Classical Music as Popular Music Author(s): James Parakilas Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 3, No.

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MUSIC AS POPULAR CLASSICAL MUSIC*

JAMESPARAKILAS Compared to popularmusic, classical music seems like a specialty. But classical music containsspecialtieswithin itself-early music and new music-compared to which most of the classical music televised on "Great Performances"seems like a popularart. Classicalmusic is not often defined by being comparedto popularmusic, or to early and new music; more often it is consideredthe normwhich defines othersortsof music. But considering it as a norm is no way to understand what kind of popularityit has or what kind of specialty it is. This study treatsclassical music as a specialty in its own right; it treats early music and new music not as specialties within classical music, but as specialties distinct enough from it to define it by contrast.This studyrepresentsclassical music not as a normalphenomenon, even among "classical" musics in world history, but as the product of special historicalconditions. Adaptationto new uses and new media gives classical music new kinds of popularity, but the popularityof classical music continues to be specialized. Even when classical music reaches people in numberswhich would be impressive for popularmusic, that popularity is explained in this study by the music's special associations rather than by its universalappeal. Classical music and popular music When classical music is performedat Avery Fisher Hall or the Met, there is no more reason to label it "classical" than there is to label music at the ShubertTheatre "Broadway" or music at a square dance "folk." The place places it. The labels are needed only where various kinds of music are found together, as they are in record stores and on the radio. Radio stations, at least in America, specialize no less than performance places, but the listener finds many differentstationson the same radio, and in most cases the station establishes its own place by labelling itself with its specialty: " 's premierclassical-musicstation" or "the home of country music." Record stores specialize much less. They are the great of meeting-grounds musical categories, and they use labels the most. Signs "classical" and "folk" and "rock" map the buyer's route through saying the store. For sellers and buyers both, these labels form a wonderfully efficient system. The same labels are applied to the same recordings in
*I am grateful to William Austin, Mary Hunter, William Matthews, and John Spitzer for their readingsof this study at various stages.

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record stores aroundthe world. Despite the adaptations musiciansmake to other than their own, despite the collaborationsof musicians from styles different fields, there are relatively few recordingsof questionableassignment. Within a record store, nothing can make a "popular" recording "classical" or a "classical" one "popular." To be sure, "classical" music is different from "popular" music in crucial and obvious ways. Most of it was composed long ago. Audiences, as a result, almost never hear it performedby its composer. Those who performit and those who discuss it constantlyreferto its score. Its audience is by and large elite. But "classical" music has something in common with "popular." Popular music, which in Romance languagesrefers to what we call "folk music," in English generallyrefersto the productsof that partof the music industrywhich sells to the largest audience. The notion of the "classical" or the "classics" in music also depends on a large audience. But the two audiences are large in different ways. The audience familiarwith Beethoven's symphonies today or at any time is select comparedto the audience for top-forty songs, but the audience Beethoven has accumulatedin two centuries balances the audience for any popularsong with its own kind of largeness. The ways in which listeners become familiarwith classical and popular music are likewise balanced. Beethoven's most fervent devotees do not often listen to one symphony over and over without a break, the way teenagers typically listen to a new rock song. But many people listen to the same Beethoven symphonyover and over in the course of their lives. The rock song has one kind of popularity becauseit is current; symphony the has anotherkind because it is classic, because it never becomes dated. Classical music and history The perpetualfamiliarityof Beethoven and other classical composers is a phenomenon with ancient precedent. The singing of the Psalms was perpetuatedin ancient Hebrew culture, as the singing of Homer was in ancient Greek culture. Christianchurches maintainedtheir repertoriesof classics of Westchantfrom medieval times to modem. But the modern-day ern music are unprecedentedin the system which perpetuatesthem. That is a system made up not of schools and religious bodies which incidentally cultivate music, but primarilyof musical institutions: conservatories,opera houses, orchestras, music publishers,journals, and others. Institutionsof that kind were not developed for the purpose of perpetuatinga classical repertory.Until the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, in fact, they were all devoted principallyto new music (as popular-musicinstitutionsare today). But aroundthe beginning of the nineteenthcentury they began perpetuatingwhat they would earlierhave discarded:the best recent works in their repertories. From these works they eventually formed a new perpet'In Japan, for instance, the label classical (kurashikku) is applied to Western classical music and

not to any venerableJapanesetradition.

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uated repertory.At this same time the word classic, which had long been in literaryand artisticuse, was first appliedto music.2 would be to give the history To describethe formationof this repertory of musical institutionsin the nineteenthcentury. Some establishedinstitutions changed in nature. The publishinghouse of Breitkopf & Hartel, for instance, founded early in the eighteenth century, pioneered in the publication of collected editions at the beginning of the nineteenthcentury (its edition of Mozartstartingin 1798, of Haydnin 1802, of Clementiin 1803)3; by the end of the century Old-Mastereditions accounted for much of its catalog. Otherinstitutionswere foundedon novel principleswhich led those institutionsto supply themselves with musical classics. The Philharmonic Society, foundedin Londonin 1813 in orderto "promotethe performance, in the most perfect mannerpossible, of the best and most approvedinstrumentalmusic," was soon joined by otherorchestralsocieties across Europe in selecting and confirminga repertoryof orchestralclassics.4 In both young and old institutions the same unseen transformation turnedmusicalworks into classics. Orchestras, operahouses, andpublishers offered the same Beethoven symphonies and Mozart operas at the end of the nineteenth century as at its beginning. But whereas those works appeared alongside other fairly new works at the beginning of the century, within a repertorywhich spanned at most fifty years, at the end of the centurythey formed the oldest and most classic layer of a repertoryseveral layers deep, spanningmore than a century. In the twentiethcenturythe institutionshave become as dependenton theirclassical repertory thatrepertory always been on the institutions. as has Orchestralprogrammingshows this dependence most clearly. Late in the nineteenthcentury orchestralprogramsroutinely sampled all the layers of repertory, from the most classic to the newest. Today many orchestral programsleave out the new, but very few (except for special events or the programsof specializedorchestras)leave out the classics. The classics have become the one nutrientnecessary to every orchestralmeal. From their mutualdependencethe institutionsand theirrepertory have both derived stability. The institutions,along with theirpublics, upholdthe
2A.L. Millin's Dictionnaire des beaux-arts (Paris, 1806) defines classic (classique) as "a term that is applied to composers who are generally admiredand who are regardedas authoritative"(translated by Peter le Hurayand James Day in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenthand Early-Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge, [1981], p. 293. In 1802 J.N. Forkel, listing what he considered the most outstandingof Bach's keyboardworks, addedthatthey "may be all consideredas classical (klassisch)" (On Johann Sebastian Bach's life, genius, and works, translated A.C.F. Kollmann, 1820; reprinted by in The Bach reader, Hans T. David and ArthurMendel eds., New York, [1966], p. 343). The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary found no applicationof the English word classical to music earlier than 1836. 3See "Editions, historical" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 4Philharmonic Society announcement quoted in Myles Birket Foster, History of the Philharmonic Society of London: 1813-1912 (London:John Lane, the Bodley Head. 1912), p. 4. Informationabout the forming of the classical orchestralrepertory be found in Philip Downs, The Developmentof the can Great Repertoire in the Nineteenth Century (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1970). and William Weber, "Mass Cultureand the Reshapingof EuropeanMusical Taste, 1770-1870." in International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music VIII/1 (June 1977), esp. pp. 18-19. Weber's subject is "the rise of the musical mastersas an early form of mass culture."

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choices they made for the classical repertoryin the nineteenth century: Beethoven and Brahms in the concert hall, Mozartand Verdi and Wagner this at the opera. At the same time, the institutionswhich first perpetuated have themselves become classics. Orchestrasand opera houses repertory founded in the nineteenthcenturyhave become today's "world-class" organizations. Before the nineteenthcentury there were conservatoriesonly in Italy; today every Western countrytrains performersof classical music in conservatoriesfoundedfor thatpurposein the nineteenthcentury.Before the nineteenth century music publishers were lucky to last a couple of generations and music journals a couple of years; today many publishers andjournals from the nineteenthcenturyflourish.5The institutionsof clasin sical music not only perpetuatethe repertory; their age and prestige they the importanceof that repertory. embody
* * *

The idea of a classical repertoryis that certain old works should be kept ever-popular,ever-present,ever-new. It is an idea founded on reverence for the past, but not necessarily on a moder scholarlyconception of history. A culture may maintaina classical repertorywithouttaking notice of historicaldifferencesbetween one work and anotherwithinit. A classical repertoryneed not be kept up-to-datewith works from the periodjust past. The repertoryof Gregorianchant, for instance, was consideredclosed by the time of the Renaissance, and performersdid not sing the older chants within that repertorydifferently from the younger chants, though the repertory as a whole was performeddifferentlyfrom place to place and from one period to the next. Moder scholarsmay find ways to distinguisholder and newer works within that repertory,but for the performersand for the culture they served, those works were long united in a common antiquity. Much the same is still true of other perpetuated courtly reperrepertories: tories in Asia and folk repertoriesaroundthe world. The repertoryof Western "classical music," however, was formed underthe spell of nineteenth-century Europeanideas of history:the archeidea of history as reconstruction,the evolutionaryidea of history ological as a process of perpetualchange, the progressive idea of history as the formation of the present. The Western classical repertorywas assembled alongside the first scholarlyediting of classic scores,6which made performers think of old music as somethingrestoredratherthan handeddown, the product of a particulartime and place ratherthan a perennialfavorite. It was formed alongside the rise of concert program-notes,which were dedicated as much to establishing the classic as to introducingthe new and which encouragedlistenersto thinkof musical works as historicallydistinct
5A list of music publishers,arrangedby countryand showing dates of operation,can be found in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart under "Musikverlagund Musikalienhandel."A comparable list of music periodicalscan be found in The New Grove under "Periodicals," Section IV. 6The first great editorial landmarkis the Bach Gesellschaftedition, begun in 1851.

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from each other.7The classical repertory,because it was thought of from the start as a record of historical development, was open to new works which seemed to embody the most importantmusical changes. of The institutionsdevoted to the performance the musical classics are and their publics admit changes and additionsto the repcustodians;they ertory, but they do not propose them. The composers, scholars, and others who offer new works, rediscoveredworks, and new ideas for the classical repertoryare for the most part outsiders to the institutionswhich do the admitting. Before the rise of the musical classics, composing was not a distinct profession from performing:in the days of Josquin and Lully and Haydn, runninga musical establishmentmeant composing new works for its repertory.But there are only tokens of thatrelationshipleft today. Music scholars at first worked outside of any institutions.In the nineteenthcentury, when they began to find institutionalsupport,they found it mostly in universitiesratherthan in performinginstitutions,and universitiessupport and most music scholars today. Conservatories orchestralsocieties and opera houses, like museums, may embody the idea of historicaldevelopment, but they let outsidersgive birth to new developments. Nevertheless, those institutionsdefine what kinds of changes and additions to the repertorythey will consider. Simply by conceiving of the musical classics as a record of historical development, they define into existence activities, careers, and institutions which they do not directly maintain.The nineteenth-century of the musicalclassics requiredthose idea other nineteenth-century ideas, "early music" and "new music." Those ideas have developed into institutionsof their own: performinggroups and concert series, schools and summer institutes, publishers and recording companies and journals. These institutionshave always developed, however, in a symbiotic relationto those of classical music, feeding something to the classical institutionsand being supportedby them. The relationship is so close that for many purposes the three kinds of music are lumped together. In record stores, for instance, the products of early music and new music are considered "classical"; at most (in the largest stores) they are discrete sub-categoriesof "classical." But this classification hides the symbiotic relationship:early and new music differ from classical in the functions they perform, and as a result they can show us much by contrast about the natureof classical music.
Classical music, early music, new music

It is no help here to distinguish early and new music from classical music as differentrepertoriesor historicalperiods. The distinctionis not in the material,nor in how history is being divided. Mozartmay be "early" or "classical," Webern "new" or "classical," depending on what the
7Percy Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music (10th ed., John Owen Ward, ed.) under "Annotatedprogrammes," describes importantnineteenth-century developmentsin programnotes, as well as citing some eighteenth-century forerunners.

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performersand listeners are doing with them. Even Monteverdiis "classical" when John Reardon sings Orfeo's "Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi"
on the childrens' television show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

To distinguish the three categories by means of their audiences is no more helpful. The classification of all three as "classical" in recordstores overlapping groups. suggeststhatthe customersfor the threeare substantially The three categoriesalso sharethe same sections of record-review journals, many of the same concerthalls, and the same classical-musicradiostations, often even the same programson those stations.The music industryassumes that customers for one of these categories are more likely to be interested in the other two than in jazz or rock or country, even though the customers themselves may think of their three categories as quite distinct. The three categories-classical, early, and new music-are betterdistinguished as ways of performing, or rather as ways of thinking about performance.Then it emerges that they are three distinct attitudestoward musical style. That is not to say that any one performercan have only one of these attitudes.Performersmove from one realmto another-from classical piano to harpsichordto preparedpiano. But as they move from one role to another, they have to change not just their hand positions, but their relationto the music. They are like actorswho have to learnnot just a new dialect, but a new method of acting. What, then, are the three attitudes toward style that belong to these three performingroles? Classical musicians have a repertoryspanningmore thantwo centuries a single means of production.They play Bach and Bart6kon the same and instrumentsand with a single, if flexible, technique. By comparison to early-music performers, who increasingly choose to play early Bach and late Bach on different instruments, they resemble popular musicians in renderingtheir entire repertoryin a common present. Thatis not to say that they ignore history. Classical musicians performa score with a particular kind of faithfulnessto history:the score by itself tells themjust what notes to perform,as it does not do for early-musicperformers in many cases, or, for new-music performers. Reverence for the exact notes transmittedby as who regardtheirrepertories classic. of historyis characteristic performers Now that Charlie Parkerhas become "classic jazz," musicians give classical performanceswhich reproduceexactly the "text" of a performance he recorded. Classical-music performersare faithful to history in mattersof style as well as of text. Unlike monastic choirs or sitar players or nightclub musicians or singers of traditionalballads, they decide the right style of performancefor each work accordingto its place in history. They do not, however, reconstructperformancestyles archeologically, as early-music performersdo. Their music history is a tradition, and their styles of performance derive from reading the whole traditionas a map of expression, more than from close examination of extracts from one layer of history. Their traditionis divided into style-periods, each representinga stage of evolution and defined by its relation to other stages. Romanticismis an answer to Classicism; Impressionismand Expressionismand Verismo are

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divergentoutgrowthsof Romanticism.The traditiondisplayseach new style as a step towardthe present, but not necessarilyas an improvementon the to previous one. Instead, each style is regardedas an adaptation the needs of its historical period, an adaptationwhich can be admired at its most perfect in the works of the greatestmasteror mastersof the period. Clasconcentrateon the few greatmastersof each period, sical-musicperformers while early-musicand new-music performersaim to give many composers of one period their due. The classical traditionis formed by the criterion Each genius embodies the style of his period in a specific and intense formof Romanticrhythmicfreedom. way. The Chopinrubatois a particular The genius, like the style-period,is defined by a place in the tradition.The classical Beethovenis derivedfrom the historicalBeethoven, but his precise characterhas been determinedthe way a color is preparedfor the palette: with an eye for the contrastit makes with all the others. In fact, a composer's particularexpression is most naturallydescribed in comparative terms: "Beethoven seizes upon you: he is more tragic and oratorical,while Mozartis more disinterestedand poetical."8 If the historicalcomposer was a personalitycreating a musical style, the classical composer is a musical style so clearly defined by contrastthatit takes on the force of a personality. It is precisely the classical performer'stask-and achievement-to turnthe display of individual styles into the expression of great personalities. The styles a classical performerdisplays are formed with the aid of historicalevidence. Classical pianists are interestedin what can be learned about Beethoven's piano-playing:did he break strings?how much did he use the damperpedal? But theirpurposeis to distinguishBeethoven within a tradition stretching from Bach to Bart6k, a traditionwhich Beethoven himself did not know. The classical style of playing Beethoven is not Beethoven's style of playing, but a style about Beethoven. Performersarrive at a style by mapping their whole tradition;they have to learn their way aroundthe whole traditionbefore they can render any one style. They have not learned Classical restraintunless they have also learnedRomanticpassion, or the rawnessof Verismounless they have also learned Impressionistrefinement. At every stage of their trainingadmissionto conservatory,graduation from conservatory,minor and major competitions-they are tested on their ability to performworks from every the period of the repertory,demonstrating right stylistic distinctions.These right distinctions are passed on from teacher to student:the mapping of styles is a traditionin itself. Because the styles have no existence without each other, performersand performingorganizations rangeover their entire traditions, if not in every program, then in the course of a season. They perform all styles on the same instruments,with the same techniques, in the same halls. But this uniformity, which would stifle early-music per8Amiel'sjournal: the Journal intimeof Henri-FredericAmiel, translated Mrs. HumphreyWard, by 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1891), p. 40, May 14, 1853. Quoted by A. Hyatt King in Mozart in Retrospect, rev. ed. ([London]:Oxford UniversityPress, [1970]), p. 30.

of genius.

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formance, is what gives life to each style in classical performance.Works of many times and places are displayedlike so many paintingshung on the same white museumwalls, so that thejuxtapositionhighlightsexactly those style characteristicswhich the performershave cultivated. Early-music performersdiffer from classical performersin the way they think about history and style. Style-periods("the Baroque") may be too large for their precise needs, individual geniuses too narrowa focus, given the kinds of stylistic information available to them. Their music history is a residuumof times and places. Workingat one site, they may compare their findings to those from other sites, but they do not need to map the whole residuum in order to establish something about their site. They resurrectthe instrumentsavailable to the composer of a given work and the techniquesof performancethat the composerwould have taken for granted. They concentrate, that is, on exactly those matters of time and place that the classical performerneglects. In their terms, the classical performermakes Mozart sound like Brahms. But early-music performers may neglect the questionof artisticpersonalityon which classical musicians concentrate.The early-musicmethodis, in fact, to discoverhow to perform Mozartlike any othercomposerof his time andplace. Playedon instruments in eighteenth-century condition, articulatedand ornamentedin the light of treatises, Mozartno longer sounds like Brahms, but the percontemporary formancedoes not necessarilydistinguishMozartfrom Haydn. Early-music performersmay have intuitionsabout each composer's artisticpersonality, but even the intuitionsgeneratedat a fortepianodiffer from those generated at a Steinway. Early-musicperformersreconstructlost performingstyles. They have to decide questions which classical performers,accepting what is passed down to them, may not even notice. They have to considerevidence which classical performersdo not need. They are liable to be chastised for "allowing themselves personal opinions too early on in the process of becoma ing acquaintedwith the music."9 But having first reconstructed style and in it, they may learn to think in it, so that they then immersed themselves can sing and play without asking themselves at every momentwhetherthey are stylistically correct. Style needs to be second nature to early-music performers,even more than to other musicians. Like all musicians, they have to learn not to "worry at it like a dog with a bone," as ThurstonDart exhortedthem at the end of a book surveyingearly-musicbones of contention.10But early-musicperformersalso need to make style seem naturalto their listeners, while classical musicians have a greaterneed to draw their listeners' attentionto it. Rather than display a variety of styles against a neutral background,early-music performerstend more and more to concentrate, at least for each program, on one style, one small spot in time and place, which they display in a consistent setting (performingnot only
9PeterWilliams, "J.S. Bach's Well-temperedClavier:a New Approach"(Part2) in Early Music, 11/3 (July 1983), 336. '?TheInterpretationof Music (New York and Evanston:HarperColophon Books, 1963), p. 168.

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on the right instruments,but, if they can, in a church or hall in the right style). When this concentrationis most complete, its effect is to submerge drawthe listenerinto a style so thatit does not present style: the performers all. itself as style at If early music may work itself free of style-consciousness,new music may work its way towardit. A new work has stylistic roots for performers to discover. A performer'sexperiencewith the music which has influenced the composer is invaluablein finding the new work's style. A new work, like an old one, is rooted in a composer's time and place. Many new-music performances,especially first performances,are given by performerswho know the composer, who share the work's time and place with the composer. When these performancesare recorded, other performers,scholars, and connoisseurs turn to them for stylistic authenticity.These others, less close in time or place, rely on the composer's collaborationwith the persharein musical formers,along with whateverthe composerandperformers outlook and experience, to guaranteethat authenticity.But these sources of authenticitymay in fact have limited the considerationof style as such of in the preparation the performance.Performers who can ask the composer how to interpreta score or whose backgroundpreparesthem to do it intuitively have little need to botherwith stylistic maps. The composer's guidance may be expressed in terms of style-"I meant this section to sound jazzier"-but any discussion of style between composer and performersis short-circuited momentthe composersays "I like that." At thatmoment the is displaced by taste. style When listeners other than the composer come to judge a new-music performance,anotherstylistic ambiguityarises:how to tell the performance from the work. The difficulty is made visible in the typical ritual at the conclusion of a performance: performeronstage and composer somewhere in the audience graciously attempt by outstretchedor clapping hands to deflect the audience's applause toward each other. Listeners may think about the style of the work, but they have little way of telling how the has performance influencedtheir ideas or how a differentone could change them. The difficulty has many varieties, depending, for instance, on what role improvisationor preparedsoundplays in the performance.But in some form it is characteristic new music because there are few performances of of a work to compare. Listeners who go to hear a Beethoven symphony can compare the performancethey hear to many others in their memories. Conductors of classical music do not, like popular singers and leaders, introducenumbersby saying "It goes something like this," but classical audiences are in fact very interestedin what a performanceis "something like," in what makes a given version special. In the years when John Kirkpatrickwas the only pianist playing the Concord Sonata, there was nothingspecial abouthis version;it had no style. Now thatotherperformers play it, listeners can compareperformancesand so distinguishthe style of the work from the style of any one performance.They can use their ideas of the work's style to judge old and new performances.In other words, the work is now classic.

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If classical music, early music, and new music all entail differentways of thinkingabout performance,they also entail differentways of listening. can to Just as a single performer move from one way of performing another, a single listener can move from one way of listening to another.Listening to classical music is dealing with something of a familiar nature, while listening to new music is dealing with something unfamiliarand listening to early music is dealing with somethingpresentedunfamiliarly. The familiarityof classical music comes not simply from hearingthe same works many times, but from hearing them presented as tradition. Classical performerspresent music as traditionby making the past continuous with the present. They make old music compatiblewith new instruments. They convert the changing music-makingpracticesof the past into a modem continuumof styles. They accumulategenius from many times and places as the common heritage of modem Westerncivilization. Listenershearingmusic as traditionhear it as somethingbelonging to them. Many listeners feel that Beethoven belongs to them, just as other listeners feel that Frank Sinatrabelongs to them. Not that Beethoven can belong to any listener in quite the way Sinatracan; he needs more mediation. But performerscan provide it. PerformingBeethoven, they can seem to have Beethoven's spirit. They can stand for Beethoven, dissolving the time which separatesBeethoven from the present and making Beethoven seem to be his own performer.Then listeners feel that Beethoven speaks to them. Classical composers, however warmly personified, speak a timeless, universalmessage. They speak to modem listenersbecause they have spoken to generationsof listeners. They speak equally, or almost equally, to listeners in many countriesbecause their native accents have been naturalized in an internationalmusical idiom. They speak to individuallisteners because they speak a message which hundredsof millions are preparedby their culture to receive. On the whole, the message of the classics is a message of comfort. When they were new, the classics had powers to discomfortas well as to comfort. But by the time they became classics, their powers to discomfort were defused, while their powers to comfort had, if anything, grown. The powers to discomfort are defused in several ways. A composer's original target disappears:no one can feel threatenedby Figaro's anger anymore, and so audiences smile at it. Familiarity softens discomfort: how many times can The Rite of Spring shock? Time and history accommodatediscomfort: the Wagnerianrevolution may have consigned Rossini's musical practices to history, but now Wagner sits beside Rossini in history and in discomfort:Monteverdi'sor the repertory.Classical status itself transforms boldest progressionshave become like inscriptionson a monSchonberg's ument, stirringbut no longer inflammatory.The RevolutionaryEtude can be played or a Verdi liberation-opera staged in the most oppressedplace in

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11

The classics belong the world withoutfear thatit will incite any disturbance. aroundthe rosy" belongs to childhood. to the status quo, the way "Ring The classics belong to the authoritiesas well as to individuallisteners, and not just to the musical authorities,which conferredclassical status in the first place, but to the social and political authoritieswhich supportthe musical ones. The classics offer comfort to the individual listener in part because they belong to the authorities.Classical music is approvedmusic; it is politically and socially safe. Listening to the treasures of Western culturecannotbe subversiveor illegitimate;it cannotlower anyone socially. Still, the politics of comfort make many listeners uncomfortable.These listeners include not only some who do not like classical music anyway, but also some of those most deeply involved in it. They include music scholars who insist on rememberingthe powers which classical music has lost. Thus, Andrew Porter writes of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera that "Serious opera has always been a political art, and it was not for nothing that Bourbon censorship forbade the performanceof 'Ballo.' "' His insistence may encourageopera companiesto stage it "seriously as a drama of real and recognizable human behavior," but no matterwhat he writes or opera companies do, Verdi's voice can never again be dangerousto any regime, any more than "Ring aroundthe rosy" can againevoke the plague. Early-music performancemakes the classics sound unfamiliar. Harnoncourt'sways of performingBach sounds unfamiliarcomparedto Klemperer's, not only because in the late-twentiethcentury it happens to be newer, but because it is based on an idea of discontinuitybetween the past and the present. This way of performingmakes Bach belong to his own time, not to all time. It frees him from the burdenof being timeless, immortal, and universal, the burdenof being classic. It removes him from a traditionbelonging to listeners today and returnshim to a traditionwhich those listeners can only imagine. Early-musicperformers cannot revive the traditionto which Bach belonged; they too can only imagine it. But their reconstructions serve thatimagining. HearingBach in these reconstructions, listeners can tell how remote music-makingin Bach's day is from musicmaking today. Early-musicperformancemakes the classics sound dated. By pushing the classics into the past, early music draws attentionto their past. Handel in early-musicperformancesounds more like the heir of Purcell than like the forerunner Mendelssohn. Classical music, by conof towardthe laterones. Classical trast, drawsthe earliestworks in its tradition musicians perform Handel like Mendelssohnand so make him sound advanced for his time. Classical music trains listeners to notice what was forward-lookingin the music of the past; early music trainsthem to notice what made music traditionalin its own time. The manifestly unmoder performancepractices of early music draw attentionto the act of historical reconstructionwhich has created the performance. They draw attentionto the reconstructor, performer.Earlythe music performersdo not stand for the composersthey are performing;they
"The New Yorker,February18, 1980, p. 120.

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stand between the composer and the listener. Even between numbersthey proclaim their own distinct role in the musical act: they talk to their audiences more than classical performersdo. Classical performers their retby icence create ambiguity about who is "speaking" to the audience. Earlymusic performersby talking about instruments,sources, and performance practice draw attentionto the process of historicalreconstruction.In words as in notes, they "speak" to their audiences as researchers,as searchers for the composer's spirit, not primarilyas vessels for that spirit. New music is unfamiliarby nature. It is different from music that listeners happen not to have heard before, such as a recently exhumed Renaissance motet or Romantic symphony. Educatedlisteners can readily assimilate those works into familiartraditions.But with new music, assimilation is not always so easy, or even desired. Many listeners relish the newness of new music; if they assimilatedevery new piece at first hearing, no music would ever be new for them. New music forms a context in which a major triad or a well-known tune by Rossini can sound new. It is music heard as new. The prestige of new music lies in its message being to some extent new: it "speaks to our time." That message cannot be conveyed if the music is totally unrecognizable. Music heard as new is music heard as departingfrom tradition, but any music, to convey its message, needs to establish a connection with tradition.A composer may find these two demands difficult to reconcile, as Gauguinfound the equivalentdemandson a painter, complaining about the "peculiar, crazy public that demandsthe greatest possible degree of originality on the painter'spart and yet won't accept him unless his work resembles that of the others!"12For composers as for painters, the challenge of balancingthe new and the recognizableis the challenge of imaginingthe public. Some composerswriteprogramnotes to help their listeners find a balance. Bart6k, for example, in notes to his examples of string quartets, analyzed the movements as straightforward traditionalforms, as if listeners would need help recognizingthe recognizable and could be counted on to sense the new for themselves. New-music concerts often include works by composers who are grandfather figuresDebussy, Sch6nberg, Ives-as if to suggest connections for listeners to make with the newer works. But while the older music may work in that way, it may also take on an unfamiliarityof its own in this context. The older works are changed for today's listenersby the influence they are still exerting on today's composers. Assimilating the new unsettles what listeners have alreadyassimilatedin the old. Recognizing connections with the old is among the pleasures of listening to the new. Assimilating new music is not only a pleasure, but a
12PaulGauguin, The Writingsof a Savage, ed. Daniel Guerin, tr. Eleanor Levieux (New York: Viking Press, [1978]), p.. 205. J. Peter Burkholderdescribes the same pressures as they bear on New works had twentieth-centurycomposers: "Composers could not afford to be too different .... to be seen to take part in the tradition,to continue the mannerof composing and thinkingabout music which characterizedthe master composers." ("Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstreamin Music of the Last HundredYears," The Journal of Musicology 11/2(Spring 1983), 123.

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need if listeners are to live with new works as they do with classic ones. New music belongs to the present, but only a few listeners feel right away thatit belongs to them. Many listenersfeel embarrassment preciselybecause
it belongs to the present: "I know I should like new music . . ." New

music does not have the unfamiliarityof the remote, as early music does. It is unfamiliarbecause its history has not yet been found, its place in traditionhas not yet been made. When thatis done, when a work's newness has worn off and familiarityhas set in, the workmay become anotherclassic alongside the Eroica. But for listeners who can rememberthe experience of hearing a work when it was new, that work can never be just another classic. A differenceremainsbetween the work whose place in historythey have learned from history and the work whose assimilationinto history is their own history. New kinds of popularity The popularityof any musical work increaseswhen the work is transplantedfrom its original situation, convertedfrom its original use. A Bach cantataor Stravinskyballet presentedin a concert hall is a conversion, as is a Schubertsymphony played by two people on a piano at home. These conversions change the work as a phenomenon, as an experience. They affect the way musiciansperformand the way the music sounds. The Bach and Stravinskyare changed subtly in sound perhaps, the Schubertperhaps comically. The title Wachetauf or Firebird or UnfinishedSymphonyseems to name a single work, but one person may have heard many versions, in many circumstances,underthat title. No one version stays altogetherclear of the others in that person's memory and conceptionof the work. No one version is the work; the work is the complex of all versions, linked to each other by their common origin, by the score, by history, by the faculty of memory. Likewise, classical music is not one phenomenon, but many. It is music which people put to many differentuses. Each use makes classical music popular in a different way, and every form of popularityfeeds the others. Classical music has always undergone conversions in use. It is traditionalto sing church music and play ballet music in concerts, to play of arrangements symphoniesfor oneself. In the twentiethcenturynew kinds of conversion have been made possible by the technical revolution in reproducing and broadcastingsound. Listeners, no longer needing to be in the presence of performers,are using music in unforeseen, unprecedented ways. Probablythe most common and varied new use of music is as "background." In some situations people do not control the use they make of backgroundmusic because they do not choose whetheror not it is played. Decisions are made for them by managersof factories, offices, and stores, by composers who provide music for movies and television. But those people make theirdecisions thinkingaboutwho theirlistenersare. Classical music, like every sort of music, offers a familiaritywhich is right for some

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listeners and situations, wrong for others. People who enter a store and hear classical music piped in can tell whetherit is theirkind of store before they even look at the merchandise,let alone the price tags. Listenerswho hear classical music in a television or radio ad may not put a name to what they are hearing, but they can feel its classical tone, its "class." Classical music in these settings is not only comforting music; it is an attributeof "comfortable" living. It suits the selling of wine or wine-based mustard just as country-westernsuits the selling of hot dogs. For backgroundpurposes, classical is just one of many distinctive sorts of popularmusic. In many situations people do control the music in their background. They choose a record or a radio station and go about their business. They plug in a cassette as they drive or wear headphonesas they walk. In some cases they choose the same music for backgroundas for foreground;in some cases they prefer quite different types of music. Both choices bear investigating. Classical music in the concert hall claims the full attentionof its listeners; they have set other activities aside to hear it. But some of the listeners who go to concert halls to hear it and some of the musicians who perform it there put the same music on while they eat or read or talk or play. PresidentCarterhad classical music piped into the Oval Office. These listeners seem confident that they can listen with less thanone ear to music which they believe deserves theirfull attentionin othercircumstances.They seem not to fear that they will be distractedby the very music that seems most capable of distractingthem, because of its inherentqualities and their music pay careful familiaritywith it. Commercialproducersof background attentionto inherentqualitiesand familiarity,but people selecting theirown backgroundmusic abide by no rules. As Hugo Cole writes in one of the
few balanced accounts of background music, "in the field of do-it-yourself

to music any type, from crumhorns Steve Reich, may be pressed background into service."'13 On the other hand, some listeners shun their favorite music for background. I have had college students interview their fellow students about how they use their record collections, and a few of the informantshave reportedthat they preferrock when they are listening intentlyto music, but put on Bach or Debussy when they need to concentrateon their math problems.These informants,however small a minoritythey are, raise some importantquestions more clearly than the other group. What musical qualto ities might make one kind of music preferableto anotheras background a given activity? How does a person listen to music while giving primary attentionto something else? How does the listener's familiaritywith the music affect that process? Available researchdoes not provide direct answers. The corporationsthat produceand sell backgroundmusic have had these mattersstudied, but they do not publish the results. Educationalreof backgroundmusic, on learning, but they have not, so far as I know,
'3"Backgroundmusic-threat or promise." in Composer(London) No. 61 (Summer 1977), 23.

searchers have studied the effects of background music, even various kinds

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consideredthe preferencesof the listenersor the musicalqualitiesthat affect listening.14 Psychologists have studied how people divide their attention between two soundingmessages or betweena soundingmessage and a silent task, but for the most part they have used spoken rather than musical The rock fan who studies to classical music may simply be choosing wordless music over worded music for background. Commercial backgroundmusic, after all, is generally wordless;the only Muzak with words is "foreground" Muzak.16 Other features of classical music may second the choice. College studentswho listen mostly to popularmusic sometimes describe classical music as lacking a beat, by which they seem to mean the kind of beat which a rhythmsection provides. Perhaps,then, much classical for music is neutralenough in a certainway to make a suitablebackground study. The classical music never, perhaps,demandsmore than a very "attenuated" concentration(to borrow a term from psychologists), but that much steady concentrationon music may keep students from losing their primaryconcentrationon math problems. Classical music is no longer itself when it is used as background music. It becomes like "easy-listening" popularmusic, valued more for its geniality than for its genius. But the change that comes over it is a change in the listening, not in the notes. The performancethat a studentputs on the cassette player while studying may be a performancethat thrilled Philharmonic subscribers. Researcherswho investigate backgrounduses of classical music may be able to isolate unchangingqualities of the notes from listeners' tastes. They may be able to find the inherentqualities that most clearly distinguish classical from other kinds of music. If they can, their findingsmight influence not only the uses of classical music as background, but also the observationsthat musicologists consider it importantto make about classical works.
messages. 15

Classical music is not "easy listening," but even in its traditional settings and uses it has gotten to be easier, in several senses, than it was only a couple of decades ago. To begin with, it is easier to get hold of. The numbersof classical-music organizations,performers,performances,

4Referencescan be found under "Attention" in EducationIndex. Music Index lists some others, under "Backgroundmusic." '5Referencescan be found under "Divided attention" and "selective attention" in Psychological Abstracts. Some studies using music can be found under "attention" and "backgroundmusic" in Music Psychology Index. A useful if somewhatdated survey of the subject is the chapter"Attention" (esp. pp. 401-404) by Howard Egeth and William Bevan in Handbook of General Psychology, ed. Benjamin B. Wolman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,[1973]). 16SeeKen Terry, "Muzak to bow 'foreground'music service." in Variety301 no. 2 (November 12, 1980), p. 71.

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and patronsare rising steadily year by year.17 Radio now makes classical music available to people everywherein America for some hours of every day. Recordingsmake it availableto them at whim. Even those who never want to hear it know that it is within their reach now. Earlier in this century, when classical music was not everywhere, it was assumedto be an acquiredtaste, and people workedto acquireit. They took courses in school to learn how to appreciateclassical music. All the were spelled out by Virgil Thomson in faults of the "Appreciation-racket" he blamed it especially for the promotionof "mere listening, that is 1939; to say, of a passive musical experience, to replace performance,which is courses are still flouran active experience."18Today music-appreciation and it seems sometimes that there is more Appreciativetalk than ishing, music on the radio. But as more and more of it is broadcast,less and less of it even pretendsto help listenerslisten. The assumptionthatpeople need to be preparedto hear classical music is largely abandoned,undermined by the nature of radio itself. Classical music is no longer a ritual which you must dress up and travel to a public building to hear. Now it comes out of your speakers and into your ears before you know what it is, sometimes before you are awake. The new pervasivenessof music in daily life overthrows even what Thomson called the "false, or at least highly disputable" "that the conscious paying of attenassumptionof the Appreciation-racket intensifies the favorablereaction."19Now tion duringthe auditive process the less hard you listen, the easier classical music is to like. The promotersof classical music rely on this new ease in making their product liked. At the same time they rely on its continued snob appeal. They work to build a larger and largerbase of "brandloyalty" to it, but they cultivate that loyalty with elitist appeals. "Strike a blow for civilization," read recent ads for Metropolitan Operasubscriptions.The Met uses the word civilizationbecause Radio City and MadisonSquareGardencan't. The Met gets away with it-and thousandsof other classical-musicorganizations derive growthfrom elitist appeals-because of economic and social
about the performingarts are to some extent speculative. Nevertheless, the most com17Statistics prehensive surveys of classical-music organizationssuggest that live performanceshave become significantly more accessible in the United States duringthe last decade and more. The Annual U.S. SurveyStatistics of the CentralOperaService (Lincoln Center, New York, New York 10023) indicate that the numberof opera groups in the United States grew from 685 in the 197071 season to 1031 in 1982-83. In the same period the annual numberof performances(excluding musicals) doubled (from 5,246 to 10,693), as did the attendancefigures (from 6.0 million to 12.7 million). The AmericanSymphonyOrchestraLeague (633 E St. N.W., Washington,D.C. 20004) estimates that between 1972 and 1983 the numberof "symphonic ensembles" in the United States rose from 1204 to 1572, the numberof players in those orchestrasrose from 70,000 to 76,000, the numberof concerts nearly doubled (from 12-13,000 to 22-23,000), and the attendancefigures rose from 18 to 23 of million. I am gratefulto Bob Olmsted and Melanie Jarratt the League's Researchand Analysis office for compiling 1983 figures for me suitable for comparisonto the League's 1972 figures, as cited in ChristopherPavlakis, The AmericanMusic Handbook (New York, 1974), p. 95. lecturesand books, l8TheState of Music (New York, 1939), p. 124. Therewere music-appreciation by H.G. Nageli and F.-J. Fetis, as early as the 1820's. 19Ibid,p. 125.

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changes. America'selite, its white collar, is largerthanever before.20More people want "the best" of everything and, at least in music, find it easy to get. People can have more classical music in their lives than ever before. They can hear any piece on recording,watch any opera on video, any time they want. A steady radio listenermay hear a Brahmssymphonya hundred times over the course of years. Music that is so easy to hear can be too easy to put out of mind. To fight againstthis effect, recordcompanies and radio stations expand the repertoryof classics they offer. Although it is nothingnew to add worksto the repertory,this expansiondiffersin principle from the creationand updatingof the repertory.It consists largely of filling in aroundthe classics, reviving every note writtenby the mastersand many works written by their contemporaries.These works are not subjected to prolonged testing, as the older classics were, before they are considered classical; they are classics by association. They may have musical merit or historical interest, but they do not have to. They are chosen for recording and broadcastbecause they fill out the classical repertorywithout discomfortingclassical listeners:a well-loved classicaldisc-jockeyin Boston, asked why he plays so little new music, replied, "I don't want people to cut themselves while they're shaving." The classics-by-associationare chosen because they fill out the classical repertorywhile maintainingits exclusive identity:a potboilerby Beethovenor even Hummelcan be whatthe classical radio stations call "good music" or "fine music," but the best of gospel or gagaku cannot. Classical music maintainsits identity while its repertoryexpands, its audience expands, and its uses expand. It grows easier and more popular, but no less exclusive. Individualclassical pieces may become so popular that they barely retain their classical identity. The Mendelssohn wedding march is hardly classical when it is played at weddings; even when it is played in a concert, in its original version, set among the other incidental pieces to A Midsummer-night's Dream, it may jump out of its classical and revert, for many listeners, to its more "popular" identity. But setting the classical repertoryas a whole retainsits identityeven as it is becoming popularworld-wide. As the opening of this study suggested, new uses and new media are now bringingclassical music worldwidepopularity,but thatpopularitycontinues to dependon the music's special associations. Seven-hundred million people heardKiri Te Kanawasing a Handel aria as they watched the wedding of PrinceCharleson television. The enormousnumberof viewers does not indicate the popularityof Handel. So many people were listening to
to 20According the 1982-83 StatisticalAbstractof the UnitedStates (p. 386), the numberof whitecollar workers in the United States rose from 28,522,000 in 1960 to 52,949,000 in 1981. According to a 1974 study by the Ford Foundation, membersof the white-collarclass were almost three times likelier than those of the blue-collar class to go to a symphonic concert at least once a year, and four times likelier to go to the opera. See The Finances of the Performing Arts (New York:FordFoundation, 1974), vol. 2, p. 13, table 13.

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Handel because so many people were watching the British royal wedding. Western classical music expands to reach a universal audience precisely becauseit retainsits associations with European culture,with Westernwealth and power, in this case with the British royal family. It has become the most universal, the most popular, of classical musics, not because of its inherentmusical appeal, but because of universalinterestin the West. It is thoughtof as "classical" even by people outside the West who have other classical musics of their own. To those listeners it is a specialty in a way that it is to no Westerner;it is the specialty of the West. Westernclassical music, which the West values as its music most universalin message, unites listeners around the world not because it has the same appeal for all of them, but because its specific associationsappeal in differentways around the world. Bates College