Tony,Interesting stuff and I like the way you express a definite and sustained case. However, I think you are being a little unfair on the longevity point - the dice are loaded in favour of Bach and Beethoven simply because their music is much older than more 'recently historical' pop and soul. I was only thinking the other day how much I love Rockabilly and Rock and Roll for its beat but that lyrically ('Lets have a party') it falls way behind Soul music in that department, and you cant knock The Beatles songwriting capabilities, for example.
Recently I watched a documentary about Joy Division. Putting your criteria to that band I note that in the face of overwhelming lack of acceptance in the early years Sumner recounted how the band went away and practised hard in a rented factory floor in 70s Manchester so that when they got a break they would be able to show everyone they could play. So there's your point about learning your art. Lyrically Ian Curtis was informed by reading novels and his songs were infused by many dark themes (unusual in popular music). Against your general point about popular music being determined by a 'voracious moneymaking machine', Factory records represented a quite different case of a label that first and foremost was invented to promote Mancunian talent and was poorly run financially. Above all I got the impression of a group of talented performers who became an important influence in post punk music and who had, in the form of lead singer Ian Curtis, a truly talented and individual singer and writer. What a tragedy his illness and suicide was.
I challenge you to say that what this band achieved was not great art. Indeed, they appear, as I argue, to conform to your criteria in a couple of ways and I dare say I could make a case for other bands and 'artists' who have had the misfortune to be born since the war.
Jack
Can't answer your points about Joy Division, Jack, as my knowledge of them consists of having heard of them! I have never knowingly heard any of their music, so I can't respond in any meaningful way. I would not deny that the rock/pop fraternity throws up the occasionally exceptional talent, but I would argue that they are few and far between. Very few come up to, for example, this outstanding rendition of a great standard:
[video=youtube;1fzZ4l2H5-w]
The point of popular music is the necessity for it to be
commercial; this was also true of Ella and Frank and the like, but not in the same industrialised way as has happened since the arrival of rock'n'roll. The rapid expansion of easy means of production and reproduction has led to a whole new ball game in which, it seems to me, quality has been generally sacrificed to the pursuit of quantity and the next big thing.
I don't think the dice are loaded in favour of Bach and Beethoven by dint of age. Bach was, in fact, completely forgotten. His sons moved away from his contrapuntal style (seen as too much of a musical straitjacket) as quickly as they could. This, coupled with the belief that music was constantly improving, led to the mindset that older music was lesser music and therefore not worth remembering. As a result, in the fateful year when the musical
enfant terrible Felix Mendelssohn was given the score of the St. Matthew Passion, the only remaining memory of J.S. Bach in Leipzig was that of a great organist. Felix's performance of St. Matt, the first for over 70 years, was the start of Bach's rehabilitation. It too a while. Everybody knows Bach's "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" (the chorale
Jesu bleibet meine Freude, from Cantata BWV147). But do you know when it was rediscovered? The 1930s, when Dame Myra Hess started using it as an encore in her piano recitals. And suddenly everyone sat up and said, "Gosh! What's that?"
Beethoven was altogether a different character, not only a composer of genuis, but also a forceful personality, who saw music as an art, not a craft. He also represents one of the few occasions in human history in which a creative person never climaxed, but just kept on getting better, right to the end - the final quartets were so far ahead of their time that it took a century for everyone else to catch up. It is hard to underestimate Beethoven's importance in musical history. He laid the foundations for the Romantic era, which still dominates the musical thinking of most people.
These people were intellectual giants, major milestones in the development of Western music, and their effect reverberates far beyond "classical" music into the very language of Western music itself, popular included. This is not to denigrate good-quality popular music in any way, nor to look down upon it, but simply to recognise that, in the scheme of things, classical survives because it deserves to, because, essentially, it wrote the book for everyone else. Where would Western music be without the major-minor scale system, so much more versatile than the modal system used by Gregorian chant? Or the tempered scale, demonstrated by Bach in
The Well-Tempered Clavier? It's sad that pop/rock artists never recognise their debt to the past (if they even know it), being simply unable to look past the sometimes stuffy trappings of classical performance and to see the wonders awaiting therein.
