One of the pitfalls of this conversation as so many is the assumption that all music essentially serves the same purpose.

Much pop music is designed to sell as many records as possible with a minimum of production effort/expense.

Much classical music is/was designed to represent the last word in erudition and sophistication.

If I myself am a snob, then I'm disdainful of both of these agendas -- in which case, I'll bear the epithet proudly.

Since I can see the Thought Police sharpening its weapons of interrogation, let me say what I think I mean by expressivity being more or less "authentic". By authentic I mean something which speaks to and of its own time, maybe in ways which relate to the past (as in reinterpretations of ancient myth for example) but bringing to bear on the artistic process the way in which the relationship of human beings to each other and to the world exists in a certain place, time and social context. Bach's music, for example, does this in a profound way, so that it not only expresses what's common between a 21st century audience and 18th century Lutheran Leipzig, but also can inform the former at least as much about the latter as might any history book (provided, in both cases, that one has a certain background fluency with the context). Arvo Pärt's music, on the other hand, doesn't do this: it ignores (rather disingenuously, given Pärt's own early work) not just the last 500 years of expanding musical resources, but also the fact that we live in a time and place conditioned by Darwin, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Bush, quantum mechanics, genetic engineering and indeed the whole juggernaut of popular culture. These things don't go away by being ignored: to me at least they become "elephants in the room".

Going back to my original point, using the expressive resources characteristic of an earlier age is to my mind an easy way out, since someone like Robin Holloway can rely on a large proportion of his audience being familiar with the expressive "tropes" he appropriates for himself: but, at the same time, what I would call the "inauthenticity" of his approach means that in principle he can't really access the means of communication developed as an artistic necessity by (say) Schumann, for which reason I'd say listen to Schumann, not an anachronistic imitation of its emotional stimuli. Maybe that's putting it too harshly. I do think that the problem with a lot of "contemporary music" isn't that it's "beyond" its audiences but that it's not contemporary enough.

Some people might call me a "musical snob" for delivering myself of a statement like this. Note however the phrases "what I think I mean", "to my mind" and so on. There is perhaps a fine line between justifying one's personal preferences by elevating them to the status of dogma, and trying to work out how those preferences came to be formed by taking a wider perspective. What I'm trying to do is the latter. If I hear some music by Robin Holloway and find it repellent, it seems natural to me to try to get to the bottom of that reaction, just as when I hear some music by someone else that I find irresistibly attractive.

Yes I know I'm being a snob now, but really.  They're atrocious.  Their fans are just...wrong! 

I'm thinking Stevie Ray Vaughn. 

I'm sorry, I can't accept either of the characterisations presented above. 'Conservatism' can mean many things - I don't see why the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks (much of which works mostly with three chords) is more 'conservative' than Maxwell Davies' First Symphony, written around the same time. And there are plenty of listeners (not just rockists, also amongst aficionados of clubbing) who do not simply experience popular music passively, and indeed give it attention and a response (just in a different manner to listeners to classical music) - the variegated modes of dancing to some music certainly constitute a 'response', just to give an obvious example.

And I don't see why dismissing music that works on many levels as 'three chord pap' or 'conservative tripe' is any less snobbish than disdain from popular music listeners towards art music. Nor how it's any different, or better, than John W's comments on Holliger (with his expression of which I have no problem whatsoever (though I would prefer if he tried to criticise in more detail rather than in terms of bland generalities), however much I might violently disagree with him on this any most other subjects; after all, his view of this type of music is probably a lot more common than most of those regularly expressed on this board, however much we might try to rule the former out of court).

Thanks Ian. Your second quote kinda answers the first point; as you know I did listen to the Hollioger but was so totally bewildered, and and even quite angry that it was sandwiched the way it was, that I could say little more than I don't like it and moan that the concert was ruined, indeed I think I switched off and forgot to go back for a Schumann work.    I'm sure the work had technical qualities that others admired but like Ted above that would sail over my head, it's just a case of liking it or not.

Of course I listen to and buy music now that I would not have dreamed of doing so thirty years ago  I'm older and wiser and have a lot more time for music today.


John W

Whilst a few of Wendell Kretschmar's ideas were informed by what Mann learned from Adorno (from whom Mann received a fair amount of his musical education), not least concerning Beethoven's Op. 111 (for example, Kretschmar's view that 'Beethoven had been far more 'subjective', not to say far more 'personal', in his middle period than in his last, had been far more bent on taking all the flourishes, formulas, and conventions, of which music is certainly full, and consuming them in the personal expression, melting them into the subjective dynamic'), I don't believe that one can view Kretschmar as being based on Adorno, even loosely. His views on Wagner ('the E-flat major triad of the flowing depths of the Rhine, the seven primitive chords, out of which, as though out of blocks of Cyclopean masonry, primeval stone, the 'Götterburg' arose. Surpassingly brilliant, in the grand style, he presented the mythology of music at the same time with that of the world in that he bound the music to the things and made them express themselves in music, he create an apparatus of sensuous simultaneity - most magnificent and heaving with meaning, if a bit too clever after all, in comparison with certain revelation of the elemental in the art of the pure musicians, Beethoven and Bach') or Bruckner (''Is there anything more heartfelt, more glorious,' he would cry, 'than such a proresion of mere triads? It is not like a purifying bath for the mind'') are a very long way indeed from Adorno's view of these composers. Rather, Kretschmar seems to be based upon a certain archetypal late 19th/early 20th century German musician/musicologist, such as his namesake Hermann Kretzschmar or Hugo Riemann, though possibly also of Schoenberg.

Adorno does appear, very clearly, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Doktor Faustus as one of the guises in which the devil appears to Leverkühn. Passages such as 'But do look at them for your consolation, your fellow-inaugurators of the new music, I mean the honest, serious ones, who see the consequences of the situation, I speak not of the folklorists and neo-classic asylists whose modernness consists of their forbidding themselves a musical outbreak and in wearing with more or less dignity the style garment of a pre-individualistic period' or 'Every composer of the better sort carries within himself a canon of the forbidden, the self-forbidding, which by degrees includes all the possibilities of tonality, in other words all traditional music. What has become false, worn-out cliché, the canon decides' are right out of Adorno, and from the Philosophie der neuen Musik (which Mann greatly admired) in particular.

(all quotes from the H.T. Lowe-Porter translation)

Play him Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit.' It's a type of pop music but uses more than three chords. Tell him she used to break down after each performance. Watch his reaction. I can't believe he won't be moved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs