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arthurlewis comments on Is masochism necessary? - Less Wrong
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What is this claim based on? The fact that you hear a lot more about both today's pop music and the art music of the past than the art music of the present?
If you think that "the public" used to be interested in art music to anything like the extent they're now interested in popular music, you're under the wrong impression. Serious music has pretty much always been an elite pursuit. Composers of the past worked for elite patrons who wrote the history of their time that we read; whereas today's composers don't get on the TV news, because the people that are interested in their work don't have the kind of political power that kings, nobles, and clergy used to.
In any case, whatever the fluctuations in the relative social status of serious music devotees, I'm quite confident that there is more actual interest (measured in person-hours) in the music of e.g. Mozart today than there has ever been in history.
ETA:
Well, I love Berg's music (the Violin Concerto is sublimely beautiful). Great music is not at all dead, and I wish it were better respected. Especially in a place like this.
Not everyone could attend concerts, but I have heard many references to musicians performing music by the same composers in small groups in coffeehouses, taverns, and other gathering places. In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians. You could walk into music shops there whose main business was selling sheet music for people to perform at home; today, a city of the size that Vienna was in 1800 (200,000) might have 2 to 8 such shops (based on my knowing cities of about 50,000 that have one such store; and on the fact that Music and Arts, the largest chain of music stores around here, has 5 stores serving a population of 5,000,000 in the Washington DC area.) Some composers made a living by selling their scores. Despite the reachable market now being many times larger (perhaps 100 times larger), I don't think anyone can do that today.
I could be wrong. I wasn't there. And the question of how popular Mozart was in his day is not as important to me as the fact that Mozart and Beethoven are popular today, while Schoenberg is not; history has already given its verdict against the 2nd Viennese School. I don't say these things in order to offend you. I apologize for using inflammatory language.
Sometimes history moves slowly. During his life, Bach was best known as an organist; sure, later composers studied and loved his work, but it wasn't until the mid 19th century that he started to get the reputation that he has now.
I think komponisto is implying that there was plenty of popular music back then as well, but most of those composers/performers didn't enter the canon.
However, I think there's another factor at play here - "art music" experienced the same academization and post-modernization that we saw in the visual arts. Serialism, musicque concrete, aleatory composition - all these things pushed the boundaries of what "music" actually meant, going against popular sensibilities in ways that (and I could be wrong here) the "art music" of previous centuries did not. The idea of linear stylistic progression totally breaks down once you get to the mid 20th century, so if you want to construct a convenient narrative, you've got to grab onto popular music or jazz.
I think the Second Viennese School tends to get singled out, because they are the major overlap between "music that some devotees of 'art music' really enjoy" and "music that some devotees of 'art music' think is too bizarre." If you go earlier, Mahler has too many fans, and later, people like Xenakis don't have enough.
It's true that in the 20th century, art music became advanced beyond the point of being immediately accessible to most non-specialists. No one would deny this. But so what? Something similar happened in science as well: in previous centuries, any educated person could hope to understand the greatest work of the time, and even possibly contribute to it. Now, that's no longer the case.
This sort of progression is arguably inevitable. If people spend all their time refining some intellectual discipline, eventually, the results are going to require something like specialist training to properly apprehend. (That's not to say that casual listeners couldn't get a lot more out of advanced art music than they actually do, with suitable popularization efforts.)
I dispute this entirely, and attribute this impression to our historical proximity. If you lived in the 18th century and were a connoisseur of music, Mozart and Haydn would have sounded a lot more different from each other than they do to us today -- because we can contrast with what came after. In a century or two, the progression of twentieth-century music won't seem very different in kind from what happened in earlier centuries.
Again, that's not to say that something different didn't happen in the twentieth century -- but every period has its unique developments.
I thought someone would mention that. I think it's different. Schoenberg et al. were famous while they were alive. Their works were performed publicly, and adored by the cogniscenti, for decades. Bach grew into public favor. Schoenberg fell out of public favor. He had every chance the music establishment could give him, and still fell out of favor.
(BTW, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all made special studies of Bach's music in the 18th century; so I'm skeptical of the "Bach had no reputation as a composer" argument.)
Also note that the time between when Bach wrote the St. Matthew Passion in 1727, and when Mendelssohn "revived" it in 1829, was only 102 years. We've already had 100 years of Schoenberg.
Also note that Bach is always brought up in this context because he is such a notable exception in that way
I agree completely.
I don't think Schoenberg ever had public favor. He may have had the favor of the "elite" music audience, but, as I understand it, the public at large was listening to early jazz. Maybe this is my American bias; I'm not sure.
I see your point about Bach; I always had the impression that composers knew about him, but the masses didn't. I could be wrong. What were people in their homes actually playing in the 18th and 19th centuries? Whose music were they going to see? The question of whether or not "popular music" has replaced the music of the canonical composers from a cultural standpoint hinges on these answers that I don't have.
And this is still the case! There's been no "falling out of favor". On the one hand, you have elite musicians, who mostly admire Schoenberg; on the other hand, you have musical laypeople, who mostly don't. Same as it's always been!
You've already demonstrated before that you don't know what's going on in music today. Why do you keep making authoritative-sounding pronouncements on the matter?
He had a tremendous reputation as a composer -- among those in a position to know about his work. That wasn't a very large group.
No; I was contrasting Schoenberg with Bach. Given the chance, most people liked Bach. Given the chance, most people didn't like Schoenberg.
Schoenberg may be good for people with decades of specialized training. Having fashion dictated by those people with specialized training resulted in a peacock's-tail runaway selection, and the effective extinction of the greatest family of music in history. IMHO.
You can't have it both ways. Your faction can't be both the underdog and the triumphant party at the same time. If Schoenberg et al fell out of favor and ended up in the dustbin of musical history, then you can't complain about his influence. If, on the other hand, you think he is responsible for the "extinction of the greatest family of music in history", then you must concede that he is still taken seriously by those in the know.
Can't you?