From StopSmiling Online:
SS: What does it even mean to say classical music, and where are the lines drawn? Because if we’re going to talk about the bleed-through between music, where does one music end and another begin? What are we really talking about when we talk about classical music?
AR: There is no such thing as classical music for me. It’s not a genre. When you go through the whole thousand-year history of so-called classical music, it takes in early polyphonic church music to renaissance songs and baroque dance suites, Mozart concertos, the grand symphonic tradition that starts with Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg’s atonality, Stravinsky’s vital rhythmic experiments. Once you get into the 20th century, you’re talking about this ridiculous variety of sounds from electronic noise to conservative romantics to hybrid Gershwin and Bernstein pieces that are half opera, half musical theater, etc. You’re left with a very tentative definition of what we’re talking about when we say “classical.” It usually has something to do with someone writing down music on paper and giving it to someone else to perform. And even there you sometimes have composers asking players to improvise, so that definition fails too. Basically, these are people who have been trained a certain way, trained in a certain tradition. They may end up totally defying it and writing something unrecognizable, but it does emerge out of centuries-old ideas.
SS: We can define it according to what it’s not. It’s not folk music, right?
AR: More or less. Although there are definitely composers who turned into ethnomusicologists, like Bartók and Percy Grainger, who blended the distinction between classical and folk.
SS: Charles Seeger.
AR: Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford turned from writing music to collecting and editing folk songs. A composer for me is someone who uses the music that is out there and sort of manipulates it, binds it with something else and twists it to his or her own creative personality.
SS: Jazz has sometimes aspired to the condition of classical music — Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. Has it become classical music, and if not, why not? Is there great music that is both jazz and classical?
AR: There’s always been a sort of weird envy across the border between classical and jazz. Jazz artists have wanted to have something of the kind of institutional recognition and creative freedom that composers, especially 20th century composers, have possessed. And on the other side, many composers, especially in the Twenties and Thirties, felt that classical music had been cordoned off from the mainstream of society and from its folk and popular roots. So they wanted to come down to earth, especially those who had been born around 1900 and lived through the First World War and as teenagers had seen this horrifying suicide of European civilization. They saw jazz as a new force coming out of the New World that would sweep all wreckage aside. They wanted to have this freedom with casualness that jazz artists had. In a way, each group was trying to escape. Jazz artists were trying to escape the confines of popular commercial music and classical composers wanted to escape from a rigidly defined concert-hall code. Perhaps someday they will meet, and we will have the perfect music.
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