Feb. 9th, 2023

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Tom's soundtracks poll starts later today, and for the hell of it I'm jotting down some thoughts about one reason I'm looking forward to it. I'm deliberately overstating and simplifying for the sake of clarity, so leaving out my usual thicket of caveats and asides and parentheticals. Bear in mind that modernism kind of throws a spanner into the works of my argument, and I'm not saying whom I mean by the "intelligentsia" beyond "people like you and me," a definition that leaves out most intellectuals who actually work for university music departments. But what follows is most definitely correct as to "classical" losing the intelligentsia and is probably correct as to movie and TV scores occupying a middle ground. As for the reasons I give for why "classical" lost its place, I'm just fooling around, hoping to spark some further thinking. Anyway…

Between 1950 and 1970, "classical" music gradually and then quickly lost the intelligentsia. If you want to mark a turning point you could say the summer of 1964 when positive reviews began pouring in for the movie A Hard Day's Night.

This obviously didn't kill "classical"/"serious" music (whatever you want to call it), and this didn't kill a lot of people's interest in it. But it was no longer the top social dog, the thing.

Nothing quite like this reversal, this losing of place, has happened in any other art form. What I'd put as an important reason for classical's plummet is that, e.g., popular rhythm & blues like "Sixty Minute Man" (1951) was at a pretty large formal distance from Beethoven and, crucially, did a shitload of sociomusical stuff that Beethoven didn't do, or barely did – especially rhythm but not only rhythm: in some ways it, along with many popular recordings, benefited from the invention of the microphone to unleash varieties of the human voice that opera couldn't – or anyway, didn't.

The Dominoes "Sixty Minute Man"


I don't think any other popular art form had this combination of doing something valuable that was also vastly different from what the "art" or "highbrow" conversation was paying attention to. For example, dime novels are still recognizably the same species – or at least genus or family – as Brontë and Austen. Maybe even gift shoppe knick-knacks are relatable to sculpture – anyway the bread-and-butter paintings and pictures from art fairs and motel walls and posters and postcards and magazine illustrations and magazine photos still seem the same universe as Rembrandt. Different in quality but not different in kind. Westerns and comedies and melodramas on film and on TV might be a fun test case. They too take advantage of the microphone and what it opens up for recording and creating voices, as much as the crooners and the rock 'n' rollers did – but I still think movies and TV are the same genus or family as plays and novels when it comes to narrative. And pictorially I'd say they share an order or genus with Rembrandt and Constable and Degas. Not that this is my main point. The main point is that if the highbrow discourse around "music" hadn't walled itself off from music that was really good and drastically different from "classical," "classical" itself wouldn't have had to take a crash.

The Beatles "Roll Over Beethoven"


But also, r&b and pop were already enough suffused with western romanticism that when the intelligentsia jumped the classical ship they could take their romanticism with them.

Now to the soundtrack poll: it's still going to be more pop songs and rock songs than it's going to be movie themes and show music – here's the nominations list. But as for the latter two, they are (or were pre-1970) still considered on the far side of the wall between classical and everything else, but formally they bring a lot of classical with them. The basic movie and TV scores especially tend to deploy the vocabulary of 19th and early 20th century classical music. Okay, here's a caveat: Yes I know that, from ragtime forward, jazz and easy listening and rock and hip-hop aren't so dumb as to never learn from "classical" and "serious" music. But one thing I'm liking about the soundtracks poll is that we'll listen to people who were doing it all along, their standard palette.

Bernard Herrmann "Scene d'Amour" (Vertigo)


Franz Waxman "The Birth Of Andrei" (Taras Bulba)


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Frank Kogan

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