music & society
June 2009 In 'Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, Aldous Huxley acknowledged that he had considerably underestimated the speed at which humanity was moving towards his famous 1931 vision of a dystopian society in which hedonism and perpetual consumption had mangled the human condition beyond all recognition. The 600 years Huxley had allowed were already looking singularly generous.
Yet when he wrote Brave New World, art music was still almost universally recognised as the apogee of music (though of course without being universally popular). Despite the misgivings about popular culture he expressed in his book, the greatest cultural transformations were still to come, even by the time of his death in 1963.
George Orwell, in his 'freedom of the press' preface to Animal Farm, wrote that "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question." Since Bretton Woods this body of ideas has been neoliberalism — a belief in market economics and 'liberal democracy' — which manifests itself ideologically as postmodernism and in the socioeconomic domain as consumerism.
As a necessary corollary of the ensconcement of 'liberal democracy' after the Second World War, music culture in particular has undergone a profound and almost certainly irreversible shift.
In sharp contrast to Huxley's era, today there are hundreds of millions of people — even many of those who still make distinctions between literature, fine art and art-house cinema on the one hand and pulp fiction, commercial art and Hollywood-style blockbusters on the other — who have come to believe that posturing, narcissistic media-stars warbling facile, juvenile doggerel in groaning, straining voices to an accompaniment of hackneyed, synthesised, amplified muzak, can constitute musical 'brilliance', 'artistry' or even 'genius' — let alone music.
Modern (and very postmodern) public ignorance or disapprobation of art music can be traced back partly to the socio-political backlash of the so-called Beat Generation (mainly in universities, primarily middle-class in nature) against perceived authoritarianism and authority which began in the late 1950s. This so-called 'counterculture' created (or greatly intensified) an 'ours and theirs' dichotomy in culture that cut through social classes, and which nurtured the 'postmodern' mindset that was quick to label modernist art music (and by extension, everything that had come before it) 'elitist', despite its own obvious 'bourgeois' origins.
This left Pop 'Music', created by the masses for the masses — if you ignored, that is, the considerable helping hand from the entertainment industries, which have profited handsomely ever since from this sudden self-liberation of the people.
The postmodern perception of art music, like many other perceptions, was also to a large extent being 'manufactured' by the vested interests of neoliberal capitalism. Against a background of Keynesian economic prosperity and technological advance, the formidable new hype-machinery of the mass media, having learnt well from the duplicity of politicians and the military during World War II, pushed a new kind of popular culture (initially American, but as always quickly exported) that began to mushroom like nuclear tests in the late 50s, disseminated above all by the proliferation of glossy magazines and a new wave of technological gadgetry for the home: radios, record players and TVs.
This culture was based mainly around newer kinds of 'music' (originating in American pre-war 'jazz', and in part inspired by the success of US company Muzak's insidious product and philosophy) that 'ordinary people' in the new 'democratic' world could relate to — in other words, that young, 'hip' (and hippy) teenagers, a newly identified (and newly invented) market, could consume.
After the destruction of parts of the old social order in the war, it was a relatively simple matter for economic forces to create an eager market for this new type of 'music', aided and abetted by the beatnik 'revolution' against non-demotic culture on university campuses. (A study published in Science by Columbia University in 2006 showed that group pyschology played as big a role in pop 'music' preferences as it does in other spheres pertaining to fads and fashions (as well as politics and economics). The 'social cascade effect' describes how large numbers of people end up doing or thinking something on the basis of what others do, either to identify with a social group or on the supposition that others know something they don't. This effect formed the basis of 'Brave New World': mass conformity was what kept citizen-consumers from questioning their own complicity; soma was the salve that helped them achieve sublimation.)
In the foreword to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman recognised the chillingly prophetic resonance of Huxley's novel: "Huxley feared those who would give us so much [information] that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism [...] [that] the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance [...] that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy-porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy."
Huxley himself noted in Brave New World Revisited that the danger was not tyranny, as Orwell had envisaged in 1984 (although certainly many elements of Orwell's dystopia have been appropriated by the institutions of 'liberal democracy'), but "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". Huxley was (somwehat belatedly) recognising that humankind had always enjoyed the kitsch, vulgar, bland, trite, morbid, mean, noxious etc, in all spheres of life. Pop 'music', then, could not but succeed.
Nearly 50 years on from Huxley's death, much of the Brave New World is already well-established, including Fordist mass production (nowadays divided into so-called 'niche markets' and known as 'post-Fordism', i.e. products available in black and every other colour, to create the impression of consumer choice and individuality), cultural homogeneity generated by relentless consumption of plentiful and disposable consumer goods available globally (and the implicit environmental catastrophe), and destigmatised recreational sex. Analogues are self-obvious: the World State is Euro-American capitalism; soma is alcohol; and hypnopaedia is pop 'music'.
The World State was well aware of the need to curb a love of nature because scenery and fresh air could be enjoyed by anyone without the involvement of factories; similarly, art, thought and solitude were impugned because they are not obviously marketable.
But pop 'music' and allied culture are supremely commodifiable, which means linked in the public consciousness with fun, wealth, socialising, success, individuality etc. For millions, it's a window on (or even a door to) an alternative world of celebrity. The pop culture industries are premised on the unholy trinity of vanity (and vapidity) — money, glamour and fame. By manipulating and then appealing to people's vanity and egotism — no arduous feat — neoliberalism has an inexhaustible market.
So it is that, for all but a small minority, pop 'music' now has all the cachet. Any reference simply to 'music' in almost any public context is almost universally taken to mean pop 'music'. For two intellectually effete generations now, addicted to cultural frivolity and hedonism and enslaved by technological gadgetry and gimmickry, the fatuous sloganeering of (supposedly) disaffected young black urban Americans in particular can come across as profound and radical, and chimerically hiphop becomes the new 'art music'.
Art music itself, meanwhile, becomes ever more imperceptible culturally, as the number of people exposed to it continues to shrink dramatically. New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein wrote recently that the difficulty today "is not how much the tradition means to its devotees, but how little it means to everyone else." So low is the cultural esteem of art music, among young people in particular, that shopping precincts, bus stations and subways now regularly play it through speakers to reduce antisocial behaviour and loitering — and with success.
The zeitgeist is neatly encapsulated in a quotation from The Rest Is Noise, a postmodern history of 20th century music by Alex Ross, trendy music critic of The New Yorker. Without irony he makes one of the most fatuous assertions ever written about music:
"When you hear a great orchestra perform Beethoven's 'Eroica', it isn't like a rock band trying to mimic the Beatles - it is like the Beatles re-incarnated."
An equation of one of the profoundest, sublimest works in the history of art with bland adolescent warbling raises barely an eyebrow among critics and academics, tripping over themselves to praise Ross's postmodern 'insights'. As for the general public, a shoulder shrug is the most likely reaction, signalling ignorance of what 'Eroica' refers to or even who Beethoven was. (In his recent book, Everything is Connected (2008; ch.2), pianist-conductor Daniel Barenboim recounts how a US company apologised to offended listeners for using an excerpt from Mozart's Requiem to advertise toilets with the explanation: "When we first selected [it], we didn't know of its religious significance. [...] We have decided to change it to a passage from Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture, which music experts have assured us does not have religious importance.")
Over the coming year or so, musoc.org will be analysing the problems facing art music today. Essentially, there are three primary considerations, all bound up in a kind of self-standing 'end of history' scenario. These are: (1) postmodernism and cultural relativism; and (2) neoliberal globalisation and the cultural invisibility/inaudibility of art music; (3) snobbery.
‡ References to Art Music and Pop 'Music' are explained in Definitions and the FAQ.
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