The myth of elitism: Part 1

In this series of posts, I hope to demonstrate that the accusation that classical/concert music is 'elitist' is largely a myth and to propose some of the reasons why it persists.  In this first entry, several accusations commonly raised in the public sphere are rebutted.

Performances are governed by draconian rules regarding social etiquette.

Those 'rules' being: be quiet when the action's going on and (usually) don't applaud between movements. Not much to ask really, as it's little more than an extension of normal courtesy.  Exactly the same as for the theatre; the cinema; the minute or two minutes' silence for war commemorations; the memorial silences that seem increasingly common at the start of sporting matches; listening to any kind of speech or lecture; school classrooms; meetings; exams; funerals; watching snooker, golf, archery, shooting, chess and tennis matches; when an infant is asleep; and numerous other occasions. I suspect this taps into a deeper paranoia inherent in modern culture: we don't like being told what to do, we don't like being told our affairs are less important than something else, and we have a skewed idea of what actually deserves our respect.  But is it really too much to ask that you don't make unnecessary noise when the guy performing for you is working so hard?

Music is a pastime of the rich/'posh' people and is not 'accessible'

I have a pet theory that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy and influences public opinion simply because people keep crowing this tired line.  Surely not for financial reasons?  Show me a pop festival that lasts for two months and at whose every concert you can get within ten feet of its stars for a fiver.  Show me how many record labels offer eighty minutes of music for £6, how many bands offer a student scheme for concerts with a generous discount, and how many of them also allow their gigs to be broadcast free of charge on public radio and over the internet.  How much pop music is available out of copyright for free on the internet and has a massive online library to facilitate this?  How many professional bands are subsidised by arts organisations in order to keep ticket costs realistic?

There is no actual good reason why concert-going and music-making need be the preserve of the wealthy or the upper-class (not that this is even the case anyhow). Plenty of young people go to concerts at the moment, and by 'young' we do actually mean under-35's, including students and teenagers, and by 'concerts' we do actually mean the sit-down-and-hear Beethoven-and-Sibelius type, not 'classical club nights' as have been on the offering in London lately.  Admittedly a great amount of 'art' music was originally commissioned by wealthy patrons, but that hasn't stopped its successful presentation to mass audiences for a period of over 200 years.  Notwithstanding facts such as the huge number of people who attended Beethoven's funeral, concert music has had genuine popular appeal and genuine influence in recent times.  To take just a few examples: the 'message' of Shostakovich's Fifth and Seventh symphonies to Soviet audiences; Rostropovich's impromptu performance of Bach as the Berlin Wall came down and Bernstein's Beethoven that followed it, with the words changed; and projects such as El Sistema and the East-Western Divan Orchestra.  Importantly, it does not seem to take sides based on political persuasion or salary-level  either.  A recent account of the unlikely friendship between Occupy New York protesters and attendees at a performance of Philip Glass' Satyagraha at the Met drew the following from its author: 'the repeated myth of opera being elitist is one of the greatest lies of modern consumerist culture'. The fact that Philip Glass, classical composer, stood up and made a speech in support of the protest, at the risk of arrest, is surely the single biggest disproof of the 'elitist' myth to result from this happening. 

Finally, exactly the same accusation can be levelled at many other cultural artefacts. To take two examples, 'Gangsta' rap relies on a knowledge of a culture the fine detail of which is unknown to the majority of people, with its own dialect and - frankly fairly misogynistic and objectionable - subject matter. The Wire, a massively popular and (quite rightly) lauded television series, which is largely set within this culture, makes no concessions to the lack of specialist knowledge of its viewers and presents them with plot threads approaching the complexity of counterpoint, yet is accepted as being part of popular culture due to its subject matter and the form of its media.  Surely both these examples demonstrate the inconsistency of the accusation - if elitism means excluding those without sufficient knowledge of the cultural artefact in question, I think these examples would qualify as much as Bach or Beethoven supposedly do.

Only the rich can afford instrumental lessons for their children.

My response to this is two-pronged: First, learning anything costs money. Do we regard learning to drive as elitist because of the costs involved?  What about electric guitar and other 'pop' instruments' lessons?  Second, if you are lucky there was, and still is, public funding for music education, so anyone who objects to individuals' financial situations causing 'elitism' in this way should really blame the accountants and politicians who sanction cuts to music services. 

Classical musicians are snobs.

Some, perhaps, but the majority are just trying to earn a living doing something they actually like (we'll ignore for now those rank-and-file second violinists who 'gave up music years ago') and have the training for.  They have the same degree of work concerns as the rest of us - and often the additional burdens of hectic travel schedules and self-assessment tax returns - tempered by the satisfaction of producing a good performance.  The fact that some may ignore pop culture because they don't have time for it is not a personality fault and should not be regarded as a superiority complex. A brilliant essay by Aldous Huxley ('On Snobbery') points out that an individual can be a snob about almost anything - and also be a snob about not being/having something, too.  As an aside, I do not recall ever being tailgated by an aggressive second clarinettist who believes the new BMW his employer has just paid £35,000 for makes him a superior species to everyone else.

Culture of the past is not relevant to today's populace.

A slightly more considered accusation.  And yet still wrong.  Firstly, it stems from the mistaken belief that people in the past were more genteel, or more intellectual, or were somehow profoundly different in taste and mentality to today. History suggests that they weren't.  Most good jokes from the last thousand years are still funny today, because our sense of humour hasn't changed. (It also begs the question as to why 'intellectual' music should be more popular in the past when the average standard of education today is astronomically higher).  Secondly, although not universally adored, it would be foolish to think that modern society has no interest in the culture of antiquity.  A television adaptation of an Austin or Dickens novel, or Downton Abbey, will draw an audience of millions. The History Channel is a viable commercial entity as are cultural documentaries on other channels.  British Museum exhibitions frequently come close to selling out. Shakespeare seems to still be doing well as a crowd-puller.  In any case, great art can, and should, be able to stand even outside of the period it was written in. I do not see that it is really necessary to have more than a rudimentary understanding of eighteenth-century culture to enjoy, say, Mozart's music on its own.

Nasty squeaky atonal music is where is all went wrong. Classical musicians only have themselves to blame.  

Yes, if those modern composers hadn't been so selfish and instead had kept writing nice tunes it wouldn't have come to this, would it? I sense a whiff of shifting the goalposts here. On the one hand the music is accused of being old-fashioned, out of touch, not relevant to the times; and yet when it moves with the times (and serialism and its children probably did genuinely reflect the cultural mood of the times - hell, they invented eugenics and nukes in the same period) it's still not good enough. To be fair, I suppose there is some truth in this accusation; all the serialists safely tucked away in government-subsidised university departments could ignore public tastes and even act with outright hostility to them, which wasn't exactly endearing.  However today's contemporary composers are working in a massively diverse range of styles and influences.  In any case, there is comparatively little public rejection of equal doses of dissonance in such fields as cinema (where, ironically, grindingly dissonant music is not only accepted but near-essential to horror genres) and the visual arts.

Things like orchestras and ballet and art don't deserve public funding because they aren't popular. Public money shouldn't be spent on them when it could be used to give us cheaper council tax/cheaper petrol/more police on the streets.

Putting aside the sigh that inevitably results when encountering an individual with this attitude (which can be summarised as 'if it's not important to me, nobody should get it') this is largely a circular argument. If they were 'popular' (even though there is actually a healthy level of interest) they would make enough money on their own to not need public funding.  Ironically, if this were the case you'd probably be going to concerts and whatnot so you'd spend more on this than comes out of your tax at the moment (bear in mind many people will happily shell out hundreds of pounds a year for football season tickets).  I suppose if you don't care about culture it's very difficult to make the case for spending on anything beyond mundane practicalities, but it really shouldn't be a cause of contention given the minute amount each individual actually contributes to arts in real terms - it's pennies. As is often pointed out, state grants for the arts actually make money for the Treasury through ticket sales and employment, which means that we should really be talking about them as investments, not subsidies. If you're still annoyed I suggest looking down the back of the sofa and you'll probably be able to 'make back' what you've contributed.

Classical music is elitist because it's for 'intellectuals'.

This brings us back to where we started and also on to the next post in this series, as it opens up a wider problem, namely stigma of displaying intelligence. It's also a stupid way of thinking. I find it no more acceptable to dislike somebody for being intellectual than it is to dislike them for wearing a turban or having an artificial limb (and in my experience all of these bigoted mindsets can often be found in the same individual).  If you dislike people with intelligence that much you should be happy to do without iPods, auto airbags, microwaves and a plethora of other things they have given us.  And for the umpteenth time, the fact that somebody has a PhD and a professorship and likes Bach does not prohibit you from having the same taste. You can take what you wish from music without actually needing to understand or debate the finer academic points of it.  Note that; firstly, the same individual may also like pop and rock music, and that some of said pop/rock has also been subjected to serious academic study - does that curse it as 'elitist' too?  Once again it is a circular argument: classical music is 'only for intellectuals' only as long as you keep saying so.