Britney and Bach - there's room for all in my brain - and that's okay.
I just saw this article in the paper and wanted to save it - since I read my papers virtually, I figure a virtual clipping is okay as well.
-kw
Did TV kill classical music? Culture isn’t dying, we’re just not playing by old elitist rules
Ian Bell, Columnist of the year
Last Thursday morning I got up, boiled a kettle, and switched on the TV. I looked at the rain and at four different newspapers, possibly in an effort to decide which was more uniformly grey. I flicked through the news channels – the BBC, Sky, CNN, ITV – and wondered if each was being edited by the same person. Then I drank some tea.
A little later, almost as a penance, I read three pages of Eugenio Montale’s essay on Dante and ate a sandwich. The TV chattered, perky and insistent, in the background. For a while I listened to a new Bruce Springsteen album, wondering why I wasn’t quite convinced. Then I spent an hour watching a Labour press conference and a prime minister who managed to make lies sound like a patriotic duty. Afterwards the TV went back to being perky and insistent.
With half an hour to spare, I threw all the newly-delivered election literature in the bin, glanced at a review copy of a book entitled Ireland And Scotland, Culture And Society 1700-2000, and watched some more TV. Highlights of Chelsea’s match against Liverpool were running. With the rain coming down and the TV’s mute button working, Wieland Kuijken and Jordi Savall’s remarkable Sainte Colombe recordings seemed preferable to work or the checking of e-mails.
By 11.30am I was watching a preview DVD of a slightly-sleazy Channel Four documentary entitled Death Of A Porn Star and deciding that TV reviewing might be closer to work than I had realised. Sticking with blatant pornography, I moved on to a property show called Selling Houses, knowing I wouldn’t write a word about it, and struggling all the while to picture the target audience. Then I went back to the news, where Blair’s bravura feats of verbal prestidigitation were being given, all metaphors mixed, an autopsy.
By this time I couldn’t wait for evening, The Simpsons, for Will And Grace, a stiff drink, and a book that wouldn’t stun me into unconsciousness.
In another life, I review TV for a living. Almost by definition, I see too much of it. My Sky subscription entitles me to hundreds of channels stuffed with garbage and I concede, to anyone who will listen, that the medium distorts culture, politics and society in ways we have not yet even begun to understand.
As a homeworker, so called, I also use TV as my ever-ready excuse to avoid most forms of honest toil. But would I blame the medium for the problems of the world, or even for my habit of preferring a trashy sci-fi show to another canto from Dante? Put it another way: pick on my telly and you pick on me.
Last weekend Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, master of the Queen’s music, alleged that an appreciation of “serious” tunes is at risk because we fill our heads with TV and pop. Classical music, an unearned description if ever there was one, is being harmed, he said, because television has made us “good, docile consumers” of anything television cares to offer. “Cultural life”, whatever that might be, is being diminished by an unrelenting diet of pap (as opposed to being corroded by artists prepared to accept daft feudal titles from a Philistine establishment).
The argument is as old as television itself. In fact, it is as old as talking pictures, cheap fiction or broadsheet ballads. It begins with a set of assumptions about cultural worth, proceeds to a display of breathtaking ignorance, and performs a slalom run around the obvious.
My account of my working day, accurate as it is, would probably strike many people as a touch pretentious, but I like medieval Italian poetry, even when it makes me feel thick, just as much as I like The Simpsons, concerts a deux violes esgales when the rain is coming down, Lambchop, Chuck Berry, or Bach.
I like John Keats as much as I like Bob Dylan. I’m fond of cheap Hollywood movies and Matisse – is this allowed? – simultaneously. I can discuss any sept of the Marx clan, from Groucho to Karlo, you care to mention. In a few small areas of art and ideas I am almost, but never quite, an expert.
I am also a disgrace, culturally speaking, and proud of it. Ballet does not move me any more than gangsta rap and its variants touch me. What Hemingway described as the built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector goes off, nevertheless, when knights of the realm begin to talk about “cultural standards”.
Who came up with those? More to the point, would Peter Maxwell Davies pass the audition? You are not a serious artist simply because you say you are. Arbiters exist, history argues, only to be given a metaphorical kicking by the truly creative. But if the rules of engagement have been handed down to us, would it be too much to suggest that the master of the Queen’s music isn’t, in fact, very good at what he himself does? Shall we settle for third-rate? Or shall we just say that I am not a fan?
The many actual fans of the composer would take issue with most of that, and good for them. If their wits are in order they will probably add that a celebrity-obsessed mass culture is losing sight, increasingly, of creative virtue, of the willingness to do artistic work without a thought for fleeting popularity. They might say – and they would be right – that you cannot judge or value art in terms of sales. But they would also have to allow, logically, that there is as much rubbish passed off as a serious creative endeavour in high art as ever disgraces a TV screen.
Maxwell Davies, to his credit, told the Royal Philharmonic Society in London last week that he would never advocate the “force-feeding” of classical music to children. Just as well, really. Anyone who has ever learned to love Shakespeare despite a school teacher or a university lecturer will know how redundant such efforts tend to be. They might also guess that workers in the fields of high art are no more entitled to tell us what is good for our souls than the people who produce Big Brother. If “classical” music is in crisis that isn’t because the Scottish Executive has failed to fund Scottish Opera adequately. It is, rather, because a sense of superiority and entitlement finds no echo in a wider audience.
Each year, each week, a lot of duff pop records are produced. Every minute of every day a dismal and offensive TV programme is being broadcast. In an average month a global film industry comes up with a single movie, if you are very lucky, that might obtain your interest for more than 10 minutes. Tens of thousands of books will be published this year and tens of thousands of them will be dire to a point that exceeds belief.
Why should “serious” music, or anything possessing the gall to nominate itself as serious, be any different?
In my other working lives I dismiss cultural products as mendacious tripe almost on a daily basis. I tell myself that someone has to, yet quite why I am entitled to do such a thing is an interesting question. What troubles me about the Maxwell Davies argument is a two-fold problem. First, he argues that “peer pressure” turns the young into witless consumers of a pervasive pop culture. What alternative does he offer if not a force-fed dose of high art?
Then, in a bumpy landing, comes the second difficulty: who decides? Why, by what right, employing which criteria, would they decide? Is it actually relevant to the 2.5 million British readers of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code that Ian Bell believes the novel to be witless, ill-written nonsense? And should I switch off the TV and sling on some Bartok because Peter Maxwell Davies is perturbed?
Art finds its level. It finds a level in spite, and sometimes because of, the people presumptuous enough to tell us what art is, what art is for, and why any of the arguments might ever matter.
In my house there is the sound of two Dutch guys sawing away on the basse de viole a sept cordes and the rain has stopped. In a minute or two we might have someone playing an electric guitar. There is nothing on TV. Perhaps I could read a book. Civilisation, when last I checked, had not ended.
