![]() ![]() So don’t ever take the easy way out of writing it off as just highbrow. From licking arses, to class warfare, to global tragedy. Not just the glossy, casual bits, but all of it. Adorno famously wrote that there could be ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ - but there was music, like Henryk Gorecki’s painful, desolate Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.Ĭlassical music is Life. Classical music is ‘Ode To Joy’ in A Clockwork Orange, and it’s Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue over Woody Allen’s black and white images of Manhattan.Ĭlassical music is Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which says something so universal about humanity that Mitt Romney used it at campaign stops - obviously not knowing that the composer was a gay, Jewish communist.Ĭlassical music is also the only music to comment on humanity’s greatest crimes and traumas. On top of all of this, classical music is also some of the most evocatively beautiful, challenging, violent, and complex music ever created.Ĭlassical music is Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey as the only appropriate music in existence to accompany the dawn of civilisation, the birth of knowledge, and science. Classical music is Stockhausen’s Helicopter Quarter, which is performed by a string quartet with each member in a separate flying chopper. Classical music is also Steve Reich’s tape experiments that led to the Beatles creating Revolution Number 9. So yes, highbrow music might be tuxedos, and serious men that tell you not to clap, and ballerinas receiving a cool $100m in the federal budget for a boarding school while every other art form starves.īut classical music is also open class warfare at the ballet. I guess that would be a bit like going to the ballet today and telling the ‘grubs’ (to use a Christopher Pyne-ism) of Toorak to shut up. The rich, elite aesthetes (who have taken over today) began to boo the performance – to which the audience in the cheap seats cried out “Shut up, bitches of the 16th Arrondissement”. Although the music was beautifully violent and the ballet choreography jarring and deliberately sexual (the whole thing is about sex, as so many classical works are), it was class that prompted the riot too. At the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913, the audience rioted. It is incredibly sad that classical music has now become the domain of the rich and elite. Your preconceptions about classical music be damned. If you’re not fluent in German, here’s a translation of Mozart’s lyrics: Let’s turn to Mozart, the music of cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.Ĭonsider, for a minute, one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s lesser-known works from 1782, a canon in B-flat major for three voices, ‘Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber’. There’s very little that’s highbrow about what we now call highbrow music. Classical music has been carefully sanded down into meaninglessness.īut really, classical music can be crude, and gross, and offensive, and generally, it is at its best when it’s all of these things. And it has become a kind of medicine that will magically make babies smarter, even if you play it to them while they’re still in the womb. It has become relaxation music for boring people. Classical music doesn’t even let you clap when you want to.Ĭlassical music has today become one of three things: it is a lullaby for an ageing, elite generation who want to display their wealth. Classical music is old, angry men in tops and tails. ![]() Just the words ‘classical music’ conjure up immovable preconceptions. The worst thing anyone ever did for classical music was label it ‘highbrow’. ![]() Here, Dan Golding defends highbrow music. #LOWBROW VS HIGHBROW FULL#This week, we’re publishing their speeches in full for your edification. ![]() Last week at the Highbrow vs Lowbrow Cultural Showdown, six of our favourite writers faced off to defend their preferred cultural forms. ![]()
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