The Fredösphere

Ionarts reviews a new recording of the 24 Preludes & Fugues by Shostakovich right here.

My regular readers, assuming they exist outside of my rich fantasy life, will remember my minuscule piano practicing time each day is devoted to learning the A-minor fugue from Shostakovich's set.  The wifeösphere has complemented me on the music, thinking it was from my own current composition project.  In fact, she's done it to me twice.  Grrrrrrrr.  I could take it as a complement, except both times there was a certain quality in her voice that communicated "hey, now you're on to something.  Finally."

The wifeösphere is an excellent type of person for a composer to be married to.  She's intelligent and attentive, but lacking any strong interest in new music.  Yet with me dragging her to concerts and giving her the background information, she enjoys it most of the time.  A couple of years ago I took her to a sneak preview of Bright Sheng's opera Madame Mao (just the first act, performed in Ann Arbor with a piano accompaniment and a mixed bag of pro and student singers) and she really liked it.  That it was sung in English helped a lot.  The fugue anecdote I mentioned shows her ear has no trouble detecting masterful writing even when it is in a 20th century idiom.

The previous paragraphs were part of my first draft of this post.  So far, so good.  The following was going to be the closer:

When classical music jumped the shark in the 20th century, it lost people like the wifeösphere.  People of our class -- the over-educated middle -- ought to feel a duty to pay attention to hi-brow music.  Whether or not you think duty should be in scare quotes, the fact is, that duty once was part of the class identity, but now it is gone.  A generation of musicians gave them little they could relate to, placing too great of an intellectual demand on them for something generally considered mere entertainment.  These people need a ladder, a means of moving up from disposable popular crap to something more enduring -- and they need permission to linger on any rung where they feel comfortable.  In the 20th century, the people in charge cut the middle right out of the ladder.  That was a big mistake.

While rereading this one last time, I asked myself, do I really believe this?  Do I know what I'm talking about?  Here's a bit of contrary evidence:  anyone who runs a choir learns when it comes time to tour, if you can afford it, you should go to Europe.  You've got to hunt where the ducks are, and you can't swing a dead alto without hitting a choral music lover, if you are in Europe.  I don't know about the decline of classical music there, but I get the impression it's not nearly as bad over there.

Here in the U.S., how much time has the classical music tradition had to take hold?  One hundred years ago, how many decent orchestras did we have here?  One hundred years ago (according to Weston Noble) we didn't even know that choirs could sing without accompaniment and still stay in tune.

Maybe the real problem is that Americans have never accepted European-based music as their own.  Around the time we were ready to develop a significant body of our own music, technology suddenly made modern pop possible, so American music and pop music became synonymous.  Maybe in one hundred more years, things will have worked themselves out, and the gaps in that ladder I was talking about will have been filled in.

Darn.  These serious posts always turn out to be confused, sprawling messes.  Maybe I should replace this whole thing with some kind of wisecrack about Havergal Brian's underpants.