Classical Music

This essay is about the value of classical music. More particularly, it is about its apparent devaluation today and the consequences of its current legitimation crisis. But this is merely the starting point for examining classical music's claim to a distinctive value and assessing the relevance that claim retains for our postmodern, plural, and multicultural world. It addresses questions not just about music but about the nature of contemporary culture, because changing perceptions of classical music have less to do with the music itself than with changes in other cultural practices, values, and attitudes. To ask questions about the status of classical music today is inevitably to ask questions about cultural choices more generally. What is the significance of our musical choices? What cultural values do those choices exhibit? Do the cultural values we hold as musical consumers equate with the values with which we align ourselves in other areas, such as education or politics? What is it about classical music that makes it so marginal and about popular music that makes it so central to contemporary society?

But concern is with classical music, not with popular culture. It has been largely avoided the labyrinthine arguments about their competing claims to value because the main point is that while some classical music can and does function as popular culture, its distinctive value lies elsewhere. It makes a claim to a distinctive value because it lends itself to functions that, on the whole, popular music does not, just as popular music lends itself to functions that, on the whole, classical music does not. This different potential of musical types arises not just from how people approach different kinds of music but from the objective differences between musical pieces and musical styles themselves.

The paradox of music in a commercial context is that, for all the appearance of difference, music that derive from quite different functions lose their distinctiveness because they are assumed to serve the same function as all the others. Classical music is shaped by different functional expectations than popular music, a fact all but lost today because of the dominance of the functional expectations of popular culture. The charge of elitism should be leveled at those forces in society that hinder the development and opportunity of all of its members. So why is it today so often the sign of entrenchment, a refusal of opportunity, a denial of cultural or intellectual expressions of the aspiration that we might - individually and collectively - realize our greater human potential?

Classical music, like all art, has always been based on a paradoxical claim: that it relates to the immediacy of everyday life but not immediately. That is to say, it takes aspects of our immediate experience and reworks them, reflecting them back in altered form. In this way, it creates for itself a distance from the everyday while preserving a relation to it. Talking about music and art, which has always been a slightly suspect activity, becomes particularly suspect today because in attempting to highlight art's quality of separation from the everyday, it refuses the popular demand that art should be as immediate as everything else. To insist on art's difference, its distance from everyday life, comes dangerously close to an antipopulist position.

Even the label "classical music" is problematic. The term implies a claim to universality, suggesting that such music transcends the judgments of any particular time or place. But the same claim underlines classical music's apparent lack of connection with the immediacy of everyday life, an aspect that ensures that it seems to be of little relevance for many people. It is a label so full of negative connotations that it might be better to avoid it altogether. But the arguments about classical music are somehow contained in its own awkward label, and it is perhaps more productive to wrestle with this than to reach for some neutral and sanitized alternative.