JOLLY DAYS

Classical Music, the Internet, Openness

In this article Alex Ross talks about the internet helping classical music, which is disappearing from radio and the pop culture. Classical music was “deemed too elitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop.”

Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already exists…

Ross thinks that the net offers “radical acts of demystification” of classical music — the obscure finding its advocates and interpreters.

In this article Adam Kirsch says about Ross,

Mr. Ross, in keeping with his usual practice, almost never says a skeptical word about even the most extreme musical absurdities. But it is clear that he is much happier writing about recent composers who use tradition creatively, not destructively, and whose accomplishments are more than theoretical. Mr. Ross devotes more space to Benjamin Britten's opera “Peter Grimes” than to any other single work, relishing both its sound and its psychosexual subtlety…These artists are the rare, inspiriting exceptions in a period whose “overall trajectory,” as Mr. Ross admits, looks like “one of steep decline.”

I'm not sure if “never says a skeptical word about even the most extreme musical absurdities” fits with the rest of Kirsch's positive assessment of Ross's writing. If that quote is true of Ross' approach, it is not a mark of openness, nor of wise restraint, but of a lack of character.

Kirsch's defense of Ross, “He knows that …raise-the-drawbridge, circle-the-wagons mentality, while it may afford a mournful, self-righteous pleasure to those inside the classical music world, is designed to drive everyone else away. Instead, Mr. Ross takes the opposite approach: he writes about even recondite works and obscure composers with intelligent absorption. He offers a skeptical world living proof that a smart, curious listener can find pleasures and challenges in new music — whether that music is opera or free jazz or avant-garde pop.”

Who knows what to make of this? Ross may be just trying to be heard, as Kirsch indicates. But clearly there is a lot of fake affection for hollow self-indulgent art, borne most likely of fear of not belonging to a target group, of being ostracized — it is as simple as the playground in its logic. An insightful critic can reinforce people's skepticism without driving them away and in the process the critic might gain trust in a more fruitful way, by establishing standards. In so much art that is celebrated there is no “there” there. Is Ross to be congratulated for his openness, allowing his erudition its due in the process, or condemned for cynical retreat before the mob?