Cultural Compost If Classical Music Is To Survive, It Needs To Learn A Few Lessons From The Popular Music Business

A recent poll taken by the New York Times described a vast collective moan issuing from across the land. The subject was American popular culture.

Nine out of 10 respondents could think of something bad to say about action movies, television sitcoms, blatant sexuality and provocative song lyrics. More than half had nothing good to say at all.

Add to the lament the shrill cries of classical-music devotees. Record sales remain minuscule next to pop; record companies search frantically for new markets, with appeals to mysticism, easy listening, nostalgia, even sexual preference.

Concert audiences, most know by now, are smaller and older. The recital business has shrunk drastically, and who knows what would happen to symphony orchestras without the massive philanthropic props that now keep them going?

Victimization is in the air. We were once pure, serious, intelligent, or so the thinking goes. Then the Rolling Stones, Whitney Houston and Snoop Doggy Dogg swooped down like locusts, eating America’s amber waves of grain right down to the roots.

I wonder. Pop culture isn’t something that has happened to us. It’s what we are. Americans watch television and hum “Feelings” because they want to. We made this culture, and maybe we should start making better use of it.

Can anyone doubt that American pop music is the most powerful musical idiom in the world? It speaks alike to Cambodian teenagers, Nepalese nomads and the president of the Czech Republic.

Are all these people stupid and shallow? Should Americans beat their breasts in guilt for perpetrating a false art on the world? I, for one, am immensely proud.

A lot of pop music isn’t very good, but then neither are a lot of the new pieces I hear regularly in the concert hall. The question here is the future. The seeds for a new music need desperately to be planted before irreversible blight sets in. Where lies the more fertile ground?

The current strength of pop, and the weakness of its classical counterpart, have a lot to do with language. Music used to speak a fairly coherent lingua franca. A shared grammar allowed listeners to agree more or less on what sounded good and what didn’t.

Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn operated out of the same musical dictionary. Even when established habits were being creatively subverted, with misspelled chords or falsely parsed progressions (habitual practice among the truly talented), composer and listener had a backdrop of “correctness” against which aberration could be measured.

There is no more lingua franca, at least not in classical music. The Haydn-Mozart language ran out of room about 100 years ago. Many musicians took the 12-tone high road.

Listeners were advised to start fresh, but they kept on hearing those dominant and six-four chords in the old ways. Serialism eventually hit a dead end, leaving a few pockets of resistance but in general sending music off into post-modernist splinter groups or giggles of nostalgia.

Pop went a different way: It rejected harmony as being important. The ever present 8- and 12-bar blues progressions became as natural and as ubiquitous as breathing patterns. The same old chords in the same old order were taken not as boringly repetitive but as bearers of a life-giving rhythm.

Classical music has chosen to not see things that way. Having rejected Cole Porter as trivial and Pearl Jam as unclean, it finds itself behind fences of its own making, tilling soil that is increasingly barren.

Brilliant as it may be, Elliott Carter’s music bears no offspring. It represents a historical conclusion, not a jumping-off point. Central Europe spits out operas and instrumental pieces shocking for their cruelty and pessimism; one hopes they produce no children.

Rock’s de-emphasis of sophisticated harmony, its belief in visceral emotion and its exaltation of directness have upended ideas of what we considered good music to be: sophisticated, civilized, appealing to our finest sensibilities, inviting intellectual scrutiny.

It’s easy to understand classical music’s uneasiness with pop culture. “Primitive” and “naive” suddenly cease to be pejoratives. Classical music, moreover, was linked with social mobility. As one rose in the world, so did one’s level of sophistication. The esoteric was prized in part because the “lower” orders couldn’t understand it.

Harrison Birtwistle, for example, writes music justly admired by a few but in a language most sincere music lovers do not speak. This music must be preserved; for indeed, art for the few is so often the best art.

What we are talking about here is not the calculated demise of the Schubert piano sonatas or Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”

It is about nourishing what is to come. Juggling the absolute necessity of preserving the past with discovering a future is daunting.

Pop music has something classical music needs: an international language. Compare its comprehensibility to contemporary music’s Tower of Babel, and critics might whine less.

For all its recurring banalities, everyday culture represents a compost heap that classical music rejects at its peril. The Western tradition may not like the way the fertilizer smells, but it had better realize how well it makes things grow.

Popular culture is more than bad movies and four-letter words. Consider the delicacies of Brazil, the Schubertian symmetries of Gershwin, the dry humor of country-and-western or the raw brute force of Nine Inch Nails.

Popular music seethes with life. It is organic matter that can exalt or demean. It depends on where we plant it.

ILLUSTRATION: Photo