The day the music died …

One point Wald doesn’t mention (though Wikipedia does is the dominant role of sheet music sales in the economics of the industry in the 19th century which persisted into the first half of C20. This also made for hits that lasted for several years, starting in a musical, going on to be played by bands and then in family homes around the piano. (I’m imperfectly recalling Nik Cohn for all of this).

John Emerson: “Mark DeVoto . . . commented that almost all of the music that Haydn heard while in the Esterhazy service was either written by himself, played by himself (with others), or folk music.”

I very much doubt this. You only have to listen to the mid-career symphonies of Haydn, Vanhal and von Dittersdorf to hear the mutual influences of each on the others. And Haydn certainly read, performed, and talked-about the chamber music of Mozart while he was at the Esterhazy Court.

A parallel and accompanying story is the rise and fall of “Art Jazz” ca 1945-65. Rise of a Jazz Art World by Paul Lopes lists various factors:the ascension of singers in swing bands, the post-WWII decline of dance culture, the rebellion of jazz musicians against being mere cogs in a big band, the various independent labels & lps, a rise in black consciousness?

My own opinion is that rock (and soul, see the importance of Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder) followed much the same pattern after 1965, it became an art and “auteur” music.

Classical? Mahler’s symphony of 1000 and Liszt and Rachmaninoff’s technique, well before modernism classical was dividing away from what could be played at home or by a local orchestra.

The rise of the novel and decline of magazine serialization;the collapse of the studios and rise of the auteur director and actor/producer; the impressionists and weakening of the Academy:we might have a more general pattern to be found.

Interesting article, Chris. I’d never seen a picture of Miller.

Having been born after 1965, obviously, I don’t really see 1970s rock as “art music” in the sense of “auteur music” as opposed to pop.

@nonfamous Henry:
A relevant movie is obviously Saturday Night Fever. Also Dreamgirls (the film at least) seems to roll together the decline of disco with the drifting of Motown into disco with the payola-ification of Motown in the first place.

7: I don’t really see 1970s rock as “art music” in the sense of “auteur music” as opposed to pop.

Thick as a Brick spent two weeks at #1 on the billboard charts in 1972. I don’t have to show that Lizard or For Everyman are great or profound art to say that the artists were in control, and that the economics of the industry had changed.

Did Magma publish sheet music for other artists to cover?

Loveless actually did bankrupt a label. Looks like Wald wants a world where Loveless couldn’t exist.

Creation Records lasted well past Loveless, and technology’s cheapened recording in a few ways.

Perhaps, bob, Wald is using “rock & roll” to refer to a particular style, which Magma and My Bloody Valentine definitely do not practice.

(Incidentally: there is I think a piano score to Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh, but apparently it’s pretty inaccurate.)

even in the 70s, pop wasn’t a subgenre of rock — it’s rock’s naughty little sister who gets about and GOOD FOR HER

11:technology’s cheapened recording in a few ways.

Of coutse there have been recent inprovements in the quality of DIY due to technology, but I am not sure how expensive a deal it ever was to get music produced, recorded, and records printed. See the four 60s bands listed in the latter half of 10. Sun wasn’t Capitol or Columbia, and Blue Note & Berry Gordy worked out of their houses. My impression is that there were hundreds of small local labels producing 45s for local markets.

There were some important advantages in quality (equipment, session musicians) but the main reason to go to a major label even in the 50s and 60s was distribution (printing thousands instead of hundreds) and marketing.

@9: Yeah, I was thinking in terms of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, and Aerosmith–not Jackson Browne, or for that matter the Talking Heads. They were doing whatever they were doing, but they didn’t get to the top of the charts because they were selling art. I don’t think the people who were buying the albums and playing them over and over in their bedrooms, alone or with a handful of friends, were appreciating them as artworks.

19: were appreciating them as artworks.

Uhh, I definitely was. Wake of Poseidon right next to Bitches Brew and the Mahler 1st. Wake might have been the most ambitious of the three. I wouldn’t know where to start, the relation of the mythopoetic figures on the cover to the lyrics?

Twelve Faces

Here is an Analysis by Andrew Keeling

I don’t think I understand you at all.

Live music isn’t important to rock ‘n roll? The bands play in football stadiums, for fuck’s sake.

My apologies: Quiggin, I meant.

All this talk somehow reminded me of
John Adams….
People always complain about cultural changes anyways…
We still get to see some interesting music in
pop culture…
Good luck trying to get young people to listen to Stockhausen or Messiaen

Oh, and about Bessie Smith’s death in obscurity:

“Smith’s funeral was held in Philadelphia on Monday October 4, 1937. Her body was originally laid out at Upshur’s funeral home, but as word of her death spread through Philadelphia’s black community the body had to be moved to the O.V. Catto Elks Lodge to accommodate the estimated 10,000 mourners who filed past her coffin on Sunday October 3.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Smith

Bloix: That’s a crazy distinction. Much early Beatles is clearly pop, and they wrote and performed their own compositions. “Pop” is music designed to appeal to a wide audience across age, class and racial boundaries, “rock” is music designed to appeal to a niche audience (even if it’s popularity breaks that boundary). However the particular niche audience can vary from group to group. E.g. the niche audience for King Crimson is different from the niche audience for XTC, which is different from the niche audience for Metallica, which is different from Deadheads. By acknowledging and playing with the conventions within that niche, and by demanding that some level of that knowledge from its audience, a rock band can claim, and sometimes achieve, more sophistication than a pop band. And certainly forge a greater connection with its core fans.

At it’s most basic though “pop” is music for middle school girls, “rock” is music for drug taking college kids, and all music can move up or down that continuum.

Bob M.:
I’m not trying to deny your experience or anything! But how many copies did you buy?

32: I don’t understand, but I am being willfully obtuse. The hell with Adorno.

33: Wake of Poseidon? 4-5 maybe. I go thru cycles of collecting until I can’t stand the acquisitiveness, and then get rid of everything.

It’s not necessarily “pseudo-elitist middlebrow”, whatever it means. I think it’s pretty common to use “pop” as a synonym of “kitsch”.

I think it’s pretty common to use “pop” as a synonym of “kitsch”.

And that proves…?

Let us assume that “kitsch” is a valid and supportable aesthetic judgment. Bianca is arguing that pop is necessarily kitsch because it is a “cultural product sold to large numbers of people who aren’t looking for art per se, people who want entertainment and a certain kind of feeling”. Note also that “kitsch” is an aesthetic judgment of art while Bianca is excluding “pop” from the category of art entirely. So, too, one should be aware that Bianca is implicitly making a value judgment, not merely one of function and terminology.

The list of works of devalued “non-art” which are described by Bianca’s functional definition would be exhaustive and include pieces that Bianca herself would almost certainly defend as both “art” and of high value.

This aesthetics is both pseudo-elitist and middlebrow because the middlebrow aesthetic tendency is to simultaneously deride popular taste while denying that it is itself a mainstream influence and consumer class.

Oh, how it pains me to be so thoroughly rebutted.

36: I don’t think that there’s any way to rebut the assertion of a personal failure to understand. But then, I’m not a philosopher. Someone call in a pro.

ABBA are rock band?

Just to say that as a complete ignoramus about these debates I’ve found (really) interesting things in what most of you (Bloix, bianca, keith, bob m, vanya) have to say, but am bemused by the apparent level of irritation within the disagreements…

And the point about bands and singer/songwriters could be useful, but I would resist tossing the interpretative modes of jazz and classical out of the art category.

My Favorite Things is art as much as A Love Supreme, I think.

And trying to determine which versions of “Summertime” are art and which are pop is just beyond my abilities. Coltrane? Joplin? The Chipmunks?

The whole point of rock is that the talent is “natural,” gained not at the foot of a master or in a regimented academy, but powered by youthful will, energy, and emotion that pours out as authentic musical expression.

And this aesthetic isn’t found at one time or another in every other artistic medium?

I fear there has been some huge misunderstanding somewhere. How could a rock band wear big t-shirts with kitties on them?

Keith M Ellis – I’m not sure what you mean by “artistic medium” but no, I’m not aware of any other “art form”- if we’re calling rock an art form – in which technical incompetence can be praiseworthy.

I agree that the entire spectrum of popular music that R&B spawned is notably naive, bathetic, and correspondingly deeply associated with youth culture. Insofar as it is by far the bulk of contemporary popular music, and has been for decades, I think that this is strongly suggestive of certain ideas in cultural criticism.

But this nexus of youth, “authenticity”, passion, and technical unsophistication is not unique to rock music, nor to music. One will find such nascent movements churning somewhere among every group of young artists; occasionally it erupts to cultural legitimacy.

onmiverse @ #27:
“Good luck trying to get young people to listen to Stockhausen or Messiaen”

This statement is nonsense. A couple of years ago a promoter booked Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall for a concert of electronica and experimental music, including music of (so-called) classical composers such as Stockhausen, Xenakis and Varese, along with contemporary club-based sounds. All 1800 seats in the hall were sold out before the performance, and the queue for returns stretched around the block.

Of course, the entire audience may well have OAPs . . .

Peter @ 27
I see your point…
I think I should have specified certain things. By young people I should have meant mainstream of music. Being a 22 year old I usually go out with friends to clubs where Rihanna, Fedde le Grand, and Alex Gaudino are the rules…don’t ask about the names, lyrics, music or whatever…
My point is I am not tying to diminish mainstream music, or people in general who enjoy it. If they like it more power to them, but certainly people are not going to like this music, they would just think is weird…or at least those are the responses I get when I expose someone to Anton Webern…or maybe I am just hanging out with the wrong people…
By the way, I don’t know how the ticket markets play in the UK but I know that at least here in NY tickets are usually acquired in mass by the big brokers companies who later sell them giving the impression of people waiting to buy them and seats selling out in a matter of minutes

I am trying to imagine people who acquire art or craft with the intention of not being entertained, not experiencing any feeling, or not identifying with a peer group. This is what I don’t understand.

Anna Russell can help you out there! *grin*

Bloix, Well, Elvis Presley had a pretty decent career as a rock & roll cover artist ;}

Generally, though, I agree with you on the single point of origin as essential to rock (though it is possible to nitpick with borderline cases) with some caveats.

This “essential unity” emerged. It wasn’t essential to rock in the beginning, which explains Elvis. Buddy Holly wrote some of his own songs, others not, no one cared (when the prevailing pop standard of songwriting was “When Sunny Gets Blue” and “I Believe in You”, I’m not shocked that few initially regarded “Peggy Sue” as a masterpiece). The origin of rock is as a marketing concept, and the musical substance to fill that slot came after the fact. The EU emerged, I would say, when the Beatles stopped doing covers, realizing they were more themselves doing their own material, which was better than anything they were covering anyway. This is also about the point at which The Beatles started consciously trying to be original, and they were the first rock group taken seriously as songwriters, though some of this was reflected retrospectively on Chuck Berry and others. At that point, I agree with Bob: rock had become auteur. The Beatles brought to rock some of the melodic strength of the older Tin Pan Alley style and, like TPA and unlike most rock, their songs stand up well in cover versions, even if done in styles dramatically different than the original. Hence, there’s an irony that songwriting became essential for rock artists because of a band whose work could stand independently of their own interpretation of it, i.e., that did not actually require this essential unity.

Where you do see this essential unity as indispensable, for example, is in the B-52’s, especially the early stuff. It is hard to distinguish between the tunes in the abstract and the stylistic gloss the band puts on them. It is not clear that one could cover “Private Idaho” in a manner that a) is true to the spirit of the song, b) does not imitate the B-52’s, and c) works. And the virtue of the unity approach is that it makes this sort of stylistic innovation easy or at least easier. I don’t agree that a single point of origin makes the music more “authentic”, though I think some rock fans believe this. But it is easier to come up with a “new sound” if an individual or small group is generating the music from scratch. It’s hard to see how the B-52’s could have worked out that novel sound if they were covering tunes written by others without them specifically in mind. Hence, what we have seen in rock and related genres is a steady stream of novel styles.

Though this unity has become essential to rock, I don’t agree that the contrary claim is intrinsic to pop. Some pop songwriters, from Hoagy Carmichael to Carole King, have performed their own material. Pop is music that relies on easily memorable and singable melodies and/or easily danceable rhythms, such that people of average ability can easily sing with or dance to it. Whether it is performed by the songwriters is irrelevant. In this sense, it is like folk, but it is unlike folk in that it is generally written and performed by professionals who may be very musically sophisticated. Keep a simple melody and beat, and you can do whatever you like, so the music as a whole is not necessarily simple; it just has some simple elements. Pop in this sense goes back all the way to Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, and you can trace a line from Kern to Rodgers to Van Heusen to Bacharach, which brings us up to the rock era. I would say that rock that has these characteristics is also pop, but not all rock does, specifically not most prog and the more extreme forms of punk, metal, industrial, etc.

What the pop approach offers, though, is, on average, higher technical quality. George Gershwin writes melodies, Ira lyrics, Nelson Riddle arranges and conducts a group of skilled instrumentalists, and Sinatra sings it. All of these people, save perhaps Ira (IMHO), are exceptional at what they do. Beck is in effect filling all these roles, and couldn’t do what he does otherwise. But he doesn’t write melodies on the level of Gershwin nor sing as well as Sinatra: not even close. You can occasionally see how this plays out in rock too. Hendrix’s version of Watchtower is not just superior to Dylan’s: it is superior to almost all of Hendrix’s own studio material. That’s because Dylan is a better songwriter, and Hendrix a better musician. Under the TPA approach, each would have focused on what they do best and the advantage would have been what you usually get from specialization: a higher level of quality at some cost in flexibility, which in this case can translate to individual voice.

As a result, you find jazz musicians born well after the rock or even punk eras eagerly covering tin pan alley “standards” and seldom and often reluctantly rock tunes (if they do cover more recent tunes, it is mostly Stevie Wonder, Beatles, Paul Simon, post-Police Sting – more pop than rock). OK, jazz and show tunes developed together and influenced one another, so it is a more natural fit. But you’re also dealing in rock with tunes that often don’t stand up as well as tunes, whereas TPA tunes, largely for the reasons Weld outlines, were designed to do this and do. And what results is things like Coltrane’s “Favorite Things”, which someone mentioned. Rodgers would never have heard in the tune what Coltrane did, but Coltrane would never have written a melody like that. To get that piece of music, you need one artist independently reinterpreting the work of another.

Marx is w-r-o-n-g.

Western Dave, I don’t know who you think you’re recapping, but that’s not at all like what I said. As for Axl, you could be right; he looms very small in my world.

One can make pretty objective judgments of originality, complexity, and such. I think emotional content comes across pretty unambiguously most of the time. Of “pure matters of taste”, I am suspicious. I think they tend to reflect what one is acculturated to and one’s extra-musical associations (such music is too upper or lower class, too rebelious or too status quo, in other words, too unlike how I want to see myself. People use musical taste as expression of identity, which distorts it). For example, there are composers I greatly admire who do things orchestrally that sound kitsch to me – early Jobim, Bacharach, certainly Mancini, even in places, Gershwin. Did any of these people lack “taste”? I think they just reflect standards of taste of an older generation that’s always going to be a bit alien to me – but that’s my problem, not theirs. And I’m not saying I don’t like their music because most of them are among my favorites.

less is better, who apparently didn’t know Mancini, mentioned how he used to get panned by jazz musicians. His reputation has improved retrospectively. He wrote “Peter Gunn” (appropriated by everyone from Sarah Vaughan to the B-52’s to Art of Noise), the theme from “The Pink Panther”, “Moon River”, “Days of Wine and Roses”, and the music for “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. He was in the mold of sophisticated pop composer with jazz influences after the heyday of such had passed. Jazz was in its most avant guard phase and trying to have nothing to do with pop, and pop was reacting to rock & roll; he had a home in neither world. He had an audience, but nothing critics would respect. So he was panned as kitsch at the time. And a lot of his arranging sounds kitsch to me too, not the brassy stuff, but a lot of his orchestration is very “muzacky” – he is actually one of the fathers of that style. I hate the choir on “days of wine and roses”. I had to hear a jazz version to realize it’s actually a good song. I don’t like “Moon River” at all. I won’t defend these things as “objective taste”, however. They are just my taste. I can’t say the composer of Peter Gunn and Pink Panther has no imagination when it comes to arranging music.

I like Mancini, didn’t he write that nice melody for Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliette? Or was it Rota?

Henri, yeah, it was Mancini.

John, well, that’s kind of what they said over 50 years ago, when this whole rock thing got off the ground.

The problem is styles that get classicized stop developing, or develop only in subtle ways noticeable to connoisseurs . When did you last hear anything new in blues? This is why classical and jazz developed avant guards: to keep from being musics that could be reduced to set of rules. Of course, both of those avant guards produced music that is much an acquired taste and thereby lost their audiences. But rehashing Dvorak or Mingus can’t help but get boring, and those are both brilliant musics drawing on brilliant forebears. Arguably, rock has an avant guard too.

SG, OK, I’ll bite: why is that music so undeniably bad? Seems typical of the genre in many ways. The lyrics are easily intelligible, a plus, which is unusual in hard rock. A lot of metal is better played than this, but so what? The singer is barely competent as a singer, but he yells effectively and does get the words across. At least he’s not trying to sound evil like many metal singers, which just reminds me of Halloween spooky sounds records. The sentiment is silly, but there’s lot of that around.

SG, OK, I’ll bite: why is that music so undeniably bad? Seems typical of the genre in many ways. The lyrics are easily intelligible, a plus, which is unusual in hard rock. A lot of metal is better played than this, but so what? The singer is barely competent as a singer, but he yells effectively and does get the words across. At least he’s not trying to sound evil like many metal singers, which just reminds me of Halloween spooky sounds records. The sentiment is silly, but there’s lot of that around.

Well, that’s not a stellar review in itself, is it?

Yes, the singer’s not good, he is trying to sound evil, the lyrics are terrible really really terrible, a call to conform in a call to rebel, the playing’s unremarkable, there’s the naked Kashmirism, big blank spaces in the chorus where the attempted anthem should be, metal is a game of competence… It’s hard to say how this is in any sense good, so I’d submit that it’s bad.

This certainly makes me a businessman, but does it make me a cook?

It might.

I don’t completely agree with it, but the doctrine of the intentionalist fallacy is relevant here.

Aside from that, it’s not clear to me at all that there’s no widely well-regarded works of art in the history of art that we can absolutely be sure weren’t created in a wholly “technocratic, pragmatic” manner. You seem to be assuming several disjunctions that I don’t see as justified. For example, there certainly must be some overlap between what people intrinsically like and what is art—that being the case, part of an artist’s talent is working within that context. If nothing else, an artist is likely to be creating to his own internal set of similar specifications and unless he is an alien, then he’s implicitly working towards others’, as well…at least to some degree.

I guess what bothers me most about your view is that it is very simplistic and idealistic about the process of artistic creation. It’s basically an expression of the culturally current idea that what is art is only what is produced ex nihilo from some mysterious creative source that has nothing to do with entertainment of others, popularity, or simply plying a trade. This is, incidentally, a very modern view of art.