All that many of us wanted for Christmas, apparently, was more classical-pop crossover bands; as Il Divo and The Choir Boys added their names to the ever-expanding roster of genre-bending bands, such as G4, Amici Forever (the ‘first opera band’), Charlotte Church, the Mediaeval Baebes and Vanessa Mae. However their music appeals to us, their considerable success and controversial appeal does serve as a reminder that musical segregation–convenient, perhaps–doesn’t come without certain associated tensions.
These particular musicians seem to have one thing in common: they have identified that music, for most of the world, is experienced in recorded form, and therefore commodified and sold. Live music, whether free or commodified (in its own way), becomes a pleasant surprise amid the flow of recorded sounds. We choose music which we think will please us and suit our tastes (often sampling before purchasing to ensure that there are no nasty surprises). We bring it to life with the help of machines in the bedroom, kitchen, sitting room, and car. Through repeated listening, we come to associate the music we’ve bought with our own character and identity. Inevitably, ‘our’ music can act as a fashion accessory, especially when it is played at a volume audible to others through one’s own hi-fi system, or cemented into the ever more personality-defining walkie-talkie as a ring-tone. We select music to suit our moods: a pre-club vodka session might call for a bit of 70s disco; classical strings could work perfectly with a hot bath, while jazz ballads could give a dinner party that diplomatic mix of sophistication and emotion. To an Adornian critic like Julian Johnson (once a French Horn player, now a lecturer, and author of the passionate Who Needs Classical Music?), this is all depressingly indicative of ‘the dominance of the functional expectations of popular culture’, but perhaps it isn’t the whole story? Music continues to exist for a minority (an ever-expanding minority, mind) as something possibly mysterious, sometimes challenging and potentially life-affirming. It may be helped or hindered by words, but it is certainly more than merely functional. Still, however many and varied our personal experiences of music might be, we are all united by the divisive world of genre classification and that, we are told, is How Music Is.
Is there any problem with the way things operate? Perhaps not. Still, things haven’t been this way for very long, so it might well be interesting and worthwhile to acknowledge the relative infancy of our framework of music consumption. In looking over our shoulders we can learn that the recorded music industry (which affects most of our musical experiences, most of the time) came into being less than a century ago. Looking further back (without confining ourselves to the West), live performance and reception were inseparable for centuries. So, our current mode of operation is really quite new, and money plays a now more significant role than ever before.
If we think of the growth of the recording industry, the gramophone record and the parallel rise of African-American styles as the genesis, in one sense, of our current era, then we should attach a lot of importance to the events of those first three or four decades of the last century. Despite the best efforts of the Gershwins, Ellingtons, and Gil Evanses of the world, the activity of this period left us conclusively segregated. Jazz would be jazz and that was that. What’s that? Folk? Well, that will be folk. The in-fighting which subdivided what many think of as just ‘jazz’, into trad, swing, bop, hard-bop, post-bop, avant-garde, fusion, avant-funk, post-avant-funk, post-ambient-European-rock-country-folk (’n bass), and so forth, has likewise affected The Music Generally Known as Classical, and many other umbrella genres similarly, and the outcome in the market-place is a hierarchy in which (if you go into any major recorded music retailer) ‘rock and pop’ sit on top, and the rest is marginalised. (At this point, all please rise and salute the arrival of ‘urban’ onto the scene: without doubt the most mind-boggling choice of words to date). To the optimist, this is perfectly natural. The finest art is necessarily unpopular, in which case ‘classical’, as Nicholas Cook (in his Very Short Introduction to Music) explains it, is a rather handy epithet:

Borrowed from the ‘classical’ art of Greece and Rome, which was seen as the expression of universal standards of beauty, this term implied that similar standards had now been set in music, against which the production of all other times and places must be measured.

To the pessimist, however, music has been hijacked, and standards are being turned on their head. I mean, what is Tony Blair doing having all those pop stars round for tea? Shouldn’t our leaders be keen to promote the most learned and innovative artistic achievement, rather than go out of their way to be seen with poorly-educated peddlers of neo-primitive background music?
Someone will always complain though, won’t they? If it isn’t Sir Thomas Allen or Prince Charles then it’ll be, oh, Oscar Wilde? Darn right. This was one of the playwright’s complaints (in Critic as Artist), almost a century and a half before Tony ever considered inviting Liam and Patsy round for Doritos and dips:

The real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.

If Wilde were here today, one supposes, he’d scrap CCTV and Zero Tolerance and bring back student grants (without worrying himself too terribly about binge drinking). He possibly wouldn’t listen to G4 (for long, anyway). Of course, it isn’t surprising that someone of Wilde’s character should put in a word for contemplation, but his viewpoint can inspire us to consider the dominant influence in our time of incidental music, from film and television soundtracks through to iPods and car stereos. In this respect, reality does reflect television. Should it come as any surprise that music in education and, therefore, in all other spheres of life, is not expected to be mentally challenging? Does music in mass culture pose a threat to music in its more cultivated forms? Will we forget that it was for a long time equal in status to any other art or science? It is significant that we don’t consume other academic disciplines (science, languages, geography and history) in the way we do music: as something consumable, accessible, disposable. The marginalisation of educative music in school curricula therefore challenges us to view music’s brief recording career with unblinkered eyes.
When school’s over, there is undeniably an active tension between the inhabitants of segregated societies, whose characteristics are often represented in their choice of music. Words like ‘popular’, ‘classical’, ‘art’, ’serious’, and ‘entertainment’ repeatedly find themselves used as weapons in ideological warfare. However, whether or not we decide that one ideology is more convincing than another, we should remember today how our weapons were produced, and the first half of the twentieth century might appear to affect our lives today more than we realize. In its early years, with ‘popular’ a part of the vocabulary of European music enthusiasts (and a style of composition within that tradition), it was jazz, not pop, that was a dirty word. The longer-established European tradition may well have needed to mark its territory in the context of the newly imported African-American sounds. In allowing improvisation and exuberance to become almost the exclusive domain of the jazz musician and his successors, the besieged Europeans may have looked to their scores for security - rejecting some of the vital components of good, rounded music-making in the process. With prejudice present on one side, the other becomes irritated. One camp is criticised for being harmonically simplistic and responds by mocking the other’s nostalgic regressiveness; each side believes the other’s criticisms to contain an element of truth and clings onto those associations, thereby perpetuating divisions which perhaps needn’t have appeared. We are not surprised today if a ‘classical’ musician says that they can’t improvise and we are a little disconcerted if pop stars perform with a music stand in front of them.
Both sides, in this scenario, could be missing out. This, just possibly, is the inkling of the recent cross-over adventurers. They may be aware of a missing link, or they could simply be revealing the range of their musical experiences, which may be wider than ever before. In the specialist field, there are those like the pianists Uri Caine and Joanna MacGregor and the singers Bobby McFerrin and Jubilant Sykes whose output (as a genre, still either ‘jazz’, ‘classical’ or ‘contemporary’) consistently encourages dialogue. Importantly, they make us aware (as do G4 et al.) that words and genres can act as snares and delusions. They might all be saying that, if music is a dismembered body whose heart is the emotion and instinct to be found in ‘jazz’, whose arms and legs are the self-assured authenticity of ‘pop’ and whose head is ‘classical’ studiousness, then perhaps it deserves to be re-united. Certainly, its new incarnation would be exactly that: new. If carefully conceived, it might be more potent than any one of its component parts. This would be a blessing, not least for that music we call ‘classical’–which may be as keen as any to escape the confines of its connotations and to reassert its significance in the musical, and wider, world–but for all music which feels the stifling effect of classification. If it so happens that way back in the last century any prejudices or fears social, racial or musical were active agents in the process which laid the foundations for the musical and social segregation of today, then we might be well advised to listen to A.C. Grayling, who points out: “Not only is the concept of race artificial, it is new; yet in its short existence it has, like most lies and absurdities current among us, done a mountain of harm”. Great stuff. Good to meet you. What sort of music are you into?