Monday, December 5, 2011

Art Versus Entertainment

In the new music world we hear lots of chatter about how things are constantly improving in terms of musical open-mindedness. Generally, I think this is true, which is a wonderfully positive thing. To take the oft-cited example, as students we usually don’t feel forced to write in a specific style the way many of our teachers once did. Unfortunately, though, academia is academia and the art-music world is the art-music world, which tends to mean that many prejudices still remain.

One of the most common elitist statements that I hear on a regular basis is an insistent delineation between “art” music and “entertainment” music. This distinction persists, despite the rampant amount of crossover music, the skill and artistry that may go into a Broadway show (not to mention the lack of craft that can sometimes be apparent in a new music piece…), etc. I guess what I’m trying to say is that good music is good music and just because something is labeled as falling more into the “entertainment” category shouldn’t preclude it from being called “art.” Likewise, music labeled as “art” can still be entertaining.

I think part of why “entertainment” music is denigrated in the music world is because it aims to communicate directly with an audience (some might say it caters to an audience). Music’s aim to communicate with an audience is a topic that is often debated in the context of its artistic merit. On one end of the spectrum, there are people who maintain that ignoring the audience indicates that the composer has gone too far in the direction of the cerebral and that her music comes off as snobby, aloof, and disrespectful (for example, consider the angry criticisms of Milton Babbitt’s “The Composer as Specialist,” also titled “Who Cares If You Listen?”). Others think that disregarding the audience indicates the height of integrity and artistry.

But why should the issue of the audience and the issue of craft be inherently linked in our minds anyway? If the music is good, who cares if it caters to an audience or not? I think Mozart’s operas are very much interested in the audience’s expectations in a way that often reminds me of today’s Broadway musicals. Speaking of which, I have taken flak from teachers/peers when I’ve said that I love Stephen Sondheim and I honestly have never been able to figure out why. I think Sondheim’s musicals are as valid in terms of their artistry as Mozart’s operas are. Yet, there is no doubt that Mozart’s operas have been canonized as art music, whereas Sondheim’s musicals still face opposition in certain academic circles.

To use an analogy, our culture seems to have a much more open-minded attitude toward movies, even though the artistic situation with film is very similar to music. There are lots of terrible commercial movies, to be sure, but there are also plenty of “commercial” movies that are incredibly well-crafted and artistic, even if they aren’t labeled as “art movies." Often avid filmgoers will regularly see both the new art movie and the award-winning Hollywood film and often both "art" and "commercial" films will be taken seriously in film studies courses. Why can’t we have the same open-mindedness with music? Admittedly, academies are starting to ease up and will sometimes include the New York crossover scene in their classes (Bang on a Can, Missy Mazzoli, David T. Little, etc.). However, it seems to me that often academia is only interested in composers who have some sort of classical background or association (determined by their training, the venue where the pieces are performed, etc.). This discrepancy seems weirder to me as time goes on, especially when I sometimes can’t tell a significant artistic difference between “crossover” art music I hear and regular “pop” music. Do Mazzoli and Little deserve more of a place in academia than Bjork?

I guess my main question in all of this is do “art” and “entertainment” delineations and labels serve any important purpose when it comes to determining the quality of a piece of music? If not, why do we continue to separate good pieces of music into two different categories?

Posted by Natalie

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