> The main use for classical music these days seems to be to drive the
> homeless out of the Port Authority bus terminal.
These days, NYC subways and places like the bus terminal have the occasional individual performer. When I was in Moscow last September, you had entire ensembles of classical musicians performing in the subways. My suspicion is that it all reflects the local labor market -- and lack thereof -- for classically trained musicians.
> As for Doug's alleged philistinism, in the midst of the recent Burns/Jazz
> hype, I recently wondered out whether one could find anyone who is not a
> misanthrope, hopelessly backward or a musical illiterate to take the
> negative in the debate "Resolved: jazz is America's classical music." The
> New Criterion's Samuel Lippman might have done the job before he kicked the
> bucket a while back, in the past decade or so Terry Teachout seems to have
> won the neo-cons over to jazz. Of course, the pwog-left has long since
> given up on classical music as it is just ever so terribly elitist.
> On the other hand, I quite agree with Doug that Madonna (or the conglomerate
> who manufactures the songs which she-with the help of terabytes of of
> signal processing software-manages to croak out onto a hard-drive) is
> probably a better "composer" than Charlie Parker.
>
> M's "compositions" are more tightly constructed, have more formal variety
> (not much, but Parker's have virtually none), have more interesting
> basslines-both rhythmically and melodically, occassionally have an
> asymettrical phrase structure-if I remember correctly, (anyone know of a
>
As a statement of individual listening taste, which is how I read Doug's comments, I have no problems with a preference for Madonna over Charlie Parker. I did not see Doug's preference as a larger statement about the status of Jazz as "America's classical music." But John, is his apparent quest for some contemporary, but far more enlightened, Adorno to do battle with jazz, is reading Doug differently. I think the comparison John reads into Doug's comments, between Parker and Madonna as musical composers, is really one of comparing apples and oranges. What I find most interesting about Madonna, for example, is the way in which she used with such creativity the opening of entirely new vistas for music as performance [music videos, MTV], which she adeptly also made into a career in film; it is in that context that her transgressive approach to sexuality, which is the center of public persona, really finds the stage it needs. Parker's milieu is an entirely different world, that of the nightclub, and it makes no sense to me to treat the two as if they were comparable.
There is no discussion of jazz as a musical genre which can avoid, if only as a subtext, the question of race. Certainly, the ignorant remarks of Adorno were thoroughly permeated with a Eurocentric dismissal of cultural forms generated out of Africa. Certainly, Marsalis' and Crouch's approach to jazz is unambiguously and unapologetically located within a conscious, politically deliberate celebration of the cultural creativity and virtuosity of African-Americans. And certainly, attempts to marginalize the importance of jazz to American culture have invariably been attempts to marginalize the importance of African-Americans to American culture.
In this respect, the latching on to Madonna as a counterpoint to jazz as a genre has a troubling aspect. Madonna is, in many ways, the Elvis of her day, the leading white figure of popular culture and music who can move the boundaries of that culture and music, especially in the area of explicit investigations and celebrations of sexuality, in ways that are never quite open in the same fashion to African-American performers, upon which both Elvis and Madonna thoroughly base themselves. In Madonna's "Like A Prayer" video, which I find most interesting, some of these themes are played out in ways that are particularly revealing. She is the sexual transgressor, crossing the racial line to initiate a sexual relationship with a Christlike African-American man, but she is also a female "God the Father," rescuing him from the lynch mob and the burning crosses. Female subjectivity emerges, but African-American subjectivity melts away...
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20010119/e2c7d99b/attachment.htm>