Comment by coldtea
5 years ago
>with an air of complete seriousness that seems so lacking today.
Jaded cynicism, crass commercialism, and the dissapearance of a cultured class that is above mass market culture, they way high/upper middle class, academics, doctors, etc., one were.
Believe it or not, for example, once there was a class of people, more so in Europe, that not only went to the Opera, but also actually liked it, followed it, could get the references, and knew its history and the history of classical/romantic/etc music, the way their today's equivalent will know the pop stars of the day.
Given the above, it's easy that soem of them would take e.g. the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky's innovations seriously, even if only to be offended by them - and some of, course, to be inspired.
Today's equivalent would at best read something like the New Yorker and the hacks featured in NYT best-selling books of the day, but will seldom have the wide culture that once was quite widespread across parts of the middle and upper middle classes.
People also seem more desperate to sell out quick for a quick buck - even artists today just want to play the game, go ahead with the galleries and agents, and give out much more easily than an early 20th century artist. This diminishes the period between "serious work" and "selling out", often to zero (whereas for Picasso it took decades, and for Van Gogh, it never happened).
Believe it or not, not all of those people were middle class. The UK and the US both had programs which made classical music accessible to the working classes, and they had a significant cultural impact.
In the UK the post-war BBC carried on with (what is called) the Reithian tradition (after Lord Reith) until marketisation started to overwhelm everything in the 80s.
This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. It was about giving people experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise, and to give them more choices about what to listen to and maybe enjoy.
The UK also had an art school track for bright creative working class kids, some of whom went on to make a living in music and/or fashion. Marketisation also destroyed that, because of course student debt destroys your choices and limits your options so you literally can't afford to take risks.
>This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop.
Today it's almost forbidden culturally to even suggest that it coule even be (superior).
The thing is, to say such a thing, you need some kind of shared cultural basis (of what's superior and what's not), one that even those who don't "like X" (the way we might like peanut butter or not), nonetheless agree on (and whether they care or not, feel like it's somewhat their loss for not liking it).
Those times, had that (shared cultural agreement).
In more modern times, after the 60s especially, and in the US doubly so, culture is whatever one makes it, the mass consumer is king (because everybody wants his/hers money, so they treat them as such), and personal taste is the be all end all, end of discussion.
Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach, for example, would be so self-evident and accepted by all (for the Bieber's and Drake's of their era), as to not even be worth saying.
> Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach
This is a strange comparison though. It's like saying strawberries are inferior to lobster. Sure, they're both eaten as food, but they serve very different purposes, and comparing them doesn't really make sense.
BBN, Bolt, Beranek Newman the original ARPANET contractors started out in computational acoustics, tasked to build for the American people concert halls to rival those of Europe, witnessed and lamented simultaneously for the first time in the destruction of war. Chicago Philharmonic and many other orchestras gained concert halls absolutely unrivalled for the next fifty years and equalled only occasionally today. My late cofounder was much better known for managing a important 20th century British classical composer whose preference for the aforementioned hall (and incumbent conductor) was almost as much of a thorn in the side of European musical nobility as receiving his Order of Merit* from HM the Queen in his Nike sneakers. Deutsche Grammafon and the listening public concurred voting with their wallets, driving classical music sales of records beyond all expectations, thanks to the work of BBN and the American people who gave such incredible support for post war music when Europe was stumbling from the beginning of one recovery to the next.
the rest of original comment in my profile simply too long