mere freedom to not do so. It is in this spirit that I think Ms. Midgette's comments should be seen. She immediately begins with the buzzwords of opprobrium for those (they assume) nasty males: "aggressive" "creepy" etc. Pretty standard and workaday stuff. There is some sort of danger, it seems, in not ever wanting to hear Talking Heads at loud volumes. Ms. Midgette's criticism is in that long tradition of genteel lady critics, bland and wholesomely perky, only now that includes discussing pop bands for reassurance. Sadly, the Washington Post's Style section [...] is now a complete waste of time. All the writers, to their credit, seem fairly embarrassed and sheepish about their commentaries nowadays. Except when they are on safe ground, for ideological reasons I suppose, when enthusing about someone like Michael Jackson. Please continue your site, it is a genius idea.
Yours truly, 'Corno di Bassetto' (USA)
July 2009 Buried under the reams of bulletins and cultural musings on the great Michael Jackson, John Lennon's guitar etc, reposes the blog of The Guardian's eminent 'classical' music critic, Tom Service, who has thrown his weight behind the 'musoc.org are vicious snobs' approach to debate.
He even helpfully throws in a photo of Mozart (a.k.a. Tom Hulce) to show he knows what he's talking about. His point being that by musoc.org's own definition of art music, Mozart's piano concertos are disqualified; so is almost everything else written before the 1800s! And all because "any piece that depends upon the players' own ornamentation or improvisation when it's performed is not allowed to be 'art music'."
The compilers of musoc.org's 'devious' criteria have now realised that they forgot to allow for people — critics mainly, it seems — who can't read and understand their native English. Service rendered.
COMMENTS
I was alerted to your site by Tom Service's column in the oh so politically correct newspaper, The Guardian. Whilst I may find some of his writing quite interesting, I find his wishy washy stance on this issue quite spineless, too afraid to come out with a strong conviction; poor lamb, he might be accused of being elitist. Oh dear.
David Foulger.
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