In the ‘hip’ music magazine VAN, an online publication decidated to classical music, in July a bitter article by a young American composer, teaching in Boston, claims that the classical music world is saturated with ‘classism’- i.e. it is a product of the well-to-do middleclass and people from the working class are excluded or made entry extremely difficult. In short: discrimination, not on the basis of race but of class.
https://van-magazine.com/mag/classism-in-classical-music/
Such article is important nowadays because it addresses a trope which circulates around classical music and which is often used as a means to attack the genre, and to undermine its legitimacy, because of its lack of social justice. While Ramsay’s observations as to the social backgrounds of a majority of classical music’s practitioners is, in general, correct, I think his conclusions are entirely wrong and misdirected. Here’s why.
To begin with, the picture above the article depicts a victorian scene of well-to-do people in a luxurious interior busying themselves with music. Which music, is impossible to establish, but the painting in itself is a very good one, in spite of its obvious intention to please and not to think or feel very deeply. That the artist (Mihály Munkácsy, who worked in Paris in the second half of the 19th century) is not mentioned, suggests that it is not so much the painting but the scene it depicts which is important: the photo does not want to show lucky, happy people enjoying music, but the scandalous bourgeois class who have music entertainment while working class atonal modernists are struggling in the streets.
But it is true that classical music, as a genre, is a bourgeois art form. Serious music, i.e. art music, was always there where the money was: first serving the Christian church, royal courts and the nobility, and when in the 19th century the bourgeois class became the dominant power and trendsetting framework in European society, it became part of bourgeois society, partaking in a kind of ‘market situation’: musicians and composers were, for the first time in history, free from feudal structures and strictures. The bourgeois class created universities, extended education chances, museums, concert halls, conservatories. Also it created the industrial revolution, with mixed results, and the birth of the modern world as we know it, also with mixed results. It created a certain type of civilian: ‘educated man’, the ‘Bildungsbürger’, working in a decent, well-paid job and being interested and partaking in the higher faculties of civilisation: culture, consisting of painting, music, literature, poetry, philosophy, science. Magazines, books, libraries, newspapers florished and enjoyed wide popularity, and with the increasing availability of information about classical music, bourgeois audiences were swelling – so much so, that Debussy in the occasional articles he wrote in the early 1900s for some magazines, complained about the popularity of classical music and advocated hermetic music societies only accessible for the incrowd. With the democratization movements in the 20th century, culture became more accessible to the working class – the people who voiceless supported the rest of society but could not afford attending a concert to hear the spectacular premières of Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, Stravinsky. Thanks to modern 20C media and the recording industry, classical music became accessible to much wider audiences from all levels of society, in spite of some barriers still in place.
So, what is there to complain about classical music being a ‘product of the bourgeoisie’ and thus, of class? That is not the problem at all, the real problem is accessibility of the art form, for musicians, and in terms of education and live concerts for people with low incomes. That there is ‘classism’ in the classical music world, is entirely normal, it never was a culture of the working class of old, and for no fault of its own. The classical music world is a product of the 19C bourgeois class, but the music is not exclusively meant for the bourgoisie: it is meant for humanity as a whole, as the composers themselves and their music bear witness. Let’s not forget that meaningful cultural achievement is only produced by a minority in a society, but its benefits are a common good for the whole of it. In this sense, the classical music world can be compared with the world of science. Talent is unevenly distributed throughout any population and that is not a matter of social injustice but a natural given. Unequal distribution of wealth in any society is something to be balanced-out, in the name of justice, but that does not mean that the natural imbalance of talent and the coincidence of birth and circumstance should be seen as social strategies. Where such inequalities are misused as strategy, it should be countered, but not at the expense of music practice as such by claiming that ‘classism is killing creativity’.
Western society is (relatively) free and capitalist, the latter parameter in different forms in different countries: in the USA the practical circumstances are different from those in Europe where there is more of a social democratic system with scholarships, grants, and state subsidies for the arts, so that in general culture (including classical music) has fewer obstacles for people from working class backgrounds. Whenever people in music life react negatively towards influx from areas of society different from their own, however despiccable this is, this can never be considered as a typical aspect of the ‘classical music world’, it is how people show their incomprehension, not more, not less. The ‘bourgeois’ concert world is something to preserve, not to attack because it does not conform to contemporary ideas of equality and social justice. Classical music is there for everybody with enough interest and perceptive capacities to enjoy it. So, it is not social justice but accessibility which is the real problem, not ‘classism’.
Does this mean that the classical music world is, more or less, a fair one, where talent and hard work is rewarded as a natural consequence? Not at all, and as such Ramsay is right. It is a world where talent, personality, coincidence, circumstance are all factors in a field which is entirely subjective, so there is a lot of nonsense and fake going-on, and a lot of injustice. But this has always been the case, it’s nothing new, and truly gifted people just have to fight to get their talents find a home in that field; it is naïve to expect justice in such a subjective field, with such competition on all levels. And then: it is not something like science where some degree of objectivity offers standards of excellence. When you read the memoirs of Berlioz and Wagner, or the letters of Debussy, you get a picture of a chaotic territory where courageous and great achievements walk side by side with the most abhorrent fakes, and success and failure are never predictable.
So far the nature of the classical music world as a whole. But then, how is it for composers? They are, next to the performing species, also an organic part of the musical world. Or, that’s how they are supposed to be. And Ramsay is a composer, it seems. But a look at his website and hearing his work, demonstrates that he is a sound artist, ‘sonic art’ being a niche genre within the new music scene, a form of art which the Germans correctly designate as ‘Klangkunst’, the art of pure sound. What does that mean? This means that it is an art form which deals with sound patterns, without all the references and associations with a musical tradition that has existed since some 1000 years in the West. It is a relatively new thing, developed in the wake of ‘musical modernism’ as set in motion by neurotic Arnold Schönberg at the beginning of the last century and getting steam after de Second World War when modernist ideologies, claiming that music is an art form which progresses like science, developing in a lineair way, tried to find a place in concert life which was (and still is) mainly consisting of music, including works of its long tradition. There is a strong argument to be made that sonic art is not music, but something else, as photography developed alongside painting but should not be confused with it. It is a legitimate art form, but we don’t expect the same things from it as we do from music, which is the reason that sonic art never got widely accepted in the concert world of music but became a fringe interest with enthusiasts at the margins of the musical world, with their own concerts, little festivals etc. ‘Klangkunst’ is a perfectly legitimate form of art, and indeed it has found a place in the educational system, as Ramsay himself clearly proves, however hideous, musically-meaningless and aurally awful the works may sound:
https://soundcloud.com/aidan-ramsay/make-me-uncomfortable
For lovers of Klangkunst, this is very nice and interesting – and who would prove them wrong and on which grounds? Reactions to music are subjective, and mostly say more about the listener than about the work. But what has it to do with music, and with the mores of the classical music world? There is a lot of confusion here.
So if you are coming from a poor background and want to build-up a career as a sound artist, and you find classism as an obstacle on your way, it is nonsensical to protest against classism as something that – in the music world – ‘kills musical creativity’. However correct Ramsay’s observations of people’s reactions may be, to construct a line of causality between such reactions and classism and creativity and music is nonsensical. When you consider Ramsay’s background, his keen obervations of people’s reactions, and where he eventually got – still as a young man, you cannot conclude otherwise than that he has, through persistence and patience, and helped by the circumstance that sound art has acquired the aura of ‘seriously modern’, nothing to complain about and certainly not about ‘classism’ of an art form so different from his own:
“Ramsay holds a B.Mus in Music Composition from The University of Oregon, where he studied with Terry McQuilkin, David Crumb, and Robert Kyr, as well as a M.M. in Music Composition from Boston University, where he studied with Joshua Fineberg. He has worked with ensembles such JACK Quartet, Ensemble Corvus, Sound of Late, and Sound Icon. In addition to his work as a composer and saxophonist, Aidan Ramsay also teaches Music Theory at The Community Music Center of Boston.”
https://www.aidanramsay.com/about
But does this mean that composers – not sound artists - don’t meet obstacles in terms of class backgrounds? That may well be, but even if you come from a wealthy bourgeois background, you will find all kinds of obstacles, too many types to mention here, of which ‘class’ is only one. There are obstacles of personality traits (‘difficult to work with’); misunderstanding the score and hence, wrong rehearsel planning and thus, lousy performances; the lack of interest by orchestral staff who have the awful sounds of much new music in their ears and therefore don’t trust any new music of any kind; financial pressures of performing bodies, concert halls, music series; pandemics which create havoc on all sides; the bad luck of being born in a provincial or non-Western country where never anything interesting came from; being American; being an Arab or black; being a woman (although if you sport a Beethoven hairdo and write feminist punk sound art, you will tap into the woke vibration field); wearing ties and jackets (could not possibly write relevant modern music) – etc. etc. too many obstacles to sum-up here.
Classism as something which ‘kills creativity’ in the classical music world is a conspiracy theory, a result of misunderstanding the nature of the art form and its history, and sounding too much like the zero sum fallacy: my misery is the result of your privilege. If we want to remove barriers for people with obvious talents, we should try to create enough funding possibilities to compensate for unlucky circumstances which are none of the students’ making. This is happening here and there, and surely far not enough, but don’t blame ‘the bourgeoisie’ for having created music life in the first place.
-------------------------
This article was offered to VAN, who profiles themselves as representing a more free and radical approach to classical music. But it was refused, apparently for being too radical into the ‘wrong’ direction. So much for the ‘hip’ attempts to counter the ‘dusty’ image of the classical music world.
No comments:
Post a Comment