What's "Classic" About "Classical"?
Example V.1 Kansas City Strip Steak1
"The Kansas City Strip. Oh yes Sir, the classic choice!"
My father had taken the family to dinner at a club of which he was a member. We had a particularly oily and obsequious waiter and when my dad told him his choice for entree the waiter gushed his approval. My brother and I eyed each other, knowing each other's thoughts: "It's just a steak, not a Rembrandt. Chill out. The tip will be fine."
"Classic" and "Classical" are problematic terms for us. We have "classic rock" radio stations. And "classic" cars. Warner Bros.Discovery offers "Turner's Classic Movies" and in 2013 Pope Francis referred to "religious classics", texts he thought had proved stimulating and mind expanding, "meaningful in every age," apparently embracing Gilgamesh to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet 2 NASCAR maintains a YouTube page of "classics" (there are a lot of crashes). There's a similar YouTube page for the "Top 10 Classic SNL Sketches of the 1980's" (a lot of
1 The Kansas City steak is a tender cut of beef with marbling throughout the meat, cut from the short loin of a cow and served with the bone intact.
2 Francis: Evangelii Gaudim, Rome: 24 November, 2013. Paragraph 256. “At other times, contempt is shown for writings which reflect religious convictions, overlooking the fact that religious classics can prove meaningful in every age; they have an enduring power to open new horizons, to stimulate thought, to expand the mind and the heart.”
laughs) and the American Association of Retired Persons has the YouTube page "10 Classic Sports Moments to Watch Again and Again." In history, we talk about "classical antiquity", by which we mean the eight hundred years in Greece and Rome from about 500 BC to 300 AD and we have to include the "antiquity" because the French, following Voltaire (1694-1778) who called them nos auteurs classiques, use "le classic" to describe their culture during the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715) and the "classic" because that ancient period doesn't include the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are very important and great but aren't considered "classical" (and we ignore the contemporary cultures of India and China). We have "classical architecture" (more Greek and Romans) and "classics" in literature, which can be anything from Dante's Divine Comedy (14th Century) to Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (20th Century). And it gets trickier. In the West, there's a particular kind of music that we call "classical." But when we talk about the history of music in the West, we refer to the period between 1750 and about 1810 as the "Classical Period." This is the music of Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries, which I guess we probably should call "classical classical" music, which sounds like we're stuttering. But again we have a problem with the French, who sometimes think of la musique francaise classique as stretching from the founding of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique in 1571 (you'll remember that academy from Chapter Three) to the 1790's and the French Revolution. So to be clear, we might have to describe the music of Haydn as "classical classical non-classique."3 Perhaps thinking about the stuttering, in 2004 the American music critic Alex Ross wrote "When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.”4
Example V.2
NASCAR YouTube page
It looks like "classic" is a synonym for old, even dead. Old rock, old movies, old literature, old television, old buildings, old history (not all old history but just some of it), old sporting events old people like to watch because it reminds them of when they weren't so old (same reason old people like to listen to "classic rock"). But "classic" isn't always old.
3 Daniel Heartz: "Classical", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 4; London: MacMillan Publishers Limited, 1980.
4 Alex Ross, "Listen to This," The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004
Sometimes it's new. American Major League baseball has an all-star game known as "The Midsummer Classic." Numerous organizations in the United States host charity fundraisers they call "golf classics" (I gave up counting at 165, "Dan Hogan Golf Classic," "Roscoe Brown Golf Classic," "YMCA Golf Classic", there are a lot). There's a limousine service in Los Angeles called "L.A. Classic Transportation" (yes, they do offer Rolls Royces). We have "classic cuisine" (of course we must use the French cuisine instead of the English cooking because we think the French is “classier”) and even here we apparently have a subcategory: Kansas City strip: "classic classic," which reminds us of Mozart's "classical classical non-classique" (stuttering again). And we've all heard something being breathlessly praised as an "instant classic!" exanimation mark included.
It's all confusing and a bit silly. But there's more. Let's go back to my dad's steak and that oily waiter. He was trying to flatter my dad. He was saying that my dad's choice showed him to be a man of superior taste, of sophistication who had the worldly knowledge to know the best and expect it, someone who was a member of the elite, someone set apart from the rabble.
That "set apart from the rabble" is important because it literally takes us back to our term's ancient origins. Aulus Gellius (ca 125 AD - ca 180) was Roman writer. In his Noctes Atticae he uses the word classicus to differentiate between the best writers of his time and the rabble, the proletarius (although classicus, and particularly classis, had more meanings than just that literary, and sociological, one) 5 In 1604, Robert Cawdrey (ca. 1538 - ca 1610) published the first edition (there were to be three more) of his marvelous A Table Alphabeticall containing and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard useful English words , gathered for the benefit and help of ladies, gentlemen, or any other unskillful persons. Whereby that they may speak more easily and fluently, have a better understanding many hard English words, which they shall hear or read in Scripture, Sermons, or else where and also be made able to read at the same aptitude themselves.6 This is generally regarded as the first dictionary of the English language and Cawdrey includes an entry for "classick:" chiefe and approued "Chief and approved," here we have the core of a common meaning of the term today: "of the first class, of the highest rank of importance, constitution and acknowledged standard or model, of enduring interest and value"7
The importance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749 –1832) to German culture probably can't be over emphasized. Poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, philosopher even what today we would call a "social influencer" (he created a rage for young men wearing yellow vests) he was one of the most significant figures of an age of titans that included Napoleon, Washington, Beethoven, and Voltaire. In conversations about their poetry with his fellow poet and playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 1805), Goethe used "classical" not as a mark of excellence but instead as a sobriquet for a particular style, a style distinctive from the "romantic."
5 Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 19.8.15. Ite ergo nunc et, quando forte erit otium, quaerite, an "quadrigam" et "harenas" dixerit e cohorte illa dumtaxat antiquiore vel oratorum aliquis vel poetarum, id est classicus adsiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius." https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Gellius/19*.html
6 It shouldn't be overlooked that Cawdrey includes "ladies" and "unskillful persons" in his title. His intention was to help people understand the Bible as they individually read it and heard sermons preached from it. As a Puritan sympathizer, these were populations Cawdrey included in his literacy program.
7 OED Classical etc.
The idea of the distinction between classical and romantic poetry, which is now spread over the whole world, and occasions so many quarrels and divisions, came originally from Schiller and myself. I laid down the maxim of objective treatment of poetry, and would allow no other; but Schiller, who worked quite in the subjective way, deemed his own fashion the right one, and to defend himself against me, wrote the treatise upon 'Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.' He proved to me that I myself, against my will, was romantic, and that my 'Iphigenia,' through the predominance of sentiment, was by no means so classical and so much in the antique spirit as some people supposed. The Schlegels took up this idea, and carried it further, so that it has now been diffused over the whole world; and every one talks about classicism and romanticism of which nobody thought fifty years ago 8
We find "classic" applied specifically to the works of musicians in John Birchensha's (active 1664-1672) translation of Johannn Heinrich Alsted's (1588-1638) Latin treatise, Templum Musicum. On the book's final page, as a summary of the whole work, the reader is enjoined to "consider those melopoetic Classic's and prime Musicians, Orlandus and Marentius" (melopoetic means skilled in making melody) [Ex.V23]. In 1829, Vincent Novello (1781-1861) and his wife Mary, kept a journal of their travels in Europe. Novello was a highly regarded English musician and is best remembered today for founding the Novello music publishing house, a firm that still exists. In Vienna, the couple attended high mass at Example V.3 the Hofberg’s Chapel Royal, hearing Templum musicum, final page9 Mozart’s Mass in D, No. 6. Vincent wrote:
"This is the place I should come to every Sunday when I wished to hear classical music correctly and judiciously performed.”10
John Comfort Fillmore (1843-1898) was one of America's most important 19th-Century musicians. Trained at Oberlin College in Ohio and finishing his career at Claremont, California's Pomona College, his far-ranging interests lead him to write books on the history of piano music, harmony, and the music of the Omaha Indians. In his 1885 A History of Pianoforte Music he defined classical music as "music having a permanent interest and value" and he was one of the first writers to go further and suggest that the music of the late 18th century possessed these
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conversations With Eckermann (1823 1832), translated by John Oxenford, edited J.K. Moorhead, Da Dapo Press, 1998.
9 Johann Alsted Templum Musicum, page 94, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/muspre1800.100280/?st=gallery
10 Vincent & Mary Novello, A Mozart Pilgrimage, Being the Travel Diaries of Vincent & Mary Novello in the year 1829, transcribed and compiled by Nerina Medidi di Marignano, edited by Rosemary Hughes, London: Eulenburg Books, 1955, p. 181. This is the chapel where the famous Vienna Boys’ Choir continues to sing.
qualities in ways that were superior to other eras. At least in American understanding, the "classical era" of Mozart and Haydn was born.
What have we learned? Perhaps the most important thing is that the notion of "classical" referencing some kind of superiority goes back to its Latin use in the second century and that this use of the term continues to this day. With the important exception of Goethe, to be "classical" is to be the best of its kind. But who's to make that decision? Who's to decide what's "best"? And what are the criteria for making that decision? Going back to that waiter, he was the one who apparently decided that the Kansas City Strip was the "best of its kind" and he made that decision to flatter my dad in the hopes of increasing the tip. He made that decision for his own economic purpose; if my dad had ordered meatloaf he probably would have said the same thing.
And even putting that question aside, who decides what's best and why and it's a very important question, perhaps the most important question and one we'll return to in the last chapter what about all those varying "classics" within music? We have the "classical classical" of Mozart, and the "classical classical non-classique" of the French, and Goethe's "classical" as an oppositional category to "romantic." And then we have this.
Billboard, Rolling Stone, and the National Endowment for the Arts have each published lists of "best songs," Billboard ranking the "500 Best Pop Songs since 1958" in 2023, Rolling Stone ranking 500 songs in 2024, and The NEA ranking 365 songs in 2001 (all these rankings were of recorded songs). Here are the top five songs from each list [Ex.V.4].
Example V.4 comparative list of top five songs11
11 Billboard list: https://www.billboard.com/lists/best-pop-songs-all-time-hits/5-kelly-clarkson-since-u-been-gone/ Rolling Stone list: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/best-albums-of-all-time-1062063/rufus-chakakhan-ask-rufus-1062734/ ;
NEA list: https://web.archive.org/web/20120324105252/http://www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=B3DB4887-39EEF70A-8C7A-3B81B66B2C44
The Billboard and Rolling Stone lists were published for the purposes of attracting readers to the publications and were thus parts of the corporations' business strategy of drivingup stock price. The National Endowment wasn't established to benefit private shareholders, but instead to "develop and promote a broadly conceived national policy of support for the humanities and the arts in the United States, and for institutions which preserve the cultural heritage of the United States. . ."12 Yet because The National Endowment's ranking was done for the purposes of providing educators with music curricula for public schools, developed and distributed by the Scholastic Corporation, a New York City based publisher with an annual revenue of 1.5 billion dollars focusing on pre-Kindergarten through twelfth-grade instructional materials, there was a commercial engine driving that list as well (this "Songs of the Century" curriculum was to be given free of charge to ten thousand fifth-grade teachers in "key areas nationally" in its inaugural phrase, the curriculum was to be purchased thereafter).13 So, as with my dad's waiter, we're back to the possible self-serving use of "excellence."
We'll come back to this, but we must address the more obvious problem first. I don't think anyone would look at those fifteen pieces and call them "classical." Yet, as the finest of their type, they certainly fulfill the primary quality of a "classical piece." And because Otis Redding's "Respect" is the only piece to appear in the top five songs on more than one list, it would be reasonable to say "Respect" is the most classical piece of all classical pieces. But I think we would all would find that ridiculous, or at least very curious, and not because "Respect" isn't a great piece of music for a lot of people but instead because it doesn't fit with the way we customarily use "classical."
There are great pieces of music, the best of their type, that we don't call "classical;" in our last chapter we'll look at Henry Mancini's and Johnny Mercer's extraordinary "Moon River" and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and later in this chapter we'll study a song by Dolly Parton. We’re going to find out that these are great works of art but we wouldn't call them "classical music." We recognize that there's something different between them and the kinds of pieces we recognize as "classical" and that difference isn't in their artistic value. It lies someplace else.
In the first two chapters we addressed the definition of music. We need to to circle back to those opening chapters and now deal with the matter of taxonomy, or classification. Knowing what music is, we now need to know what kinds of music there are. But before we begin, two caveats. First, the boundaries between these definitions are porous, and second, none of these categories reflect artistic excellence. To label something as "pop" or "folk" or "classical" is not in itself to make a judgement about its artistic value. The placement in a category is based on something else; I know I’ve said that before but it needs to be remembered.
I12 NATIONAL FOUNDATION ON THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES ACT OF 1965, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS FISCAL YEAR 2010 APPROPRIATIONS, AND RELATED AGENCIES, 1 August 2010, 20 U.S.C. § 951 (2010), 4 20 U.S.C. § 953 (2010) § 953; https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Legislation.pdf
13 RIAA, NEA Announce ‘Songs of the Century’ https://web.archive.org/web/20120324105252/http://www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=B3DB4887-39EE-F70A8C7A-3B81B66B2C44
Fundamentally, there are three kinds of music: 1) folk; 2) pop; and 3) classical. We'll begin with the second category, "pop" because it's the easiest to define and, at least in the United States, the most significant.
Example V.5
Billboard, September 19, 1960 top of first page
"Pop" is short for "popular." Pop music is music that's popular. People like it and they show that they like it by listening to it, buying it, and attending events where it’s performed. And all that popularity can be tabulated, valued, and sold. We mentioned Billboard earlier when we looked at those three lists of "best" songs. Billboard is probably the most import publication in music business, the equivalent of The Wall Street Journal for investment and Variety for theater and film [Ex. V.5]. Founded in 1894 in Cincinnati as a journal devoted to advertising, by the 1930's Billboard had shifted its focus to music: hearing it performed live, broadcast on the
Example V.6 Billboard, September 19, 1960; Top LP's
Example V.7 Billboard, web page, June 2024
Example V.8 Billboard charts, 2024
radio, and reproduced on phonographs. It published its first "hit parade" in 1936 and started featuring a "record buying guide" three years later. In 1940, record sales were tabulated in its "Chart Line" and this was followed in 1944 by a tabulation of juke box plays called "The Music Box Machine." By 1987 Billboard published eight charts and that expanded to twenty-eight charts by 1994. Today, Billboard publishes data about one-hundred and fifty categories [Ex. V.8].
Once a week, Billboard publishes data gathered about recordings from radio stations, physical and digital sales (data gathered from Nielsen and SoundScan), streams, Youtube and TickTock views, and even playlists submitted by Billboard approved disc jockeys. The results are posted on the firm's web site. The "Hot 100" is the most anticipated posting [Ex. V.9]
Example V.9
Billboard "Hot 100", week of June 15, 2024
The charts for the other categories are similarly formatted. The "Hot Rock & Alternative Songs" chart is typical. [Ex. V.10]
Example V.10
Billboard "Hot Rock. & Alternative Songs;" week of June 15, 2024
How Billboard tabulates and weighs that diverse data is complicated and nuanced. In 2013 the company revealed that its "Hot 100" was achieved through a point system that was 3545% based on sales (of any kind), 30-40% based on airplay, and 20-30% based on streaming.14 But that report leaves 30% of "play" between the percentages and it isn't clear what criteria Billboard might use in their final reckoning.
Whatever guides Billboard's decisions about how high or low something is placed on their lists, it's essential to note that the various lists are entirely business driven. The charts track
14Gary Trust: "Ask Billboard How Does the Hot 100 work?" 09/29/2013, https://www.billboard.com/pro/askbillboard-how-does-the-hot-100-work/
how people buy music, either through actually purchasing physical CD's or vinyl albums, listening to music on various membership streaming platforms, or "purchasing" it with their time, which is what we do when we listen to music on the radio or various "free" on-line platforms or hear it at a club If we go back to our original point that the primary characteristic of "pop" music is that it's popular, Billboard is THE metric of popular music. There is a marker of excellence in popular music, and that marker is charted by Billboard. The higher the music charts, but better the piece, better because it’s more popular.
That's a very important point and there's much more to discuss here (for one thing, you might think it too cynical, it’s not). We'll circle back to it and Billboard but before we do we have to look at that other very important list, the Grammy Awards.
Unlike Billboard's charts, which are published weekly, the Grammy Awards are given yearly by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (usually abbreviated as "The Recording Academy"). Like so many things in Hollywood, the Recording Academy had its origins in a publicity stunt mixed with envy. Wanting to promote Hollywood tourism and driveup sagging property values along Hollywood Boulevard, in 1953 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce hatched the idea of a "walk of fame." The walk would promote "the glory of a community whose name means glamour and excitement in the four corners of the world," a glory
15 Grammys Blackstone received in 2006 for William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and Experience Photo courtesy of Jerry Blackstone
Example V.11
Conductor Jerry Blackstone with Grammy Awards, 200615
that by the mid 1950's had grown a bit seedy.16 After imposing an additional one and a quarter million-dollar tax assessment on Hollywood property owners to pay for it (which is close to fifteen-million 2024 dollars), the walk received its first permanent "star" in 1960. The Chamber of Commerce put together a committee of entertainment moguls to select who would be honored by a star. But when the committee's musicians discovered that the agreed upon criteria for inclusion would exclude many in their business they decided to create their own prize.17 Together they formed the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Modeling their award on the Oscars, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had first awarded in 1927, and the Emmy, first awarded in 1949 by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the National Academy invented the "Grammy." If the movie and TV folks were going to have their big awards, music people were going to have theirs too. The first Grammy was awarded in 1959. Recognizing the commercial importance of Spanish-language music, the Academy spunoff separate Grammy Awards for Spanish and Portuguese music in 1989 and in 1997 established the Latin Recording Academy. The Latin Grammy Awards are given for projects in Spanish or Portuguese and is an event and process separate from the Grammy Awards (although there remains a "Latin" category in the older awards).
Grammys are given in “categories” arranged under “fields.” Both the number of categories and fields change, reflecting changes in the market and even politics. In 1958, twenty-eight awards were given. In 2024 the Academy awarded ninety-four Grammys in twentyseven fields but for the 2025 ballot the number of fields was slashed to eleven [Ex.5.12].18 Fundamentally, the changes reflect the market. Rap was first included 1989 (it's estimated that hip-hop has controlled about 28% of all music consumption in the United States since 2020)19 Polka was included as a category in 1986. It was dropped in 2009. The reason given was that the elimination was required to keep the Grammys "relevant and responsive . . . within a dynamic music community."20 Because practitioners of Hawaiian music felt themselves slighted by the lack of awards given to their music, a Grammy Award for "Best Hawaiian Music" was introduced in 2005. It was retired in 2011. The "Best Regional Roots Music Album" category was invented in 2012 as a catch-all for polka, Hawaiian, Native American, Zydeco, Cajun, and
16 https://walkoffame.com/history/
17 The committee included five highly accomplished musicians and music executives: Dennis Farnon (1923-2019), head of RCA's West Coast A&R department; Paul Weston (1912-1996), West Coast Music Director of Columbia Records (and composer of "Day by Day"); Sony Burke (1914-1980), a composer, conductor and arranger with Decca Records; Lloyd Dunn (1907-1991), vice president of merchandising and sales at Capitol Records, and Jessy Kaye, producer and engineer for MGM. Paul Grein: "Dennis Farnon, Last Survivor of the Recording Academy's Five Founders, Dies at 95". Billboard, 06/21/2019; https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/dennis-farnonrecording-academy-founder-dead-95-8517056/
18 Paul Grein, “Here Are the 11 Fields on 2024 Grammy Ballot & Categories They Contain: Complete List, Billboard, 06/16/2023. https://www.billboard.com/lists/2024-grammy-ballot-fields-categories-complete-list/rockmetal-alternative-music-field-6-categories/
19 Jordan Rose, "Don't Call It a Comeback: Rap is Rebounding in 2024", COMPLEX, April 17, 2024, https://www.complex.com/music/a/j-rose/rap-music-decline-popular-again-2024
20 Ben Sisario, Polka Music is Eliminated from as Grammy Award Category," New York Times, May 10, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/arts/music/05polk.html
General Field
Record of the Year
Album of the Year
Song of the Year
Best New Artist
Producer of the Year, Non-classical*
Songwriter of the Year, Non-classical*
Pop & Dance/Electronic Music Field
1. Best pop solo performance
2. Best pop duo/group performance
3. best pop vocal album
4. Best dance/electronic recording
5. Best pop/dance recording
6. Best dance/electronic music album
Rock, Metal & Alternative Music Field
1. Best rock performance
2. Best metal performance
3. Best rock songs
4. Best rock album
5. best alternative music performance
6. best alternative music album
R&B, Rap & Spoken Word Poetry Field
1. Best R&B performance
2. Best traditional R&B performance
3. Best R&B song
4. Best progressive R&B album
5. Best R&B album
6. Best rap performance
7. Best melodic rap performance
8. Best rap song
9. Best rap album
10. Best spoken word poetry album
Jazz, Traditional Pop, Contemporary Instrumental & Musical Theater Field
1. Best jazz performance
2. Best jazz vocal album
3. Best jass instrumental album
4. Best large jazz ensemble album
5. Best Latin jazz album
6. Best alternative jazz album
7. Best traditional pop vocal album
8. Best contemporary instrumental album
9. Best musical theater album
Country & American Roots Music Field
1. Best country solo performance
2. Best country duo/group performance
3. Best country song
4. Best country album
5. Best American roots performance
6. Best Americana performance
7. Best American roots song
8. Best Americana album
9. Best bluegrass album
10. Best traditional blues album
11. Best contemporary blues album
12. Best folk album
13. Best regional roots music album
Gospel & Contemporary Christian Music Field
1. Best gospel performance/song
2. Best contemporary Christian music performance/song
3. Best gospel album
4. Best contemporary Christian music album
5. Best roots gospel album
Latin, Global, African, Reggae & New Age, Ambient, Or Chant Field
1. Best Latin pop album
2. Best música urbana album
3. Best Latin rock album
4. Best música Mexicana album (including Tejano)
5. Best Tropical Latin album
6. Best gospel music performance
7. Best African music performance
8. Best global music album
9. Best reggae album
10. Best new age, ambient, or chant album
Children’s, Comedy, Audio Book Narration and Storytelling, Visual Media & Music Video/Film Field
1. Best children’s music album
2. Best comedy album
3. Best audio book, narration and storytelling recording
Example V.12
4. Best compilation soundtrack for visual media
5. Best score soundtrack for visual media (included Film and television)
6. Best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media
7. Best song written for visual media
8. Best music video*
9, Best music film*
Package, Notes & Historical Field
1. Best recording package
2. Best boxed/special limited edition package
3. Best album notes
4. Best historical album
Production, Engineering, Composition & Arrangement Field
1. Best engineered album, nonclassical
2. Best engineered album, classical*
3. Producer of the year, classical*
4. Best remixed recording
5. Best immersive audio album
6. Best instrumental composition*
7. Best arrangement, instrumental or a capella*
8. Best arrangement, instruments and vocals*
Classical Field
1. Best orchestral performance
2. Best opera recording
3. Best choral recording
4. Best chamber music/small ensemble performance
5. Best classical instrumental solo
6. Best classical solo vocal album
7. Best classical compendium
8. Best contemporary classical composition*
Special Merit Awards*
MusiCares Person of the Year
Lifetime Achievement Awards
Dr. Dre Global Impact Award
Best Song for Social Change
Music Educator Award
Grammy Award Fields (in bold) and Categories, 2025
Go-go music (no, Go-go isn't the music associated with the topless, and occasionally bottomless, dancers that scandalized the late 1960's but is instead a subgenre of funk that became, by law, the official music of Washington, D.C. in 202121). It would be politically unthinkable to drop any of these kinds of music because of the potential charge of racism, but none of them command the commercial status to merit their own category, hence the catch-all field.
I've said that the categories are "market driven" and I'd like to explain that a bit more clearly. First, in order for something to be considered for a Grammy it must be recorded and commercially available through what the Academy calls "general distribution:" "available nationwide via brick-and-mortar stores, third-party online retailers and/or streaming services. ‘Streaming services’ is defined as paid subscription, full catalog, on-demand streaming/limited download services. . . "22 The recording has to be something that can be sold as part of the American capitalist/corporate system. A CD that you're recorded and sold at a booth at the local Renaissance fair or farmers' market, no matter how wonderful it is, won't be considered; it's not part of the profit-driven corporate culture. As we shall see, this isn't a trivial matter.
Second, the categories are recognizable by consumers. Here is the Academy’s requirement for a recording submitted in the “Best African Music Performance” category:
Eligible recordings include vocal and instrumental performances with strong elements of African cultural significance that blend a stylistic intention, song structure, lyrical content and /or musical representation found in Africa and the African Diaspora. Meaning; The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas.23
Morocco, Egypt, and South Africa are all African countries with “native Africans” and with African “diasporas.” Although the Academy’s requirements would allow submissions here of Amazigh music (Berber music of Morocco), Coptic music (Christian music of Egypt) and even Boer hymns (White South Africans of Dutch descent), I suspect the Academy would disallow the placement of such pieces here What this category is really intended for is music of Black Africans because consumers, when looking for “African music” are looking for the music of Black Africa. Someone looking for music of the “African diaspora” would be perplexed to see on the list a mass sung by the folks of St. Karas Coptic Church down the street from me.
A similar example is the Academy's "Contemporary Christian" category. It would be reasonable to think that contemporary Christian music would be music of today in which Christianity was fundamentally important. The British composer James MacMillan (b. 1959) and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) would fit that bill nicely since both are internationally known composers and their music is deeply informed by their Christian beliefs (Roman Catholic in the case of MacMillan and Orthodox in the case of Pärt). But their works would never appear in any of the Grammy's "Christian" categories because consumers looking to listen to "Christian Contemporary Music" (CCM) are looking for rock, pop, rap/hip-hop, or possibly Latin music with generally Christian lyrics, the kind of music they'd hear broadcast on Christian radio stations and performed as "worship songs" by "praise bands" in evangelical churches. A new
21 Marissa J Lang, "Go-go is signed into law as the official music of D.C.", The Washington Post, February 4, 2021.
22 67Th Grammy Awards Rules & Guidelines, p. 9
https://naras.a.bigcontent.io/v1/static/67_Rulebook_06.13.2024_FINAL%20(1)
23 P 10 https://grammysubmit.dmds.com/Content/documents/naras/en/CatDescGuide.pdf
recording of Pärt's Credo in a Christian Contemporary Grammy category would deeply confuse them.
In summary, for a recording to be considered for a Grammy it must be literally part of the market; it has to be something that's sold within American corporate culture. It also has to fit-in, or be placed in, a market defined niche.
Remembering this, we’re now in a position to look at the process that can result in a Grammy Award.24
There are three levels of membership in the National Academy: 1) Voting members, who are performers, songwriters, producers, engineers, and other creators currently working in the recording industry. Voting members alone determine the Grammy winners; 2) Professional members, who are people involved full-time in music business: publishers, promoters, agents, writers, executives of labels, etc.; and 3) "Grammy U" members who are people involved with music in its creating, performance and marketing side at the beginning of their careers. Membership at all the levels is through application and nomination. I am privileged to be a voting member of the Academy; there are about 12,000 of us.
Every year, voting and professional members have the opportunity of submitting recordings to the Academy for consideration as potential nominees in specific categories. Media companies that are registered with the Academy may also submit projects for consideration. This process garners thousands of recordings which Academy staff screens for their eligibility and placement in the proper category. While some of the categories are clear (such as the classical: opera category) others are possibly more ambiguous and the Academy employs committees of musicians who are deeply experienced in the various fields to make final determinations about appropriate category placement.25 At this stage no artistic or technical judgments are made about the recordings.
24 https://www.recordingacademy.com/awards/voting-process
25 This is an example of a possible ambiguity. Here are the qualifications for entry in the “Best Alternative Jazz Album” and “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album” categories: Best Alternative Jazz Album
Screening Criteria. This Category recognizes artistic excellence in Alternative Jazz albums by individuals, duos, groups/ensembles (large or small), with or without vocals. Alternative Jazz may be defined as a genre-blending, envelope-pushing hybrid that mixes jazz (improvisation, interaction, harmony, rhythm, arrangement, composition, and style) with other genres, including R&B, Hip-Hop, Classical, Contemporary Improvisation, Experimental, Pop, Rap, Electronic/Dance music, and/or Spoken Word. It may also include the contemporary production techniques/instrumentation associated with other genres (Instrumental albums in the well-established Smooth Jazz style will remain in the Contemporary Instrumental Category).
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
Screening Criteria: This Category recognizes excellence on albums of large jazz ensemble performance , primarily recording with a “big band sound.” Other large ensemble or orchestral jazz recording where a number of musicians come together, most commonly to play arrangement featuring the orchestrational possibilities of a large ensemble of musicians are eligible. In some instances, arrangements may be less structured (so-called “head arrangements”) that nonetheless demonstrate the orchestration possibilities of a large ensemble setting. Generally, these ensembles must contain none or more members to be eligible in this Category (excluding the conductor or bandleader). The ensembles may be billed as ensembles or under the name of a solo artist who is the featured band or orchestra leader. Recording that use synthesizer to imitate the sound of a large jazz ensemble are not eligible in the Category. Large jazz vocal ensemble albums must be entered in Best Jazz Vocal Album.
After submissions have been screened, voting members of the Academy are sent ballots. Some categories may have hundreds of entries, some a few dozen, which makes some areas much more competitive than others (for instance in 2024 there were 978 entries for “Song of the Year” and 32 for “Best Opera”). Although the specific procedures have changed over the years, usually, after casting votes in the General Field, voters are able to cast votes in ten categories spread across three Fields. The Academy relies on an honor system, asking voters only to cast ballots in areas where they have day-to-day professional expertise and to vote only on the basis of the projects’ merits.
These votes are tabulated and, with the addition of projects determined by the committees judging the seventeen “Craft” categories,26 the top vote-getters in each category become official Grammy Award Nominees. Depending on the category there may be as many as eight or as few
Example V.13
“For Your Consideration” campaign for Just 627
as three nominees. Like being an Academy Award Nominee, being a Grammy Nominee is a big deal. It can catapult a career from relative obscurity to potential stardom. If the nominee isn’t an
The question is how much artistic innovation in something entered in “Best Large Jazz Ensemble” propels it into “Alternative Jazz.”? It isn’t immediately clear and judgments regarding things like this are left to the committee and will always be somewhat subjective. 67th Grammy Awards, Rules & Guidelines, The Recording Academy, 2024.
26 Shown by asterisk (*) on Example V.12
27 https://fyc.agency/
American citizen, it even gives the nominee a new legal status: he or she is now, legally, a person of “extraordinary ability” and eligible for a O-1 Visa.
As we will soon see, there’s potentially a lot of money now a stake, and the lobbying for a Grammy can be intense. Technically, the Academy strictly forbids voters being directly solicited for their votes but nominees, or their representatives, can engage in “For Your Consideration” (FYC) campaigns where voters are made aware of the nominee’s project [Ex.V13].28 All voting members are mailed a special Billboard Grammy Award magazine, an extraordinarily luxurious edition with ads placed by various agents, publishers, and labels on behalf of clients. In certain locations in Los Angeles and Nashville, there are even billboards with FYC notices and FYC meet-and-greet soirees.
Voting members are sent their second ballots sometime in the late fall (the rules are the same as for the first). We vote, and the results are announced several months later.
Like the Oscars, the winners are announced in front of a ticketed audience but unlike the Oscars there are two ceremonies, distinguished, to put it bluntly, by the commercial value of the nominated projects. There is a first ceremony, usually in the afternoon, where the winners in the areas of children’s music, audio book, best package, best notes, best historic, etc. are announced. Then that night there’s a second ceremony, broadcast live on a major television network, with stars walking the red carpet, celebrity hosts, and performances by major stars. It’s at this ceremony that the winners of the song of the year, best new artist, album of the year – the potential big money makers – are announced.
That commercial value can be significant. And we’re back to those Billboard charts. In February 2011, Columbia Records released 21, the British singer Adele Adkin’s (b.1988), known as Adele, second studio album; it was released a month earlier in Europe by XL Recordings.29 The project won the 2012 Grammy Award for “Album of the Year” and the Brit Award “British Album of the Year” (the “Brit Awards, ” given by the British Phonographic Industry, are the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the Grammys). Adel was already an internationally known singer. At the 51st Grammy Awards in 2009, she had been named “Best New Artist” and the song “Chasing Pavements” won a Grammy for “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance” (the song also received nominations in the categories “Song of the Year” and “Best Female Pop Vocal Performance”). 21 had been heavily promoted in the months before the Grammy balloting. The previous October, before its release, Universal took the singer to Minneapolis to perform before executives of Target Corporation; Target agreed to sell a two-CD version of 21 (enhanced by additional tracks) and later that month Adele performed in Los Angeles for an invitation-only audience of “tastemakers” at the Largo nightclub. After the release of 21, Adele appeared on the
28 Even here the Academy has rules for what’s allowed. These FYC presentations may not: 1) Cast a negative or derogatory light on a competing recording. Any tactic that singles out the ‘competition’ by name or title is not allowed 2) Exaggerate or overstate the merits of the music, an achievement or an individual 3) Include any Recording Academy trademarks, logos or any other protected information. Logo use is reserved for paid Recording Academy sponsors or partners 4) Include entry list numbers or category numbers 5) Include chart numbers, number of streams, sales figures, or RIAA awards 6) Include personal signatures, personal regards or personal pleas to listen to the eligible recordings 7) Misrepresent honors or awards, past or present, received by either the recording or those involved with production 8) Reference the year or the telecast number (i.e., 2023 or 66th Grammy Awards)
29 The track “Rolling in the Deep” was released early on November 19, 2010, as a single lead.
“Today Show” (February 18), “The Late Show with David Letterman” (February 21), “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (both on February 24), and “CBS’ The Early Show (February 28). Additionally, one of the album’s cuts, “Rolling in the Deep” figured in a scene of the science fiction movie I Am Number Four, released in theaters on February 18. In March and April, Adele toured Europe performing tracks from the recording, followed by appearances in the Unites States in May and June.30
“Rolling in the Deep” hit the number one spot on Billboards Hot 100 chart the week of May 21, 2011, having already been tracking since January 24 (it stayed as number one for twenty-four weeks). The album’s other cuts also all tracked on the Hot 100 chart (“Someone Like You” and “Set Fire to Rain” both from March 12, “Turning Tables” from May 7, and “Rumor Has It” from August 13). By the time Academy voters had cast their ballots in the early fall, 21 was already a well established hit.
What is astonishing is that after 21 received its Grammy Award, sales for the album exploded 207%. This “Grammy bump” isn’t unique to Adele. When Taylor Swifts’ (b.1989) Folklore won “Album of the Year” at the 63rd Grammys in March, 2021, it was greeted both by a 53% increase in earnings in the week of the award broadcast and the week following and a 12% increase in revenue for her entire catalogue. Grammy nominees or winners or even musicians who perform as part of the televised Grammy ceremony, see surges in earnings ranging from 4% to 400% after the broadcast. And apart from the increase in immediate sales, a Grammy award puts the award-winning musician in a much stronger position to negotiate more favorable contracts with recording labels. Harvey Mason Jr, chief executive officer of the Recording Academy, summed it up:
The attention and excitement around a Grammy win always translates to people more curious, especially if it’s a newer artist. It impacts your ability to attract attention thereby getting you better deals, better contracts. . . hopefully more people are excited to see you and want to listen to what you’ve done.31
“See you” and “want to listen to what you’ve done” means “buy your stuff” (and Mr. Mason leaves something out that’s very important and we’ll return to that). There is a symbiotic relationship between the Grammy Awards and the Billboard charts. Although the charts show recordings’ relative levels of market success and we vote on Grammys based on our views of artistic and technical excellence of marketed projects, appearance on a Billboard chart gives a project a prominence that helps propel it to Grammy voters’ “radar screens” so that it receives consideration and a Grammy award (or even a nomination) drives up a project’s sales.
And the SALES. The world was stunned when something that had been rumored for months was finally confirmed in June, 2024: after a bidding war between several major corporations, Sony Music was buying the entire music catalogue of the music ensemble Queen for one billion, twenty-seven million dollars. From now on, every time a stadium trembles with
30 Mikael Wood, “Adele: The Billboard Cover Story”, Billboard, January 28, 2011; https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/adele-the-billboard-cover-story-4733347/
31 Starr Bowenbank, “Billboard Explains: What a Grammy Award Win Means,” Billboard, March 31, 2022.
“We will, we will rock you” royalties flow into Sony Music. 32
The Queen sale is only the most spectacular sale of a number of purchases that have testified to the value of pop music. It’s worth money. A lot of money. Example V.14 is a list of only some of the most prominent sales since 2006. The confirmed sales are all in the millions of dollars and the rumored and undisclosed sales are assumed to be similar figures (rumored figures are shown by **) All in all, the total of just this partial list is about five billion dollars.
Musician
Queen Sony Music Group June ’24 full catalogue. $1.27 billion 0/4
Rod Stewart Iconic Artists Group Feb '24. song catalogue $100 million** 1/15
Michael Jackson Sony Music Group Feb '24. Half publishing & $600 million 13/38 recorded masters
Enrique Influence Media Dec '23 Name, image $100+ million ** 1/4 Iglesias BlackRock/Warner likeness, partnership.
Christine McVie Harbor View Oct '23
Share of Fleetwood undisclosed. 2/7 (estate) Mac record royalties
Master recording & Katy Perry Litmus Music Sept '23 publishing rights of $225 million** 0/13 five albums
Paul Simon BMG June '23 Simon & Garfunkel undisclosed 16/36 Royalties
Justin Bieber Hipgnosis/Blackstone Jan '23 100% of music, $200 million 2/23 publishing & performing assets
Dr. Dre Universal Music Group Jan '23 artist & writer $200 million 7/26 & Shamrock Holdings royalties
Keith Urban Litmus Music Dec '22 100% recorded undisclosed. 4/19 catalogue
David Bowie Warner Chappell Music Jan '22 100% music $250 million 5/19 catalogue.
Huey Lewis Primary Wave Nov '22 100% $20 million 1/6 and the News
Justin Hipgnosis/ May '22 100% $100+ million** 10/39 Timberlake Blackstone writer's & publishers share of catalogue & publisher's share of performance income
Joey Ramone. Primary Wave Oct '22 Publishing Rights $10 million. 1/1
32 Jem Aswad, “Queen Catalog to be acquired by Sony Music for £1 Billion”, Variety, June 19, 2024. https://variety.com/2024/music/news/queen-catalog-acquired-by-sony-music-1-billion-1236042619/
Musician Purchaser
Phill Collins/ Concord Music Group Sept '22
100% publishing $300 million 8/27 Genesis rights
Gordon Sumner. Universal Music Feb ’22
100% song writing & $300 million 17/45 (Sting) Publishing Group Performing rights
Jason Aldean Spirit Music Group Feb '22
90% of recording $100 million. 0/5 catalogue.
Tina Turner BMG Sept ’21 Singer’s share of $50 million** 8/25 recordings, publishing, name, image, likeness
Bob Dylan Sony Music July '21 all recorded music $150-200 million** 10/38 Entertainment since 1962
Paul Simon Sony Music Entertainment April '21 song catalogue $250 million** 16/36
Bruce Sony Music Entertainment Dec '21
100% of recordings $525 million** 20/51 Springsteen. and songs
ZZ Top BGM/KKR Dec '21
100% of catalogue $50 million 0/3 & all recorded & published royalties
Bob Dylan Universal Music Dec '20 song-writing catalogue $400 million** 10/38 Publishing Group (lyrics & compositions)
Stevie Primary Wave Dec '20 80% interest in songs $100 million 2/15 Nicks Music & brand representation
Taylor Swift Shamrock Capital Nov ‘20
100% rights to Swift’s $300 million** 14/52 first six albums
Smokey Primary Wave Music Sept '16 partial catalogue, $22 million 0/1 Robinson all name & likeness
Maurice White Primary Wave May, ’07 partial interest in $30 million** 7/22 (Earth, Wind Music song catalogue & Fire)
Courtney Love. Primary Wave Oct, ’06 25% of Kurt Cobain’s $50 million 1/7 (widow of Kurt Music song catalogue Cobain)
Example V.14
Examples of prominent music purchases *number of Grammy awards/number of Grammy nominations
Who are these buyers? Sony and Universal are well known, others are not. Shamrock Capital Advisors is a private corporation, founded by Walt Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney (1930-2009) and wholly owned by the Disney family with an estimated two billion dollars of assets. Hipgnosis Songs Fund was purchased by The Blackstone Group in July, 2024 for 1.6 billion dollars. The Blackstone Group (not to be confused with BlackRock, Inc.) is a New York City based private equity business with an estimated one trillion dollars in managed assets In October, 2021, the firm announced its intention to invest one billion dollars to acquire music
rights and song catalogues (Blackstone also owns the music rights organization SEAC and the MNRK Music Group) 33
BlackRock, Inc. is a multinational investment company based in New York City and managing assets of ten trillion dollars. It’s one of the most famous, and in some eyes notorious, companies in the world today. Founded in 2006, Primary Wave is a privately held company with Germany’s Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Canada’s Brookfield Corporation holding significant interests. In 2016 BlackRock invested three hundred million dollars in the company. Thirteen years later, BlackRock launched Influence Media Partners with an investment of seven-hundred and fifty million dollars, bringing the firm’s commitment to purchasing music right up to one-billion and thirty million dollars. Influence Media Partners is dedicated to purchasing and promoting the “award-winning catalogues of some of music’s most influential female music creators.”34
Iconic Artist Group was founded in 2018 by an initial one billion dollar investment by HPS, Highbridge Principal Strategies, a private company based in New York City with estimated assets of about one hundred and six billion dollars.35 Based in Newark, New Jersey, HarborView was launched in 2021 with a billion dollar financial package from Apollo Global Management, a New York City based asset management firm with approximately five hundred billion dollars under management. In early 2004, HarborView used its portfolio to raise another five hundred million dollars through asset-backed securities.36
In August, 2022, Carlyle Global Credit, part of the Carlyle Group Inc, a private equity, asset management and financial services company with about four hundred twenty-six billion dollars of managed assets, backed Dan McCarroll, who had served as president of both Warner Bros and Capitol Records, and Hank Forsyth, who was executive vice president at Warner Chappell Music with a five-hundred-million dollar to buy catalogues under the corporation invest Litmus Music.37
In May, 2024, publicly traded Reservoir Media Management announced that it had already spent $938 million on acquisitions since its inception in 2007 and looked to raise another $100 million for further purchases.38 Founder Golnar Khosrowshahi (b.1971), a member of an extraordinary Iranian family whose significant wealth was confiscated by the Islamic revolution and eventually had to flee the country for Canada (her father, Hassan Khosrowshai, eventually founded a chain of electronics stores, later expanded into pharmaceuticals and real estate development and served on the board of the Bank of Canada; her brother Behzad is the chief executive officer of DRI Capital an investment firm that purchases royalty streams paid by
33 https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/blackstone-outbids-concord-16-bln-takeover-battle-hipgnosis-2024-04-29/
34 https://www.billboard.com/pro/litmus-music-500-million-music-rights/
35 https://musically.com/2024/02/16/iconic-artists-group-raises-1bn-and-buys-rod-stewart-catalogue/
36 https://www.billboard.com/business/business-news/harbourview-equity-partners-raises-500-million-debtfinancing-1235631775/
37 https://www.carlyle.com/media-room/news-release-archive/music-industry-veterans-hank-forsyth-and-danmccarroll-partner-with-carlyle-global-credit-to-launch-litmus-music
38 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/reservoir-media-plans-100m-offering-to-fund-acquisitions-debtrepayment/
pharmaceutical companies to patent holders;39 and her cousin Dara is chief executive officer of UBER and served on the board of directors of The New York Times), has set Reservoir apart by its goal to not only hold the properties of Western musicians but also to become world’s largest holder of Arabic music copyright. Khosrowshahi told investors: “Expanding our portfolio in… important emerging markets, but especially within the Middle East, is highly important to our overall strategy and a key differentiator for us”40 To that end, Reservoir formed a joint venture with Abu Dhabi headquartered PopArabia in 2020 and purchased the catalogue of Egyptian rap duo El Sawareekh and all past and future recordings of Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajran.41
A hundred million here, a trillion there, it’s a lot of money. What this means is that the world’s most sophisticated money managers believe that the long-term earning potential of owning this music justifies the princely prices required to buy it. And you can see their point. A song with a pre-existing fan base doesn’t require a field to be plowed or a crop harvested or a mine dug or factory workers paid to make it or truckers hired to haul it before it can make money. Of course there are expenses. The various platforms have costs and there are always accountants and lawyers but compared with the overhead of running something like a paper factory or a copper mine or even a bakery, the expenses are minimal. It simply sits on a streaming platform and brings in money as people listen to it.
Example V.15
Reservoir Media stock performance, June 25, 2024
But are those prices justified? The sale of Bob Dylan’s material is instructive. In 2022, Billboard estimated the world-wide sales of Dylan’s recordings to be $16 million a year and
39 It’s ironic that the business model of DRI mirrors the business model of Reservoir; both seek to purchase the income generated by creators; DRI the income generated by inventors holding patents and Reservoir the income generated by musicians holding copyrights.
40 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/reservoir-and-poparabia-expand-presence-in-mena-with-two-newacquisitions-in-egypt/
41 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/reservoir-and-poparabia-strike-catalog-deal-with-queen-of-arab-popnancy-ajram/
believed that a benchmark being used to value catalogues was about 15 to 20 times annual revenue. Taking sixteen million and multiplying by twenty (the upper limit) we get $320 million. Apparently, Sony and Universal were willing to pay a premium for Dylan’s materials since their combined possible $600 million price tag almost doubles that valuation.42 Will the investments prove wise? Will the repertory prove popular (meaning profitable) over a long time, thirty to sixty years or longer? Of course I can’t tell, but the five-year stock performance of Reservoir shows the stock down almost 30%.43 [Ex.V.15] Sometimes the smartest investors in the world make mistakes; the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers comes to mind.
Example V.16
Secretary of State John Blinken performs in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms as part of the ceremony announcing the PEACE through Music Diplomacy Act September 27, 2023
I began this segment by saying that pop music was the most significant kind of music today. If we can define “significant” as the most frequently performed, listened to, promoted and invested in, I think you can agree that’s right. And we can even go further and say, as the driving wedge in the American entertainment behemoth (or even Levithan), pop music is America’s most significant contribution to world culture. It’s even an official instrument of America’s foreign policy. The 2022 “PEACE through Music Diplomacy Act” authorizes the State Department to partner with the private sector to create programs and events that build “cross-
42 Hannah Karp & Robert Levine, “Sony Music Bought Bob Dylan’s Master Recordings, Now Worth More Than 200 Million”, Billboard, January 24, 2022 https://www.billboard.com/pro/sony-music-bob-dylans-masterrecordings-200-million/
43 https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RSVR/; June 25, 2024
cultural understanding and advance peace abroad.”
44 45 The primary, private sector partners have been the Recording Academy and YouTube. At a September 27, 2023 ceremony at the Department of State, Harvey Mason Jr, chief executive office of the Recording Academy, and Lyor Cohen, global head of music for YouTube and Google, were joined by Secretary of State John Blinken in announcing several cooperative programs one of which will bring foreign midcareer music industry professionals to the US for mentorship with the Recording Academy and another which will help teach English across the world by bringing American songs into classrooms. [Ex. 5.16] Whether or not any of this helps bring world peace remains to be seen as we remember from Chapters Three and Four, music hasn’t had a particularly impressive record in bringing social harmony but the programs will certainly help foreign musicians network with the American corporations who would like to own their music and potentially create international populations of children whose taste will be wedded and the values of Grammy winners and the Hot 200.46
Remember, the Recording Academy isn’t committed to all music, but only to recorded music that can be sold. Its purpose in cooperating with the State Department isn’t altruistic, it’s in furthering corporate interests (and those interests are even obliquely acknowledged in the legislation for the act). And the interests of the State Department aren’t broadly humane but in specifically furthering American interests; we Americans tend to take it as self-evident that our interests are always humane but we have to acknowledge that there are people in the world who would disagree.
BUT and I think you’ve been holding that “but” for a while through these pages and with growing annoyance isn’t “pop” music popular just because people love it? Isn’t that enough? And isn’t all that rather ham-fisted economic analysis we gone through unnecessary? And isn’t it too cynical? As we’re going to see in a minute, there is a kind of music that people deeply love but isn’t pop and needs to be distinguished from it. And that economic analysis is
44 State Department website: https://www.state.gov/music-diplomacy/
45Here are the justifications for the act. “It is the sense of Congress that (1) music is an important conveyer of culture and can be used to communicate values and build understanding between communities; (2) music artists play a valuable role in cross-cultural exchange, and their works and performances can promote peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts; (3) the music industry in the United States has made important contributions to American society and culture, and musicians and industry professionals in the United States can offer valuable expertise to young music artists around the world; and (4) the United States Government should promote exchange programs, especially programs that leverage the expertise and resources of the private sector, that give young music artists from around the world the chance to improve their skills, share ideas, learn about American culture, and develop the necessary skills to support conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts in their communities and broader societies.” H.R.6498 PEACE through Music Diplomacy Act; https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6498
46 Impetus for the act was given by a 2022 opinion piece published in The Hill by Tara D. Sonenshine Sonenshine, an academic with former experience in The State Department, served on the board of “Silkroad,” the arts organization founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma Golnar Khosrowshahi, founder of Reservoir Media Management, is also a member of “Silkroad.” Remember, one of the purposes of Reservoir is to expand its properties outside of the US. Tara D Sonenshine, “American could use a little jazz diplomacy”, The Hill, August 6, 2022; https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3590272-america-could-use-a-little-jazz-diplomacy/
required if we’re to understand our culture. Let me finish with two examples: one rather private and the other very public.
In the early days of streaming, unless your works were already part of a major label, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get your music streamed on iTunes. Looking for a way to help new and unknown musicians, my brother and I took some of our inheritance and founded a company to try to make that possible. We hired a project manager and a couple of developers, some attorneys, and launched musiquedart, LLC. We were successful in becoming a “aggregator,” partnering with iTunes in placing some new musicians’ music on the platform. Nashville being Nashville, the company received a lot of attention and investors presented themselves. Eventually the company was restructured and renamed and, as its focus shifted, my brother and I sold our interest. After having received the attention of people in the music business across the country and even a laudatory piece about the company in The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately the firm went bankrupt in 2017.47 For a few months, before we sold our interests, I was a member of the board and sat across tables from some of the most influential people in American music: investors, managers, accountants, attorneys, entrepreneurs (although musiquedart focused on classical music and I know we haven’t defined that yet but we will all of the investors in the re-structured company came from the world of pop music). These were decent and highly respected people, but their goal was clear: they liked music OK or some of it but their interest was financial. The music and the musicians were means to an end and that end was the maximum profit of the investors. It was a profoundly important learning experience for me because it disabused me from any notion that something other than profit drove American music. James Carville (b. 1944) was a well-known advisor to Bill Clinton During the 1992 Clinton vs. Bush presidential campaign, Carville, with some ire at having to point out what should have been obvious to everyone, summarized the issues at stake with what has become one of the most famous quips in American political history: “it’s the economy, stupid!” I learned my lesson the hard way: “it’s the money, stupid.”
That’s the first example. Here’s the second.
The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum sits in downtown Nashville, kitty-corner from the Schermerhorn Symphony Hall, next door to the city’s over two million square feet futuristic convention center, a couple of blocks south of the honky-tonks of Broadway and three blocks from the Ryman Auditorium from where The Grand Ole Opry radio program was broadcast from 1943 to 1974 (when the show moved nine miles east to a larger theater with better parking and less crime). [Ex.V.17] The museum attracts over a million and a half visitors a year from all over the world (the last time I checked-in with a class of students I was behind a group visiting from Australia) and is estimated to contribute ninety-three million dollars to the Nashville economy.48 Its 1967 charter says that its purpose is to “to collect, preserve, and
47 Nate Rau, “Dart Music, one of Nashville’s most promising music technology companies in recent years, files for bankruptcy protection on Monday”, USA TODAY NEWORK, February 28, 2017 https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2017/02/28/prominent-nashville-music-startup-dart-filesbankruptcy/98521732/
48 Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumAnnual Report, 2020, p. 25; https://issuu.com/countrymusichalloffame/docs/2022_annual_report_2023
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Nashville, main front
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Entrance to 3rd floor exhibition, public exhibits to the left, closed archives to the right
Example V.17
Example V.18
interpret country music and its history”49 and while that’s true it’s also disingenuous. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is not devoted to country music but to the business of country music. It’s not too far off the mark to say that it’s an informercial wrapped around an archive costumed as a museum.
After buying our ticket for $29.95 (which is about six dollars more expensive than a ticket to the Louvre and eight dollars higher than a ticket to the Vatican Museums), we take an elevator to the museum’s third exhibition floor [Ex.V18] Most museums allow visitors to wander the collections at will. Not here. Our visit is a scripted narrative carefully managed through the architecture. After passing by cases highlighting Southern 19th-century rural American music and then moving into the early 20th Century, seeing Elvis Presley’s (1947-1977) “gold-plated Cadillac” (it’s not goldplated but a gold trimmed 1960 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine) and the even more impressive fire-arm and silver dollar encrusted 1962 Pontiac that belonged to Webb Pierce (1921-1991), past exhibits of some of the most important musicians’ personal instruments (Maybelle Carter’s Gibson L-5 guitar, Bill Monroe’s Gibson F-5 mandolin, etc.)[Ex.V.19], we’re confronted with what sets these musicians and their music apart from the rest; a display of “gold, “platinum” and “diamond” albums.[Ex.V.20].
49 Country Music Museum and Hall of Fame Annual Report, 2023, https://issuu.com/countrymusichalloffame/docs/dev_2023_annual_report_24_final_digital_1_
Example V.20
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
And in a spectacular piece of architectural stage craft, we exit the darkened exhibition floor through a door that opens to the museum’s expansive sun-lit atrium now literally in the light and we descend to the lower floor by a free-standing staircase that spirals down, giving us multiple views of a full wall of iridescent “gold,” “platinum,” and “diamond” recordings. We thought we’d seen a lot of those plaques just before, but this is overwhelming.[Ex.5.21]
Example V.21
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Spiral staircase descending from 3rd to 2nd floor.
“Gold,” “platinum,” and “diamond” albums are part of an awards program administered by the Recording Industry Association of America (not to be confused with the Recording Academy). Although originally bestowed by individual labels on their best selling projects, today record labels must request that the RIAA make a certification. After an audit, the RIAA awards a certification based on sales: five hundred thousand units = gold album; one million units = platinum album; ten million units = diamond album 50 The wall makes explicit what up to that point has been implied: this museum isn’t celebrating any “country music,” it’s celebrating country music that’s been sold and sold a lot.
50 RIAA lists on its website the status of recordings. https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Various performers’ costumes and paraphernalia
And if we’ve somehow missed the point, after another floor of exhibits of established musicians’ stage costumes, boots, instruments, and various other memorabilia [Ex.V22] and temporary exhibits focusing on newer musicians the museum has chosen to promote, we’re finally brought to the sun-lit Country Music Hall of Fame.
Example V.22
Example V.23
Country Music Hall of Fame, rotunda
In 2024, there were 155 inductees to the Hall of Fame. Plaques honoring each of them are hung on the rotunda’s wall (the portraits of the inductees are unfortunately uniformly hideous) [Ex.V.24]. The performers are major stars with multiple Billboard hits and Grammy awards and nominations; the ensemble “Alabama” (inducted 2005), Gene Autry (inducted 1969), Reba McEntire (inducted 2011), Garth Brooks (inducted 2012), and Elvis Presley (inducted 1998) are typical. But 15% of inductees are non-musicians and will be recognized only by industry insiders: label executives, marketing specialists, publishers, agents, broadcast personalities. The text: “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” (without question mark) is repeated on the rotunda’s cornice.
And that unbroken circle? It’s money. After having been steered through several thousand feet of exhibits, past a gold Cadillac, cases of Grammy Awards and walls celebrating the sale of songs in their hundreds of millions, our visit culminates in this shrine-like rotunda, what the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) would call “a sacred precinct,” a space put apart where the heroes are honored. And who are these heroes and why are they here? They are the musicians who make country music and the people who market it and sell it; together they keep the money stream unbroken by creating fans to buy it. And to remove any ambiguity, the plaque near the front entrance that commemorates who paid for the building clarifies that it’s all an investment: Capitol Records, MGM Records, Mercury Records it’s a list of record companies and publishers, music executives and the State of Tennessee. [Ex.V.25]
It’s deeply ironic. That “WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN” text comes from a 1907 hymn where the singers are asking their listeners to remain faithful to their saving faith in Jesus and not to be seduced by the things of this world, so that their Christian fellowship on earth might be continued and perfected in heaven, the circle of fellowship unbroken.51 Alvin Pleasant,
51 Original lyrics: 1) There are loved ones in the glory / Whose dear forms you often miss. / When you close your earthy story, / Will you join them in their bliss? CHORUS: Will the circle be unbroken / By and by, by and by? / Is a better home awaiting / In the sky, in the sky? 2) In the joyous days of childhood / Oft they told of wondrous love / Pointed to the dying Saviour; / Now they dwell with Him above / CHORUS 3) You remember songs of heaven, / Which you sang with childish voice / Do you love the hymns they taught you / Or are songs of earth your choice? CHORUS 4) You can picture happy gath’rings /. Round the fireside long ago / And you think of tearful partings /
“A.P.” Carter (1891-1960), pater familias of the famous Carter Family, re-worked the verse into a maudlin funeral song (stripping it of much of its Christian content) but keeping its chorus and recorded it in 1935 as “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By).”52 The song has been recorded many times since and the chorus, with either “can” or “will,” has become the unofficial anthem of country music. In the context of its use here in the Hall of Fame rotunda that unbroken circle becomes the continuing commercial success of country music, which is pretty much the opposite of the original hymn’s meaning.
Example V.25
Plaque commemorating founders of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
When they left you here below / CHORUS 5) One by one their seats were emptied / One by one they went away / Now the family is parted / Will it be complete one day? CHORUS. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, text by Ada R Habershon, music by Charles Gabriel, 1907. 52 1) I was standing by my window / On a cold and cloudy day / When I saw the hearse come rolling / For to carry my mother away. CHORUS Will the circle be unbroken / By and by Lord, by and by / There's a better home awaiting / In the sky Lord, in the sky. 2) Well, I went back home, home was lonely / For my mother she was gone / And all my family there was cryin' / For our home felt sad and alone. CHORUS 3) Undertaker, undertaker, undertaker / Won't you please drive slow / For that lady you are haulin' / Lord, I hate to see her go. CHORUS Lyrics by A.P. Carter, 1935
Let’s go back to where we started. “Pop music” is music that’s popular and that popularity is tabulated and monetized. And because it is monetized it is esteemed. The Billboard charts, the Grammys, the halls of fame, the investment firms that buy it (and the investors who buy stock in the investment firms), and the United States government programs that use it as a tool of American foreign policy, all of this is only available to music that’s part of our corporate capitalist system, in other words: monetized. I need to be clear here. This doesn’t mean that the musicians making the music aren’t extraordinarily fine musicians, because many are. And it doesn’t mean that this music can’t be of the highest artistic quality, because some of it is (as we shall soon see). And it doesn’t mean that this music isn’t deeply important to people and can be a powerful tool for emotional self-discovery, because it can be and is for millions of people which is why it speaks to them in the first place and they buy it. But it does mean that in the category of which we’re thinking about here, none of these things are of primary importance. Popularity is the music’s raison d'être. And that popularity is proven by its value in dollars and cents.
There’s more to be said here and it’s very important but we’ll return to it at this chapter’s end. We now need to look at what can be called “folk music.”
II
That’s not a scene from a Grand Ole Opry production, a Grammy Awards broadcast or part of a Hollywood movie. [Ex.V.26] It’s a group of neighbors in the mountains of North Carolina who’ve gotten together in a home to show a visiting New Yorker what they do for fun.
53 David Hoffman, “The Best Bluegrass Clog Dancing Video. How & Why I Made It” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJB_HGdGfic
Example V.26 Dancing in Bascom Lunsford’s parlor, Turkey Creek, North Carolina, 196553
It’s folk music. And folk dancing too, of course. And it’s free. In a home and that “home” is important, we’ll come back to that.
The scene is from a documentary shot by David Hoffman (b.1941) in the home of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973). Although an attorney, Lunsford was best remembered as a folklorist and collector of the music of his native Appalachia, of which he was a proud and indefatigable champion. Hoffman had heard of Lunsford’s work up in New York, wrote him and asked if he could come to North Carolina and film him and some of the music of which he was so proud. Lunsford was delighted, invited Hoffman to his home, called in friends and neighbors, rolled-up the parlor carpet, and Hoffman and one assistant filmed the playing and dancing, some of the neighbors watching and toe-tapping and even a couple of the older folks taking a nap through the ruckus.
And nobody had a ticket. It was free. Folks were doing what came natural, getting together and playing and dancing and enjoying each other’s company. And you don’t charge folks for what y’all do natural. It would be like going to the church picnic, putting your platter of fried chicken on the big table and then expecting folks to pay for the pieces they take. And you don’t have to be told to cook it and bring it along in the first place; it’s just what the community does.
“Just what the community does.” That’s as good a definition of folk music as I can think of. Unlike pop, that requires lawyers to write the contracts and accountants to watch the money, and classical music that we’ll soon see requires philosophers to argue about it and schools to teach it folk music does fine just by itself. Work songs, game songs, religious and protest songs, songs of street sellers, drinking songs and mothers singing lullabies none of this needs academic justification or contracts any more than a church picnic requires a dietitian or an Irish pub sing-along demands an auditing.
But having said that, it doesn’t follow that hasn’t been studied because it has, and by some of our most significant figures The notion of “folk music” (Volkslied) as a particular category was first posited by the extraordinarily influential German pastor and polymath Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). It’s difficult to know where to start with Herder. He was an admired poet (Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Schubert, Richard Strauss and Weber all set his poems), translator, and librettist for oratorios and cantatas. As a philosopher, one historian summarized his importance by saying “Herder virtually established whole disciplines that we now take for granted.”54 He had a profound influence on the work of Georg Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and his interpretation theory was foundational to both modern hermeneutics and anthropology. His ideas concerning the relationship between thought and language have been the basis of the modern philosophy of language. Historians credit the Strasbourg meeting between Herder and Goethe in 1770 as one of the pivotal events in German literature. Although only five years Goethe’s senior, Herder gave the twenty-one year old Goethe a deeper appreciation for folk tales and intensified his appreciation of the epic character of Shakespeare, Homer, and Ossian – perspectives which transformed Goethe’s poetry and world view. Five years later, Goethe was instrumental in
54Forster, Michael, "Johann Gottfried von Herder", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/herder/
convincing Duke Karl August to appoint Herder as General Superintendent of Clergy in the duke’s realms of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (an appointment in Lutheranism similar to a bishop). It was during his time in Weimar that Herder began collecting Volkslied. In 1778 and 1779 he published a collection that he called Volkslieder which, after his death, was republished under the title it is known by today: Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern (“Voices of the Peoples in Their Songs”). This 1807 edition was used as a source by the poets Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) and Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842) in their collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Boy’s Magic Horn”), published in three volumes between 1806 and 1808, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to collect the stories that they published as Kinder und Hausmärchen ( known in English as “Grimm’s Fairytales”), first published 1812 (the seventh, and last definitive edition, was published in 1857). Despite its title, Liedern, “songs”, Herder’s collection had no music, only texts, drawn from German, Lithuanian, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Scottish, Greenlandic, Sicilian, and even some texts from Shakespeare, translated into German if required (Des Knaben Wunderhorn was also a collection of texts only). But almost more important than his collection of texts, was his idea that compelled him to assemble the texts: that the spirit of a culture was to be discovered through its common people, das Volk, and it was in their songs, poetry, and dances that a nation’s basic character was revealed (der Volksgeist).
There were collections of folk music, with music, before Herder’s Stimmen. One of the earliest is Georg Forster’s (c.1510-1568) Frische teutsche Leidlein (1539-1556). Forster was a physician and composer in the circle of Martin Luther (Luther admired his musicianship and encouraged him to compose) and his Leidlein is a monumental collection of 380 primarily secular vocal works that he assembled between 1539-1556. Some of the works are Forster’s, but most are by others and trace the development of song from four to five-part vocal writing to a solo voice accompanied by instruments to a vocal consort with all parts having the text underlaid. It's one of the most important collections of music from the German Renaissance. Its importance for us is in its tenors, some of which scholars have discovered to be tunes of folk songs.
A century later, Thomas d’Urfey (1653-1723) published his Wit and Mirth: Or Pills to Purge Melancholy between 1698 and 1720. Eventually expanded to six volumes (and retitled with the more pedestrian Songs Complete, Pleasant and Divertive; set to MUSICK) the collection contained both texts and tunes “Set to Musick by Dr. John Blow, Mr. Henry Purcell, and other excellent masters of the town.” It’s plausible that at least some of the melodies are traditional. [Ex.V.27] Not as influential as d’Urfey’s collection (only one original copy survives), John and William Neale’s 1724 A Collection of the most Celebrated Irish Tunes proper for the violin, German Flute or Hautboy contains 49 melodies (one of which has an Italianate bass line added). Some of the melodies are by Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1738), Ireland’s famous blind harpist, the sources of other tunes are unknown. Published in 1725 and revised in 1733 (the second version was in two volumes and dedicated to Queen Caroline and supported by a list of several hundred subscribers, including twenty-two dukes and duchesses), William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius, or a Collection of Scotch Songs Set to Musick was an important recognition of Scotland’s traditional music [Ex.V.28].
But certainly the most important of these early collections was James Johnson’s (1753? –1811) The Scots Musical Museum. The Museum came about through a chance meeting of
Example V.27
Thomas d’Urfey: Songs Complete, Pleasant and Divertive; set to MUSICK, 1719 3 pages from volume 155
Example V.28
Title page and “The Bonny Scot” from William Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius, 173356
55 National Library of Scotland, https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87652457 in 1719 Thomas D'Urfey reordered and added to the work to produce a new edition (also in 5 volumes)
56 National Library of Scotland, https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/91483363
Johnson, who was a struggling publisher, and Robert Burns (17591796) in 1786, in Edinburgh. The men recognized that they had a shared love of Scotland’s traditional songs and Burns agreed to contribute to a collection that Johnson was assembling. The first volume was published a year later and the collection eventually ran to six volumes with one hundred songs in each volume, the last volume being published in 1803. Burns contributed about a third of the set’s six hundred songs, the most famous probably being “Auld Lang Syne.” [Ex.V.29]57 Some of the texts are by known poets, like Burns, others are anonymous. The tunes are provided with bass lines, some with figured bass. The Museum sparked international interest, and both Haydn and Beethoven arranged tunes and set songs from the collection.
Although Herder and Johnson were contemporaries, and the last volume of Johnson’s Museum was published the same year as the posthumous re-publication of Herder’s Stimmen, there’s no evidence that the German and the Scot knew of each other’s work. Yet Herder’s notion of a culture’s essence being carried in the music of its Volk lies very much at the heart of the Museum. Scottish Highlander’s hopes of independence from England were crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and in the aftermath of that defeat Parliament extended the Disarming Acts of 1715 and 1725, which stripped Scots of their rights to “warlike weapons” (swords, battle knives, and fire arms), to the “Dress Act” of 1746 which outlawed the wearing of highland dress for most Scots (the tartan and the kilt).58 Because it was
57 https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87802958
58 It was these Disarming Acts that lead to the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution and its insistence of citizens’ right to bear arms. The act’s “warlike weapons” was so broadly interpreted that one court ruled that it applied to the bagpipes. David Thomas Konig, “The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical Meaning of ‘the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms;’” History Cooperative https://historycooperative.org/journal/the-second-amendment-a-missing-transatlantic-context-for-the-historicalmeaning-of-the-right-of-the-people-to-keep-and-bear-arms/
“of great importance to prevent the rising generation being educated in disaffected and rebellious principles,”59 London not only wanted the clans defeated militarily but culturally. The policy was successful and, in a generation, London found the clans adequately pacified to repeal the acts in 1782. But the memory lingered. Two years later, the Highland Society of Edinburgh was founded to reinvigorate rural Scotland’s farms and culture and three years after that Johnson began the publication of the Museum. The voices of Scotland, Herder’s true heart of the Volk, had been suppressed, but not suffocated and the six hundred songs in the Museum were a defiant testimony to their continuing life. We can almost say it was a way to quietly educate the “rising generation” in disaffection and rebelliousness.
Almost but not quite. “Disaffection and rebelliousness” we’re going to find to be a very important, and controversial, part of folk music, particularly in 20th Century America, but we need to be careful not to overstate it here; nuance is needed. If subversion had been the principle aspect of these works or even a significant one it’s unlikely that peers of the realm would have subscribed to Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius or Johnson’s Museum would have run to six enthusiastically received volumes. Something else was going on here.
Part of that “something else” was a new passion for surveying. Some of these were literal surveys, using theodolites and compasses. Probably the most spectacular was “The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India”, begun in 1802 and finished in 1871, a scientific survey of the entire Indian subcontinent. But there were many others. In 1815 William Smith published his Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with Part of Scotland, the first geological map of an entire country, followed in 1820 by Geological Map of England and Wales assembled by George Bellas Greenough (1778-1855) and published by the Ordnance Geological Survey (now The British Geological Survey). In 1841, two mining engineers, Armand Petit-Dufrénoy (1792–1857) and Léonce Élie de Beaumont (1798–1874) published the Geological Map of France. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) was created in 1879 and published its first topographic map in 1882; Spain’s first geological map was published seven years later.
Other surveys were more metaphorical. The Grimm brothers’ (who we’ve met before) 1854 Deutsches Wörterbuch can be seen as a survey of Germanic languages and we need to remember that Darwin’s second voyage on The Beagle (1831-1836) was officially designated a survey, a survey that gave him data which he eventually shaped into his theory of evolution. But we need to go one step further. The collectors of folksongs were working in this milieu, collectors and organizers of data, but with an added and most important element: love.
I expect you find that a bit startling. The East India Company funded the Great Survey not because of its investors’ love of India but because of their need to understand the subcontinent Britain was about to colonize and economically drain. Greenough didn’t produce his maps of England because of his affection of the Cotswolds; it was part of a drive to better
59 Act of Proscription 1746, https://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/proscription_1747.htm
understand the economic potential of the landscape. But at its core, it was love that drove those folk music collectors.
We find that love in one of Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) most famous passages in his War and Peace (1869). The young, St. Petersburg raised Natasha Rostov, is visiting her uncle’s rustic forest cabin with her brother. The uncle’s common-law serf wife, Anisya Fyodorovna, brings out trays of Russian specialties: pickled mushrooms, buttermilk rye-cakes, preserves and honey, and drinks: sparkling mead, herb-brandy, varieties of vodka. Balalaikas are being played in a neighboring room and the uncle picks up his guitar and begins to play the love-song, “Came a maiden down the street.” Natasha has never heard it but it awakens some deep feeling in her and she begins to dance. [Ex.V.30]
Example V.30
Natasha’s Dance, War and Peace60
Tolstoy continues:
Natasha threw off the kerchief she had wrapped around her, ran and placed herself in front of her uncle and, arms, akimbo, made a movement with her shoulders and stopped.
Where, how, and when had this little countess, brought up by an émigré Frenchwoman, sucked this spirit from the Russian air she breathed, where had she gotten these ways, which should have been long supplanted by the pas de châle? Yet that spirit and these ways were those very inimitable, unstudied
60Leo Tolstoy War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, Mosfilm (USSR), 1967.
Russian ones which the uncle expected of her. As soon as she stood there, smiling triumphantly, proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear which had first seized Nikolai and all these present that she would not do it right went away, and they began to admire her.
She did it exactly right, and so precisely, so perfectly precisely, that Anisya Fyodorovna, who at once handed Natasha the kerchief she needed for it, wept through her laughter, looking at this slender, graceful countess, brought up in silk and velvet, so foreign to her, who was able to understand everything that was in Anisya and in Anisya’s father, and in her aunt, and in her mother, and in every Russian.61
The music, the lyrics, the dance, the food on the table, didn’t exemplify Russia, they were Russia and to be Russian was to know that instinctually; they were “in every Russian. ” The music bound together the “bric-a-brac” not only the music and dance but also politics, ideology, social customs and beliefs, folklore, religion, habits and conventions that formed a Russian’s consciousness 62 It was a Russian’s home A century after his first publications, we find Tolstoy expanding on Herder’s der Volksgeist
This was the importance of Natasha’s dancing and her uncle’s singing and playing; it was the liturgy of home. And it was that love of home or for some of them, their desire for home, and I’ll talk about that in a minute that compelled the collectors to gather their collections. In 1790, Johann Gottfried Pratsch (1750-1818) and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Lvov (1752-1803) published their Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes. 63 Between 1814 and 1816, Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847) and Arvid August Afzelius (1785-1871) published a three volume collection of Swedish folk-songs, Svenska folk-visor från forntiden in Stockholm and in 1819, Julius Maximillian Schottky (1797-1849) and Franz Tschischka (1786-1855) published their collection of Austrian folksongs: Österreichische Volkslieder: Mit Ihren Singweisen in Pest. Henryk Oskar Kolberg (1814-1890) published his collection of Polish folk songs in 1857, Pieśni ludu polskiego (“Songs of the Polish People”) a particularly poignant collection because Poland hadn’t been a nation for almost a century, being progressively divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia and between 1871 and 1876 Evald Tang Kristensen (1843-1929) published a collection of Danish folksongs, Jyske Folkeminder I-II. Building on Yury Melgunov’s 1879 Russian Songs Directly from the Voices of the People, Evgeniya (or “Yevgeniya”) Linyova (1853-1919) made field recordings of Russian peasant music between 1900 and 1910, publishing her two volumes of The Peasant Song of Great Russia as They are in the Folk’s Harmonization, Collected and transcribed from Phonograms in St Petersburg between 1904-1910.64 There were many other collectors on the Continent, probably the most significant being Béla Bartók (18811945) who between 1905 and 1921 gathered and published collections of Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian, and Algerian folk music, frequently in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály.
61 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Alfred A. Knoff, 2007, p. 512
62 Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance, A Cultural History of Russia, Metropolitan Books, 2002, p. xxvi.
63This Collection was used as a tune source for Beethoven, Hummel, Rossini, and Rachmaninoff. Nikolay Aleksandrovich Lvov is another of the polymaths we met in this chapter; he was also a chemist, an engineer and an architect who designed the tower of the church in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg
64 These volumes were to have a huge influence on Stravinsky, melodies extracted from the volumes appearing in The Firebird, Petruska, and The Rite of Spring. Figes, op. cit., . p. 278
For English speakers, three of the most important figures in folk music in addition to those already mentioned were Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), and Charles Seeger (1886-1979), and his son Peter, “Pete” (1919-2014).
Example V.31
Cecil Sharp (left) and Edwin Clay (right), Brailes, Warwickshire, ca. 1900-191065
The third of nine children and the oldest boy of a prosperous upper-middle class family, Sharp was born in London in 1859 and attended Cambridge’s Clare College where he read mathematics, rowed, debated, and was involved with a number of the university’s music societies. Upon graduation, he went to Adelaide, Australia, where he read law and within two years became clerk to the Chief Justice of South Australia and served as assistant organist at the Adelaide Anglican cathedral. In 1892 Sharp returned to London and supported himself as a pianist and music teacher and administrator.
His passion for English folk music was sparked by two chance encounters. December 26, “Boxing Day”, is a holiday in the United Kingdom. Sharp was visiting relatives in Oxford on that day in 1899 and came across the Headington Quarry Morris Men who were busking in the street. Fascinated by their dancing, Sharp called to their concertina player, William Kimber, and asked him to repeat the tunes so he could take them down. Four years later, visiting a parson friend in Somerset, Sharp heard a gardener singing “Seeds of Love” while tending the lawn. Both captivated by the music and the fear that urbanization was causing it to disappear, in the twenty years following that Boxing Day dance, Sharp collected about five-thousand examples of folk music (the number is disputed) and published about 1,450 folk tunes, 1,282 that had
65The Guardian, June 25, 2019; Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
accompanying texts, in a number of collections.66 Most this material was collected in Somerset, a rural country in South West England bound on the north by the Bristol Chanel, but between 1916 and 1918 Sharp visited Appalachian communities in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky and collected songs of English origin preserved there. He also studied and documented folk dances, believing them essential to the folk tradition and in 1911 was instrumental in founding the English Folk Dance Society (in 1932, this merged with the Folk-Song Society, founded in 1898, to make the English Folk Dance and Song Society67).
Perhaps because of his background in mathematics and law, Sharp not only collected folk material but developed and published an apologia and a taxonomy for the genera. Folk song was rural, it came from “native and aboriginal inhabitants” of “remote country districts ” The result of “the spontaneous and intuitive exercise of untrained faculties [the folk song is] created by the common people, in contradistinction to the song, popular or otherwise, which has been composed by the educated.” Sharp postulated that this “communal composition” exemplified three principles: continuity (the unfailing accuracy of the oral record), variation (spontaneous invention, the product of an anonymous individual), and selection (preserved within a living community).
Sharp’s collections and philosophy had enormous influence. He urged that folk songs be both used and emulated by composers in their art music to create an authentic “English” repertory, something Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) had been doing before Sharp started collecting his tunes (Vaughan Williams was a founding member of the Folk-Song Society in 1898). And he published and lectured tirelessly promoting the inclusion of folk song in British education. It was necessary for the health of the nation.
Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens that we want. How can this be remedied? By taking care, I would suggest, that every child born of English parents is, in its earliest years, placed in possession of all those things which are the distinctive products of its race. . . The discovery of English folk-song, therefore, places in the hands of the patriot, as well as of the educationalist, an instrument of great value. The introduction of folk-songs into our schools will not only affect the musical life of England; it will also tend to arouse that love of country and pride of race the absence of which we now deplore.
When every English child is, as a matter of course, made acquainted with the folk-songs of his country, then, from whatever class the musician of the future may spring, he will speak in the national idiom.68
We need to stop. Sharp’s last phrase is important: “he will [future tense] speak in the national idiom.” But Tolstoy’s Natasha didn’t need to be taught the Russian “idiom.” She simply knew it; she “sucked this spirit from the Russian air she breathed.” And there’s no suggestion in Herder that der Volksgeist is written in a book and taught in a school. Here we’re face to face with politics, and that “disaffection and rebelliousness” that we saw earlier.
66 Folk Songs from Somerset, 1904-1909; English Folk Song; Some Conclusions, 1907; Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, 1921; The Morris Book, 1907-1913; The Country Dance Book, 1909-1922; Sword Dances of Northern England, 1911-1913
67 The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000references to nearly 25,000 English language songs collected from oral traditions all over the world. It is maintained by the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
68 Sharp English Folk Song; Some Conclusions (1903), p. 137, quoted by David Harker, “Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Conclusions,” Folk Music Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1972; p. 240.
Cecil Sharp’s England, or at least a large part of that England, had a national idiom. He just didn’t like it. Musically, it was a national idiom evangelized from the music halls and chapels by, as Sharp put it, the “purveyors of cheap harmoniums, singing evangelists with their unspeakable songs and solos, choir-masters with their doggerel for Sunday and their clap-trap for the penny-reading.” Folk song, der Volksgeist of England, “unknown in the drawing- room, hunted out of the school, chased by the chapel deacons, derided by the middle classes, and despised by those who have been uneducated into the three R's” survives only in this debased society’s fringes, “poor cottages, and outlying hamlets . . . in the last lingering remnant[s] of the old village life,” these hamlets “a survival of the times when the village had a more or less independent existence, built its own church, hanged its own rogues, made its own boots, shirts and wedding rings, and chanted its own tunes.”69 Or, another way to put it, good times, or at least better times.
Good or bad, they were times that Sharp himself did not know. You remember that when I introduced Tolstoy’s story about Natasha, I mentioned that it was some collectors’ desire for home that led them to collect. The music and dances Sharp collected, published and promoted weren’t music and dances of his home. He didn’t grow up with them; he was a university trained lawyer and musician from a wealthy, upper middle-class family who owned a manor house. He found those Morris dancers and that singing gardener in Somerset exotic, fascinating and compelling and built a mythology of nostalgia around it. This is what England should be, at least musically. And this is what he wanted his home to be, and all Englishmen’s.
Sharp’s antipathy to industrialization and urbanization was a continuation of some of the notions of John Ruskin (1819-1900) and William Morris (1834-1896), ideas which themselves echoed William Blake’s (1757-1827) famous “dark satanic mills,”70 but it became institutionalized in the English Folk Dance and Song Society, formed in 1932 by the union of the Folk-Song Society with Sharp’s English Folk Dance Society. In 1947, this was united with several other folk music organizations to become The International Folk Music Council. At its 1955 congress in São Paulo, Brazil, the Council put together a formal definition of “folk music.”
Folk music is the product of a musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission. The factors that shape the tradition are: (i) continuity that links the present with the past, (ii) variation which springs from the creative impulse of the individual or the group; and (iii) selection by the community which determines the form or forms in which the music survives.
The term can be applied to music that has been evolved from rudimentary beginnings by a community uninfluenced by popular and art music, and it can likewise be applied to music which has originated with
69 Sharp, Folk Songs from Somerset, p, xi; quoted by David Harker, op. cit., p. 235
70 And did those feet in ancient time
Bring me my Bow of burning gold; Walk upon Englands mountains green: Bring me my arrows of desire: And was the holy Lamb of God, Bring me my Spear: O Clouds unfold! On Englands pleasant pastures seen! Bring me my Chariot of fire!
And did the countenance Divine, I will not cease from Mental Fight, Shine forth fupon our clouded hills?
Nor Shall my sword sleep in my hand: And was Jerusalem builded here, Till we have built Jerusalem, Among these dark Satanic Mills? In Englands green & pleasant Land. William Blake, Preface to Milton a Poem (1810)
an individual composer and has subsequently been absorbed into the unwritten living tradition of a community.
The term does not cover composed popular music that has been taken over ready-made by a community and remains unchanged, for it is the re-fashioning and re-creating of the music by the community that gives it its folk character 71
The first paragraph repeats Sharp’s three principles. The second repeats his emphasis on rural and isolated origins (“rudimentary beginnings”) while the third echoes, with its emphasis on community, Herder’s der Volksgeist
But the definition almost immediately proved problematic, and it’s a problem you already have noticed. If the essential aspect of folk music is community, can’t an urban setting be a community? A village is a community. Why can’t Chicago’s “Greektown” be a community? Why does the community have to be “uninfluenced by popular and art music”? Who’s to say that the various elements of an urban setting, where there’s lots of “popular and art music” can’t come together and create a community’s music just like the various elements in an isolated, rural setting can coalesce into a folk music? Fundamentally, wasn’t Sharp’s definition of folk music at least a bit bigoted?
Yes, of course, but at least one thing needs to be said in his defense. In many ways, Sharp was working like an archeologist who, digging through a Mesopotamian tell, seeks the civilization’s oldest level and, once established, that lowest level can then be studied to discover how the civilization changed. Communities who were most isolated, and for the longest time, would reasonably preserve the oldest forms of the music, texts and dances Sharp was trying to find and preserve. The problem came in Sharp’s belief that these oldest versions, and new music deeply influenced by them, should be privileged as being essential to being English. He believed that this was the music every English home ought to have. Another way of saying this is that for Sharp, the music of one folk ought to be privileged over the music of another folk.
We’re going to return this problem in a moment but before we do we need to look at the enormously significant work and life of Pete Seeger and his father, Charles Seeger, Jr.
Although two generations younger, in significant ways Pete Seeger’s life and work paralleled Sharp’s. Like Sharp, Pete Seeger was born of privilege. His grandfather, Charles Louis Seeger, Sr. (1860-1943) extended the family fortune in publishing, sugar, and rubber businesses in Mexico and the United States, raising his family in well-staffed homes in New York City on Stanton Island and Park Avenue, in Patterson, New York, in Mexico City (where Pete’s father, Charles Jr, was born), and the several hundred acre family estate in Bridgewater, a favorite rural haunt of wealthy New Yorkers in northwest Connecticut.72 A Harvard graduate, Charles sent his two sons to Harvard, Charles Jr (1886-1979), and Alan (1888-1916) who became a celebrated poet and was killed at the Battle of the Somme. His daughter, Elizabeth
71 Klaus F. Wachsmann “Folk music” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; London: MacMillan Publishers Limited, 1980.
72 Ann M. Pescatello, Charles Seeger; A Life in American Music, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, pp. 10-12.
(1889-1973) as was typical of the time, did not go on to college but became an accomplished author and taught at New York’s Dalton School for thirty-five years.
Upon being awarded his BA at Harvard (magna cum laude in music composition) Charles Jr went to Germany where he studied for two and a half years, returning to America where he married the Paris Conservatory trained violinist Constance de Clyver Edson (18861975), published his first compositions, had three sons Charles III (1912-2002), John (19142010), and Peter (1919-2014) and in 1912 joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as a full professor of music at the age of 26. At a time when the average American salary was about $750, Charles Jr was initially awarded the handsome salary $3,000 which was soon raised to $5,000 (about $162,000 in 2024 dollars). As well as teaching (Henry Cowell was one of his students), Seeger was responsible for developing a four year course of music study (theory, harmony, counterpoint, history). The first of its kind in the United States, this would eventually become the “music major” of undergraduate study throughout the county.73 Charles composed, arranged and performed in chamber music concerts with his wife, and started to become involved in various leftist movements, speaking in 1914 on the condition of migrant field workers at a meeting of the International Workers of the World (the IWW and known as the “Wobblies”). He also became a vocal opponent of American involvement in World War I.
Seeger was offered a sabbatical for the 1918-1919 academic year. He and his family returned east but soon after arriving Seeger suffered an emotional collapse. The reasons are not clear (it’s suggested that it was caused by a combination of physical exhaustion from the Berkeley workload and an existential crises having to do with the relationship between writing music and writing about music) but he spent the year as an invalid at his father’s home in Patterson. At the sabbatical’s end, Seeger didn’t feel well enough to return and requested an extension. The extension was not given and Seeger’s professorship was not renewed.
Unemployed, now with three children (Pete was born on May 3, 1919, just as the sabbatical ended), the Seegers began a quixotic crusade that would significantly influence American music. They would travel across rural America bringing “good music” to people who wouldn’t have had the opportunity to hear it. Charles was later quoted:
We looked down on popular music folk music didn’t exist, or except in the minds of a few very old people, who would die shortly and then there wouldn’t be any. And this new thing that was coming, called jazz, was simply filthy it was of the gutter and the brothel and wasn’t fit to pay any attention to.74
They hoped to tour the country, eventually making their way back to California (where they still owned a house) funding the trip by giving violin-piano recitals in the homes of rich families (Charles’ Harvard network providing letters of introduction) and free concerts in churches, schools, and various assembly halls. Charles had raised a kind of trailer on the bed of a
73 Seeger’s position had recently been approved by the state legislature as an appendage to the Department of Agriculture. There were minimal facilities, classes meeting in the YMCA or the foyer of the Hearst Mining Building. There was no curriculum to speak of. Pescatello, Ibib. p. 51
74 Pescatello, Ibib p. 79
wagon. Pulled behind their Model T, the trailer had a harmonium, an iron cauldron for washing, some furniture and incidentals. There were occasional successes. Through the sponsorship of Adolph C Miller (1866-1953) who was Assistant Secretary to the Interior under Franklin K. Lane (1864-1921) in the Harding administration and who Charles knew from the faculty at Berkeley, in 1921 the Seegers were able camp in Washington’s Rock Creek Park where Constance gave violin recitals in the afternoon.[Ex. V.32] In May, again through Miller’s auspices, they rented the National Theater on Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Ticket sales were slim but the theater was full; the Millers had introduced the Seegers to Grace Coolidge (1897-1957), wife of the then Vice President Calvin Coolidge, and Mrs. Coolidge had made sure that the diplomatic corps and cabinet members were provided with complimentary tickets. The Seegers presented their audience with a two-part program. The first was a typical recital: Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. But when the curtain went up on the second half the audience saw the Seegers’ trailer, the cast iron cauldron over a make-believe fire and a country backdrop. The grand piano was gone, replaced by the harmonium. Charles spoke to the audience about what they had been trying to accomplish: taking great music out to the people, playing free concerts for folks who couldn’t pay for it supported by playing concerts for folks who could. And they went on to show the audience what a typical country recital might be like. Constance’s brother, Elie Edson was a publicist, and he staged the concert’s pièce de résistance:
Example V.32
The Seegers performing in Rock Creek Park, 1921 Charles III, John, Constance, Pete (on his father’s lap), Charles Jr.
the boys were in the wings and on his cue they ran on stage, little Pete jumping on his father’s lap as he played the harmonium, accompanying Constance. The story made all the Washington papers the next day.75
While even that modest triumph was unique, and the Seegers’ evangelistic mission to spread illumination through great music was plagued by horrible roads, uninterested audiences, and poor planning, in one way it was successful: it began Charles’ introduction to the music of the rural South. Those backwoods people didn’t have Brahms, but they possessed a music of their own that was interesting, worth learning about, preserving and performing. That realization about “folk music” altered Charles’ career and later became the center of Pete’s life.
The couple eventually abandoned their traveling and settled in New York. Financial difficulties and changes in interest lead to their separation. Charles began an affair with his student, the composer Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) -- they began living together in 1931 and were married when Constance and Charles were divorced a year later. At age four, Pete was sent to a boarding school and, except for two years in a public school in Nyack, New York (living with his mother), Peter spent most of his adolescence in boarding schools in Ridgefield and later Avon, Connecticut. He was quiet and reserved but took to playing the ukulele and, ukulele in hand, became a popular entertainer for fellow students.
Like his father, uncle, and grandfather, Pete enrolled at Harvard, assisted by a partial scholarship (he was in the same class of John Fitzgerald Kennedy). But in the summer of 1936, before he matriculated, he accompanied his father and step-mother to Ashville, North Carolina, to attended Bascom Lunsford’s “Mountain Dance and Folk Festival” yes, this is the same Bascom Lunsford we were introduced to at the beginning of this section (Charles, in late 1935, had taken a job with the music unit of the Resettlement Administration’s Special Skills Division, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, and he had enrolled Lunsford’s help in one of the projects76). Pete had heard some of this music before, particularly from his stepmother who was working at the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, transcribing and cataloging part of the collection. But the music at the festival, and particularly hearing Lunsford’s banjo playing, captivated him. He bought an instrument, got some basic instruction, and resolved to master it.
Pete did not flourish at Harvard. He did poorly in classes, lost his scholarship, and left halfway through the second semester of his sophomore year, not even having bothered to register for the term. He moved to New York City with the goal of becoming a journalist.
Besides the banjo, Pete’s passion was Communism. In what now can be seen as almost a cliché after century of reflection, this passion was typical of many privileged youths of his generation who attended elite schools in both the United States and Great Britain, the “Cambridge Five” being the most notorious.77 But radial leftist politics was something of a
75 Ibid., pp. 82-83.
76 Ibid., p. 128
77 Donald Maclean (1913-1983), Guy Burgess (1911-1963), Kim Philby (1912-1988), Anthony Blunt (1907-1983) and John Cairncross (1913-1995) were all students at Cambridge and were all spies for the Soviet Union, Blunt
tradition with the Seegers. John Reed (1887-1920) was the Harvard classmate and assumed lover of Alan Seeger, Charles Jr’s younger brother and Pete’s uncle. They lived together in New York after graduating but Reed remained in New York when Alan went to Paris to live the life of a poet. Reed became a reporter and his enthusiastic coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution became Ten Days That Shook the World (1919); when he died in 1920 he was honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union and buried next to the Kremlin’s wall (one of only three Americans awarded that privilege). In 1931, Charles Jr. was a founding member of the “Composers’ Collective”, a group of New York composers that also included Henry Cowell, Marc Blitzstein, and Elie Siegmeister. An off-shoot of the Communist Party’s International Music Bureau and the Pierre DeGeyter Club (DeGeyter was the composer of the “Internationale”), the Collective’s goal was to foster new music that inspired the proletariat in its revolutionary struggle. Under the name “C.S.” (for “Carl Sands”), Charles Jr. regularly provided articles to the Daily Worker, the primary propaganda organ of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). The Collective produced two volumes of Workers’ Songs (1934 and 1935), the purposes of which was “to provide material for mass singing on the street and at all rallies, choruses (for elementary to advanced) as well as informal singing where workers gather.78 The Collective disbanded in 1936 due to internal disagreements, but Charles Jr. maintained that the primary purpose of music was sociological and political through the rest of his life. At the encouragement of his father, Pete joined the Young Communist League in 1936 when he began at Harvard and joined the Communist Party in 1942, literally becoming a card-carrying-member. Although he dropped his official membership in 1949 and later apologized for not seeing Stalin as “a supremely cruel misleader,” in 1995 he insisted that he still called himself a communist.79
When he left Harvard, Pete looked for work in New York. He was successful neither in becoming a journalist, or his other early interest, a painter 80 He took what jobs he could: a porter at 1939 World’s Fair, working with a traveling troupe of puppeteers (the group’s tour attracting the attention of the Daily Worker), assisting Alan Lomax (1915-2002) at the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song. In 1940, Woodie Guthrie (1912-1967) heard Pete sing as part of a line-up of performers at a benefit for California migrant workers (Burl Ives and Lead Belly were also on the docket). Seeger began a kind of apprenticeship with Guthrie, riding the rails with him, visiting his family in Texas, literally singing for their suppers. Eventually Seeger formed the Almanac Singers of which Guthrie was an occasional contributor. Based in New York, the six members lived communally, performed, and cut several albums of sea shanties, pioneer songs, and anti-draft songs and fairly quickly attracted notice. They sang on CBS’s radio program We the People, found representation with the William Morris Agency, and played several engagements at New York’s most famous nightclub, “The Rainbow Room” at the top of Rockefeller Center. But their anti-draft songs, which echoed the policy of the Communist Party
becoming one of Britain’s most distinguished art historians and entrusted with maintaining the paintings in the royal collection and Burgess eventually becoming one of the most senior members of the Foreign Service.
78 Chaplin-Kyzer, Abigail, Searching for Songs of the People: The Ideology of the Composers' Collective and Its Musical Implications, thesis, May 2018; Denton, Texas, (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1157558/m1/1/: accessed July 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .p. 6.
79 “The Old Left”, New York Times, Sunday, January 22, 1995.
80 Arthur Stern, his art teacher, asked Seeger what else he did besides paint. Seeger: “Well, I play the banjo.” Stern: “I’ve never heard you play the banjo but I suggest you stick to that.” David King Dunaway: How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger, Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, 2008, p. 81
following Hitler’s cooperation agreement with Stalin (the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), attracted the attention of the nascent FBI Artistic and personal differences between the members, exacerbated by continual governmental investigation into the group’s politics which lead to cancellation of contracts, contributed to the Singers’ break-up in 1942.81
Drafted in 1942, Singer served in the army, first as an airplane mechanic and later with an entertainment unit, eventually being stationed on Saipan. Seeger did not see combat, but he saw plenty of opportunities to hone his performing skills. Upon his discharge and return to New York in 1946, friends found him physically matured and a much stronger performer, and with a “national idea in his mind now.”82
Example V.33
People’s Songs, Vol. I, No. 1 (with “1945” typo)
Pages one and four
That national idea was the “People’s Songs.” Developed during talks with other soldiers on Saipan, once back in New York Seeger gathered friends, pulled together the required $155 incorporation fee and, in order to “create, promote and distribute songs of labor and the American people,” created People’s Songs, Inc. Pete was executive secretary, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and Alan Lomax were some of the committee members. Joseph R. Brodsky (18891947), a charter member of the American Communist Party and its principal attorney and later famous as a civil rights lawyer, served as the corporate counsel. Incorporated as a non-profit, for
81 Dunaway, Ibid., pp. 110-119
82 Dunaway, Ibid. p. 132
four years, the “Bulletin of People’s Songs,” was published quarterly and distributed to members. Issues included new songs by contributors Seeger’s and Lee Hay’s “If I Had a Hammer” was first published in it83 and traditional songs with new texts, news items and editorials. [Ex.5.33]84
In 1948, Seeger and Lee Hays (1914-1981), who had been a member of the Almanac Singers, joined with Fred Hellerman, (1927-2016) and Ruth “Ronnie” Gilbert (1926-2015) to form The Weavers. One New England blue blood, two secular Jews (children of immigrants from the Czarist empire), and one Southerner (atheist son of a Methodist preacher), it was an odd assembly for traditional American folk music but they were united by their idealistic communism (Gilbert and Hellerman knew each other as teenagers from a Communist summer camp) and their zeal in believing songs could propel social change. At first they continued to perform the same kind of music for the same kind of venues as had the Almanac Singers , but their following was modest, and their finances tenuous. When Seeger’s offer to help with a fundraiser for the American Labor Party was rebuffed, the committee preferring a headliner who would bring in a mass audience, he realized that for the Weavers to both survive and for them to reach the broad audience they sought, they had to be commercially successful first; bourgeois corporate capitalism would have to fund the worker’s communism. Seeger was well aware of the irony of not being visible for the communists until the Weavers had been successful for the capitalists.
The Weavers were booked at New York’s famous Village Vanguard for two weeks at Christmas, 1949, the fee was two hundred dollars a week and all the hamburgers they could eat. Initially popular, their novelty faded, the club’s attendance dropped but the club’s owner liked them and extended the booking. They used each night as a kind of rehearsal, re-working old material, adding new, and when Alan Lomax brought Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) to hear them in February, the poet wrote “The Weavers are out of the grass roots of America. I salute them. . . When I hear America singing, the Weavers are there.”85 When Sandburg’s praise hit the newspapers, the crowds were back and the two weeks eventually extended to six months. The Weavers eschewed the overtly political and the ribald, giving their listeners a mix of humor, traditional American songs, new songs in a traditional vein, and introducing what was going to be called “world music” their most famous contribution being “Wimowhe, Wimoweh” by the
83 Peoples’ Songs, 1950, Vol. 25, No.1, p.50.
84 This admonition to songwriters from the second edition is particularly illuminating, showing the publication’s purpose: “Attention. Songwriters: Song writers should begin thinking about songs that will be needed in the fall campaigns. Writers should visit their local PAC offices and talk with union leaders about plans for the fall campaign. Songs of general purpose, and songs which may easily be adapted for specific candidates and local issues should be prepared during the summer, and recordings made at that time. IMMEDIATELY NEEDED: Songs about Gerald L.K. Smith, the Freeport Murders, the high cost of living, picket lines, labor unity. Housing for veterans, the fight against Rankin and Bilbo, Hearst and Pager, should be put into songs. Not to be neglected are the serious compositions stating the people’s concern about atomic power, about labor’s role in the peace, and our concern about suffering minority people everywhere.” People’s Songs, Vol.I, March 1946, p. 2. The “Freeport Murders” is a reference to a racially charged incident in Freeport, New York, where a grand jury found a white policeman to have “done his duty” when he shot and killed Charles Ferguson and his brother, both African-American and unarmed, after a verbal altercation in a bus station. “Hearings on the Freeport Case”, Labor Action, July 29, 1946. p. 2; https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/1946/v10n30-jul-29-1946-LA.pdf
85 Dunaway, Ibid, p. 185.
South African Solomon Linda; later re-arranged in 1961 with additional lyrics by George Weiss (1921-2010) for the group The Tokens and recorded as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” 86
Example V.34
The Weavers, performing in 1951 Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman
Within a year The Weavers were represented by the William Morris Agency (the man who handled them was the same agent that had cut-off The Almanacs) and Decca was releasing their recordings. Their Decca recording of “Goodnight, Irene” was number one on the Billboard chart for thirteen weeks, the first folk recording to reach that level of sales (the racier elements of Lead Belly’s original text were omitted and the ensemble was backed-up by a symphonic orchestra, changes that took a bit of the folksy edge off their performance but made it more immediately acceptable to the broad market). They were performing on radio and television and booked in the country’s top venues.[Ex.V.34]
While their initial shows were politically innocuous, as their fame grew, and their confidence, they gradually began to include more overtly political fare. They sang Spanish Civil War songs (in Spanish). Anglo audiences didn’t notice, and the pieces became requested encores. Seeger biographer David Dunaway described the programs: “The Weavers’ music operated on two levels: commercial pop songs, accessible to all listeners [on recordings]; and a symbolic, encoded music (available only at live concerts) that reminded the Left of its existence: calypso, peace, topical songs.” 87
86 For the notorious, and heartbreaking, copyright history of Solomon Linda’s song see: Rian Malan, “In the Jungle”, Rolling Stone, September, 2023. https://www.coldtype.net/Assets.08/pdfs/0808.Jungle.pdf; as well as the film Remastered, The Lion’s Share,“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” Story, 2019, Netflix. 87 Dunaway, op. cit., p. 171
But it wasn’t only the Left that was reminded, it was the entertainment industry too. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s effectual defeat of the United States in its colonization of Europe east of the Oder the beginning of the “cold war” and a “hot war” now raging on the Korean peninsula between communist China, its client state North Korea (with the Soviet Union as a silent partner), and the United States and allies from the United Nations a war American men were being drafted to fight and the 1951 trial and conviction and 1953 execution of Julius Rosenberg (1918-1953) and his wife Ethel (1915-1953) for providing the Soviet Union with top secret information about American nuclear weapon designs, Americans became increasingly less tolerant of views outside of the political mainstream.88 The day after the House of Representatives (November 24, 1947), voted to hold ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors in contempt of Congress because of their refusal to answer the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities’ questions about their involvement with the Communist Party (these “Hollywood Ten” were later convicted and served six month to one year prison terms89), fortyeight leaders of American motion pictures, and their attorneys, met in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel and issued what became known as “The Waldorf Statement”. Among other things, the statement pledged that
“We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocated the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods . . . To this end we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives: to protect the innocent; and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened”90
The statement evolved into a “blacklist,” a list of people Hollywood refused to employ. It’s important to recognize that this list had no legal weight, it wasn’t a government program, but it reflected broad suspicions of the time. Intended only for the film industry, it quickly spread out to affect all entertainment.
88 Although denied by contemporary leftists and ridiculed by main-line historians through the 1980’s as the paranoid “red scare”, the depth of cooperation between Americans and British and the Soviets wasn’t begun to be revealed until Margaret Thatcher unmasked the “Cambridge Five” before Parliament in Novermber, 1975 and the bipartisan Commission on Government Secrecy, chaired by Senator Daniel Moynihan (1927-2003), approved a partial release of the “Veronica Papers,” a United States counterintelligence program run between 1943 and 1980. See: John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Alexandeer Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in American, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010; and Mark Kramer, “Why Ethel Rosenberg Should Not Be Exonerated, Cognoscenti, January 5, 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20220502162453/https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/01/05/juliusrosenberg-soviet-spying-mark-kramer
89 The “Hollywood Ten” were the screen writers Alvah Bessie (1904-1985), Herbert Biberman (1900-1971), Lester Cole (1904-1985), Ring Lardner Jr (1915-2000), John Howard Lawson (1894-1977), Albert Maltz (1908-1985), Samuel Ornitz (1890-1957), Adrian Scott (1911-1972), Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976), and the director Edward Dmytryk (1908-1999). Subsequent research has shown all were members of the Communist Party. Bessie’s involvement was not atypical: a veteran the Spanish Civil War where he fought as part of the Comintern’s International Brigade, in his autobiographical Inquisition in Eden he boasted of inserting Soviet propaganda into the 1943 film Action in the North Atlantic, staring Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey. See Allan H. Ryskind, Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, Regnery History, 2015. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was a standing committee of the House of Representatives formed in 1938. It is frequently confused with the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of which Senator Joseph McCarthy was chair.
90 Thomas Doherty, “Reflections on Hollywood’s Infamous Blacklist 70 Years Later,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 24, 2017; https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/reflections-hollywoods-infamousblacklist-70-years-guest-column-1060628/
The Weavers soon became victims. As stories and rumors and innuendoes about their Communist past began to circulate, venues refused to book them. Radio stations denied their recordings airplay (which created a significant financial hardship because of the sudden lack of royalties). NBC withdrew an offer for a television show. Facing hard economic realities, the group disbanded in 1952, thereafter only coming together for occasional reunion concerts. A year after disbanding, Decca even removed Weaver recordings which were continuing to sell well from their catalogue. In 1957, Seeger himself came under scrutiny of the House Un-american Activities Committee. Like the “Hollywood Ten” before him, but with greater courtesy members of that group had insulted and berated committee members Seeger refused to answer their questions believing them to violate the fundamental rights of all Americans. He was indited for contempt of Congress and in March, 1961, convicted in a jury trial in the Southern District of New York. He was sentenced to ten, one-year, jail terms. Fourteen months later, an appeals court ruled the indictment flawed and overturned his conviction.
After The Weavers break-up, Seeger continued his career primarily as a soloist. Barred from many venues because of the blacklist, he played smaller venues and colleges and schools and continued to record (the 1953 American Folk Songs for Children, on Folkways Records, was his first solo album; he selected the eleven songs from his step-mother’s 1948 book American Folk Songs for Children). He toured internationally and became involved in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. His blacklist inspired isolation ended in 1967 when he appeared on CBS’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, in September He was booked again on the show the following February 25. In 1994, Seeger was a Kennedy Center honoree, along with actor Kirk Douglas, singer Aretha Franklin, composer Morton Gould, director Harold Prince.[Ex.V.35]
Which brings us back to Cecil Sharp. You’ll remember this:
“The discovery of English folk-song [is] an instrument of great value . . [that will] not only affect the musical life of England [but also] arouse that love of country and pride of race the absence of which we now deplore. . .When every English child is . . .made acquainted with the folk-songs of his country then . . .he will speak in the national idiom.”
As it was for Sharp, folk music was an exotic experience for the Seegers; it wasn’t music of the culture of which they were raised. And like Sharp, the Seegers insisted this music had a political purpose. But unlike Sharp, and especially for Pete, it wasn’t a political purpose to privilege one
“folk” as opposed to another or, like Tolstoy’s dancing Natasha, to exemplify a culture, but instead folk music was for the Seegers a means to create a culture that did not yet exist in America: a culture of international peace, civil rights, unionism, secularism, and communism.91 This was going to be the music of a home newly made. And also unlike Sharp, Pete Seeger wasn’t content to collect folk music, but he continued the tradition by making it. Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” became as ubiquitous in the 20th Century’s second half as “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Aure Lee” were in the second half of the 19th .
Which brings us back to The International Folk Music Council and the definition of “folk music” it proposed in 1955 in São Paulo. We mentioned how potentially bigoted the definition’s idea of “community” was. And with Sharp we saw how bigoted his preference of one kind of “folk” as opposed to another kind of “folk” was. These problems didn’t escape the notice of the members of the Council and the organization’s name was changed to the “International Council for Traditional Music” in 1981 and then in 2023 changed again to the “International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance.”92 In the last decades, “world music,” “world beats music,” “root music,” “indigenous music” and “traditional music” have all been promoted as replacements for “folk music” (“Roots Music” has been awarded its own Grammy category and until 2023 there was a category for “World Music”). But the term “folk music” has proven to be stubbornly persistent, and it is still used by the New Grove as a category to distinguish the music from pop music and art, or “classical,” music.93
But we’re missing something, and it’s obvious and I know this discussion has frustrated you because it’s been obvious to you too and we’ve been dancing around it. Why is it called “folk” music and not “Beethoven” music? Or “Mozart” music? Or “John Williams” music? It’s a very good question and maybe should have been addressed at the start, but its answer has been
91 The secularism, and indeed “anti-traditionalism” of this music, is an important aspect that’s usually ignored. It was well known that Lunsford detested the Seegers’ politics and believed that the traditions of The South were being ill-used and coopted for purposes antithetical to traditional values. This can be clearly seen in the movement’s use of Christian hymnody. Well-known hymns were supplied both with words that ridiculed the hymns’ initial message and presented in ways that denuding the songs of their Christian message. The Little Red Songbook, first published by The Industrial Works of the World in 1909, exemplifies the first (this was the first leftist organization Charles Jr became involved with in 1914). Joe Hill’s (1879-1915 ) new lyrics for the hymn “There Is Power in the Blood” is typical of many. 3rd verse:“If you’ve had ‘nuff” of “the blood of lamb,’ / Then join in the grand Industrial band; / If, for a change, you would have eggs and ham, / Then come, do your share, like a man. Chorus: There is pow’r, there is pow’r, / In a band of working men, / When they stand, hand in hand, / That’s a pow’r, that’s a pow’r / That must rule in every land: / One Industrial Union Grand.” “This Little Light of Mine” is example of the second. The origin of “This Little Light” is uncertain John and Alan Lomax recorded Jim Boyd singing it in 1934 at the State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, but it might have been written by Harry Dixon Loes and Avis B. Christiansen around 1920. Whatever its origin, it began appearing in Protestant hymnals in the 1940’s and was understood as a commentary on the parable of the light and the bushel basket (Matthew 5:14-16; Luke 11:33). Removed from its Christian context in 1960’s and sung at demonstrations and folk concerts, the “light” became the cause de jour, civil rights, peace in Vietnam, disarmament, etc. There is Power in a Union to the tune “There is Power in the Blood” #16; “To fan the flames of Discontent; The Little Red Songbook, London, 1916. https://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/iww.html; Daniel Harper: “This Little Light of Mine”, March 3, 2016, Yet Another Unitarian Universalist; https://www.danielharper.org/yauu/tag/harry-dixon-loes/ 92 https://ictmusic.org/general-information
93 Carol Pegg, “Folk Music”, New Grove Music Online, #6, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.09933
implied. It’s been called “folk” music because “folk” is a place-holder for “don’t know.” It’s “don’t know music ” We don’t know who wrote it. Its composers have been anonymous. But wait. Just a couple of paragraphs ago I referred to “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Aure Lee” as folk songs and we know who wrote all of these (OK, we don’t know who wrote the “Battle Hymn” tune but we know who wrote the words). How can those be “don’t know” music?
This brings us to the issue of copyright and, there’s no other term for it really, greed. When scholars started assembling collections of tunes and their texts (and you’ll remember that the texts were collected before the tunes), authorship of the material was mostly unknown. When the collections were published in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the anonymous character of the material was acknowledged. But beginning in the 1960’s, some publishers, seeing the material as potentially lucrative, began to copyright folk songs, sometimes using the fictious names “Albert Stanton,” “Mr. Cavanaugh,” and “Harold Leventhal” (“Leventhal” tried to copyright an obscure tune that turned out to be India’s national anthem94). There are a number of examples of this (“Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” was first published in 1867 as No. 31 in Slave Songs of the United States by A. Simpson & Co. in New York. It was an anonymous Spiritual.95 The text was copywritten in 1977 by R & B Music Publishing & Sales Corp.) but probably the most outrageous there’s no other word example of the practice was the claim of The Richmond Organization, Inc, and Ludlow Music, Inc. to own the lyrics of “We Shall Overcome” on behalf of Pete Seeger.
Seeger first heard the song in 1947 when Zilphia Horton (1910-1956) taught him a version she had heard from striking tobacco workers in North Carolina.96 Thinking it more singable, Seeger changed two words: we to shall and down to deep
Original version
Seeger’s changes
We will overcome, We shall overcome, We will overcome, We shall overcome, We will overcome some day We shall overcome some day Oh down in my heart, I do believe. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe We will overcome some day We shall overcome some day
In his 1963 memoir, Seeger wrote that his publishers advised him to copyright it because “If you don’t copyright this now, some Hollywood types will have a version out next year like ‘Come on baby, we shall overcome tonight, ’” although later in court records Seeger said that he didn’t remember who made the changes. In any case, Seeger copyrighted the song and, in the truest capitalist fashion, royalties and licensing fees from “We Shall Overcome” flowed into
94 Rian Malan, “In the Jungle, How American music legends make millions on a Zulu tribesman who died a pauper,” Rolling Stone, May 2000, https://web.archive.org/web/20200214102148/http://reprints.longform.org/inthe-jungle
95 https://docsouth.unc.edu/church/allen/allen.html
96 Dunaway, Ibid., p.181.
communist Seeger’s publishing companies until September, 2017 when US district judge Denise Cote found the changes trivial and returned “We Shall Overcome” to the public domain.97 Pop or folk? For over a half a century it was used legally as a pop song, its copyright aggressively protected to maintain its monetary value. But culturally it was a folk song, perhaps the folk song of the era. We can say it began as a folk song, became a pop song (at least on some publishers’ accounting books) and is now a folk song again.98
I think we can agree with Judge Cote, “We Shall [or We Will or We Whatever] Overcome” should never have been copywritten. It was a folk song from an anonymous source and passed around and treasured by a community. The fact that it was copyrighted, and people were dunned for licensing fees, was a miscarriage of justice and, in the last analysis, an embarrassment for Seeger. But what about Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”? There’s no ambiguity about its source. Why can we call it a “folk song”?
First, unless we want folk music to be a completely fossilized repertory, we have to realize that anonymity cannot be a requirement. The anonymity of the traditional folk repertory is an accident of history, not a requirement of the genera. Nor can it be a requirement that the music be “uninfluenced by popular and art music” referencing the São Paulo definition because since the popularization of the transistor radio in the mid 1950’s the world has very few places untouched by broadcasts of both popular and art music. But look at the São Paulo definition again. What presents itself repeatedly? “Community.” The term appears five times, “community which determines,” “by a community uninfluenced,” “living tradition of a community,” “ready-made by a community,” “the music by the community that gives it its folk character.”
Now, let’s look at “If I Had a Hammer.” We know who wrote it and when and why. Pete Seeger and Lee Hays wrote it in 1949 and first performed on June 3 as an anthem at a fundraising benefit for eleven Communist Party leaders who were on trial for violating the Smith Act (the lyric’s “hammer” is an oblique reference to the hammer of traditional communist heraldry).99 The song wasn’t written to make money but instead came out of Seeger’s life-long conviction that “the right song at the right moment could change history.” 100 Seeger and Hays repeated the song the following September 4 at a concert with Paul Robeson (1898-1976). It was published in Peoples Songs in 1950 and that same year The Weavers recorded it on the Hootenanny label (“Banks of Marble” was on the B-side). The recording was copyrighted when it was pressed but the song (music and lyrics) was copyrighted in 1958 and 1959 by Ludlow Music, Inc. (yes, this is the same Ludlow Music that claimed copyright of “We Shall Overcome”). The recording didn’t sell well and had minimal commercial impact.
97 Edward Helmore, “Civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome freed from copyright”, The Guardian, Monday, 11 September, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/11/we-shall-overcome-civil-rights-anthemcopyright-lawsuit; also Charles Cronin and Niall Fordyce: “We Shall Overcome Foundation v Richmond Organization & Ludlow Music” https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/we-shall-overcome-foundation-v-richmondorganization-ludlow-music/
98 For a similar and fascinating story regarding the copyright of “Happy Birthday” see: Robert Brauneis, “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song”, Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., 2009; https://bpb-usw2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.law.gwu.edu/dist/a/4/files/2018/12/BrauneisHappyBirthday-tcu5mh.pdf
99 Dunaway, Ibid., p.181.
100 Dunaway, Ibid., p.335
Albert Grossman (1926-1986) was a New York based music promoter. Sensing that the folk music which was thriving in New York’s Greenwich Village café scenes might have a broader commercial appeal especially if it could be distanced from its communist heritage he auditioned singers and in 1961 assembled the trio of tenor of Peter Yarrow (b. 1931), baritone Paul Stookey (b. 1937) Yarrow and Stookey were also guitarists and the contralto Mary Travers (1936-2009). Grossman had “Peter, Paul, and Mary” try-out their act in Boston and Miami clubs, eventually booking them at New York’s “The Bitter End”, the city’s most important folk music venue. He leveraged those performances to broker a recording contract with Warner Brothers and in 1962 they released their first album: Peter, Paul and Mary [Ex.V.36]
Example V.36
Peter, Paul, and Mary, album cover, 1962
Although Peter’s and Paul’s goatees might have been a bit beatnikish for Eisenhower America, they were fully “hip” with the optimism of the new Kennedy era and smiling Mary, blond and with flowers in her lap gave the album cover an up-beat wholesomeness that was echoed by the record’s music inside. The album included “500 Miles” (attributed to Hedy West), and Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?.” “If I Had a Hammer” was preceded by Will Holt’s Jamaica-happy calypso inspired “Lemon Tree.” The revolutionary fervor of the proletariat was a distant echo, if sensed at all. It certainly wasn’t present in the blub on the album’s back, which included this:
These dynamic youngsters have been “together” for almost a year now. . . and each day seems to bring new definition to that word, “together.” The trio has elsewhere been described, visually, as “Two bearded prophets of the folk idiom in league with a bright, young blond-and-a-half.” And vocally, as “An angel, and two cellos playing guitars.” Beyond such imagery, such facts as birth places, hobbies, ages, and last names are unimportant here. Their identities as artists, both individually and collectively, are emphatically established on the record inside. By way of rounding out the biography, let’s just add that what they do in their spare time is sing. More important than biography, there seems to be something optimistic, something encouraging about this whole musical experience. Peter, Paul and Mary’s first album is bright with enthusiasm. No gimmicks. There is just something Good about it all. Good in the sense of Virtue, that is, And the news that something this Good can be popular as this is can fill you with a new kind of optimism. Maybe everything’s going to be all right. Maybe mediocrity has had it. Maybe hysteria is on the way out. One thing is for sure in any case: Honesty is back. Tell your neighbor.”101
The pieces were beautifully performed (and performed better than on the Weavers’ recording) and the LP became a huge commercial success. The individual cut “Lemon Tree” peaked at No. 35 on the Billboard charts but the album was on Billboard’s “Top Ten Albums” for ten months, seven of which it ranked No. 1. In 1962, at the Fifth Annual Grammy Awards, “If I Had a Hammer” was awarded Grammys in both the Best Folk Recording and Best Performance of A Vocal Group categories and the ensemble was nominated for Best New Artist of 1962 (they lost to Robert Goulet).102 Soon after the Grammy wins, the album again jumped to No. 1 on the Billboard “Top Ten.” Peter, Paul and Mary remained a best seller, eventually selling over two million copies and earning a double platinum certification from sales in the United States alone. The next year, Trini Lopez (b. 1937) recorded “Hammer” as a single. It charted at No. 3 on Billboard’s “Top Ten” and the Weavers included it in their May 2, 1963 reunion concert at Carnegie Hall (recorded and released as The Weavers Reunion at Carnegie Hall, 1963 by Vanguard Records103). In 1969 Wanda Jackson’s (b. 1937) recording of “Hammer” charted for ten weeks on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs, debuting in the first week of February and peaking at No. 41 in the first week of April and in 1972 Johnny Cash (19322003) released a version with his second wife, June Carter Cash (1929-2003). Beginning in July
101 Of course the entire Peter, Paul & Mary project was Grossman’s and Warner Brother’s gimmick to monetize folk music but the blurb’s hucksterism with its emphasis on “good” and “virtue,” “honesty,” and “optimism” makes clear the recording’s intended ethos. No one is to hear this music and think of rallies supporting Soviet agents. And that list (“honesty,” “virtue”, etc.), becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the revelation that Peter Yarrow was a pedophile and was convicted and sentenced in 1979 one-to-threeyearsinprison(thetermsuspendedsavefor threemonths).HewaspardonedbyPresidentCarteronthelastnightofhispresidency. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/17/peter-yarrow-carter-pardon-assault/
102 Tony Bennett’s performance of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” won Record of the Year and Sammy Davis Jr’s “What Kind of Fool Am I” won Song of the Year. The comedy album “The First Family” won both Best Comedy Performance and Album of the Year (Other Than Classical), a hilarious set-up of the Kennedy White House written and directed by Vaughn Meader. The presentation ceremony was not televised but the Academy partnered with NBC to present a hour-long “The Best on Record” special highlighting the Grammy winners. Frank Sinatra hosted Les Brown performed “If I Had a Hammer.” But because of President Kenney’s assignation on November 22, 1963, the broadcast was delayed and all references to the comedy album removed. The special ended with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performing “The House I Live In That’s America to Me” as a sobering yet patriotic benediction. The awards and the broadcast are a fascinating snapshot of America on the cusp of Camelot optimism about to be plunged into the turbulence of the 1960’s. https://www.grammy.com/awards/5th-annualgrammy-awards
103 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfdNHYheucw
it charted for seven weeks on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs, peaking at No. 29 in midAugust.104
All this firmly established “If I Had a Hammer” as a piece of pop music, immensely popular and that popularity proven by its commercial success and it was this commercial success that probably propelled Seeger’s only individual performance to chart on Billboard: his 1964 recording of “Little Boxes” charted for eight weeks on the Billboard “Hot 100,” beginning in January and peaking at No. 70 at the end of February.105 And while “Hammer’s” popular success continued to feed its composers, publishers, and performers, it’s commercial importance was soon eclipsed by its cultural importance, perhaps even trivialized.
Example V.37
Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, and Peter Yarrow, Washington, D.C., 1963
On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million people marched on Washington, D.C. and stood on the mall before the Lincoln Memorial to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver from the Memorial’s steps what has come to be recognized as the one of greatest speeches in American history: “I have a dream.” Billed as “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” the assembly was closer to a Christian worship service than a political rally, with
104Wanda Jackson: https://www.billboard.com/artist/wanda-jackson/chart-history/csi/ ; Johnny Cash: https://www.billboard.com/artist/johnny-cash/chart-history/csi/ . For comparison, Cash’s “Ring of Fire” charted for 26 weeks in 1963, and was No. 1 for seven of those weeks.
105 https://www.billboard.com/artist/pete-seeger/chart-history/csi/
the National Anthem (lead by Marian Anderson) followed by an Invocation delivered by the Archbishop of Washington and closed by a benediction, given by the Rev. Benjamin Mays (1894-1984), Baptist minister and President of Morehouse College. And there were hymns. Some were true hymns: Mahalia Jackson singing “How I Got Over” and Marian Anderson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and Odetta singing “I’m On My Way.” But others became hymns because of the context and primary among them was Peter, Paul and Mary’s performance of “If I Had a Hammer ” Ossie Davis (1917-2005) introduced them saying, “And now a group of singers who have come to help express in song what this great meeting is all about. I give you now, Peter, Paul, and Mary.” [Ex.V.37] The trio started to sing and a quarter million people joined in, singing it like an altar call.106 Years later, Mary Travers described the event.
“I started to sing, and I had an epiphany looking out at this quarter of a million people. I truly believed at that moment it was possible that human beings could join together to make a positive social change.”107
“Hammer” had become a folk song, not because of its commercial value but instead because of its importance to the community. On that hot August afternoon in Washington, it was sung as an anthem of home, a home everyone there hoped to have.
And we’re back to Herder and Tolstoy and Sharp and that dance in Bascom Lunsford’s parlor and the São Paulo definition. Propelled by both their communist ideals and their understanding of the First Amendment, Hays and Seeger wrote “Hammer” as a testament of their solidarity with the eleven Communist leaders accused of violating the Smith Act; it was their consciousness that inspired the song, not their cupidity.108 When repurposed, better performed, and cynically there’s no other word for it marketed for its “goodness” and “optimism,” it appealed to a wide American market and became a significant pop hit. But as that pop hit circulated through the culture, it became more than a cash cow, it became part of the Volkgeist. Since that performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it’s been universally recognized as expressing an American ideal, its Americaness to be sucked “in the air,” like Tolstoy’s Natasha breathing in Russia, footnotes not required.
I said at the beginning of this section that folk music is “Just what the community does” and I think you understand that a bit better now. Folk music can start a lot of places: in the distant past or relatively recently. Its sources can be anonymous or copywritten. It can be rural or urban. It can use traditional instruments, guitars, banjos, double basses, or electronic keyboards
106 Peter, Paul & Mary – If I Had a Hammer” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKgm9ARmOMM
107 “Peter Paul and Mary Talk about the March on Washington & Sing Songs 1963,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUpG0Cev7qc , also “Voices of the Civil Rights Movement, Peter, Paul and Mary at the March on Washington” https://voicesofthecivilrightsmovement.com/video-collection/2015/12/04/peterpaul-and-mary-at-the-march-on-washington
108 The Smith Act Trials were one of the longest and most publicized trials in American history, stretching from 1949 to 1958. All eleven defendants, public leaders of the Communist Party USA, were convicted in what contemporaries called a zoo-like atmosphere, the defendants repeatedly insulting the court. Appeals eventually reached the Supreme Court in Dennis v United States. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s convictions in a 6 – 2 decision. In 1969 the decision was de facto overruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio. See: Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
and drum sets (as are being used in a vibrant urban music community among Hassidic Jews in Brooklyn). But it’s deeply valued by a community, the community recognizing in the music something so essential to its character that it seems as if it’s always been and that’s “just what the community does.” In the last seventy-five years, a number of songs have taken on that character; Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (1955) and his “Turn! Turn! Turn! For Everything There is a Season (1959), Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (1940), Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1962), even Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Edelweiss” (1959). Mary Travers, when talking about the debt she and Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow owed to Pete Seeger and The Weavers, said: “We learned from them [the Weavers] that folk music had to be a process that had to be carried on and had a responsibility to the community from which it sprang that the folk tradition was one of social commitment as well as just old fashioned have fun together.”109 There’s no reason to think that some of the songs of the last thirty years won’t “carry on this process” and achieve a similar importance to “If I Had a Hammer”, becoming “just what the community does.” Time will tell. But that verb, “does” is essential. It’s not music that is just listened to. It’s music that’s sung, or danced to, it’s music that requires active participation. The people at the Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial didn’t just listen to “If I Had a Hammer.” They sang too. And they sang because they just knew that’s just what you do.
III
Let’s summarize. “Pop music” is valued primarily for the revenue it produces. It’s the kind of music that Blackrock, Inc. buys in order to have more money to buy more things and it’s the kind of music the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum promotes for pretty much the same reason. “Folk music” is loved – not valued, there’s an importance difference between the words because it’s an essential way people in a community understand each other and themselves. It can be related to pop music but if a piece of folk music doesn’t prove to be commercially successful it’s not particularly important since the piece is loved. “If I Had a Hammer” hasn’t appeared on a Billboard chart in almost fifty years but nobody apart from the copyright holders much care. It’s too important for Billboard. It’s part of being American.
Now “Classical.” Before we start it’s essential to know that “classical,” as we’re going to understand it, doesn’t just describe music of a European or Western heritage. It equally describes particular kinds of music from India and China. Indian Classical Music, typically called “Carnatic” for the music of the Hindu south and “Hindustani” for music of the Muslim influenced north, is an ancient and extraordinarily sophisticated repertory with roots reaching back to the time of the Vedas, perhaps 1500 BC (you’ll remember the boys memorizing the
109 Mary Travers, quoted in The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time, directed by Jim Brown, distributed by United Artists, 1982.
Rigveda from melodic formulas in Chapter Two). Chinese Classical Music goes by a number of names, depending on the region and dynasty, but the repertory at least goes back to the yayue music (“elegant” or “court” music) on the Zhou dynasty (1046 BC – 256 BC).
There are three characteristics of “classical music, ” characteristics found in all three “classical repertories”, Western, Indian, and Chinese:
1) It’s supported by a large body of written philosophical and theoretical literature.
2) It’s valued for its aesthetic quality and is therefore always associated with a leisured class and is performed by trained practitioners (but not necessarily professional musicians). It is by definition an aristocratic form
3) Emotional content is conveyed through form, or form contributes to the emotional content of the music.
1) It’s supported by a large body of written philosophical and theoretical literature
This first characteristic can be covered quickly because we’ve been doing it together already: it means that the music is considered worthy of significant thought, and that thought is written down. It’s just not music to sing or dance to, it’s music to think about and think about seriously. We’ve been thinking about music seriously now for almost five chapters; philosophers have been doing this for thousands of years: Pythagoras, Plato, Confucius, Aristotle, Boethius, Nietzsche, it’s a very long list. Grammars have been constructed about this music, this is the “theoretical literature.” This material asks the questions: what is this music made of? Are there scales and if so what are they? Do they go up or do they go down or do they go up and down both? What’s a musical “note”? And how big is the distance between one of these notes and an adjacent note, something called an “interval” (this is going to be a major concern of the next chapters)? The music itself doesn’t need to be written down, but the literature about it does. The “Seikilos epitaph” is generally considered the oldest notated example of Greek music we can confidently transcribe. Found in 1883 in the Turkish town of Tralles, it’s a stone pillar inscribed with a Greek poem and with letters and dashes above the words that indicate pitches. It’s been dated sometime in the first or second centuries AD.110 But our theoretical literature about Greek music goes back at least five hundred years earlier, to Damon of Athens, who lived in the 5th Century BC (and possibly taught Pericles, ca. 495 – 429 BC), and to Aristoxenus of Tarentum (fl 375-335 BC) and his near contemporary Ptolemais of Cyrene (the only known female music theorist of classical antiquity). In China, sophisticated theoretical writing about music goes back to the Zhou dynasty (c.1046 BC – 256 BC) but performable notation developed much later in the Tang dynasty (618 – 907).111
110 See: Armand D’Angour: “The Musical Setting of Ancient Greek Texts” in Music, Text, & Culture in Ancient Greece, edited by Tom Phillips & Armand A’Angour, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 64-72
111 See: Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Musical Theory through the Zeng Inscriptions”, Suspended Music, Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pp 280-309
2) It’s valued for its aesthetic quality and is therefore always associated with a leisured class and is performed by trained practitioners (but not necessarily professional musicians). It is by definition an aristocratic form.
The first, “It’s valued for its aesthetic quality,” means that the most important aspect of the music is its artistic excellence. Whether or not the music is financially successful is of no significance. It’s also not important whether or not it means much to a particular culture, that business of “Natasha’s dance” and Herder’s Volksgeist. The music of the Austrian composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945) is a good example One of the great “classical” composers of the twentieth century, his compositions are almost universally admired for their spectacular artistry yet they were not commercially successful during his life nor have they been since (he didn’t rely upon his music’s sales for his income; he came from a prosperous family and further supported himself by conducting). His music has minimal significance for the broad Austrian culture out of which he came (upon visiting his grave behind the church in the Austrian town of Mittersill, the church’s warden looked at the grave with me, shook his head and said: verrückt, “crazy”). But as “classical” works, neither of those two things matter for Webern’s music. It’s only the level of artistry that counts.
At this point your asking, quite rightly, “OK, but how do we determine that level of artistry? Who’s to say what “artistic” is more “artistic” and what is less “artistic” and why? And you’re remembering Duchamp’s bottle rack and that banana taped to the wall and Cage’s “silence” piece. Great art? Yes? No? The matter of what makes art “great” is a very important question, and perhaps the important question, but I’m going to have to delay that discussion to our final chapter. Of course this is frustrating, but for now we’re just going to leave the matter of artistic importance undefined.
But we do need to discuss the other sections of this part of the definition: the matters of what is required to value classical music and who best represents, or embodies, that value.
I’ve said that this music is “associated with a leisured class.” I’m using the term “leisure” not as a synonym for “rest” but instead for time that is spent in ways that are not required for survival. Hunting for food, when you’re hungry, is work. Pheasant hunting with friends and dogs and alcohol is leisure.
It’s good to start with hunting because that’s where we started. Apparently literally. All civilization is based upon surpluses, specifically a surplus of food and a surplus of security. If we don’t have a surplus of food, meaning we have more food at hand than we can immediately eat, we are forced to spend all of our time getting food. And, since the easiest way to get food is to take it from someone who has it already and is weaker than we are, we must have a surplus of security because without it we would be forced to spend all of our time defending the precious little food that we have.
Let’s imagine this scenario. Until fairly recently in geological time, all of our ancestors were nomadic hunters/gathers on the veldts of Africa or on the fringes of the great ice sheets. They spent their time getting food and trying not to be food for the predators all around them, cave bears, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves those “lions and tigers and bears” still lurking in our
nightmares perhaps even other cannibalistic humans. It’s probable that every hour, existence was a matter of life and death. And let’s suppose that these ancestors had developed enough technology that they were able to make containers to hold things, things like grains and nuts, preserved meat, even water. I’m simply going to call those containers “pots” no matter what they were made of, leather, clay, wood. What would a good pot be for these ancestors? It would be a pot that held things, that didn’t leak, that didn’t easily spill, and perhaps had some sort of handle that made it easy to carry. And if our ancestors had two pots, which one would be preferred? I think we can assume that it would be the pot that best did what it was supposed to do: not leak, not spill, not be hard to carry And let’s assume that these ancestors live a very difficult life, food is scarce, and because they are continually threatened by predatory animals and other tribes they find that they have to occasionally flee suddenly or at least frequently decamp. In these situations, and our ancestors have two pots but they can’t carry both, which of the pots will our ancestors choose? They’ll choose the one that’s the most reliable.
Let’s consider a different situation. Our ancestors have gathered together into a community and they’ve been able to build some kind of barrier around their community. The barrier gives them now a bit of protection from predators, both animals and predatory communities. And inside this barrier they have some storage, perhaps with grain, and they might now have some domesticated animals with them too, goats, perhaps some cattle. They have a bit of surplus food, and security for that food. And with that surplus comes some extra time and that time can be spent making a decoration on a pot, just something pleasant to look at, not necessary for its function. And let’s say that these ancestors, now with the barrier that we’ll call a wall (and some of them on that wall defending it, called soldiers) and with that storage, that we’ll call a granary, have a bit more security. And let’s say that these ancestors now have two pots. One is a really good pot, but the other leaks but has a design on it that our ancestors quite like and they keep it now primarily to look at. If they suddenly must flee, it’s not the pretty pot they would take with them, but with their present security, and their leisure, they can keep the “worthless” pot and spend some time doing nothing but admiring it.
You can see that the civilization is starting to become a culture. Leaving aside the question why our ancestors would want to decorate the pot in the first place and why, having decorated it, they would get pleasure from looking at it very important questions about aesthetics we can simply say that objects like these exist and people made them. And all this required leisure which was the result of surpluses of food and safety.
Of course, this is all a truism but it’s important to remember none-the-less. Classical music is valued primarily for its artistic quality and to value something for that reason requires abundance: abundance of food, abundance of security, and abundance of time which is called “leisure.” It requires a society in which not everyone has to be a farmer or a soldier, some people can be trained to play the piano and other people can be trained to build pianos and more people can be trained to listen to piano recitals. Perhaps that last one surprises you, “. . .trained to listen to piano recitals” but it’s not any different than people learning the rules of baseball so that they can follow the game; no one just comes on a baseball field and instinctively knows what’s going on The same is true of a piano recital. Movements within suites, parts of sonatas and rondos, themes and variations, these are sophisticated matters and require some instruction to understand. Anyone can sit through a piano recital just like anyone can sit through a baseball game, but
without some instruction in the music attending the recital is like going to a baseball game, passing along the hot dogs and beer, and just enjoying the sunshine. A lot is missed.
Classical music has to be learned and practiced. It’s not casually, or intuitively, pickedup. Professional baseball players didn’t achieve their level of performance the first time they put on a glove. Yes, there’s natural talent but even the most naturally gifted are also coached. So too with classical musicians. They are taught their craft and the need for teaching gives rise to teachers and teachers organized together become schools. Classical music, in the West, in China, in India, is nurtured in schools and has been for millenia. The schools produce professional musicians and it’s these professional musicians who set the standards of music making against which performances are measured. Of course, amateurs play classical music, there are community orchestras, choral societies, and individuals playing and singing for their own pleasure and the pleasure of friends, but again we have a parallel with athletics. There are lots of amateur baseball leagues, but the standard for great baseball isn’t set by the weekend baseball players but by the professional players, the members of the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Cardinals. There are lots of volunteer community orchestras, but their performances don’t set the standard for the music making, instead the standard is set by the Berlin or New York Philharmonic orchestras and the world’s other great ensembles and soloists. Whether or not the particular pieces are virtuosic, the virtuosi performers model the performances.
Because traditionally the aristocracy has had the greatest leisure, classical music has traditionally been an aristocratic form. Not that the aristocrats are the musicians themselves, although they sometimes can be Samudragupta (c. 335-375), the second ruler of India’s Gupta Empire, played the veena (an ancient plucked instrument, generally of the guitar family). Archduke Rudolf of Austria (1788-1831), the youngest brother of the Austrian Emperor Francis II (1768-1835) and Beethoven’s greatest patron, was a fine pianist and composer. Princess Friederike of Prussia and Margarvine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1709-1758) was a respected composer of operas and chamber works as well as a fine lutenist And of course there’s the example of the Roman Emperor Nero (37-68) who competed in the 67 Olympics as a singer and lyre player and won every competition (of course). Aristocrats have funded the environment in which classical music thrived. The famous concerto delle donne, was an ensemble of female singers in the employ of Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1533-1597). Richard Wagner (18131883) would never have been able to complete and perform his Der Ring des Nibelungen without the patronage of Ludwig II, King of Bavaria (1845-1886). Closer to home, Martha Rivers Ingram (b. 1935) not only significantly contributed to construction of Nashville’s symphony hall, but twice rescued it from bankruptcy.
It’s an aristocratic form because aristocrats pay for it. But Mrs. Ingram isn’t a titled aristocrat, she’s a skilled, and generous, businesswoman. But her gifts testify to the form aristocracy takes in the last century and a half: wealth. And this wealth has an aspect that might surprise you. When we go to a concert, or a recital, or an opera, or a piece of theater, we’re behaving, if for a couple of hours, as people of wealth, as aristocrats, wealthy with leisure. For a couple of hours, because of our surplus of security and food, we’re able to do nothing but listen to music because we find it beautiful. And that’s extraordinary, particularly thinking of the world our ancestors lived in. And one of the characteristics of classical music is that we think that time is well-spent. Of course we can think the same thing about attending a pops concert or a
hootenanny, and that similarity unites the classical concert with those other events, but there is a difference and this difference is extremely important: it’s economic.
Pop concerts (and here I’m going to include folk concerts that are ticketed) do what economists call “create wealth,” more simply put, they make money. The performers are paid, the venue is rented and the money raised by sales of tickets and related merchandize (and this “related merchandize” has become an important part of the income stream) combines to exceed the cost of the event. It’s profitable. The classical concert rarely is. This has not always been the case. Particularly in the 17th and 18th Centuries, European opera houses not associated with royal courts were businesses. Francesco and Ettore Tron, members of Venice’s aristocratic Tron family, opened their Teatro Tron to ticket buying attendees in 1637.(Ex.V.38) Soon Venice had six commercial opera houses, sustained by Venice’s infamous carnival season (the party started on the First Sunday of October and ran to midnight the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday; it’s probably best to think of those Venetian operas as similar to Las Vegas dinner theater
Example V.38112
Imagined re-construction of the interior of Teatro Tron (Teatro San Cassino), ca. 1637 shows). Hamburg followed with its Opern-Theatrum in 1678 (Handel premiered his first opera there, Almira, in 1705) and other European cities opened their own commercial theaters. In the United States, three opera houses competed for audiences in New Orleans: the Théâtre
112 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teatro_San_Cassiano_reimagined.jpg, creative commons usage.
d’Orléans, opened in 1815 and rebuilt after a fire in 1819, the Camp Street Theater, opened in 1824, and the St. Charles Theater, opened in 1835 With a seating capacity of 4,100, The St. Charles was one of the largest theaters in the world and the greatest theater in the Western Hemisphere [Ex.V.39].113 All of these were commercial ventures presenting European operas (works by Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Verdi were performed) with European singers. They operated more or less successfully until the Civil War.
Example V.39
New Orleans St Charles Theater, c. 1840.
But this changed at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th Century. Classical music, and particularly opera and symphonic performances, required subsidies both for the
113 On March 13, 1842, a coffin factory behind the St Charles Theater caught fire and the blaze spread to the theater, burning it to the ground. It was rebuilt, but on a much more modest scale. It burned again in 1899, was rebuilt in 1902, and the much reduced building was finally demolished in 1965 for a parking lot.
performances themselves and the buildings in which they were performed. The Sunday, NewYork Daily Tribune, October 21, 1883, is instructive.114
Example V.40
Diagram of the box holders in the Grand Parterre, Metropolitan Opera, 1883115
When the Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1883, the New-York Daily Tribune ran a full page covering the event, including diagrams of the boxes and box holders of the Grand Parterre and First Tier levels. The building and organization was funded and owned by a consortium of philanthropic New Yorkers and many of them had their own boxes in the theater. The list is a roster of the most prominent families of the Northeast. Jay Gould (1836-1892), one
114 “Opening of the Italian Opera Season. The New and the Old Homes of the Lyric Drama, the Metropolitan Opera House and its Predecessors Social Features of Opening Night”, New-York Daily Tribune, October 21, 1883 https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1883-10-21/ed-1/seq-9/ 115 Ibid.
of the most controversial men of the period and the money behind New York’s Tweed political machine, owned the theater’s visually most prominent box, No. 2. No matter where you were seated in the theater, you’d see the Gould box right next to the stage. His financial rivals, the Vanderbilts, had boxes Nos. 28 and 30 (Willian Kissam Vanderbilt I, 1849-1920), Nos. 34 and 35 (William Henry Vanderbilt, 1821-1885), and No. 17 (Cornelius Vanderbilt II, he’s the one who built “The Brakers” mansion in Newport, Rhode Island). George Peabody Wetmore (18461921), Governor and later senator from Rhode Island, owned No. 4, right next to Jay Gould. Sophia Augusta Brown Sherman (1867-1947), one of the most prominent hostesses in New York and a descendent of the founder of Brown University, was in the box owned by her husband, William Watts Sherman (1842-1912). John Jacob Astor IV (1863-1912), great-great-grandson of the founder of the family’s fortune and who died in the Titanic, owned No. 24. His mother, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (1830-1908) who famously ruled over New York society, was in No. 19. On the level above, the slightly less prestigious First Tier, Theodore Roosevelt’s uncle, James A. Roosevelt (1825-1898) owned No. 55 and Henry Gurdon Marquand (1819-1902) financier, art collector, philanthropist and President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was across from him in No. 22. J. P. Morgan (1837-1913) and Joseph William Drexel (1833-1888) were bitter business rivals. With boxes on the same side of the horseshoe, Morgan in No. 56 and Drexel in No. 38, they wouldn’t have to inadvertently see each other during a performance.
The Metropolitan Opera ran a $600,000 deficit after its first season (about $16,500,000 in 2024 buying power)116 and it has pretty much run at a deficit ever since and has required subsidies to continue. Why were, and are, these subsidies given? How are they justified? The men in the paragraph above were the same generation, and frequently the same men, who also partnered with New York City and gave and that’s the appropriate verb, “gave” because this was before the imposition of the income tax and the tax incentives for charitable contributions that came with it significant funds and collections for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the New York Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Zoo and significant additions to the city’s universities and churches.117 They did this not for the public relations benefit that concept had to wait until after World War I to be invented but because they believed these institutions, and ones like them, were ennobling. It was their humanitarian duty to create and support them and make them accessible to the public. In the case of music, they believed, or at least believed that they should believe, the world’s greatest music, performed by the world’s greatest musicians, dignified those who listened. Its existential excellence justified its expense.
This idea, modified by the times and eventually encouraged by tax codes, continues to animate people who donate to support classical music. Perhaps the most recent example is David Geffen (b. 1943), who gave one hundred million dollars to New York’s Lincoln Center in 2015.118 Classical music is an aristocratic form not only because of the requirement of leisure to
116 “Metropolitan Opera” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Metropolitan-Opera-Association
117 For a discussion of these projects see: Mike Wallace, “Chapter 12, Acropoli”, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City, 1898-1919, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017
118 Adam Hetrick, “Avery Fisher Hall to be Renamed for Music Mogul David Geffen After $100M Gift”, Playbill, February 16, 2017; “How David Geffen’s $100 Million Lincoln Center Gift Came Together”, The New York Times, March 12, 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/arts/music/how-david-geffens-100-million-lincoln-centergift-came-together.html. “Lincoln Center Receives $100 Million From David Geffen”, Philanthropy News Digest, March 5, 2015, https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/lincoln-center-receives-100-million-from-david-geffen
experience it but also because of the requirement of an aristocracy for its financial support. Ironically at least in the hard accounting books of profit and loss unlike pop music, which generates wealth, classical music diminishes it.
3) Emotional content is conveyed through form, or form contributes to the emotional content of the music.
The third part, "emotional content is conveyed through form, or form contributes to the emotional content," is the most difficult of the three aspects to explain. It can be quite sophisticated and complex and we'll look at it more fully when we talk about excellence in our last chapter but now we're helped, perhaps surprisingly, by two of the most significant musicians of their centuries: Dolly Parton and Guillaume de Machaut.
Parton
119
A songwriter (both as a composer and lyricist), actress, entrepreneur, philanthropist, winner of eleven Grammy Awards (and nominated for fifty), a recipient of the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, twice nominated for an Oscar and once for a Tony Award, recipient of Jeff Bezos' (founder of Amazon) "Courage and Civility Award" (an award which caried with it a onehundred million dollar prize), Dolly Parton (b. 1946) is one of the most significant Americans of the second half of the 20th-Century and into first half of the 21st. A native of the mountains of East Tennessee, upon graduation from high school Dolly came to Nashville to make her mark on County Music. She did and never left. I've spent much of my professional life in Nashville and
119
Close-up of Dolly Parton, Tweet: @WhiteHouseHstry, January 19, 2024; close-up of Machaut from "Amour leading his children Sweet Thought, Pleasure and Hope to Guillaume de Machaut,” by Master of Bible of Jean de Sy (1372-77)
Example V.38
Dolly
(b. 1946) and Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377)
I've never heard even the whisper of a rumor of anything slightly bad about Dolly Parton. She is deeply respected and truly loved. When the Tennessee State legislature was about to pass a bill authorizing funds for a statue of Dolly to be erected in the capitol, Dolly requested that the bill be withdrawn, tweeting, "Given all that is going on in the world, I don’t think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time." She's even modest. [Ex.V.39]
Example V.39
Dolly Parton, Tweet, February 18, 2021
In the late 1990's, Parton's play on country music radio stations began to flag. When a friend mentioned that a survey of her fans showed that they had a strong interest in hearing her perform blue grass music, she decided to cut a blue grass album. Although Parton had been raised with blue grass music and had included individual blue grass songs in her concerts and on recordings, this was to be her first album solely devoted to the genre. It was a business decision to keep her work relevant and profitable; if you’re in popular music you have to stay popular and to stay popular the sharp musician must have a sense of the market and if she’s anything Dolly Parton is sharp.120
Parton wanted to write a lead song for the album. Putting aside the actual plant, Kentucky bluegrass (poa pratensis), Parton thought about the irony of the name, "blue grass." Grass isn't blue. It's green. What else isn't what it is? Parton played with this business of deception and opposites and inversions, something in rhetoric called antithesis, and created a lyric about a broken heart. “The Grass Is Blue” became the title song of her 1999 album. At the 43rd Annual
120 Jim Bessman, "Parton Sings Bluegrass for the Fans," Billboard, the International Newsweekly of Music, Video, and Home Entertainment, p. 34, September 15, 1999.
Grammy Awards it won in the Best Bluegrass Album category and the cut “Traveling Prayer” was nominated for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.
It's a brilliant lyric: rivers flowing backwards, swans hating water, green sky, blue grass all leading to the poignant final couplet of heart break. Parton takes what could be maudlin sentimentality and raises it to thoughtful and sophisticated poetry. It's exemplary. It's art.
I've had to think up a way to survive
Since you said it's over
Told me goodbye
I just can't make it one day without you
Unless I pretend that the opposite's true
Rivers flow backwards
Valleys are high
Mountains are level
Truth is a lie
I'm perfectly fine
And I don't miss you
The sky is green
And the grass is blue
How much can a heart and a troubled mind take
Where is that fine line before it all breaks
Can one end their sorrow just cross over it
And into that realm of insanity's bliss
There's snow in the tropics
There's ice on the sun It's hot in the Arctic And crying is fun And I'm happy now And I'm glad we're through And the sky is green And the grass is blue
And the rivers flow backwards And my tears are dry
Swans hate the water And eagles can't fly
But I'm alright now Now that I'm over you And the sky is green And the grass is blue
And I don't love you
And the grass is blue
But it's not classical music. It’s pop, of the blue grass subcategory, and immediately we have an example of pop music that’s also artistic music. That itself is important, but why isn’t it classical? Parton combines her lyric with a very nice, serviceable tune set with the four chords that typically populate pop harmony: tonic, subdominant, dominant, submedient. Although there is a nod to the text's irony in the final deceptive cadence (where Parton ends on a submediant chord instead of the customary tonic), there's nothing about this music that suggests inversion or opposites, that business of rhetorical antithesis. Any text with the same metric rhythm and rhyme scheme would fit the music just as well. Here, the form does not contribute to the emotional content of Parton's lyric. It doesn't distract from it, but it doesn't aid it either.
For musicians, Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377) ranks with Mozart and Bach as one of the most important figures of our tradition. As a poet, to the French his rank is similar to Chaucer’s for English speakers. In the political history of the era, he served as personal secretary of John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia (1296-1346) and was with him when he was killed at the Battle of Crécy121 . As a composer, Machaut was also the first to write extensively both liturgical works and secular pieces, his secular works continuing the tradition of the troubadours
121 John was one of the most remarkable men of the Middle Ages. Although he lost his sight when he was about forty, he was tasked with directing troop movements at Crécy, which he could hear (John was allied with the French against the English). When told the battle was turning against him, he directed his men to lead him to the center of the most intense fighting, commended his life to God and asked his retainers to take care of his son.
and trouvères, what today is called by historians the “cult of courtly love.” His setting of the sections of the mass with consistent texts (called the “ordinary of the mass”, as opposed to parts of the mass in which the texts change daily, called the “proper of the mass”) is the first example of a composer setting these texts together as an artistic unity. This is the “Notre Dame Mass” written between 1360 and 1365 for use at the cathedral of Reims, where Machaut was employed and where he was buried.
Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) and Johannes de Muris (c.1290-1344), contemporaries of Machaut, both called the music of their day the ars nova, de Vitry in his 1322 Ars nova notanda and Muris in his 1319 Ars novae musicae. This “new music” was to be distinguished from the old music by its greater rhythmic sophistication and independence between the various polyphonic voices, the different voices frequently having different texts (which commented on each other philosophically) and markedly different rhythms. The music of the era is some of the most sophisticated, and esoteric, written until the twentieth century.
Example V.40122 Machaut’s “Ma fin,” begins in the last system of the first page and continues to the top four systems of the second.
122 Paris, Bibliothèque national de France MS A fonds fr. 1584. 479v-480r, reproduced Jordan Alexander Key, “My End is My Beginning: “Popular” (?) Music from 14th Century France: Part 3”, https://www.jordanalexanderkey.com/single-post/2016/08/13/popular-music-from-14th-century-france-part-3guillaume-de-machaut-c-1300-1377-rondea
Machaut’s “Ma fin est mon commencement” is one of twenty-two rondeaux that he wrote, the rondeau being one of the forms fixes the ars nova inherited from the traditional poetic form of the troubadours and trouvères (the others being the ballade and the virelai). It probably dates from the final decade of his life.[Ex.V.40]
Machaut’s text
Ma fin est mon commencement
English Translation123
My end is my beginning Et mon commencement ma fin And my beginning my end.
Est teneure vraiement
And this holds truly. Ma Fin est mon commencement. My end is my beginning.
Mes tiers chans trois fois seulement
My third melody three times only Se retrograde et einsi fin. Reverses itself and thus ends.
Ma fin est mon commencement
My end is my beginning Et mon commencement ma fin. And my beginning my end.
Like Parton’s song, Machaut’s text deals with antithesis, that business of reversals. But unlike Parton’s song, that antithesis includes the music itself, and even in one of the manuscripts on which it’s preserved, the way it’s presented on the page.
Machaut’s rondeau is in three parts. The top, the “triplum” carries the text. It’s accompanied by the second voice, the “cantus”, probably played by an instrument and both are above the “tenor”, also played on an instrument. The piece works like this: The top line is sung, using the first line of the text (“Ma fin. . .”). At the piece’s midpoint, this triplum sings the second line of the text (“Et mon commencement. . .”) but to the music of the duplim sung backwards. At that midpoint, the music of the duplim switches to the music of the triplum but performed backwards. The bottom line, the tenor, performs music up to the midpoint, then performs the same music, but backwards. Example V.41 is a transcription of the first twenty three measures, without the text. The double bar marks the middle of Machaut’s piece. At that point the triplum switches and begins to perform the music of the duplim backwards (green going to green), the duplim switches to the triplum but now backwards (blue going to blue) and the tenor reverses itself (red to red).
The music is literally the same forwards as it is backwards. And if the point isn’t clear enough, the scribe who is responsible for this manuscript includes a figure in the illuminated initial that references the “ouroboros,” a mythical creature that eats its own tail, it’s a design extending back to antiquity and continuing in popularity with the Celts and into the Middle Ages. [Ex. V.42].
123 Jordan Alexander Key, “My End is My Beginning: “Popular” (?) Music from 14th Century France: Part 3”, https://www.jordanalexanderkey.com/single-post/2016/08/13/popular-music-from-14th-century-france-part-3guillaume-de-machaut-c-1300-1377-rondea
Example V.41
Machaut: “Ma fin”, transcription of the first 23 measures.
Example V.42124
Left, Illuminated initial, Paris, Bibliothèque national de France MS A fonds fr. 1584. 480r, Right, Book of Kells, Dublin, illuminated initial, ca. 800
124 Ibid.
When Yale was assembling a hymnal for use in its Divinity School, there was a new text by Brian Wren (b. 1936) that the committee wanted to include. Like Parton’s “The Grass Is Blue” and Machaut’s “Ma fin,” Wren’s text had to do with the idea of reversal and the Christian teaching that Jesus’s teachings are understood “backwards,” meaning that the stories and sayings of his life are only understood through the story of the Resurrection; to understand the Nativity you need to understand the Resurrection first.
I was an assistant on that committee and since an appropriate tune couldn’t be found, taking as a model Machaut, I wrote one.[Ex.V.43] Although the harmonies aren’t reversable, traditional harmony won’t allow that, and the rhythms are changed to accommodate the text, the pitches of the tune are exactly the same forwards as they are backwards. The pitches: one, two, three, four, . . .nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, are reversed at the double bar: twenty-one, twenty, nineteen. . . four, three, two, one.
Example V.44
“Sing my song backwards” text by Brian Wren tune by Michael Linton
I don’t think my song is great art, it’s serviceable and interesting but it’s a piece intentionally composed within the tradition of classical music. Parton’s song is great art, or at least a very good piece of music, but it’s not part of that classical tradition, it’s a pop song, and it was successful as a pop song in reinvigorating her business. Machaut’s rondeau is both a piece of classical music and a great work of art, which is why it was considered worthy of preserving in the generations after his death and is admired now.
Is jazz “classical music”? Let’s test it. Is it supported by a “large body of written philosophical and theoretical literature?” A century ago it wasn’t. You’ll remember Charles Seeger’s comment that jazz was “simply filthy it was of the gutter and the brothel and wasn’t fit to pay attention to.” In the early 20th Century, jazz was regarded as salacious and indecent, and both were part of its attraction and revulsion; think of jazz performer Josephine Baker (19061975) famous for performing naked, except for beaded necklace and a string of artificial bananas
around her waist.125 But with the coming of the Big Bands and particularly the popularity of “swing” in the second half of the 1930’s and the performances of a generation of great musicians: Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and their orchestras, Ella Fitzgerald (who you will remember from Chapter One), Louis Armstrong jazz became much more popular and profitable and, in a great American tradition, with profit comes respect. Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert on January 16, 1938 (echoed by Duke Ellington’s 1943 concert there) is seen as a turning point in America’s reception of jazz. Jump nearly a century and there are now several generations of significant philosophical discussions of jazz and numerous detailed and nuanced theories of the ways the music operates. Yes, it is supported by that required “large body” of written philosophical and theoretical literature.
What about its value? Is it primarily valued for its artistic content and is it associated with a leisured class? In the later 1930’s and 1940’s, jazz was a commercially important kind of music. It was a kind of pop. But the economic prominence that jazz once had is now occupied by hip-hop, rap, and rock, with those genres commanding about 60% of the music market and traditional jazz about one percent.126 But jazz is still valued by its enthusiasts and universally recognized for its artistic importance. And it’s very much associated with a leisured class in two ways. First, jazz enthusiasts typically have large collections of recordings of jazz performances that they listen to and know well (we’ll come back to that in a moment). It takes leisure to listen, and a certain amount of wealth to buy the library of records typical jazz enthusiasts have. Secondly, jazz is heard in jazz clubs and jazz clubs are late night operations. If you have to be on a work site laying brick at six o’clock in the morning, you can’t be listening to jazz at a club until two a.m.
And the third aspect: in jazz is emotional content conveyed through form or does form contribute to the music’s emotional content? Yes, it does. The most important form in jazz is the twelve-bar blues and the way that form is manipulated by composers and performers is an important part of jazz performances. But as jazz connoisseurs listen to a jazz performance, especially if it’s of one of the traditional jazz pieces (typically called “standards”), they’re listening to the present performance through the memories they have of previous performances For many jazz musicians their improvisations are purposeful commentaries on the improvisations of previous performers and they expect or at least hope their listeners to understand what they’re doing (and this is where that collection of recordings I mentioned above is important). It’s a very sophisticated business.
Jazz is a kind of Western Classical Music. And it’s appropriately a part of the curriculum in Western music schools . This wasn’t the case a little over a century ago. It is now (the University of North Texas was the first institution to offer an undergraduate degree in jazz, beginning in 1947). Is hip-hop a kind of classical music? No. Not yet. It’s a financial power-
125 It’s important to note that much of the opposition to jazz during this period wasn’t race based. African Americans of the period, and particularly middle-class African Americans, opposed jazz recordings in their homes believing jazz demeaned the accomplishments of African Americans in the two generations since liberation from slavery. White Americans, and particularly Protestants, opposed jazz because of its association with speak-easies during Prohibition (and it’s important to remember that Prohibition was one of the most important planks of progressive populism and was a very popular amendment to the Constitution when passed).
126 “Share of total music album consumption* in the United States in 2018, by genre;” https://www.statista.com/statistics/310746/share-music-album-sales-us-genre/
house and possibly a creative one as well, but it hasn’t yet developed that extensive philosophical and theoretical base of literature required of classical music (although that material is growing) and doesn’t yet seem to be valued primarily for its aesthetic content. But hip-hop could become a kind of classical music, going through the same process that jazz did. The same thing could happen to rock.
IV
I think we’re now ready to go back to this chapter’s opening pages. When we’re talking about classical music we’re not engaging in silly self-serving flattery, like that waiter talking about my dad’s Kansas City strip steak or those “classic” golf tournaments, a dance of coded privilege and one-upmanship. In music, defining a piece as “classical” is simply the recognition of particular characteristics as opposed to others. And now in the 21St Century our culture wasn’t able to do so a century and a half ago because we knew relatively little about other cultures we’re in a position to recognize that “classical music” isn’t a characteristic of only some of the music of the West, or of a particular era of the West’s history, but also describes some of the music of China and India, since that music too shares these same characteristics.
But I’d like us to consider one more aspect this matter. “Pop” music is valued because it’s popular and that popularity is demonstrated in sales. But what happens when a piece of popular music isn’t popular anymore? What happens when it doesn’t sell? Does it become something else? In business, something that doesn’t produce profit, or assist in producing profit, is a liability and in one way or another it’s discarded. A piece that isn’t popular anymore, that doesn’t produce profit, is discarded from a publisher’s catalogue and if there are physical products CD’s, LP’s, music scores they are removed from its inventory and destroyed Performers who can’t get bookings are dropped by their management. A pop piece that isn’t popular anymore becomes a historic curiosity, something quaint, perhaps to be preserved in an archive, rather like a corpse is preserved in a tomb.
That’s a bit startling, “like a corpse is preserved in a tomb ” Let me give you an example. “The Old Arm Chair” is a ballad with music by Henry Russell and words by Eliza Cook. [Ex.V.45] It was published by the Wm. H. Oakes company in Boston in 1840. Eliza Cook (1818-1889) was a popular British writer, poetess, and early advocate for workers’ and women’s rights, and so highly esteemed that the liberal government of Prime Minister Henry Temple gave her a £100 pension for life in 1863 (for comparison William Wordsworth had been granted a civil pension of £300 in 1842). Her “Old Arm Chair”, published in 1838, made her a household name in both America and The United Kingdom and remained a well-beloved poem through the
rest of the century in middle-class homes. When she died her estate was valued at almost £6,000, which is about £968,000 today or about $1,267,000, a significant estate for an unmarried woman in the 19th century. Henry Russell (1812 or 1813 to 1900) was a similarly distinguished English
Example V.45
“The Old Arm Chair”, 1840
pianist, baritone, composer, and impresario. His setting of Cook’s text (published both with piano and guitar accompaniment127) was one of the favorite parlor songs of the 19th Century.
The text is a ballade to the chair in which the speaker’s mother died. Here are Cook’s lyrics.
I love it, I love it, and who shall dare, I sat and watch’d her many a day, To chide me for loving that old arm chair. When her eye grew dim, and her locks were grey I’ve treasured it long as a holy prize, And I almost worshipp’d her when she smil’d, I’ve bedew’d it with tears, and embalmed it And turn’d from her Bible to bless her child. with sighs; Years rolled on, but the last one sped, ‘ Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart; My idol was shatter’d, my earth star fled: Not a tie will break, not a link will start. I learnt how much the heart can bear, Would ye learn the spell, a mother sat there, When I saw her die in the old arm chair, And a scared thing is that old arm chair.
‘Tis past! ‘Tis past! But I gave on it now With quivering breath and throbbing brow; ‘Twas there she nursed me, ‘twas there she died; And mem’ry flows with lava tide. Say it is folly, and deem me weak, While the scalding drops start down my cheek; But I love it, I love it, and cannot tear My soul from a mother’s old arm chair.
This is a different world. We don’t “bedew” things with tears or “embalm” them with sighs, particularly furniture. We also don’t clip the hair of our loved ones when they die and weave them into jewelry, as was common of the age. The world of Victorian grief is more than a century removed from us; it is literally dead. And this once popular song is dead too. It can be part of an archive, it can be brought out and performed as a curiosity (Jerry Blackstone, who you saw earlier holding those Grammys, and I performed it on an April’s Fool’s concert when we were college freshmen), but it’s a curiosity like a mummy is a curiosity; it is not a living part of our world. We gape at it in museums and laugh at it at recitals.
When pop music is no longer popular it dies. It’s instructive to spend some time with the Grammy charts from the last century and loot at the “hits;” it’s like going through a cemetery and reading the headstones of strangers. Here’s Billboard’s “Honor Roll of Hits” from 1946.[Ex.V.46] With the exceptions of “Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” (which has taken a life as a Holiday season song), and two songs from Act I of Irving Berlin’s (1888-1989) Annie Get Your Gun, premiered that May, “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly” and “They Say It’s Wonderful”, most of the pieces are unperformed today. They may be admirable, as Johnny Mercer’s “Personality” certainly is (#14), but they’re no longer popular. Commercially, they’re dead.
Pop music has a shelf life; it flourishes and dies, perhaps to be remembered occasionally as it’s dusted off from archives, perhaps just to vanish. But it does not endure, just as no
127 For the guitar version see: https://www.loc.gov/resource/music.mussm2-sm1840-370920/?sp=1&st=image&r=0.497,0.147,1.046,0.63,0
Example V.46
The Billoard, “First Annual Music-Record Poll”128
investment endures in perpetuity. Classical music isn’t like that, and to a degree neither is folk music. The characteristics that define classical music testify to a music that is not esteemed for its fashion or valued by ephemeral markets. We’ve already seen this with Machaut’s “Ma fin,” a piece from seven-hundred years ago that we still admire and esteem. It’s too much, and probably irresponsible, to say that classical music, whether it is the classical music of the West, or India, or China, is “eternal,” because eternity is a very long time, but its worth is certainly valued for a long time. In this way, and it’s a very important way, classical music is the antithesis of pop and
128 The Billboard, January 4, 1947, Vol 59, No. 1, p. 13; https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-AllMusic/Billboard/40s/1947/BB-1947-01-04.pdf
its existence is a refutation of the values of pop music. Pop and classical music live in antithetical worlds.
129
But we must be nuanced. Again, it’s crucial to remind ourselves that not all classical music is good music and some pop music is fine art we have the examples of my mediocre hymn and Patron’s fine blue grass song but classical music is supposed to be artistically good and if pop music is great art that artistic excellence doesn’t matter much if the song doesn’t sell. It’s the artistic excellence of classical music allows it to speak to us, and move us, through the ages. The anonymous Christmas introit “Puer natus est” (dating from the 9th century), the Easter sequence “Victimae paschali laudes” attributed to Wipo of Burgundy (995-1050), Richard the Lionhearted’s (1157-1199) “Ja nuns hons pris, ” the four voice “Missa L’homme armé” by Josquin (c. 1450-1521), the prelude with which Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) opens his first volume of the Well Tempered Clavier a piece we’ll look at in some detail in our final chapter the 1803 “Eroica” Symphony by Beethoven (1770-1827), “Appalachian Spring” by Aaron Copland (1900-1990), “West Side Story” by the team of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), and Arthur Laurents (1917-2011), none of these pieces are dead. Some more recent than others, they all continue to move and inspire us. We’ll return to this and see how this is done in our final chapter.
Example V.47
“Music” (musette and oboes), attributed to Jean-François Roumier (active 1716–48) The Louis XV Room, Metropolitan Museum of Art
129 It’s an interesting question: Can the United States, a culture that places its greatest value upon money and above everything else esteems financial success, produce a thriving culture of classical music, as we’re defining it here? It’s a very important matter and can’t be addressed here, but it’s important to recognize that classical music, and the values it embodies, will always be deeply subversive to the American cultural values.