In Defense of Classical Music
Because I like a good debate, as long as it stays friendly, I must present my defense of Classical Music in view of the attacks recently made against it by certain friends and acquaintances.
In response to one comment that the movement entitled "Volcano" from Alan Hovhaness' Symphony No. 50 is not bad for a cacophonous 20th-century composer, I must state that, of course, since Hovhaness is using music to represent the eruption of Mount St. Helens, cacophony would seem to be rather appropriate. Most of his work is not cacophonous or dissonant, but much like the beginning and end of "Volcano." He wrote lots of stuff; as indicated; "Volcano" is from his Symphony No. 50! And of course, since I like powerful music, I also like the middle portion -- that's what blew me away -- a very clever representation of the event of May 18, 1980.
I am writing this defense because one person said that 90% of Classical Music is "crap" and a second person chimed in and said that 95% of Classical Music is "crap" and person number three said, kiddingly I think, that 99% of it is "crap." Of course, making statements like that is a dead give-away that you have absolutely no understanding or true appreciation of Classical Music if you think that such a high percentage of it is bad. I do think each of these individuals were exaggerating just to get my goat – Good job! One might say that she or he "likes" Classical Music, that Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and their like are nice, but nearly everyone says that; it means nothing. These anti-Classical individuals seem to think that Classical Music is supposed to be all softness, sweetness, and lightness, with nice, catchy melodies, and that it is always supposed to sound like Classical Music from the Romantic Era of the 19th-century. It is not exclusively about that -- it is as much about sound as well as melody. Beethoven is an excellent example of someone who used sound more than melody to make his artistic points. Yes, he could compose a nice ditty or two, but his genius was in using the orchestra to convey certain emotions through sound, not melody, and he did it so well, that you hardly notice that the melody in much of his music is weak. Given that many people consider melody the main thing in music, the focus of their attention and interest, it is surprising how slippery the subject remains, and how many works of all kinds have found popularity without a strong melodic line. Rock n' roll, for example, is not a particularly melodic genre; the classic sixties tunes "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles' "Come Together" are mostly a minimal chanting of two or three notes, and the recent rap style has no tune at all but only a text spoken rhythmically.
If melody were the main criterion of quality in classical music, Schubert might be considered the greatest of composers, with only a few people such as Verdi and Mozart holding a candle to him. Though Beethoven could write a dandy tune now and then, some of his finest movements are based on rather simple and featureless melodic material. Even the effect of the famous first movement of Moonlight Sonata depends more on the harmony, rhythm, and dreamlike atmosphere than on the laconic melody." [Jan Swafford, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music]
But most of the complaints about Classical Music seem to concentrate on the 20th-century. It was Stravinsky who devised the dissonant 12-tone scale in order to convey emotions of a more discordant time in history, not to say that the Napoleonic Wars were not discordant, but even those wars did not surpass the horrors of WWI and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War. So Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and many others used this new style as a reflection of the time. And if you really want to hear dissonance, try Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony. I have not heard any complaints from my Russian friends about about Shostakovich's music because they seem to understand perfectly what he was doing and they can connect emotionally with the music, given the history of their country in the 20th-century. That's what it's really all about. And, when an emotional connection can be made, it can be beautiful in its own way, powerful and moving; it can grab you and hold on to you and even the dissonance and the cacophony enhance the emotion. Music is art. The definition of art is: "The expression of our emotions, by means of creating, for ourselves, an imaginary experience or activity." (The Principles of Art by R. G. Collingwood). If you cannot do that, you are failing the work of art – it is not failing you -- You are failing it. If the art cannot elicit in you an expression of emotion, it is more a reflection of you than of the art. Of course this can get us into the controversial area of whether a supposed "work of art" is art. Some works, especially in the plastic arts, but also in some music, may masquerade as art, but they are not art at all – they are junk, i.e., crap. But making that judgement is so very subjective. It often comes down to a matter of personal taste. What is beautiful to me may simply be ugly to you because our tastes are different, but that does not mean that a given work of art is not great per se, ipso facto, just because you don't like it. But if you want to say that Shostakovich's music is not art, that certainly is your privilege when you have the impertinence to masquerade as an art critic. It is your privilege as a person to dislike it, even if those with greater expertise than you or me say a piece of music is great. So, if you want to criticize a piece of Classical Music, you would be almost always going against the grain of most art critics possessing greater expertise than you. Speaking for myself, I am someone who is always extremely hesitant about disagreeing with the experts. If the majority of professors of music, music critics, musicians, conductors, and so forth say that a certain composition is great, there must be a reason for it. I cannot bring myself to be so arrogant as to think I know better than they. The first time I ever heard Shostakovich, for example, I did not really like it. But I knew that most experts said his music is great. So I did what one should do when it comes to Classical Music, I listened to it again, and then again. And studied it because I knew there was something more to it than the superficiality of my first reaction. I am not going to dismiss something after hearing it just once. With repeated listenings the music grew on me and I began to understand it and I even started to become enamored and emotionally moved by it. As Jan Swafford writes, in his The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, "[I]n understanding [classical] music, knowledge is second in importance only to listening." Or as Roger Kamien writes in his Music, an Appreciation, "Alert and repeated listening will enhance our ability to compare performances and judge music so that we can fully enjoy it." This idea is summed up by Robert Riley at www.Catholicity.com: Classical music is the greatest music. This assertion is not based upon my preference or opinion; it is as much a fact as the statement that the noble is higher than the base, or the beautiful than the ugly. I say this because there exists a hierarchy in the nature of reality, including in the world of sound, which is metaphysical. Noise occupies the lowest rung in this hierarchy; it is an undifferentiated mass of sound in which no distinction exists. The lowest kind of music – rock – comes closest to noise. Classical music exists at the highest rung, because it is the apprehension of reality in sound in the most highly differentiated way possible. It is the farthest from noise.
Classical music uses the natural laws of tonality to exploit fully the inherent potential of the world of sound and, by so doing, reveals the nature of reality and points beyond it to the source of reality itself. No other kind of music does this or can do it.
Tonality is the natural law of the sound world in the same way as, say, gravity is a natural law in the physical world. Gravity operates everywhere in the same way: Things fall when they are dropped, and heavy things require more force to lift than light things. That may be simple enough, but it is how well one apprehends the laws of gravity that leads to things like Gothic cathedrals, skyscrapers, and airplanes – or does not.
Likewise in music, how well the principles of tonality are apprehended can lead to Bach's inimitable counterpoint, the extraordinary tonal architecture of Beethoven's symphonies, or Bruckner's sonic cathedrals – or to banging on a hollow log with a stick. [Robert Riley at www.Catholiciy.com]
In other words, "[T]he greatness of classical music is not about how relaxing or soothing it sounds. Classical music is parallel to human history and civilization. You hear not only the beautiful but the brutal, the ugly, the suffering, the joy, the despair, the hope, the love, the tears, the life, the death, the darkness, the light. You can only get the full benefit of classical music if you are willing to embrace the full depth of it." [Anonymous quote from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070702123644AAftDDl]
I tend to talk about Shostakovich here more than other 20th-century composers because he always seems to be the first one mentioned when someone says they don't like modern Classical Music; he is the one usually brought out as the prime example of crap. But Shostakovich knew how to effectively use sound in the orchestra. His symphonies often used unusual instruments in order to convey the emotion he was communicating. It may often be difficult to connect with emotion, but that is again the problem of the individual, not the external source that is trying to elicit an emotion. I have stood in front of a great work of art in a museum, contemplating it for an hour, because of the emotion it was making me feel. Something has been accomplished in Venezuela wherein an unlikely population of poor Hispanic children from the slums have obtained an appreciation and understanding of Classical Music, even that of Shostakovich. Their youth orchestra performed his Symphony No. 10 at the BBC Proms in London and they performed it with passion, and they were a sensation. Why? Because they understand and appreciate Shostakovich. May I draw your attention to the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43tqQhOTCgQ. Now, if poor children from the slums of Venezuela can do this, why does it fail in the U.S. Why do so many Americans dislike Classical Music or only like the melodious selections, mostly from the Romantic Era? One reason might be because Classical Music is not taught much in our schools, at least not as much as in most countries in the world, even Third World countries. Because of friends I have there, I have learned that they understand and appreciate Classical Music better in Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world, than most Americans. Joseph Schumpeter addresses this problem in his book, Anti-Intellectualism in America. Those who hate the music of Shostakovich, for example, have been infected with this anti-intellectualism that is so pervasive in this country. As David Alstyne writes:
[M]ainstream culture has become saturated with the youth values of immediacy and novelty. Geared to commodities and advertising, it dismisses the more deliberate and complex responses which classical music requires as outmoded, unsalable and elitist. Classical music offers not merely the basic pleasures of melody, harmony and rhythm, but the meanings which these elements can reveal when explored in the process of composition by a master. It is just this intense emotional and intellectual engagement, shared by composer and listener, that pop music and pop culture reject: it is definitely not cool, a quality which denies complexity. . . . [David van Alstyne at www.davidvanalstyne.com]
Okay, I do agree that some of this music takes some getting used to (recall the comments above about how this is accomplished -- More than one listening is often required). There is a strange phenomenon about music: To reiterate, because it is so important, repeated listenings tend to make the music grow on you and with each listening, you learn more about it until you begin to both understand it and be moved by it. Classical Music is not meant to be used primarily as background music, although there is nothing wrong with using that way, but ultimately it must be listened to with concentration and studied; it is an intellectual exercise. And of course this goes up against American anti-intellectualism and American distrust of intelligence and hard thinking and study. It's too much work. It's why you'll never see foreign films in the local neighborhood cinemas – reading subtitles is just too much work – it's just too much to handle in a dumbed-down society. Anything that is a bit too cerebral is suspect.
Now, this little essay is being addressed to intelligent individuals who are not at all dumb and who are intellectual in many ways. But their approach to Classical Music seems weak. They need a course in Classical Music Appreciation.
I realize that I will never change your minds about Classical Music and I am not really trying to; I am just explaining the facts. As Julian Johnson writes, Perhaps nothing seems more futile than a dispute about music. To argue about the relative merits of different pieces of music appears as fatuous as arguing about the superiority of spring over autumn, or of red over blue. Common sense suggests that we should instead celebrate the differences and concede that individual preferences are never anything more than "a matter of taste." And indeed, the circular and vacuous nature of most arguments about music offers ample reason to avoid them.
Yet we do make such comparisons all the time. Our own musical preferences are shaped by judgments that, however unexpressed, impart greater value to some music than to other music. To consider some music "good" implies the possibility that other music might be less good, or even bad. Some people insist that their judgment is entirely personal and has no claim on anyone else, but others feel that their judgment has a wider validity, that some music simply is good and that its quality is more than a matter of individual opinion.
Whichever position we adopt, we make a similar assumption: that judgments about music are concerned with its quality and that its quality is related to its value. The more we value music, the more likely we are to defend its qualities against the opinion of others. And the more passionately we feel about the music we value, the more we feel that we are right and that our judgment is somehow objectively true, regardless of other people's opinions. But to voice such an opinion and to become involved in a dispute about musical quality proves to be frustrating and circular. The argument is not resolvable because in the absence of any objective criteria, we either fall back on the subjective claims of "taste" and agree to differ, or we make ourselves ridiculous by stubbornly reasserting our own position.
Our frustration is deep-seated. It arises because music is not a purely personal matter: it is a shared, communal matter, even when we enjoy it alone. Music is communal property, made and played as a shared activity whether it is carried on by a solitary individual or a large group. . . . The activity of making and listening to music involves us in something that is never merely personal [Who Needs Classical Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian Johnson.]
In view of all this, I will nevertheless make this bold, argumentative statement: One fact is certain: it is an absolutely prima facie impossibility that I will ever lose this debate. It is a given, even among non-Classical Music artists, that Classical Music is the superior genre in the world of music, whether you like it and appreciate it and understand it, or not. As Jose Antonio Abreu, the founder of Venezuela's El Sistema, said, "All music creativity is a value to all human-kind, but Classical Music allows for a more elevated and a richer set of values, more complex, more complete." He does hit the nail on the head. I recall seeing a PBS documentary on the history of the Boston Pops Orchestra, the orchestra that was led by Arthur Fiedler for so many years. It presented many excerpts of performances with the orchestra by non-Classical musicians, and singers – blues singers, rock and roll singers, folk singers, as well as jazz musicians, and so forth. Time and time again, they would say that it was a dream come true to perform with a symphony orchestra and to hear their own music in a symphony. Time and time again, they stated that it was among their greatest honors to perform with a Classical Music symphony. Yes, even they know what genre of music is the superior one. Okay, it's the Boston Pops, not the Boston Symphony, but even the Boston Pops occasionally performed the likes of Stravinsky or Shostakovich.
I make these statements fully cognizant that arguments can be made for the superiority of other types of music. As Greg Sandow writes:
Are we now to go out in the world, and find a new audience by telling people that the music they currently listen to is crap? That's plainly not going to work. Are we going to tell people that their lives are incomplete, their emotional development is stunted, their thinking is shallow, all because they listen to pop music instead of classical? That won't work, either. And the worst thing is that none of this is true. Pop music is entirely respectable, musically, artistically, and culturally, and the people on the classical music side who denounce it typically don't know the first thing about it. Which then puts classical music in a dramatically ignorant place. And, if you want to look at it this way, it undermines all arguments not just for its superiority, but for its value on any terms. Because it now seems apparent that too much indulgence in classical music undermines -- at least for some people -- a wide and tolerant view of the larger world. And also undermines any substantial knowledge about it. [Greg Sandow at http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2010/06/the_myth_of_classical_music_su.html]
In spite of my bold statements in favor of Classical Music, I must agree with Mr. Sandow and I do realize that one should never love Classical Music to the exclusion of other types. That is why I have placed pages devoted to non-classical genres in my web site (http://karitos3044.wix.com/classical) pages that feature other genres of music besides Classical. Two extremes have been presented above, that of Robert Riley hierarchical approach, placing Classical Music at the top and rock music at the bottom (except for noise) and that of Greg Sandow who tries to discredit Classical Music, calling its reputation as the superior genre a myth. My position is somewhere between the these two extremes.
Books consulted:
Dubal, David, Essential Canon of Classical Music, The,
Joe and Duncan Clark, eds., Rough Guide to Classical Music, The: The A-Z of Composers, Key Works and Top Recordings.
Gilder, Eric and June G. Port, Dictionary of Composers and Their Music, The: Every Listener's Companion
Johnson, Julian, Who Needs Classical Music: Cultural Choice and Musical Value
Kamien, Roger, Music: An Appreciation
Libby, Ted, NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music, The
Lloyd, Norman, Golden Encyclopedia of Music, The
Swafford, Jan, Vintage Guide to Classical Music, The
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