What She Said!

The great thing about being young and having a voice is that you can tilt at windmills.

A musician and critic named Jennifer Gerston came across my suggested articles feed on my phone the other day at lunch. I stopped to read it and found it well-written and interesting. Better, I agreed with it. You can check it out here.

I have long found it annoying that classical music is being marketed as something for relaxation, rather than something for actually listening to. It strikes me that the greatest musical minds of many countries and centuries just might have something to offer beyond effervescent sonic scents while we doze off after a long day.

But I'm afraid I know exactly why they are marketing the music this way. That is because it works. People are consumers. More than that, they are wired to want the greatest bargain, the most bang for the buck, the easiest way to achieve the most. Actual listening, or worse, learning, requires time and effort, and there is really no solid route to grabbing power (can you think of a more prevalent human motivation?) by understanding art. On the other hand, the people who have historically had any art in their lives at all tend to be folks who are not exactly struggling for survival. Their problems tend to be things like feeling stressed out because they are busy and have to deal with other jerks like themselves all day. Sorry, was that a little too candid?

What they are looking for is a way to relax. So the advertising geniuses decided to give them what they want.

Is that any favor to Brahms? No. Of course not. That isn't what the music is for at all. Not that it doesn't sometimes have relaxing properties, but that it is so much more. But there is a long, long history of human beings refusing to admit the properties of anything beyond what it can do for their immediate needs, and this is just one tiny example. Advertising is the art of the possible.

There are some who go beyond this model, of course. They are a minority, but they are there. The majority of the people who "listen" to classical music, though, don't really listen. They have it on in the background at work, at home, and they don't really notice it. And the moment some composer dares to get loud enough to be noticeable they turn down the volume.

Classical music organizations know this. They know that only a small fraction of their listeners are actually listeners--that is, committed enough to really care about what they are offering. And they know they can't survive on just those people alone. So they cast their nets wide--wider, anyway--and come up with music as a sleep aid.

None of this is meant as a rebuttal to what Ms. Gerston is saying. She's right about what the music should be--really, what it is, and how it ought to be treated. In the real world, she's not going to get what she wants anymore than I am, but I applaud her effort.

Besides, if some of you want to take her words as a challenge, great! I may seem cynical about all this, but in the end, if we look around, we see arts organizations teetering on the edge of disaster, and the vast majority of mankind spending more of their time on longstanding human pursuits like slaughter and jealousy and anger and misery. And if we go back 100 years we'll see pretty much the same thing. And I would bet, in 100 years' time, too. Disaster has always been at hand, particularly for the arts. There has been gloom and doom aplenty. This is, in fact, the norm. And that should be oddly comforting. Because if we wait for classical music to become a favorite pastime, we'll not only be waiting a long time, we'll be missing the point, which is that art is valuable regardless of whether you can bottle and sell it to the masses, as a soporific drug or anything else that promises a cure to what ails you.

My point is, this has always been a fool's errand. And a minority pursuit. And it has somehow managed to survive. One day, if humankind ever grows up a little, pursuit of the arts may even become popular (as an actual pursuit). Meanwhile, there are some humans out there doing amazing things. and some folks are even listening to them. I would submit that our lives are better for it.