This article at Edge.org is pretty interesting to me.
Classical music is such a funny thing...
It's a source of constant frustration to me that I never received sufficient formal education in music to better appreciate 'classical' music. Granted, 'classical music' is as loaded and useless a descriptor as 'pop' for actually describing the form or the content of the music. I suppose the most reductive definition for 'classical music' is music that is notated as a set of instructions for producing music (allowing for non-standard, procedural and stochastic systems of the 20th century, a la Xenakis, Cage, Cardew, etc.)
There's nothing in not being educated that prevents me from enjoying the music in the moment, but it is frustrating to me that the basics of harmony and its relationship to the 'classical' forms (sonatas, symphonies, etc.) were never presented to me in my early education. While I might enjoy a Mahler symphony's color and texture, it's melodies and tensions and resolutions, I don't really have any understanding of the underlying movements in the music.
Perhaps it's bratty to assume that this kind of education should be part of a basic elementary, middle and high school education but why not, really, if we are as a culture going to continue to place value in this body of work? Why shouldn't it be part of a basic education to understand how Western music evolved from early church music to romantic symphonies to serialism and non-determnistic scores? Why should we have some some basic understanding of how Indian classical music or folk forms throughout the world differ from the Western tradition? Is it not in some way as fundamental to culture as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Faulkner or Joyce?
(For my part, I took a class in college, but a 3 credit hour course in a single semester just doesn't allow you to get into a whole lot of detailed analysis...)
Likewise, the identity of the performer in classical music seems to be tertiary to that of the composition and the composer. Shades and subtlety of technique certainly exist but are far more difficult to pick out of the relative anonymity of the piece. Obviously, the performance has an effect on the listener, but it is not always easy to tell what it is about the performance that actually elevates it over another recording of the same piece - is it the technology or the method of recording? Is it the vigor in the performance or the restraint? Too allegro or not enough?
Of course the recording technology itself has a huge effect as well - with recorded works, you can start with the performer and always produce a definitive and recognizable work. The notion of definitive performances or interpretations even in classical music emerge, even as the un-notated figured bass of baroque music gradually became notated in 'definitive' manuscripts over time. It all seems part of a general shift in emphasis in our broader culture: less emphasis on works and the creative process and more emphasis on the persona of the creator. All roads lead not to Rome, but to the central campfire of McLuhan's global village where the personal, emotional and shared is paper to the rolling stone of linear, individual renaissance thought.
So, when so much of the audience isn't going to be able to tell the difference, or isn't going to necessarily be able to quite put their finger on what it is that makes a performance, why not pull off an elaborate hoax like that? Years ago, when I worked in the classical department of a record store (I was assigned there, I believe, mostly because I had some rudimentary hygiene, could string words together to form sentences and actually find stuff in bins that were organized in a marginally 'more complicated' fashion than the rock bins) I noticed that many of the people who would come in looking for classical music seemed less interested in the musical content than the form, that what they were actually looking for was ambient or incidental music. Extremely well defined and unambiguous melodies were also desired - Pachelbel's canon, anyone?
That said, I'm sometimes guilty of using it as ambiance as well - but I do make an effort to wrestle with the formal aspects of the music as well, sometimes with more success than at other times...
I wonder if my experience with education growing up in central Texas is different from that of the majority of the country, if students elsewhere were more exposed to the classical forms of music and the visual arts - then or now - than I was... It's certainly strange reflecting on those things that are important to me as an adult and how little value they held to the 'establishment' when I was growing up. I wonder if that's entirely coincidence - if there is an element of rejection/rebellion in that which I choose to place value in or if I'm really just wired a certain way and I just like what I like...