parakilas, james. 1984. classical music as popular music

Classical Music as Popular MusicAuthor(s): James ParakilasSource: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1984), pp. 1-18Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/763659 .Accessed: 07/01/2011 20:26

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CLASSICAL MUSIC AS POPULAR MUSIC*

JAMES PARAKILAS

Compared to popular music, classical music seems like a specialty. But classical music contains specialties within itself-early music and new

music-compared to which most of the classical music televised on "Great Performances" seems like a popular art. Classical music is not often defined by being compared to popular music, or to early and new music; more often it is considered the norm which defines other sorts of music. But considering it as a norm is no way to understand what kind of popularity it has or what kind of specialty it is. This study treats classical music as a specialty in its own right; it treats early music and new music not as specialties within classical music, but as specialties distinct enough from it to define it by contrast. This study represents classical music not as a normal phenomenon, even among "classical" musics in world history, but as the product of special historical conditions. Adaptation to new uses and new media gives classical music new kinds of popularity, but the popularity of classical music continues to be specialized. Even when classical music reaches people in numbers which would be impressive for popular music, that popularity is explained in this study by the music's special associations rather than by its universal appeal.

Classical music and popular music

When classical music is performed at Avery Fisher Hall or the Met, there is no more reason to label it "classical" than there is to label music at the Shubert Theatre "Broadway" or music at a square dance "folk." The place places it. The labels are needed only where various kinds of music are found together, as they are in record stores and on the radio. Radio stations, at least in America, specialize no less than performance places, but the listener finds many different stations on the same radio, and in most cases the station establishes its own place by labelling itself with its specialty: " 's premier classical-music station" or "the home of country music." Record stores specialize much less. They are the great meeting-grounds of musical categories, and they use labels the most. Signs saying "classical" and "folk" and "rock" map the buyer's route through the store. For sellers and buyers both, these labels form a wonderfully efficient system. The same labels are applied to the same recordings in

*I am grateful to William Austin, Mary Hunter, William Matthews, and John Spitzer for their readings of this study at various stages.

THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

record stores around the world. Despite the adaptations musicians make to styles other than their own, despite the collaborations of musicians from different fields, there are relatively few recordings of questionable assign- ment. Within a record store, nothing can make a "popular" recording "classical" or a "classical" one "popular."

To be sure, "classical" music is different from "popular" music in crucial and obvious ways. Most of it was composed long ago. Audiences, as a result, almost never hear it performed by its composer. Those who perform it and those who discuss it constantly refer to its score. Its audience is by and large elite.

But "classical" music has something in common with "popular." Popular music, which in Romance languages refers to what we call "folk music," in English generally refers to the products of that part of the music industry which sells to the largest audience. The notion of the "classical" or the "classics" in music also depends on a large audience. But the two audiences are large in different ways. The audience familiar with Beetho- ven's symphonies today or at any time is select compared to the audience for top-forty songs, but the audience Beethoven has accumulated in two centuries balances the audience for any popular song with its own kind of largeness. The ways in which listeners become familiar with classical and popular music are likewise balanced. Beethoven's most fervent devotees do not often listen to one symphony over and over without a break, the way teenagers typically listen to a new rock song. But many people listen to the same Beethoven symphony over and over in the course of their lives. The rock song has one kind of popularity because it is current; the symphony has another kind because it is classic, because it never becomes dated.

Classical music and history

The perpetual familiarity of Beethoven and other classical composers is a phenomenon with ancient precedent. The singing of the Psalms was perpetuated in ancient Hebrew culture, as the singing of Homer was in ancient Greek culture. Christian churches maintained their repertories of chant from medieval times to modem. But the modern-day classics of West- ern music are unprecedented in the system which perpetuates them. That is a system made up not of schools and religious bodies which incidentally cultivate music, but primarily of musical institutions: conservatories, opera houses, orchestras, music publishers, journals, and others. Institutions of that kind were not developed for the purpose of perpetuating a classical repertory. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, in fact, they were all devoted principally to new music (as popular-music institutions are today). But around the beginning of the nineteenth century they began perpetuating what they would earlier have discarded: the best recent works in their repertories. From these works they eventually formed a new perpet-

'In Japan, for instance, the label classical (kurashikku) is applied to Western classical music and not to any venerable Japanese tradition.

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CLASSICAL MUSIC AS POPULAR MUSIC

uated repertory. At this same time the word classic, which had long been in literary and artistic use, was first applied to music.2

To describe the formation of this repertory would be to give the history of musical institutions in the nineteenth century. Some established institutions changed in nature. The publishing house of Breitkopf & Hartel, for instance, founded early in the eighteenth century, pioneered in the publi- cation of collected editions at the beginning of the nineteenth century (its edition of Mozart starting in 1798, of Haydn in 1802, of Clementi in 1803)3; by the end of the century Old-Master editions accounted for much of its catalog. Other institutions were founded on novel principles which led those institutions to supply themselves with musical classics. The Philharmonic Society, founded in London in 1813 in order to "promote the performance, in the most perfect manner possible, of the best and most approved instru- mental music," was soon joined by other orchestral societies across Europe in selecting and confirming a repertory of orchestral classics.4

In both young and old institutions the same unseen transformation turned musical works into classics. Orchestras, opera houses, and publishers offered the same Beethoven symphonies and Mozart operas at the end of the nineteenth century as at its beginning. But whereas those works ap- peared alongside other fairly new works at the beginning of the century, within a repertory which spanned at most fifty years, at the end of the century they formed the oldest and most classic layer of a repertory several layers deep, spanning more than a century.

In the twentieth century the institutions have become as dependent on their classical repertory as that repertory has always been on the institutions. Orchestral programming shows this dependence most clearly. Late in the nineteenth century orchestral programs routinely sampled all the layers of repertory, from the most classic to the newest. Today many orchestral programs leave out the new, but very few (except for special events or the programs of specialized orchestras) leave out the classics. The classics have become the one nutrient necessary to every orchestral meal.

From their mutual dependence the institutions and their repertory have both derived stability. The institutions, along with their publics, uphold the

2A.L. Millin's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts (Paris, 1806) defines classic (classique) as "a term that is applied to composers who are generally admired and who are regarded as authoritative" (translated by Peter le Huray and James Day in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge, [1981], p. 293. In 1802 J.N. Forkel, listing what he considered the most outstanding of Bach's keyboard works, added that they "may be all considered as classical (klassisch)" (On Johann Sebastian Bach's life, genius, and works, translated by A.C.F. Kollmann, 1820; reprinted in The Bach reader, Hans T. David and Arthur Mendel eds., New York, [1966], p. 343). The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary found no application of the English word classical to music earlier than 1836.

3See "Editions, historical" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 4Philharmonic Society announcement quoted in Myles Birket Foster, History of the Philharmonic

Society of London: 1813-1912 (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head. 1912), p. 4. Information about the forming of the classical orchestral repertory can be found in Philip Downs, The Development of the Great Repertoire in the Nineteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1970). and William Weber, "Mass Culture and the Reshaping of European Musical Taste, 1770-1870." in Inter- national Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music VIII/1 (June 1977), esp. pp. 18-19. Weber's subject is "the rise of the musical masters as an early form of mass culture."

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choices they made for the classical repertory in the nineteenth century: Beethoven and Brahms in the concert hall, Mozart and Verdi and Wagner at the opera. At the same time, the institutions which first perpetuated this repertory have themselves become classics. Orchestras and opera houses founded in the nineteenth century have become today's "world-class" organizations. Before the nineteenth century there were conservatories only in Italy; today every Western country trains performers of classical music in conservatories founded for that purpose in the nineteenth century. Before the nineteenth century music publishers were lucky to last a couple of generations and music journals a couple of years; today many publishers and journals from the nineteenth century flourish.5 The institutions of classical music not only perpetuate the repertory; in their age and prestige they embody the importance of that repertory.

* * *

The idea of a classical repertory is that certain old works should be kept ever-popular, ever-present, ever-new. It is an idea founded on reverence for the past, but not necessarily on a moder scholarly conception of history. A culture may maintain a classical repertory without taking notice of historical differences between one work and another within it. A classical repertory need not be kept up-to-date with works from the period just past. The repertory of Gregorian chant, for instance, was considered closed by the time of the Renaissance, and performers did not sing the older chants within that repertory differently from the younger chants, though the repertory as a whole was performed differently from place to place and from one period to the next. Moder scholars may find ways to distinguish older and newer works within that repertory, but for the performers and for the culture they served, those works were long united in a common antiquity. Much the same is still true of other perpetuated repertories: courtly repertories in Asia and folk repertories around the world.

The repertory of Western "classical music," however, was formed under the spell of nineteenth-century European ideas of history: the arche- ological idea of history as reconstruction, the evolutionary idea of history as a process of perpetual change, the progressive idea of history as the formation of the present. The Western classical repertory was assembled alongside the first scholarly editing of classic scores,6 which made performers think of old music as something restored rather than handed down, the product of a particular time and place rather than a perennial favorite. It was formed alongside the rise of concert program-notes, which were ded- icated as much to establishing the classic as to introducing the new and which encouraged listeners to think of musical works as historically distinct

5A list of music publishers, arranged by country and showing dates of operation, can be found in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart under "Musikverlag und Musikalienhandel." A comparable list of music periodicals can be found in The New Grove under "Periodicals," Section IV.

6The first great editorial landmark is the Bach Gesellschaft edition, begun in 1851.

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from each other.7 The classical repertory, because it was thought of from the start as a record of historical development, was open to new works which seemed to embody the most important musical changes.

The institutions devoted to the performance of the musical classics are custodians; they and their publics admit changes and additions to the repertory, but they do not propose them. The composers, scholars, and others who offer new works, rediscovered works, and new ideas for the classical repertory are for the most part outsiders to the institutions which do the admitting. Before the rise of the musical classics, composing was not a distinct profession from performing: in the days of Josquin and Lully and Haydn, running a musical establishment meant composing new works for its repertory. But there are only tokens of that relationship left today. Music scholars at first worked outside of any institutions. In the nineteenth century, when they began to find institutional support, they found it mostly in universities rather than in performing institutions, and universities support most music scholars today. Conservatories and orchestral societies and opera houses, like museums, may embody the idea of historical development, but they let outsiders give birth to new developments.

Nevertheless, those institutions define what kinds of changes and additions to the repertory they will consider. Simply by conceiving of the musical classics as a record of historical development, they define into existence activities, careers, and institutions which they do not directly maintain. The nineteenth-century idea of the musical classics required those other nineteenth-century ideas, "early music" and "new music." Those ideas have developed into institutions of their own: performing groups and concert series, schools and summer institutes, publishers and recording companies and journals. These institutions have always developed, however, in a symbiotic relation to those of classical music, feeding something to the classical institutions and being supported by them. The relationship is so close that for many purposes the three kinds of music are lumped together. In record stores, for instance, the products of early music and new music are considered "classical"; at most (in the largest stores) they are discrete sub-categories of "classical." But this classification hides the symbiotic relationship: early and new music differ from classical in the functions they perform, and as a result they can show us much by contrast about the nature of classical music.

Classical music, early music, new music

It is no help here to distinguish early and new music from classical music as different repertories or historical periods. The distinction is not in the material, nor in how history is being divided. Mozart may be "early" or "classical," Webern "new" or "classical," depending on what the

7Percy Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music (10th ed., John Owen Ward, ed.) under "Annotated programmes," describes important nineteenth-century developments in program notes, as well as citing some eighteenth-century forerunners.

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performers and listeners are doing with them. Even Monteverdi is "classical" when John Reardon sings Orfeo's "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi" on the childrens' television show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

To distinguish the three categories by means of their audiences is no more helpful. The classification of all three as "classical" in record stores suggests that the customers for the three are substantially overlapping groups. The three categories also share the same sections of record-review journals, many of the same concert halls, and the same classical-music radio stations, often even the same programs on those stations. The music industry assumes that customers for one of these categories are more likely to be interested in the other two than in jazz or rock or country, even though the customers themselves may think of their three categories as quite distinct.

The three categories-classical, early, and new music-are better dis- tinguished as ways of performing, or rather as ways of thinking about performance. Then it emerges that they are three distinct attitudes toward musical style. That is not to say that any one performer can have only one of these attitudes. Performers move from one realm to another-from classical piano to harpsichord to prepared piano. But as they move from one role to another, they have to change not just their hand positions, but their relation to the music. They are like actors who have to learn not just a new dialect, but a new method of acting. What, then, are the three attitudes toward style that belong to these three performing roles?

Classical musicians have a repertory spanning more than two centuries and a single means of production. They play Bach and Bart6k on the same instruments and with a single, if flexible, technique. By comparison to early-music performers, who increasingly choose to play early Bach and late Bach on different instruments, they resemble popular musicians in rendering their entire repertory in a common present. That is not to say that they ignore history. Classical musicians perform a score with a particular kind of faithfulness to history: the score by itself tells them just what notes to perform, as it does not do for early-music performers or, in many cases, for new-music performers. Reverence for the exact notes transmitted by history is characteristic of performers who regard their repertories as classic. Now that Charlie Parker has become "classic jazz," musicians give classical performances which reproduce exactly the "text" of a performance he recorded.

Classical-music performers are faithful to history in matters of style as well as of text. Unlike monastic choirs or sitar players or nightclub musicians or singers of traditional ballads, they decide the right style of performance for each work according to its place in history. They do not, however, reconstruct performance styles archeologically, as early-music performers do. Their music history is a tradition, and their styles of performance derive from reading the whole tradition as a map of expression, more than from close examination of extracts from one layer of history. Their tradition is divided into style-periods, each representing a stage of evolution and defined by its relation to other stages. Romanticism is an answer to Classicism; Impressionism and Expressionism and Verismo are

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divergent outgrowths of Romanticism. The tradition displays each new style as a step toward the present, but not necessarily as an improvement on the previous one. Instead, each style is regarded as an adaptation to the needs of its historical period, an adaptation which can be admired at its most perfect in the works of the greatest master or masters of the period. Clas- sical-music performers concentrate on the few great masters of each period, while early-music and new-music performers aim to give many composers of one period their due. The classical tradition is formed by the criterion of genius.

Each genius embodies the style of his period in a specific and intense way. The Chopin rubato is a particular form of Romantic rhythmic freedom. The genius, like the style-period, is defined by a place in the tradition. The classical Beethoven is derived from the historical Beethoven, but his precise character has been determined the way a color is prepared for the palette: with an eye for the contrast it makes with all the others. In fact, a composer's particular expression is most naturally described in comparative terms: "Beethoven seizes upon you: he is more tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more disinterested and poetical."8 If the historical composer was a personality creating a musical style, the classical composer is a musical style so clearly defined by contrast that it takes on the force of a personality. It is precisely the classical performer's task-and achievement-to turn the display of individual styles into the expression of great personalities.

The styles a classical performer displays are formed with the aid of historical evidence. Classical pianists are interested in what can be learned about Beethoven's piano-playing: did he break strings? how much did he use the damper pedal? But their purpose is to distinguish Beethoven within a tradition stretching from Bach to Bart6k, a tradition which Beethoven himself did not know. The classical style of playing Beethoven is not Bee- thoven's style of playing, but a style about Beethoven.

Performers arrive at a style by mapping their whole tradition; they have to learn their way around the whole tradition before they can render any one style. They have not learned Classical restraint unless they have also learned Romantic passion, or the rawness of Verismo unless they have also learned Impressionist refinement. At every stage of their training- admission to conservatory, graduation from conservatory, minor and major competitions-they are tested on their ability to perform works from every period of the repertory, demonstrating the right stylistic distinctions. These right distinctions are passed on from teacher to student: the mapping of styles is a tradition in itself. Because the styles have no existence without each other, performers and performing organizations range over their entire traditions, if not in every program, then in the course of a season. They perform all styles on the same instruments, with the same techniques, in the same halls. But this uniformity, which would stifle early-music per-

8Amiel's journal: the Journal intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel, translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 40, May 14, 1853. Quoted by A. Hyatt King in Mozart in Retrospect, rev. ed. ([London]: Oxford University Press, [1970]), p. 30.

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formance, is what gives life to each style in classical performance. Works of many times and places are displayed like so many paintings hung on the same white museum walls, so that the juxtaposition highlights exactly those style characteristics which the performers have cultivated.

Early-music performers differ from classical performers in the way they think about history and style. Style-periods ("the Baroque") may be too large for their precise needs, individual geniuses too narrow a focus, given the kinds of stylistic information available to them. Their music history is a residuum of times and places. Working at one site, they may compare their findings to those from other sites, but they do not need to map the whole residuum in order to establish something about their site. They resurrect the instruments available to the composer of a given work and the techniques of performance that the composer would have taken for granted. They concentrate, that is, on exactly those matters of time and place that the classical performer neglects. In their terms, the classical performer makes Mozart sound like Brahms. But early-music performers may neglect the question of artistic personality on which classical musicians concentrate. The early-music method is, in fact, to discover how to perform Mozart like any other composer of his time and place. Played on instruments in eighteenth-century condition, articulated and ornamented in the light of contemporary treatises, Mozart no longer sounds like Brahms, but the performance does not necessarily distinguish Mozart from Haydn. Early-music performers may have intuitions about each composer's artistic personality, but even the intuitions generated at a fortepiano differ from those generated at a Steinway.

Early-music performers reconstruct lost performing styles. They have to decide questions which classical performers, accepting what is passed down to them, may not even notice. They have to consider evidence which classical performers do not need. They are liable to be chastised for "al- lowing themselves personal opinions too early on in the process of becoming acquainted with the music."9 But having first reconstructed a style and then immersed themselves in it, they may learn to think in it, so that they can sing and play without asking themselves at every moment whether they are stylistically correct. Style needs to be second nature to early-music performers, even more than to other musicians. Like all musicians, they have to learn not to "worry at it like a dog with a bone," as Thurston Dart exhorted them at the end of a book surveying early-music bones of conten- tion.10 But early-music performers also need to make style seem natural to their listeners, while classical musicians have a greater need to draw their listeners' attention to it. Rather than display a variety of styles against a neutral background, early-music performers tend more and more to concentrate, at least for each program, on one style, one small spot in time and place, which they display in a consistent setting (performing not only

9Peter Williams, "J.S. Bach's Well-tempered Clavier: a New Approach" (Part 2) in Early Music, 11/3 (July 1983), 336.

'?The Interpretation of Music (New York and Evanston: Harper Colophon Books, 1963), p. 168.

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on the right instruments, but, if they can, in a church or hall in the right style). When this concentration is most complete, its effect is to submerge style: the performers draw the listener into a style so that it does not present itself as style at all.

If early music may work itself free of style-consciousness, new music may work its way toward it. A new work has stylistic roots for performers to discover. A performer's experience with the music which has influenced the composer is invaluable in finding the new work's style. A new work, like an old one, is rooted in a composer's time and place. Many new-music performances, especially first performances, are given by performers who know the composer, who share the work's time and place with the composer. When these performances are recorded, other performers, scholars, and connoisseurs turn to them for stylistic authenticity. These others, less close in time or place, rely on the composer's collaboration with the performers, along with whatever the composer and performers share in musical outlook and experience, to guarantee that authenticity. But these sources of authenticity may in fact have limited the consideration of style as such in the preparation of the performance. Performers who can ask the composer how to interpret a score or whose background prepares them to do it intu- itively have little need to bother with stylistic maps. The composer's guid- ance may be expressed in terms of style-"I meant this section to sound jazzier"-but any discussion of style between composer and performers is short-circuited the moment the composer says "I like that." At that moment style is displaced by taste.

When listeners other than the composer come to judge a new-music performance, another stylistic ambiguity arises: how to tell the performance from the work. The difficulty is made visible in the typical ritual at the conclusion of a performance: performer onstage and composer somewhere in the audience graciously attempt by outstretched or clapping hands to deflect the audience's applause toward each other. Listeners may think about the style of the work, but they have little way of telling how the performance has influenced their ideas or how a different one could change them. The difficulty has many varieties, depending, for instance, on what role improvisation or prepared sound plays in the performance. But in some form it is characteristic of new music because there are few performances of a work to compare. Listeners who go to hear a Beethoven symphony can compare the performance they hear to many others in their memories. Conductors of classical music do not, like popular singers and leaders, introduce numbers by saying "It goes something like this," but classical audiences are in fact very interested in what a performance is "something like," in what makes a given version special. In the years when John Kirkpatrick was the only pianist playing the Concord Sonata, there was nothing special about his version; it had no style. Now that other performers play it, listeners can compare performances and so distinguish the style of the work from the style of any one performance. They can use their ideas of the work's style to judge old and new performances. In other words, the work is now classic.


* * *

If classical music, early music, and new music all entail different ways of thinking about performance, they also entail different ways of listening. Just as a single performer can move from one way of performing to another, a single listener can move from one way of listening to another. Listening to classical music is dealing with something of a familiar nature, while listening to new music is dealing with something unfamiliar and listening to early music is dealing with something presented unfamiliarly.

The familiarity of classical music comes not simply from hearing the same works many times, but from hearing them presented as tradition. Classical performers present music as tradition by making the past contin- uous with the present. They make old music compatible with new instruments. They convert the changing music-making practices of the past into a modem continuum of styles. They accumulate genius from many times and places as the common heritage of modem Western civilization.

Listeners hearing music as tradition hear it as something belonging to them. Many listeners feel that Beethoven belongs to them, just as other listeners feel that Frank Sinatra belongs to them. Not that Beethoven can belong to any listener in quite the way Sinatra can; he needs more media- tion. But performers can provide it. Performing Beethoven, they can seem to have Beethoven's spirit. They can stand for Beethoven, dissolving the time which separates Beethoven from the present and making Beethoven seem to be his own performer. Then listeners feel that Beethoven speaks to them.

Classical composers, however warmly personified, speak a timeless, universal message. They speak to modem listeners because they have spoken to generations of listeners. They speak equally, or almost equally, to listeners in many countries because their native accents have been natural- ized in an international musical idiom. They speak to individual listeners because they speak a message which hundreds of millions are prepared by their culture to receive.

On the whole, the message of the classics is a message of comfort. When they were new, the classics had powers to discomfort as well as to comfort. But by the time they became classics, their powers to discomfort were defused, while their powers to comfort had, if anything, grown. The powers to discomfort are defused in several ways. A composer's original target disappears: no one can feel threatened by Figaro's anger anymore, and so audiences smile at it. Familiarity softens discomfort: how many times can The Rite of Spring shock? Time and history accommodate discomfort: the Wagnerian revolution may have consigned Rossini's musical practices to history, but now Wagner sits beside Rossini in history and in the repertory. Classical status itself transforms discomfort: Monteverdi's or Schonberg's boldest progressions have become like inscriptions on a mon- ument, stirring but no longer inflammatory. The Revolutionary Etude can be played or a Verdi liberation-opera staged in the most oppressed place in

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the world without fear that it will incite any disturbance. The classics belong to the status quo, the way "Ring around the rosy" belongs to childhood.

The classics belong to the authorities as well as to individual listeners, and not just to the musical authorities, which conferred classical status in the first place, but to the social and political authorities which support the musical ones. The classics offer comfort to the individual listener in part because they belong to the authorities. Classical music is approved music; it is politically and socially safe. Listening to the treasures of Western culture cannot be subversive or illegitimate; it cannot lower anyone socially. Still, the politics of comfort make many listeners uncomfortable. These listeners include not only some who do not like classical music anyway, but also some of those most deeply involved in it. They include music scholars who insist on remembering the powers which classical music has lost. Thus, Andrew Porter writes of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera that "Serious opera has always been a political art, and it was not for nothing that Bourbon censorship forbade the performance of 'Ballo.' "' His in- sistence may encourage opera companies to stage it "seriously as a drama of real and recognizable human behavior," but no matter what he writes or opera companies do, Verdi's voice can never again be dangerous to any regime, any more than "Ring around the rosy" can again evoke the plague.

Early-music performance makes the classics sound unfamiliar. Har- noncourt's ways of performing Bach sounds unfamiliar compared to Klem- perer's, not only because in the late-twentieth century it happens to be newer, but because it is based on an idea of discontinuity between the past and the present. This way of performing makes Bach belong to his own time, not to all time. It frees him from the burden of being timeless, im- mortal, and universal, the burden of being classic. It removes him from a tradition belonging to listeners today and returns him to a tradition which those listeners can only imagine. Early-music performers cannot revive the tradition to which Bach belonged; they too can only imagine it. But their reconstructions serve that imagining. Hearing Bach in these reconstructions, listeners can tell how remote music-making in Bach's day is from music- making today. Early-music performance makes the classics sound dated.

By pushing the classics into the past, early music draws attention to their past. Handel in early-music performance sounds more like the heir of Purcell than like the forerunner of Mendelssohn. Classical music, by contrast, draws the earliest works in its tradition toward the later ones. Classical musicians perform Handel like Mendelssohn and so make him sound ad- vanced for his time. Classical music trains listeners to notice what was forward-looking in the music of the past; early music trains them to notice what made music traditional in its own time.

The manifestly unmoder performance practices of early music draw attention to the act of historical reconstruction which has created the performance. They draw attention to the reconstructor, the performer. Early- music performers do not stand for the composers they are performing; they

"The New Yorker, February 18, 1980, p. 120.

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stand between the composer and the listener. Even between numbers they proclaim their own distinct role in the musical act: they talk to their audiences more than classical performers do. Classical performers by their ret- icence create ambiguity about who is "speaking" to the audience. Early- music performers by talking about instruments, sources, and performance practice draw attention to the process of historical reconstruction. In words as in notes, they "speak" to their audiences as researchers, as searchers for the composer's spirit, not primarily as vessels for that spirit.

New music is unfamiliar by nature. It is different from music that listeners happen not to have heard before, such as a recently exhumed Renaissance motet or Romantic symphony. Educated listeners can readily assimilate those works into familiar traditions. But with new music, assimilation is not always so easy, or even desired. Many listeners relish the newness of new music; if they assimilated every new piece at first hearing, no music would ever be new for them. New music forms a context in which a major triad or a well-known tune by Rossini can sound new. It is music heard as new.

The prestige of new music lies in its message being to some extent new: it "speaks to our time." That message cannot be conveyed if the music is totally unrecognizable. Music heard as new is music heard as departing from tradition, but any music, to convey its message, needs to establish a connection with tradition. A composer may find these two demands difficult to reconcile, as Gauguin found the equivalent demands on a painter, complaining about the "peculiar, crazy public that demands the greatest possible degree of originality on the painter's part and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!"12 For composers as for painters, the challenge of balancing the new and the recognizable is the challenge of imagining the public. Some composers write program notes to help their listeners find a balance. Bart6k, for example, in notes to his string quartets, analyzed the movements as straightforward examples of traditional forms, as if listeners would need help recognizing the recognizable and could be counted on to sense the new for themselves. New-music concerts often include works by composers who are grandfather figures- Debussy, Sch6nberg, Ives-as if to suggest connections for listeners to make with the newer works. But while the older music may work in that way, it may also take on an unfamiliarity of its own in this context. The older works are changed for today's listeners by the influence they are still exerting on today's composers. Assimilating the new unsettles what listeners have already assimilated in the old.

Recognizing connections with the old is among the pleasures of listening to the new. Assimilating new music is not only a pleasure, but a

12Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, ed. Daniel Guerin, tr. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Viking Press, [1978]), p.. 205. J. Peter Burkholder describes the same pressures as they bear on twentieth-century composers: "Composers could not afford to be too different .... New works had to be seen to take part in the tradition, to continue the manner of composing and thinking about music which characterized the master composers." ("Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years," The Journal of Musicology 11/2 (Spring 1983), 123.

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need if listeners are to live with new works as they do with classic ones. New music belongs to the present, but only a few listeners feel right away that it belongs to them. Many listeners feel embarrassment precisely because it belongs to the present: "I know I should like new music . . ." New music does not have the unfamiliarity of the remote, as early music does. It is unfamiliar because its history has not yet been found, its place in tradition has not yet been made. When that is done, when a work's newness has worn off and familiarity has set in, the work may become another classic alongside the Eroica. But for listeners who can remember the experience of hearing a work when it was new, that work can never be just another classic. A difference remains between the work whose place in history they have learned from history and the work whose assimilation into history is their own history.

New kinds of popularity

The popularity of any musical work increases when the work is trans- planted from its original situation, converted from its original use. A Bach cantata or Stravinsky ballet presented in a concert hall is a conversion, as is a Schubert symphony played by two people on a piano at home. These conversions change the work as a phenomenon, as an experience. They affect the way musicians perform and the way the music sounds. The Bach and Stravinsky are changed subtly in sound perhaps, the Schubert perhaps comically. The title Wachet auf or Firebird or Unfinished Symphony seems to name a single work, but one person may have heard many versions, in many circumstances, under that title. No one version stays altogether clear of the others in that person's memory and conception of the work. No one version is the work; the work is the complex of all versions, linked to each other by their common origin, by the score, by history, by the faculty of memory.

Likewise, classical music is not one phenomenon, but many. It is music which people put to many different uses. Each use makes classical music popular in a different way, and every form of popularity feeds the others. Classical music has always undergone conversions in use. It is traditional to sing church music and play ballet music in concerts, to play arrangements of symphonies for oneself. In the twentieth century new kinds of conversion have been made possible by the technical revolution in re- producing and broadcasting sound. Listeners, no longer needing to be in the presence of performers, are using music in unforeseen, unprecedented ways.

Probably the most common and varied new use of music is as "background." In some situations people do not control the use they make of background music because they do not choose whether or not it is played. Decisions are made for them by managers of factories, offices, and stores, by composers who provide music for movies and television. But those people make their decisions thinking about who their listeners are. Classical music, like every sort of music, offers a familiarity which is right for some

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listeners and situations, wrong for others. People who enter a store and hear classical music piped in can tell whether it is their kind of store before they even look at the merchandise, let alone the price tags. Listeners who hear classical music in a television or radio ad may not put a name to what they are hearing, but they can feel its classical tone, its "class." Classical music in these settings is not only comforting music; it is an attribute of "comfortable" living. It suits the selling of wine or wine-based mustard just as country-western suits the selling of hot dogs. For background purposes, classical is just one of many distinctive sorts of popular music.

In many situations people do control the music in their background. They choose a record or a radio station and go about their business. They plug in a cassette as they drive or wear headphones as they walk. In some cases they choose the same music for background as for foreground; in some cases they prefer quite different types of music. Both choices bear investigating.

Classical music in the concert hall claims the full attention of its listeners; they have set other activities aside to hear it. But some of the listeners who go to concert halls to hear it and some of the musicians who perform it there put the same music on while they eat or read or talk or play. President Carter had classical music piped into the Oval Office. These listeners seem confident that they can listen with less than one ear to music which they believe deserves their full attention in other circumstances. They seem not to fear that they will be distracted by the very music that seems most capable of distracting them, because of its inherent qualities and their familiarity with it. Commercial producers of background music pay careful attention to inherent qualities and familiarity, but people selecting their own background music abide by no rules. As Hugo Cole writes in one of the few balanced accounts of background music, "in the field of do-it-yourself background music any type, from crumhorns to Steve Reich, may be pressed into service."'13

On the other hand, some listeners shun their favorite music for background. I have had college students interview their fellow students about how they use their record collections, and a few of the informants have reported that they prefer rock when they are listening intently to music, but put on Bach or Debussy when they need to concentrate on their math problems. These informants, however small a minority they are, raise some important questions more clearly than the other group. What musical qualities might make one kind of music preferable to another as background to a given activity? How does a person listen to music while giving primary attention to something else? How does the listener's familiarity with the music affect that process? Available research does not provide direct an- swers. The corporations that produce and sell background music have had these matters studied, but they do not publish the results. Educational researchers have studied the effects of background music, even various kinds of background music, on learning, but they have not, so far as I know,

'3"Background music-threat or promise." in Composer (London) No. 61 (Summer 1977), 23.

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considered the preferences of the listeners or the musical qualities that affect listening.14 Psychologists have studied how people divide their attention between two sounding messages or between a sounding message and a silent task, but for the most part they have used spoken rather than musical messages. 15

The rock fan who studies to classical music may simply be choosing wordless music over worded music for background. Commercial background music, after all, is generally wordless; the only Muzak with words is "foreground" Muzak.16 Other features of classical music may second the choice. College students who listen mostly to popular music sometimes describe classical music as lacking a beat, by which they seem to mean the kind of beat which a rhythm section provides. Perhaps, then, much classical music is neutral enough in a certain way to make a suitable background for study. The classical music never, perhaps, demands more than a very "at- tenuated" concentration (to borrow a term from psychologists), but that much steady concentration on music may keep students from losing their primary concentration on math problems.

Classical music is no longer itself when it is used as background music. It becomes like "easy-listening" popular music, valued more for its geni- ality than for its genius. But the change that comes over it is a change in the listening, not in the notes. The performance that a student puts on the cassette player while studying may be a performance that thrilled Philhar- monic subscribers. Researchers who investigate background uses of classical music may be able to isolate unchanging qualities of the notes from listeners' tastes. They may be able to find the inherent qualities that most clearly distinguish classical from other kinds of music. If they can, their findings might influence not only the uses of classical music as background, but also the observations that musicologists consider it important to make about classical works.

Classical music is not "easy listening," but even in its traditional settings and uses it has gotten to be easier, in several senses, than it was only a couple of decades ago. To begin with, it is easier to get hold of. The numbers of classical-music organizations, performers, performances,

4References can be found under "Attention" in Education Index. Music Index lists some others, under "Background music."

'5References can be found under "Divided attention" and "selective attention" in Psychological Abstracts. Some studies using music can be found under "attention" and "background music" in Music Psychology Index. A useful if somewhat dated survey of the subject is the chapter "Attention" (esp. pp. 401-404) by Howard Egeth and William Bevan in Handbook of General Psychology, ed. Benjamin B. Wolman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, [1973]).

16See Ken Terry, "Muzak to bow 'foreground' music service." in Variety 301 no. 2 (November 12, 1980), p. 71.

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and patrons are rising steadily year by year.17 Radio now makes classical music available to people everywhere in America for some hours of every day. Recordings make it available to them at whim. Even those who never want to hear it know that it is within their reach now.

Earlier in this century, when classical music was not everywhere, it was assumed to be an acquired taste, and people worked to acquire it. They took courses in school to learn how to appreciate classical music. All the faults of the "Appreciation-racket" were spelled out by Virgil Thomson in 1939; he blamed it especially for the promotion of "mere listening, that is to say, of a passive musical experience, to replace performance, which is an active experience."18 Today music-appreciation courses are still flour- ishing, and it seems sometimes that there is more Appreciative talk than music on the radio. But as more and more of it is broadcast, less and less of it even pretends to help listeners listen. The assumption that people need to be prepared to hear classical music is largely abandoned, undermined by the nature of radio itself. Classical music is no longer a ritual which you must dress up and travel to a public building to hear. Now it comes out of your speakers and into your ears before you know what it is, sometimes before you are awake. The new pervasiveness of music in daily life over- throws even what Thomson called the "false, or at least highly disputable" assumption of the Appreciation-racket "that the conscious paying of attention during the auditive process intensifies the favorable reaction."19 Now the less hard you listen, the easier classical music is to like.

The promoters of classical music rely on this new ease in making their product liked. At the same time they rely on its continued snob appeal. They work to build a larger and larger base of "brand loyalty" to it, but they cultivate that loyalty with elitist appeals. "Strike a blow for civilization," read recent ads for Metropolitan Opera subscriptions. The Met uses the word civilization because Radio City and Madison Square Garden can't. The Met gets away with it-and thousands of other classical-music organizations derive growth from elitist appeals-because of economic and social

17Statistics about the performing arts are to some extent speculative. Nevertheless, the most com- prehensive surveys of classical-music organizations suggest that live performances have become sig- nificantly more accessible in the United States during the last decade and more.

The Annual U.S. Survey Statistics of the Central Opera Service (Lincoln Center, New York, New York 10023) indicate that the number of opera groups in the United States grew from 685 in the 1970- 71 season to 1031 in 1982-83. In the same period the annual number of performances (excluding musicals) doubled (from 5,246 to 10,693), as did the attendance figures (from 6.0 million to 12.7 million).

The American Symphony Orchestra League (633 E St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004) estimates that between 1972 and 1983 the number of "symphonic ensembles" in the United States rose from 1204 to 1572, the number of players in those orchestras rose from 70,000 to 76,000, the number of concerts nearly doubled (from 12-13,000 to 22-23,000), and the attendance figures rose from 18 to 23 million. I am grateful to Bob Olmsted and Melanie Jarratt of the League's Research and Analysis office for compiling 1983 figures for me suitable for comparison to the League's 1972 figures, as cited in Christopher Pavlakis, The American Music Handbook (New York, 1974), p. 95.

l8The State of Music (New York, 1939), p. 124. There were music-appreciation lectures and books, by H.G. Nageli and F.-J. Fetis, as early as the 1820's.

19Ibid, p. 125.

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changes. America's elite, its white collar, is larger than ever before.20 More people want "the best" of everything and, at least in music, find it easy to get.

People can have more classical music in their lives than ever before. They can hear any piece on recording, watch any opera on video, any time they want. A steady radio listener may hear a Brahms symphony a hundred times over the course of years. Music that is so easy to hear can be too easy to put out of mind. To fight against this effect, record companies and radio stations expand the repertory of classics they offer. Although it is nothing new to add works to the repertory, this expansion differs in principle from the creation and updating of the repertory. It consists largely of filling in around the classics, reviving every note written by the masters and many works written by their contemporaries. These works are not subjected to prolonged testing, as the older classics were, before they are considered classical; they are classics by association. They may have musical merit or historical interest, but they do not have to. They are chosen for recording and broadcast because they fill out the classical repertory without discom- forting classical listeners: a well-loved classical disc-jockey in Boston, asked why he plays so little new music, replied, "I don't want people to cut themselves while they're shaving." The classics-by-association are chosen because they fill out the classical repertory while maintaining its exclusive identity: a potboiler by Beethoven or even Hummel can be what the classical radio stations call "good music" or "fine music," but the best of gospel or gagaku cannot.

Classical music maintains its identity while its repertory expands, its audience expands, and its uses expand. It grows easier and more popular, but no less exclusive. Individual classical pieces may become so popular that they barely retain their classical identity. The Mendelssohn wedding march is hardly classical when it is played at weddings; even when it is played in a concert, in its original version, set among the other incidental pieces to A Midsummer-night's Dream, it may jump out of its classical setting and revert, for many listeners, to its more "popular" identity. But the classical repertory as a whole retains its identity even as it is becoming popular world-wide.

As the opening of this study suggested, new uses and new media are now bringing classical music worldwide popularity, but that popularity continues to depend on the music's special associations. Seven-hundred million people heard Kiri Te Kanawa sing a Handel aria as they watched the wedding of Prince Charles on television. The enormous number of viewers does not indicate the popularity of Handel. So many people were listening to

20According to the 1982-83 Statistical Abstract of the United States (p. 386), the number of white- collar workers in the United States rose from 28,522,000 in 1960 to 52,949,000 in 1981. According to a 1974 study by the Ford Foundation, members of the white-collar class were almost three times likelier than those of the blue-collar class to go to a symphonic concert at least once a year, and four times likelier to go to the opera. See The Finances of the Performing Arts (New York: Ford Foundation, 1974), vol. 2, p. 13, table 13.

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Handel because so many people were watching the British royal wedding. Western classical music expands to reach a universal audience precisely because it retains its associations with European culture, with Western wealth and power, in this case with the British royal family. It has become the most universal, the most popular, of classical musics, not because of its inherent musical appeal, but because of universal interest in the West. It is thought of as "classical" even by people outside the West who have other classical musics of their own. To those listeners it is a specialty in a way that it is to no Westerner; it is the specialty of the West. Western classical music, which the West values as its music most universal in message, unites listeners around the world not because it has the same appeal for all of them, but because its specific associations appeal in different ways around the world.

Bates College

parakilas, james. 1984. classical music as popular music

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