How Music Works (50 page)

Outside of his work as an economist, Lord Keynes was involved in an orga-

nization called the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts

(CEMA), a government arts-funding agency that later morphed into the Arts

Council of Great Britain. It was established during World War II to help preserve British culture. Keynes, however, didn’t like popular culture—so some

things were deemed outside the provenance of the agency’s mission. Keynes

“was not the man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals,” observed

Kenneth Clark, the director of London’s National Gallery, and later the host of the popular television series
Civilisation
. Mary Glasgow, Keynes’s longtime assistant, concurred: “It was standards that mattered, and the preservation of serious professional enterprise, not obscure concerts in village halls.”19

If we subscribe to the nineteenth-century view that professionally made

classical music is good for you and good for the ordinary man, then it follows that supporting it financially is more like funding a public-health measure

than underwriting entertainment. The funding of “quality” work is then inev-

itable, because it’s for the good of all—even though we won’t all get to see it.

The votes came in, and the amateurs lost by a landslide. (The Arts Council

did, however, modify their brief after Keynes’s death.) There seemed to be

no way, meanwhile, to teach folks how to develop their own talent—one was

either born with it or not. Hazlitt, Keynes, and their ilk seem to discount any DAV I D BY R N E | 279

knock-on effects or benefits that amateur music-making might have. In their

way of thinking, we should be happy consumers, content to simply stand

back and admire the glorious efforts of the appointed geniuses. How Keynes’s friends like Virginia Woolf, or his wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, learned their own skills is not explained.

Elitism is not the sole reason that the “temples of quality” are lavishly

funded. There is also the undeniable glory of seeing your name on a museum

or symphony hall. David Geffen may have gotten his start managing popular

folk rockers, but now his name is on art museums (and AIDS charities). I’m

not criticizing this philanthropy, just noting that it’s not being done with the aim of building a thriving network of folk-rock clubs across the nation.

Museums and symphony halls encourage this trend by offering more and

ever-smaller spots on which to chisel your name. I’ve seen donor names on

hallways, cloakrooms, and even on the vestibule as you enter the toilets. Pity the poor donor who proudly points that one out. Soon every chair and door-knob will have someone’s name on it.

The writer Alain de Botton wonders why our residences and offices are

often so enervating:

I met a lot of people in the property business [developers, as they are called in the United States], and asked them why they did what they did… They said it was to make money. I said, “Don’t you want to do something else? Build better buildings?”

Their idea of doing something better for society was to give money to the opera.20

This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s

social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind

a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the

United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding

a theater at Lincoln Center, or why a Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors

avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s

almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other.

Industry titans have long directed a good amount of their wealth to the

acquisition of the artifacts of high culture. After accumulating a collection, they need to find somewhere to park it. Henry Clay Frick was a coke and steel 280 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

manufacturer and railway financier before he became the founder of the jewel-box museum on the Upper East Side that bears his name. The core collection

of American art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco was donated by

John D. Rockefeller III, whose wealth was originally generated by his grand-

father, the founder of the energy monopoly Standard Oil. In 1903, Isabella

Stewart Gardner used an inherited industrial fortune to build a Renaissance

palace in the swamps outside Boston to house her own collection. Referring

to oil magnate John Paul Getty, Carey writes,

In his view, artworks are superior to people. His art collection was viewed as an external or surrogate soul. These spiritual values attributed to the artworks were transferred to the owner. That owner can be an individual or a nation. It applies to theaters and concert halls as well as paintings. The artworks or performance spaces become like spiritual bullion—underwriting the authority of the possessor.21

Such industrialists, whose wealth was sometimes brutally obtained or whose

moral judgment was entirely questionable (Getty felt that women on welfare

should be denied the right to become parents), thus engaged in a kind of reputation laundering. Someone who supports “good” music must be a good person,

too. (I have no idea why the Mafia dons and the narco-gangsters haven’t wised up to this fact. Wouldn’t you love to see the Joey Bananas opera hall?) Reputation laundering works because it’s assumed that the folks who support fine music would be less likely to commit heinous crimes than the human flotsam

that frequent a honky-tonk or a techno club. Participating in the scrums and mosh pits at pop concerts must be less morally and psychologically uplifting than sitting stock-still in complete silence at the ballet.

What if, in an imaginary country, a hypothetical king preferred house

music to Mozart? Would that confer high status on raves? Would we then

see buckets of funding being allocated for dance venues, and witness top-

flight architects vying to build pop-music clubs out of titanium and imported marble? I don’t think so. But seriously, why not? Why does the idea of equal funding for popular music seem ridiculous? Granted, pop music is supposed

to stand on its own two feet financially—“pop” stands for “popular,” after

all—so by definition it shouldn’t need help. High-art music is not nearly

as popular, so it needs financial support to stay afloat, to continue to have a presence in our culture.

DAV I D BY R N E | 281

But there are plenty of innovative musicians who now work in a vaguely

pop idiom (though that definition has been stretched a lot lately) who have

had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies.

For years, pop music was considered crassly commercial—a place where most

musical choices were made solely in order to pander to the lowest common

denominator and rake in more cash. Now, though, many would agree that there

is a lot more than money behind all the work and innovation that falls within the increasingly fuzzy boundaries of the form. There is still plenty of soulless work being churned out, but I would argue that for sheer quantity of innovative output, there is more going on within pop music than in any other genre. The mere use of electric guitars, laptops, or samples, for example, doesn’t mean the intentions of the composer or performer are any less serious than anything traditionally deemed high art. Much of it is done for the joy of it, with no hope of having a commercial hit. (Though some hit songs can be innovative, too.) Why not fund the venues where these young, emerging, and semi-amateur musicians can make and perform their own music? Why not invest in the future of

music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

POP MUSIC: CAPITALIST TOOL

Take pity on popular music. Leftist critics like the late Theodor Adorno

felt that popular music worked like a drug, pacifying and numbing the

masses so that they could be easily manipulated. Adorno felt that the public in general had bad taste, but he generously maintained that it was not their fault; it was the wily capitalists and their marketing folks who conspired to keep the plebes stupid by
making
them like pop music. People liked pop, he believed, because it was cynically tailored to mirror their sad, mass-produced world. The mechanized rhythms of popular music echoed the industrial

production process. One can certainly imagine metal or techno evoking an

assembly line or a giant pile-driver; the feeling of surrendering to such a

sonic machine might even have a sublime aspect to it, as well. Surrendering

feels good. But Adorno doesn’t credit us with the ability to enjoy industrial-sounding music without actually becoming a cog in the capitalist machine.

In his view, capitalist societies produced both workers and music via a kind of assembly line. That criticism is still leveled at a lot of contemporary pop 282 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

music—it’s called “cookie cutter,” now, or formulaic. But did Adorno really

think that the music made by the giants of classical music didn’t adhere to

any tried-and-true formulas? I hear formulas in almost every genre—it’s

rare when something really shatters the rules and appears to be completely

sui generis. Besides, you can be a headbanger without accepting your hor-

rible factory job. Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music gives them hope

and inspiration. It doesn’t just placate and pacify.

Adorno’s ideal was Beethoven, and he felt that subsequent trends in

German music were corrupted. “It is this lack of experience of the imagery

of real art,” he wrote, “which is at least one of the formative elements of the cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven’s people, into

Hitler’s people.”22 Here we go again, linking music with moral and ethical

values. Adorno maintained that such music—the work of corrupted popular

composers—no longer attempted to suggest something greater than itself; it

was content to be a utilitarian product, a diversion, a hummable tune. God

forbid a tune should be hummable!

Adorno argued that by reminding the dehumanized masses of their human-

ity, classical music—classical music, mind you!—threatens the capitalist system, and it was therefore this music that was discriminated against and dis-

couraged. But wait—wasn’t classical music encouraged by Hitler? And isn’t

classical music, as evidenced by the symphony halls and opera houses that are proudly displayed in the center of many of the world’s cities, fairly well supported by those very same capitalists? If that’s discrimination, I’ll have some.

It is easier to find evidence of the overt persecution of pop music by the

totalitarian left. In 1928, the Soviets announced that the playing of American jazz was punishable by six months in jail. Jazz

jail. Hip-hop is still an underground phenom-

enon in Cuba, and until recently pop music

was narrowly circumscribed in China. The

government of the former East Germany was

worried about the subversive influence of rock

and roll, so they attempted to “inoculate” their

populace by introducing a fake popular dance

called the Lipsi.G These governments view pop,

not classical music, as a potentially disruptive

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G

force. While Adorno’s musical favorites might indeed inspire a transcendent

look toward the stars, it’s the social aspect of pop in the streets that really frightens totalitarian governments. Even in the United States, popular music has been banned when it seemed to encourage disreputable racial mixing or

unwelcome sexuality.

The Brazilian composer Tom Zé, who has to some extent bridged the

elite world of academic composition and popular music, proposes a theory

in which, in a weird nod to Adorno, workers are (poorly) “manufactured” by

the system—in other words, the capitalist project aims to create cogs in the machine. But Zé says that our manufacture is defective, and that our quirks

and our innate humanity make us, in effect, damaged goods. We’ll never work

the way we were designed to; our humanity is our saving defect. In a way, he’s saying that while Adorno might be right about the system’s intention, he’s

wrong about how things actually work out. Zé and his music prove that we

will always fuck the system up in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.

The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera

is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons.23 That these donors should choose to support this music at