Feb
25
“The classic register—I borrow the term from a fine forthcoming book by Michael Long called Beautiful Monsters: Music, Media, and the Imaginative Classic—is typically an elevated, exalted, aspiring one. That makes it an easy butt of ridicule. Think of Margaret Dumont, Groucho Marx’s “plus-sized muse” (as Long describes her)— but also recall that by the end of A Night at the Opera, Miss Dumont is no longer being satirized, and opera has worked its unmocked magic. Higher is not automatically better; but opponents of snobbish pretension would be foolish to lose sight of the reality of the high-low gamut. The proof of its reality is the way it reproduces itself within all discourses: now we have “classic jazz,” “classic rock,” and I will bet that somebody somewhere is touting classic kitsch. We all draw upon its full range, or as much of it as we can, and its narrowing would be a loss to everyone. With that in mind, consider Kramer’s cleverly titled final chapter, “Persephone’s Fiddle,” which is largely devoted to—guess what?—a violinist Kramer once heard busking unaccompanied Bach in the New York subway. Unlike Joshua Bell at L’Enfant Plaza, this fiddler drew a rapt crowd: It was early fall, the start of a new academic semester, and the performer on the platform—Times Square, my usual spot—looked like a music student trying to pick up some extra cash for books or scores. She was young, in her early twenties, blonde, attractive, and well dressed, which may help explain the unusual amount of attention she was getting from a crowd that in normal circumstances wouldn’t give a busker a second glance. Or maybe it was the music… . Kramer goes on to speculate about what it was in Bach that so captivated fifteen or twenty listeners in that noisy atmosphere, and moved them at the end to “a moment of complete silence followed by a smattering of applause.” My question, rather, is whether you noticed the difference between the scene Kramer describes and the one that the Washington Post reporter engineered for Joshua Bell. It couldn’t be simpler, or more crucial. Bell was playing at the entrance to the station, where trains cannot be seen and everyone is hurrying to catch one. Kramer’s little Persephone was playing down on the platform, where riders are apt to be at (enforced) leisure. Little Persephone knew that she needed an appropriate location to get across her message (“Isn’t this beautiful?” or “Can I have some money?” or whatever you like). The Post reporter chose the least appropriate location possible. One of them was trying to make money, the other was trying to make a point. And Bach served them both equally well. As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it—and why not?—as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. (My favorite example right now is Gabriel Prokofiev, the British-born grandson of the Russian composer, who studied electronic music in school, has headed a successful disco-punk band, and is now writing string quartets.) Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped.”
Richard Taruskin (The New Republic, 2007 — I warn you, the article is an unformatted block of text)
(via schubertiade)
