Is it just me, or does the classical music world have (at least two) conflicting messages running simultaneously about elitism? One message, prevalent in discourse about the purported death of classical music, is that classical music's elitist baggage has bloated beyond the limits of a far less formal society. Many people might like classical music, the story goes, but they're intimidated by the social niceties allegedly required in order to enjoy the art form, or don't have the energy to keep up the appearances classical music allegedly requires one to keep up - or both. Another, contrasting, message is that a certain mystique should surround classical music, that it is an elevated art form that deserves the most rigorous scrutiny from those who take it in. From this notion it follows that classical music is not for everyone, that it is instead for connoisseurs, or at least those with intellectual apparatus (i.e., knowledge) or credentials impressive enough to gain entrance into its hallowed realm. At the risk of offending, piffle. Take a recent piece by Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette, who lambastes art critic Roberta Smith, the author of a New York Times review of the 2012 Whitney Biennial exhibition in New York, for writing in emotional rather than intellectual/critical terms about a bit of classical music in one of the exhibition's films. Smith wrote that a cellist shown in the film was "playing his heart out," and she, Smith, dared us "not to cry" at the emotional power of the music. Midgette's response includes this thought, which more or less summarizes her position:
Classical music has a reputation of being something smart â indeed, its fans are often stereotyped as nerds and eggheads â but the way that people engage with it often seems to me anything but, as if it renders otherwise smart thinkers uncritical.
Ah, the old triumph of reason over emotion. I am assuming that Midgette's discomfort with Smith's emotional way of connecting with and communicating about the music she heard stems more from the professional context (New York Times art review) in which the emotional assessment of the music appears, than with some absurd, inhuman notion that music ipso facto shouldn't move us. Even giving Midgette this credit, though, I'm not sure I like some of the broader implications of her line of thinking. What are the motivations and justifications for ascribing to a philosophy that potentially distances an art form from its audience, whose members have a right to process and discuss art however they can and will? This line of thinking has clear drawbacks for art: distance art from its audience and you've reduced or removed the audience's incentive to care about the art. No audience, and the art becomes irrelevant, then maybe even extinct. At least equally troublesome are the social implications of the insiders-only approach to arts discourse: people feel they are disenfranchised from art (and I do mean feel - how many people determine solely by critical evaluation that they are disenfranchised from anything?) and the part of their souls art feeds goes hungry. To be sure, professional criticism of any art form calls upon one to, well, critique examples of that art form from an informed and intelligent perspective, and on its surface Midgette's piece calls only for informed discourse on classical music. Nothing unreasonable there. But what lurks beneath that seemingly well intended professional call to arms threatens to send the wrong message to those who, not being professional musicians or writers on music, would engage with classical music on their own level and terms. And while we're not throwing babies out with the bath, let me ask: since when is it a bad sign that classical music moves its listeners? Bottom line: let music move you, go with the flow, and if you're an arts writer whose area of specialization is not classical music, you are, as Midgette implies, probably better off not pretending you know more than you do about this art form that - thank the heavens above - continues to captivate, sometimes inexplicably, so many people of so many different walks of life. Good thing, then, that Roberta Smith respected the limits of her intellectual knowledge of classical music and surrendered her discourse on music to the rhetoric of her emotional way of knowing. Even here Smith did get something right, at least according to some top-notch classical musicians: to paraphrase a tag line once used by the esteemed Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, music isn't what you think, it's what you feel. Read more:
