Evolution of the Music Market; How Western Music Canon Relates to Westernization of the World

Evolution of the Music Market: how Western Music Canon Relates to Westernization of the World

Formation of the Western Music Market

Formation of open market for general public to consume music is one single point that sets Western classical music apart from the rest of the musics in the world. Nowhere else did society elaborate ways for multitude of composers and performers to compete between their peers in satisfying all varieties of people’s need for music. The issues of notation, music education, public media, music publishing industry, and technical progress in music instrument construction and manufacturing -‐ all contributed to the exclusivity of Western society in genesis of a public marketplace. And music here just followed the same historic process as the political economy: once the marketplace was formed, it started expanding over new territories in variety of ways, from military conquest to colonialism, until the modern global market has been established.

Just as most of the world’s states have been engaged into the global market by the banking system, industrialization, Western technologies and commodities, their cultures have been permeated to various degrees by the Western music culture.

Western music market is the centripetal force in the music culture of the world, and understanding its nature and functions is an absolute condition for grasping the dynamics of the historic momentum. What gave the music market power to mold the culture of at first separate Western European countries, then Western Europe as a region, and then colonizing the world?

The common answer that the Western music was implanted onto new lands by the political and economic power of France, England, Austro-‐Hungarian Empire and, later, Russia just scratches the surface. Throughout the world’s history the civilizations have conquered new territories and forced their culture on local inhabitants, but the traces of such influences usually are wiped off by time unless they prove their usefulness to the local people. So, what makes the music market useful in eyes of a regular music user, and Western music -‐ an attractive good at that market?

The answer to this question lies in the history of Western music. The biological need of a person in music is best satisfied, apparently, by personal consumption -‐ at least this is what historic and economic data demonstrates over and over. When people are offered choice, they like to exercise control in deciding what kind of music serves their needs at a given point. Before the 17th century the palace and the church musics did not offer choice: a

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citizen could not choose between two courts or between going to the church and not going to it. He could have chosen between different churches of the same denomination, but the kind of music he was likely to encounter there was essentially the same all over. The music of the court was authorized by the monarch, the music of the church -‐ by the ecclesiastical authorities. In both cases the music consumer had no other choice but to accept the music as part of serving to the king or being a good Christian.

Let us examine exactly how did it happen in the Western Europe that an average citizen became a participant in the music marketplace. The case of secular instrumental music serves as a good example. From Ancient Roman culture we know that instrumental music was used primarily for the dance and entertainment purposes. We also know that the “barbaric” tribes populating post-‐Roman Europe must have used folk music that was likely to include some forms of dancing.

However, from the 4th century Christianity started playing the role of shaping the Western civilization: the barbaric kings have been converted into Christianity, and in two centuries the bulk of Europe, including British Isles fell under Catholic influence. In the 6th century the church has defined its position against the heresies, becoming a unifying force for the people of Western Europe -‐ ensuring that they worshipped with the same ceremonies and the same language, Latin, and establishing monasteries as outposts of scolarly knowledge and literacy across the lands seized by endless wars and pillage. 1

However Christian church has been taking negative position towards pagan music, especially instrumental one, regarding it as dance and entertainment, from early times on. Saint Hierom, St. Augustine, St. Kliment of Alexandria or St. John Chrysostom "Golden Mouth", by whose efforts the Council of Laodicea in 365 A.D. instituted and defined engagement of deacon and singers in the Liturgy, whole-‐heartedly condemned "frivolous" and "lewd" dance music, and even more so, virtuosic instrumental music, seeing in virtuosity a greater threat to impress and seduce a person. They went at lengths describing diabolic association of unruly music. St. Kliment wrote that: "we must expel as far as possible from our bold-‐spirited disposition those tenderizing harmonies with their refined decorations, which covertly instill in people's minds addiction to luxury and dissoluteness. Let's leave this music to shameless debouches and lascivious crowds." 2

The rationale for this rhetorics comes from the 3rd century, when it was customary to hire prostitutes to perform music and dance for the events at the theater, the circus, at banquets and weddings. It is in this context St. John Chrysostom’s statement: “Where the aulos is, there Christ is not” should be understood. Similar attitudes towards secular instrumental music can be found in Judaic and pagan sources of the time. However, the reason why the church maintained this strong opposition throughout the Middle Ages was

1 Logan, Donald F. (2012) -‐ A History of the Church in the Middle Ages, 2nd edition. Routledge, New York & London, p. 3-‐36. 2 Shestakov, V.P. (1975) -‐ Ot Etosa k Affektu. Istoriya muzykal'noi estetiki ot antichnosti do XVIII veka. [From Ethos to Affect: History of musical aesthetics from Antiquity to the 18th century]. Muzyka, Moscow.

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the claim for exclusive intellectual control over music production -‐ in attempt to secure the central position in the cultural life of society.3

Courts were less prohibitive than the Fathers of the Church. Especially in Byzantium, where the Emperor was the nominal head of the Church from the 4th to the late 10th centuries, so that the Patriarch of Constantinople could not hold office without the Emperor's approval, ritual dancing was used in the cycle of ceremonies for the Emperor and his family. This cycle formed a counterpart to the cycle of the feasts of the ecclesiastical year, with instrumental music and dances employed in such events as the celebration of the birthday of Constantinople, when hymns were sung to the dance of the torch-‐bearers.4

Liturgical dance even penetrated into the Eastern Christian church, fortified by the ancient Egyptian tradition, taken up by the Coptic Church, and brought into northern Abyssinia in the late 4th century. The priests and deacons of Ethiopian Church participated into dance-‐like ceremonies with the accompaniment of drums, shakers and clapping. 5

In the Medieval West, instrumental music maintained a dubious status. The court music must have included dance forms at least as part of the vocal music. Thus, it is definite that the troubadour Rambaut de Vaqueiras (fl. 1180 – 1207) wrote the popular song 'Kalenda Maya' on an estampida, a dance-‐tune. However, the information on dance music in Middle Ages is scarce, with most data coming from the single source,, Johannes de Grocheo’s treatise Ars musicae (c. 1300). 226 It appears that many songs could have involved dancing in the chorus part of the song. During late Middle Ages the importance of dance increased in the festivals, like the May celebrations, where caroles, the ring-‐dances with sung accompaniment, became one of the chief attractions, bridging the court culture with the city culture. In urban communities secular music was likely to be performed during festivities: local saints days, marriages, spring games (maieroles) or harvest suppers. From the 12th century on such festivities were spread out through the calendar year.6

On another hand we have the illustration from the initial leaf of Psalterium Triplex from Reims (12th century) at St John's College, Cambridge, representing sacred and profane music, where King David plays a harp above, surrounded with the pictures of Pythagoras inventing music, reproduction of organ playing, and choristers singing from their parts -‐ against the bottom with a beast pounding a drum in a company of instrumental musicians, clappers, dancers and acrobats. The story from the Summa Predicantium by John Bromyard (d. c. 1352) explains this picture: few churchmen were approaching the city and saw a devil sitting on the city wall, who told them that he was resting there because there was nothing

3 McKinnon, James (1990) -‐ Christian Antiquity, In: Antiquity and the Middle Ages: From Ancient Greece to the 15th century. The Macmillan Press, Hampshire, p. 68-‐87. 4 Hughes, Anselm (1954) -‐ Early medieval music, up to 1300, Oxford University Press, London, p. 32-‐33. 5 ibid. p.47-‐49. 6 Page, Christopher (1990) -‐ Court and city in France, 1100-‐1300. In: Antiquity and the Middle Ages: From Ancient Greece to the 15th century. The Macmillan Press, Hampshire, p. 197-‐217.

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else to do -‐ the entire city abode his master -‐ as the churchmen entered the city, they saw every citizen engaged into dancing caroles. 7

In fact most of information we have today about secular music of common people of the Middle Ages comes from scolding reports of church authorities and pictures from the book illustrations. There it can be seen that players on bagpipes, pipes, tabor, rebec, vielle, lute and drum in groups from two to four accompany to the dancers -‐ none of the musicians reading music. The scarcity of the surviving instrumental repertory of the Medieval Western music also supports the idea of its oral tradition and improvisatory base: only few textless works and 37 dances.for the entire historic period.8

However, folk character of cultivation of the instrumental music cannot be taken as the only reason for the shortage of notation. The earliest notation of the European dance music is found in the French chansonnier from the late 13th century, Le Manuscrit du Roy (The King’s Manuscript), and contains eleven dances, eight of which being “royal estampies.” The next sizeable collection of dance music scores appears no earlier than the beginning of the 16th century, although many untexted pieces are found in the mid-‐15th century collection from Burgundian court, with at least some of them likely to be dances. 9

What this suggests is that the mixed reputation of the dance must have been responsible for the dance music staying in limbo. There is no doubt that dance was widely used throughout the Middle Ages, however the decided antagonism to it by Church undermined the production of instrumental music for the general public. For the entire period from the fall of Rome to the 14th century we have only two dances on record, carole and estampie. 10

This is an indication that dancing generally fell under the category of folk art during the Middle Ages, and usage of it was to a considerable degree restricted by the ecclesiastical authorities. The courts were more or less exempt from the religious restrictions, but then the court instrumental music was unavailable to the commoners.

There was no public market for the instrumental music in the Medieval West. Market is an infrastructure that allows buyers and sellers the exchange of goods, or of money for goods. Market participants consist of buyers and sellers who negotiate the price. The price paid establishes the value of goods and services. The need of a buyer is played against the price asked by the seller, and the result of their bargaining represents the profit margin for the seller and the value of a product for the buyer. Instrumental music of that period was not offered as a market product because of its illegitimate status imposed by the Church. Illegitimate products do not engage into market relations, because their distribution cannot

7 ibid p.206. 8 McGee, Timothy J. (1990) -‐ Medieval and Renaissance music; a performer’s guide. Scolar Press, Aldershot, p. 113. 9 ibid. p.121-‐123. 10 Lord, Suzanne (2008) -‐ Music in the middle ages: a reference guide. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, p.173-‐176.

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be open. Therefore, they are excluded from the economic development -‐ exactly what we can see in the historic picture of the Western Medieval music.

A situation where the king can allow himself to keep a group of instrumental musicians permanently at his court cannot be qualified as a music market, because there is only one buyer and very few sellers, all deprived of the right to bargain their price. A situation where few rich citizens can pay some musicians to play at a banquet does not constitute market relationship as well, because this activity cannot be publicly exposed without challenging the privilege of the king to enjoy his court music and the privilege of the church to dictate what is right and what is wrong.

Such challenge was likely to cause repercussions for a commoner that would have decided to spend his money to hire the court or church musicians for himself, during the early Middle Ages. Since selling instrumental music was not available on the market, then this music was not organized as a legitimate profession, and was not produced according to the market standards. Therefore, the “underground” semi-‐folk local musicians in business of serving the public demand in music did not generate overtime increase of productivity and effectiveness of their labor, and their business remained still. The music performance was executed according to the folk principles, within the local community, and no attempts were made to record the music or the dance.

The first comprehensive description of the dance steps for the most popular court dances was made by Domenico da Piacenza in De arte saltandi & choreas ducendi (c. 1450). It took a lot longer before Marco Fabrito Caroso pulished Il Ballarino (Venice: 1581) -‐ the first dance manual to include notated examples for some of the dances in the manual. 11

Publication of concise dance manuals proves that dancing has become a market product: that in the 16th century there were enough readers interested in how exactly to replicate a dance, that there were some standards of how to execute a particular dance in place, and that a number of professionals must have been involved in the dance business. First and foremost important condition of all of this was the change in the public status of dance.

Indeed, the church has eased its grip: Villancicos de Navidad, christmas songs accompanied with dancing, became common across Spain (under the surveillance of Spanish Inquisition). In 1439 Pope Eugenius IV allowed liturgical song-‐dance Los Seises done by the corps of choirboys on Easter and Corpus Christi at Seville’s Cathedral. In seven churches of Toledo, until the 19th century, the service included solemn dancing of the style of the Saraband and the Pavane. In 1462 King Rene of Provence staged an entertainment given on the eve of Corpus Christi that contained representative allegorical dances and combats. One of the most popular dance manuals, Orchésographie (1584) was written by the Canon of Langres, Jehan Tabourot, under the nickname Thoinet Arbeau. There is a 1561 record that dances were performed before the cathedral of Soissons. During the 16th century “sacred representations” of events from scriptures became customary, and utilized

11 Larsen, Matt (1989) -‐ Period Dance Sources: An Annotated Bibliography, Part I. The Letter of Dance, no. 1 .

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the genres of saltarello, pavane, siciliana, gigue, gaillarde and fiery moresca, with heel-‐tapping in Spanish manner. The official festivities of the canonization of Carlo Borromeo, at Lisbon in 1610, included mass dances. 12

Loosening of the church’s taboo removed obstacles for the wealthy commoners to copy the court’s fashions. Just as the ballet spectacles were presented at the Medici’s courts, or Elizabeth I engaged herself and her courtiers into dances collected from all over Europe, those citizens who could afford dance tutoring pursued social dances at their homes. In other words, by the 16th century the public market for the dance music was already in place.

What was responsible for this? First, legitimization of dance, and second, conviction that dancing was valuable. Where did this conviction come from? The influence of the court superseded the folk-‐like practice accepted by the commoners during the Middle Ages: the wealthy citizens have decided that it was more prestigious for them to imitate the court rather than to share the same music as lower classes used. This brought in the third factor -‐ increase in productivity that led to increase of wealth. When the Medici family introduced banking, this introduction of more effective form of financing not only made them rich, but also increased the net-‐worth of the local economy by providing the business opportunities to other trades within their community. The increase of business led to accumulation of greater capital within the economy, and necessarily led to the increase of the living standards of all the members. People started receiving extra gains, which raised the question of how to spend them. Formation of new market for dance was the answer to that question.

The same process that we observed in relation to the dance music applies to music in general: the public market for it has collapsed in the 5th century and was reviving some time from the 13th century, when the first evidence of ‘commercial capitalism’ appeared. Professional merchants started acting as middleman between producer and consumer, developing the know-‐how of closing the deals and building their reputation, as well as causing the genesis of infrastructures for law enforcement and mediation, crucial for the market growth. But it was only in the 15th century that Western European markets became fully functional -‐ with the development of the money market. Prior to that, both, silver and gold were in shortage, constantly shifting in their price, and coins’ weight and fineness varied considerably between different mints and years, preventing the market growth.13

Subsequently, before the 13th century the only buyers in the music market were the churches and the courts. After the 13th century the Hanseic cities could afford commissioning of music for special occasions. On the turn between the 12th and the 13th century the income per head in the most economically advanced European cities finally

12 Kinney, Troy & Margaret West (1914) -‐ The Dance: Its Place in Art and Life. Frederick Stokes Company, New York, p. 31-‐44. 13 Massa, Paolo (2006) -‐ The economy in the 15th century: preconditions for European expansion. In: An Economic History of Europe: From expansion to development, Routledge, New York, p. 1-‐6.

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approached the levels typical for the Roman period. Only by the 15th century Western Europe caught up with China, the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world in terms of welfare, technology and learning.14

During the 15th century the richest of the commoners could afford shopping for the music at the marketplace that still was serving primarily to the church, court and civic authorities. By the end of the 16th century European population started steadily growing, with 7.6% of the population living in cities, and first metropolises being formed: Milan, Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Paris, London and Lisbon, with population over 100,000 -‐ initializing the urbanization pattern. Technical advances in agriculture, windmills and waterwheels, metallurgy, building construction, navigation and cartography led Europeans to realize that they were in a position to provide themselves with the goods and services they needed. As a result all sectors of the economy, especially mining and agriculture, experienced growth, promoting increase in the living standards. 15

By the end of the 16th century the portion of urban population in biggest cities, that could afford shopping for music, became big enough, so that the ticket sales from public performances became profitable -‐ leading to the appearance of first forms of public concerts in the 17th century. Although this century was characterized by economic stagnation in the West, except England and Holland, an important change across most of European countries was adoption of the doctrine of mercantilism. Mercantilism amplified the importance of state control over the trade, pushing the state to take advantage of its neighbors by trying to export more to them than importing from them, and using force when necessary to get things the desired way.

Mercantilism encouraged politics of colonialism and imperialism, sharpening political conflicts and promoting wars, raising the importance of army and food supply. The chronic shortage of finances caused governments of richer countries to put in place bureaucratic administration systems to levy taxes. The endless search for new sources of revenue stimulated development of new economic policies. The governments were aware that raised private income helped to increase revenue from taxation, prompting a systemic and thoughtful approach to the economic matters. Mercantilism strongly supported the urban and rural middle classes, the landed aristocracy, the financial sectors and, in general, the rising social classes.16

Europe was taking over Asia in international trade, and taking lead with the living standards, was largely the result of mercantilistic politics of France, Holland, England and other colonial states, heavily relying on aggressive trade policies and broadening their

14 Persson, Karl G. (2010) -‐ An Economic History of Europe Knowledge, institutions and growth, 600 to the present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 21-‐29. 15 Bracco, Giuseppe (2006) -‐ European expansion in the sixteenth century. In: An Economic History of Europe: From expansion to development, Routledge, New York, p. 26-‐36. 16 Guenzi, Alberto (2006) -‐ European expansion in the seventeenth century. In: An Economic History of Europe: From expansion to development, Routledge, New York, p. 54-‐91.

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overseas operations. The technological superiority of Europeans on the sea made the international expansion of Europe lightening fast, with trade ships supported by the military fleet. Most economic activity went into drawing silver and gold from the colonies and trading them for manufactured goods and raw materials from the Far East -‐ bypassing the Near East. With their powerful galleons, the Europeans destroyed most of the Muslim shipping trade in the Indian Ocean and conquered the high seas, replacing the traditional merchants and capturing a large share of the intra-‐Asian trade. The increase in liquidity brought down the interest rate in a number of major financial cities, like Genoa or Amsterdam, where loans with 3% interest were common.17

As more Europeans were becoming affluent, the demand for music grew. Listening to professional performances of live music and being able to perform music oneself used to be regarded as luxury. From economic perspective they were luxury goods: the demand for them exceeded the rise in income -‐ the wealthier the consumer the disproportionally more he would buy. Through democratization of the music market music was turning into a normal good, characterized by proportional relationship between the demand and the income. In this process, demand in live music produced new, derived demands: demand for musical instruments, demand for music instruction, demand for music publications -‐ contributing to the growth, division of labor and specialization in the music market. Thus, the increase of demand for new music called for professional separation between the functions of the performer and the composer, Musicians capable of inventing new music were engaged more so in writing and less in playing music. 18

What we see in the course from the 17th to the 18th centuries is how the market development reshapes the music, transforming it into the music industry. “Industry” is defined as is the organized production of an economic good in mass quantities for the wide market. Industrial production is usually distinguished from pre-‐industrial one by presence of self-‐sustained and infinite growth, translating into significant gains in economic efficiency and sustained increase in both, population and per capita income. The nature of industrial growth is fundamentally different: the expansion of local and intra-‐regional trade result in integration of domestic, and eventually, international markets. The product is not concentrated locally, and is designed for a broader consumer base. With growing consumption the capital becomes more easily available and allows to sustain a continuous technological and institutional innovations. Subsequently, the production becomes technically more complex and requires greater competence, which establishes the demand for high skilled labor.19

17 Cipolla, Carlo M. (2007) -‐ Before the Industrial Revolution. 3rd edition, Routledge, London, p. 163-‐170. 18 Scherer, F. M. (2004) -‐ Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Princeton, Princeton University Press. p. 33. 19 Horlings, Edwin -‐ Pre-‐industrial economic growth and the transition to an industrial economy. In: Early Modern Capitalism, Economic and social change in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Prak, Maarten. Routledge, London, p. 85-‐102.

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Music industry during the 18th century was characterized by its trans-‐national outreach. The public interest was high for the music from different parts of Europe. The printed media allowed quick distribution of novel music ideas. Copyright laws appeared at first in England (1709), followed by France in 1789 and America in 1790. Touring provided a steady supply of live music events in all major cities and many smaller towns. The music instruments have been consistently modernized and advanced technically. The market was differentiated in progressively greater amounts of niches: symphonic orchestra, large ensembles, small ensembles, with further subdivision of specific settings of instruments, solo instrument with accompaniment, unaccompanied solo, choir, opera, with further division on buffa, seria and singspiel, ballet, etc.. Music production became progressively divided into more narrow specialization: composer, performer, impresario, librettist, lyricist, stage director, stage and costume designers, stage technicians, instrumental suppliers, constructors, technicians, teachers, coaches, critics, music publishers, editors and printers.

The old forms of production, such as court orchestras, were gradually abandoned during the second half of the 18th century. The aristocracy found it more economical and as prestigious to finance salons rather than full-‐time orchestras, not to speak of theaters. Occasionally, when there was a need for larger event, a noble patron would sponsor (often in partnership) the live concerts, usually delegating administration and marketing to composers whose music was going to be performed. Royal theaters reduced their operation. Their place in cultural life was taken by public concerts organized by composers and performers, charging admission for their own benefit, or held by one of the new public concert societies.

Musicians also gave lessons, had their own works published for sale to the public and accepted commissions and part-‐time employment. Musical salons remained the basis of musical life in major European cities. They provided the platform for the professionals to promote themselves, to develop relations with important dilettanti and be hired for after-‐dinner music and other services. Gala-‐concerts at the salons were held on all levels of society. The low wages made music affordable for quite wide strata of urban population. On another hand, musical career was open for all classes: the son of a forester (Gluck), or the son of a wheelwright and distinguished town official (Haydn).20

By the 1780s many European composers were pushed to actively engage in the open market, as most of the court orchestras were dissolved; including even such famous as Esterhazy’s Kapelle. The bourgeoisie salons, open to anyone who could afford the admission fee, became the preferred form of music production for many composers. Thus, the Yearbook of Music in Vienna and Prague 1796 19 named and described 25 music salons in Vienna. Often they employed the subscription model, such as Mehlgrube dance hall in Vienna, where Mozart was one of the first to take risk to organize subscription concerts for his own profit. The degree of his mercantile skills can be seen from his 1784 enterprise,

20 Baumol, William & Hilda (1994) -‐ On The Economics of Musical Composition in Mozart's Vienna. Journal of Cultural Economics 18: p. 171-‐198.

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when he rented a room at the Trattnerhof for three concerts, for which he managed to assemble the audience from 174 subscribers to make net profit of about 1000 florins.21

The advantages of free-‐lancing are obvious if to compare the profit from just three concerts to 150 florins annual salary Mozart received in Salzburg from Prince-‐Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo.22

Already in the beginning of the 18th century composers were free to compete in the open European market. France opened its music market in 1789, banning the royal licences and cutting down on aristocratic patronage. Moving from place to place in search of better employment was customary amongst musicians. Touring started becoming more and more common. Even those musicians who served for the aristocrats or churches were no t restricted by their employers to solicit commissions from other parties. Freelancing was progressively growing: about 25% of the composers born between 1650-‐1699, 35% in 1700-‐1749, 45% in 1750-‐1799 and 63% in 1800-‐1849 were engaged in free-‐lance composing. Similar trend applied to the performers, coming to the halt in the middle of the 19th century. In reverse, court and church employment showed decline, especially pronounced during the 19th century -‐ with under 20% of the composers being patronized by courts, and about 22% by the church (comparing to 60% for the composers born between 1650-‐1699).23

Already the 18th century showed a marked change in audiences for music. Several public gardens were opened beginning in the 1730s in London collecting audiences over 6000 people for an open-‐air concert. On the turn of the centuries the ball rooms became a new venue for mass admittance. During the waltz craze Viennese ball rooms could accommodate 50000 participants simultaneously. The exhibition concerts were pioneered by Berlioz in 1844, when about 8000 listeners gathered to listen to the 1000 performers joining their forces in choral symphonic music.24

The line of historic development from a Dark Ages’ semi-‐legal, by the Church standards, folk musician to the 18th century music industry is a direct response to the demand of the music market. The forms and institutions of music making that we have today have been shaped by the market forces. The view that market is somehow corrupted, evil and hostile to music art is ahistoric and irrational. It is very unfortunate that in cultural management this view has earned recognition, and even led to defining the goals of art policy as to protect an artist from the “blasted heath” of the marketplace and absolve of the necessity to

21 Tschmuck, Peter (2002) -‐ Creativity without a copyright: music production in Vienna in the late eighteenth century. In: Copyright in the Cultural Industries, Edited by Ruth Towse, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham Glos UK, p. 210-‐220. 22 Solomon, Maynard (1995) -‐ Mozart: A Life (1st ed.). Harper Collins, New York City p. 98. 23 Scherer F.M. (2001) -‐ The Evolution of Free-‐Lance Music Composition, 1650–1900. Journal of Cultural Economics 25: p. 307–319. 24 Scherer F.M. (2006) -‐ The Evolution of Music Markets. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture,Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 123-‐145.

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delve into “the greasy till” of commerce -‐ to cushion the artist by public funding in order to let him freely experiment and “be creative”. 25

Such goal is destructive in relation to the very nature of music communication and goes against the entire historic process of evolution of the Western music, in violation of the very foundation that gave an edge to the Western music as opposed to other forms of music, and made Western music so appealing to wider audiences. It is not the artist that has to be defended against the market -‐ it is the market that has to be defended against the cultural managers. The only thing that such management does, it fills up the market with defective produce that is placed at a more favorable economic position against those artists who work to satisfy the public need in music.

Music Market and its connection to the Music Canon

Yet another entity, closely related to the music market, that needs defense is the music canon. The term “canon” here stands, like in other arts, to mean a stable set of models that are authorized for production of new works, their usage, their interpretation and evaluation. For the users “canon” is exemplified in the collection of art works chosen by the authorities and accepted by the general consensus. “Music canon” means the set of works believed to be masterpieces and taken as a reference models to measure other works against. “Canonic composers” means the authors of those works, who are considered important for the historic development of music, and are taken as model figures in relation to the new composers.

It is exceedingly common to find presentation of canon as an obstacle for the “normal” historic development of music. The Cambridge History of 20th century Music follows this trend. Thus, Leon Botstein in the overview of the century writes that by the end of the 19th century “the incipient canon became increasingly resistant to facile expansion” by the new music. This he explains by the fact that “the repetition of the familiar led to the gradual exclusion of the new”, so that the receptivity for the contemporary music by the audience became compromised. He complains that “it is strikingly hard for music written after 1945 to make the transition to a canonic status”, and sees a problem in the situation that the criteria for canonic status in music still are based on the autonomy of musical meaning; “the act of listening is understood normatively as possessing only marginal connections in terms of meaning to words and images”.26

It appears that there is lack of clarity in the music literature on the part of what constitutes music canon and how it is related to the music practices. Canon cannot resist

25 Fitzgibbon, Marian (2001) -‐ Managing innovation in the arts: making art work, Quorum Books, Westport, CT, p. 2. 26 Botstein, Leon (2009) -‐ Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy. In: The Cambridge History of Twentieth-‐Century Music. Ed. Nicholas Cook, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 40-‐ 68.

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the new music. Neither can it block the ear of the listener from “getting” the contemporary music. The avant-‐garde music cannot become part of the canon by the definition -‐ because it opposes the canon and does not have anything to do with the conventional idioms. Canonic status has little to do with the autonomy of musical meaning, and by no means prevents auditory grasping of the music work.

Historically, the term “canon” originated in reference to the Judeo-‐Christian religion. The word literally means “rule” or “ruler” (a measuring stick) in Greek. As a term, the original meaning of “canon” has to do with a “clearly defined number of writings in a nearly fixed text form” that is presented as “one codex and used as a cohesive, structured whole”. In this sense the term “canon” was introduced around the 4th century AD. The process of canonization of the Holy texts took long time, from the 6th century BC to the 6th century AD, and related to the separation of Christianity from Judaism. The fixing of the formal final structure of the canon was conscious, not random, and occurred during the 4th century AD. From there on the term “canon” has implied the notion of a foundation of faith for the community that provides itself with a structure.27

In this capacity of conscious distinction between authentic and corrupted material, that is crucial for the matter of faith, “canonization” was applied to the Western music during the late 8th century AD as part of the package of cultural change. Charlemagne initiated an important political process of unification of Europe under the Christian faith, using religion to resolve the local conflicts of the barbarian tribes. Following the model of Byzantium, he wanted to restore civic culture and put much effort in pursuing administrative and monetary reforms. Education played a big part in his agenda, including preservation of Latin manuscripts, institution of tutoring at the court for himself and the royal family, reforming the Roman script and standardizing liturgical music for the Roman mass and office services.

Charlemagne should be considered as the originator of the Western music canon, because he set the goal of replacing all existing local variations of chant with the Roman chant. Canonization always involves filtering out unreliable, “apocryphal”, sources in favor of the authorized, “canonical” ones. This process took place some time during late Charlemagne’s rule or little later. The oldest surviving specimens of musical notation from the Middle Ages date back to the beginning of the ninth century, and there is a possibility that a fully neumated chant book was used at Charlemagne’s court. The transcription of the singing that prior to this was spread by oral transmission, in the manner analogous to Medieval epic poetry, must have fixed the musical text and marked an end of folk-‐like tradition and the beginning of the tradition of literacy which has proved to be crucial for the entire evolution of the Western music. The name “Gregorian” was added post-‐factum, in the 9th century, to reflect on the integrity of the melodies that were supposed to be conceived during the rule of Pope Gregory I, Bishop of Rome from 590 to 604, who then became credited for having ordered cataloging of music assigned to specific masses in the church calendar. For Charlemagne it was important that the Franks and the Gauls would

27 Zaman, Luc (2008) -‐ Bible and Canon: A Modern Historical Inquiry. Volume 50 of Studia Semitica Neerlandica, Brill, Leiden, p. 29-‐38.

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adopt a uniform way of singing based on the different tradition of Rome, and he wanted the initiative to be seen as coming from Rome. That called for abandoning the “corrupted” versions of chant and restoring the authentic ones -‐ notation was invented exactly to perform this function.28

The medieval canon codified the church repertory for music. Just as canons are fixed by religious, cultural or political authorities, repertories are fixed by performers and composers. If “canon” is the stock of models, “repertory” is the body of legitimized material musical structures in circulation. “Repertoire” is the collection of finished works that satisfy the canon and are constructed from the repertory. Gregorian chant has determined the development of Western music pretty much until the Seconda prattica, or Stile moderno, coined by Claudio Monteverdi and Giulio Caccini. The Reformation did not replace the musical idioms:. In the new hymns Martin Luther followed the folk models, emphasizing the metric features and using greater intervalic variety for melodic lines. The prosody of German language also contributed to more pronounced iambic metric pulsation of Lutheran canon music, while the bar-‐form made the music appear more “square” comparing to the chant in Latin. Calvinist psalms, on the other hand, used French, Dutch and English translations from Latin, with similar practice of keeping the stock of Gregorian melodies and generating new psalms by adding material from popular songs of the time. French prosody made Huguenots’ psalms more metrically and rhythmically diverse than German hymns. But aside small differences the 16th century music remained rather similar in its language across the catholic /protestant divide, often used interchangeably within worship. The musical design of the worship changed, especially in restrictive Calvinist canon, with its ban of instrumental accompaniment and polyphony, but the melodic style of music in liturgical use did not. Even smaller was the difference between the non-‐liturgical music, say by a Lutheran, Hans Leo Hassler, a Catholic, Orlande de Lassus, and a Huguenot, Claude Le Jeune.29

The political movement of Counter-‐Reformation caused updating of the musical canon of the Catholic church, initiated by the council of Trent in 1562–63 and directed at secular “lascivious” characteristics of vocal and instrumental music and practice of polyphonic elaboration that obscured the hearing of the sacred words. Post-‐Tridentine developments included establishment of the consensus that all means of persuasion, whether fine art, literature or music, were suitable for spiritual renewal. This prompted wide production of vernacular music, such as madrigals. The focus of the Catholic church on missionary work in the colonies prompted an attempt to restore the early Christian tradition of congregational singing, leading to the establishment of the Oratorian style. Laude were

28 Treitler, Leo (2007) -‐ With Voice and Pen: Coming to Know Medieval Song and How it Was Made. Oxford University Press, New York, p. 143-‐159. 29 Leaver, Robin A. (2006) -‐ The Reformation and Music. In: European Music, 1520-‐1640, Edited by James Haar, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, p. 371-‐400.

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commonly sung during the religious meetings. The Jesuit missionaries translated the prayers into local languages in the New World.30

Throughout the 17th century the differences between different national and religious music cultures kept growing. The entire Baroque period passed under the direction away from the tradition of cantus firmus technique, the melodic model of the Gregorian chant and consonant harmony of the strict style polyphony. From the perspective of music canon, the superlative imposition of new elaborations outgrew the basement: the repertories generated from the beginning of the 17th century on outweighed the Gregorian chant repertory by numerous factors. The massive cultivation of music outside of worship -‐ in spiritual concerts, ball rooms, opera, private home music making -‐ boosted development of completely new idioms that had nothing to do with the chant. The exponential growth of new expressive means was desperately calling for a new codification. Formation of the secular canon during the 2nd half of the 18th century was exactly the spontaneous fulfillment of this demand.

Technically speaking, the Classical canon was the 2nd canon, with Gregorian chant being the 1st. However, the rapid development of the new Classical canon started expanding retroactively, and in effect, “swallowed” the music that prior to that used to belong to the territory of the Gregorian chant. Prima pratica, opposite to Seconda pratica of the Baroque culture, was the extension of Renaissance culture, indebted to the idioms originating from the chant. Smoothness of the melodic line, ametric viscidity and modal harmony of strict polyphony relate much closer to the Gregorian chant than to Baroque music with its preference for chromatic harmony, genesis of tonality and meter, unprepared dissonances, extravagant jumps in the melody and escapades of rhythmic passages.

However the concert programs of the mid-‐19th century started including at first the Baroque names: Stradella, Tartini, L.Rossi, Rameau, F. Couperin, Jommelli, Hasse, and Graun. Then Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris and The Gewandhaus Orchestra ventured into the 16th century by performing the arrangements of the pieces by Orlando di Lasso, Giovanni Palestrina, Costanzo Festa, and Tomas Luis de Victoria. 31

Romantic composers invaded the domain of Renaissance music: Gounod, Brahms and Tchaikovsky took on the Palestrina’s style in their choral works. The next generation -‐ Taneyev and D’Indy -‐ perceived strict style as a general methodology of compositional thinking, and composed according to that philosophy across all genres. Both composers had big follow-‐up. D’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum de Paris and taught there, as well as at the Paris Conservatoire. Taneyev was the head and the prolific teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. His massive two-‐volume treatise, Convertible Counterpoint in the Strict Style

30 Monson, Craig (2006) -‐ Renewal, Reform, and Reaction in catholic Music. In: European Music, 1520-‐1640, Edited by James Haar, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, p. 401-‐421. 31 Weber, William (2006) -‐ The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-‐Century Orchestral Concerts. In: Peyser J. (Ed.), The orchestra: A collection of 23 essays on its Origins and Transformations. Hal Leonard Corporation, Milwaukee, WI, p. 361-‐386.

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became very influential in Russia. Taneyev, as well as d’Indy, propagated the music of composers before Palestrina, and the mission of the Schola Cantorum was defined as to forge a return to the tradition of Gregorian chant and early Flemish school -‐ reflected in d’Indy’s course of composition.

By the middle of the 20th century, with Messiaen’s resurgence of the isorhythmic techniques within the semantic framework of Neo-‐Thomism, the Classical canon have largely absorbed the bulk of the repertory associated with the Renaissance and Middle Ages polyphonic practices implementing the melodic material of the Gregorian canon. The evolution of the authentic performance movement from Walter Damrosch and Wanda Landowska to medievalists like David Munrow pretty much filled up the historic gaps and incorporated the early repertories into the modern day Western canon.

At this point the term “canon” refers to the set of models that are authorized for production of new works, and are embodied in the particular works which are frequently performed, recorded and discussed in music literature.

The crucial point that is completely missed in existing literature on the issue of musical canon is that the second canon is the direct creation of the music market. Historic development of the public market and historic development of the second canon coincide in every tweak -‐ until the onset of modernism caused the split of the market into “serious” and popular segments, collided them and marginalized, leading to the evaporation of the middle ground -‐ the music that would satisfy both criteria, of being popular and “serious” at the same time.

The turning point in the creation of the second canon was the conservation of the repertory two generations older than the current contemporary music. It became noticeable around the 1740s-‐1760s: music by J.S.Bach went into public oblivion, but Handel’s Messiah (1742) was one of the first works to stay in the repertoire uninterrupted until the modern days. The middle of the 18th century was characterized by the formation of music industry: intense process of separation of labor and professionalization of new music occupations, abrupt increase in production of new music, refusal from polyphony in favor of more speedy homophonic techniques of composition, urbanization of music making, inclusion of different social groups and classes into production and consumption of music. Industrialization is also characterized by facilitation and availability of transportation and speeding up and restructuring of communication of information to make access and navigation in the data pool easier for a member of the market. This is exactly what started happening during the course of the 18th century: governments began to collect and collate data and information on an unprecedented scale, and were assisted in this by the contemporary developments in mathematics that gave rise to the new science of statistics. The increased political stability of the European continent that made travel possible and relatively safe, encouraging tourism and the tourist industry. The first travellers were mainly English and French, but they were joined by Scandinavians,

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Germans, Russians, as well as subjects of the sprawling Habsburg monarchy. A new ‘consumer culture’ was on the rise.32

“Proto-‐industrial” state of music industry in the 18th century led to the full blown “industrial” formation towards the middle of the 19th century -‐ accompanied by the process of expansion of the musical canon in both directions, to the past (starting from inclusion of J.S.Bach) and to the future (with inclusion of the “music of the future”, by Wagner). Industrialization of major European countries went hand in hand with institualization of the music criticism that cemented the canon. Critical reviews of printed publications of music in periodicals originated at around 1760 in Germany, France and England and gradually became a common feature in a general readership press, that grew also in Switzerland and Austria, featured mostly in music magazines, scholarly review journals, and political newspapers. 33

The second canon can be defined as the expression of price setting between the market forces. Market defines the price, which is supposed to summarize all relevant information about a good. Canon is precisely the information that established the value of a particular “good” in the music market. Formation of canon was a spontaneous reaction of the buyers in the music market to the traded products -‐ reflecting on the ways the music was consumed, features in music that mattered and common shortcomings in the purchased products. The canonized music referenced the properties most important to the buyers.

One of the most immediate triggers for the formation of canon was exactly the defense against the substandard music produce marketed to the novice music consumers. Already in 1776 Sir John Hawkins complained about the vicious circle of supply and demand, instilling a corrupt taste in music, through concerts for the general public, where profane listeners “assumed the character of judges of what they did not understand”, putting the artists, who “lived by the favor of the public” in the position to accommodate the corrupted interest. This market pressure did not disappear after the institution of the canon. In 1895 Hugo Riemann wrote about the mercenary deal between the music teachers and the publishers, compromising the public taste. The customary practice of that time was for music publishers to give substantial discounts for the music that had low self-‐cost. Teachers then forced their students to purchase such music at the full price. Yet another common practice for the publishers was to pay to the teachers the referral percentage fee from every purchase from the catalog made by their pupils. Under this deal it was often the third-‐row patchworks that found their way into the homes of the beginner musicians.34

32 Davies, John A. (2006) -‐ The European economies in the eighteenth century, In: An Economic History of Europe: From expansion to development, Routledge, New York, p. 92-‐134. 33 Morrow, Mary Sue (1997) -‐ German music criticism in the late eighteenth century, Cambridge University Press , Cambridge UK, p. 20-‐23. 34 Ringer, Alexander L. (1994) -‐ Musical Taste and the Industrial Syndrome. A Socio-‐Musicological Problem in Historical Analysis. International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jun.-‐ Dec., 1994), pp. 79-‐92.

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Music canon served as a barrier for the substandard produce, serving the critical function. Joseph Kerman, in his “A Few Canonic Variations”, pointed out that just as repertory is determined by the performers, canons reflect the opinion of the critics. It is not a mere coincidence that the genesis of the second canon took place at the same time and in the same territories as the musical criticism. What was even more important, new criticism differed from the critique expressed in older music treatises by focusing on the makeup of a particular music work. Interestingly enough, that was not the sound of the work that was judged, but its score -‐ most cases of early criticism were reviews of new publications. The institutionalization of new canon was accompanied with the spread of inexpensive pocket scores designed for students and concertgoers. Thus, the issue of music literacy was at the heart of both canons, the Gregorian, and the 18th century market driven, with the difference that the latter involved the formal analysis, at least in the most general extent.35

The second canon was colored in strong Romantic tones right from the very beginning, when the musicians became conscious of the new development that certain music works by certain composers presented a special value that entitled them to be conserved and exposed to the public as models. The first person who explicitly expressed this view was E.T.A. Hoffmann, a great Romantic writer and a professional musician. He definitely set the direction for later authorities, from Schumann to Hanslick, in championing the figure of the composer, the field of instrumental music, and the music as the most elevated of all arts. Prior to that composers had not been regarded in any way more important than other musicians. Overall, employers esteemed dexterity over creative abilities, and looked at composition as one of many services expected from the musician. Romantic view featured composer as a luminary, above other kinds of men and musicians, dwelling in shrines and communicating to God (or devil). Hoffmann put forward the figures of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (presiding over the three) as first, what he called, “Romantic” composers (but probably meant “canonic” composers) for the value of their instrumental music. Instrumental music was preferred for its purity from non-‐musical influences, and greater capacity to display the perfection of musical thought.36

The values Hoffmann found in Beethoven’s music are indicative of the features listeners find attractive in canon and base their judgments in purchases of music. In the article “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” (1810) written for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Hoffmann contrasted Beethoven’s music with the showmanship or conformism of other composers, who follow the 18th century aesthetics of pleasing and entertaining the listener. Hoffmann appreciated the “seriousness” of Beethoven, writing music to tell something important “for real”, in an intimate manner, as sharing his dear thought with the listener on the matters of life, death, destiny, love -‐ all things crucial for everyone. “A deep soul seeks for intimations of that joy which is more glorious and beautiful than the joy of our constricted life”, -‐ Hoffmann stressed the consecration effect of Beethoven’s music, calling for deep entry into the world of music. Hence, the greatest value was placed on the 35 Kerman, Joseph (1994) -‐ Write all of this down: essays on music, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, p. 38-‐40. 36 Schafer, Murray R. (1975) -‐ E.T.A. Hoffmann and music. Toronto University Press, Toronto and Buffalo, p. 75-‐82.

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composer’s fancy: ability to pull out convincing characters and put them in life by creating events -‐ following the dramatic content rather than grammatical rules and idiomatic standards. Beethoven’s music was telling the story of “infinite longing” offset by infinite desire to rise, overcome the pain and blows of fate, and be in charge. Beethoven’s hero was the human aspiring to a position of control previously held by the Creator alone, wrestling with elemental powers and civilizing them. The theme of conquering nature must have been urban in its essence, and sympathetic to the idea of industrialization. (ibid.)

Instrumental music by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn transcended class affiliations and was prevalent at Viennese concert halls during 1790-‐1810. Beethoven was a key figure in winning the public respect and authority, which paved him the way to the cultural dominance he earned in the 1820s. His initial success during the 1790s, when he managed to differentiate himself from his peers, entailed an aesthetic reorientation away from an emphasis on lightness of texture, clarity, and pleasantness -‐ towards difficulty, complexity, expressiveness, and originality of thought. It is this placement of music that retroactively justified the music of late Mozart, so that the very works that were called “undesirable” during his time, now were pronounced great.37

The canonized music was special for its “seriousness”, conceptualism, dramatic content, realistic characterization, high idealistic stand and challenge to intellectual capacities of the listener. It was a novel set of features, easy to spot for the contemporary listeners, because such music required different type of listening -‐ analytical, suggesting repetitive auditioning of the same piece of music, listening with the score and even playing it by oneself, in some arrangement. Canon put forward the figure of the composer and set the score as a foundation for the composer’s authority. The closest collateral to music canon was the contemporary literary canon with its cult of Shakespeare, to whom Beethoven was often compared. Beethoven’s symphonies were assigned a perpetual value in the same way as Shakespeare’s tragedies: the inherent content of a work was seen as a deep complex concept that had to be re-‐enacted over and over again in new performances and new interpretations for fuller introspection.

Spontaneous evolution of the Romantic canon is the end result of a long chain of developments in the Western music market. When a product is offered at the marketplace, buyers gradually learn about this product, how it can be used, in which ways it is beneficial, how it is possible to utilize the product more effectively, which other products could be used concurrently, etc. -‐ what constitutes a product education. Sharing this information bonds consumers into a group, by creating awareness of their product use, and therefore self-‐identification and a group mentality, initiating the product-‐related discourse within the group. Canon is nothing but the resumé of all positive features the consumers like to see in the music product. Figures of Beethoven and Mozart have been used as the criterion of evaluation of a particular music work as satisfactory or unsatisfactory right from the start, by E.T.A. Hoffmann, followed by major European critics of the time, such as A.B. Marx, Rellstab, Fétis, Schumann, Odoyevsky, Castil-‐Blaze, Heine, Dwight and Berlioz.

37 Denora, Tia (1993) -‐ Beethoven, the Viennese Canon, and the Sociology of Identity, 1793-‐1803. Beethoven Forum, University of Nebraska Press, vol.2, p. 29-‐54.

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Haskell, Harry (1996) -‐ The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ

Why Beethoven became the staple of the canon and not Weber, Hummel or Wolfl -‐ all talented composers, holding themselves up to the highest aesthetic standard of their days, embracing the new “serious” attitude, recognized and popular at around the same time? The answer lies in marketing: Beethoven was more successful in distributing the “serious” message. The marketing gurus tell us that having the best product is not what decides the success with the public. “Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.” In the world of marketing there are no best products -‐ all that exists are perceptions in the minds of the customers. Successful marketing instills the impression of the product’s superiority. Competitive marketing addresses those perceptions and not products. The basic issue in marketing is creating a category your product would be first in -‐ applying the law of leadership: “it’s better to be first than it is to be better”.38

Beethoven was the first to be “live” composer who behaved and composed in explicitly “serious” way. There was no shortage of incidents by which he demonstrated that there was only one Beethoven and plenty of emperors. It was a calculated strategy designed to create a public image of the genius of immense worth, employed initially to secure the patronage of the Viennese nobility, and developed further as the strategy proved to be fruitful. Of course, there was an enormous talent and great skills in place, to begin with, but so was the case with Hummel or Wolfl, excellent pianists and composers. 39

At the end it was successful marketing strategy that gave an edge to Beethoven and set him as “the first” in the field of “serious” music. Once this point was established, every new addition to the canon was measured to the “number one”. There was the ever-‐existing intangible “everybody knows” principle at play. Researchers find ideological issues here, talk about authoritarianism and propaganda, but the matter is innocently simple: people always think in terms of “number one” and once they form a convention, it is usually there to stay. Very rarely conventions about superiority of products change, unless there is some drastic deterioration of the product. In case of cultural product, especially belonging to a museum, such deterioration is impossible -‐ products are way well preserved, hence the phenomenon of Beethoven’s superiority is just as virile today as it was in the 1850s.

Most puzzling issues observed in relation to the canon are resolved by looking at them from the economical perspective. From the 1910s on the field of “serious music” started freezing and eventually locked up. The body of music works performed in concert programs, and the list of composers acknowledged as "important", hardly changed. New composers had to fight for the place for their work within the canon. Canon became the model against which anything modern ought to be weighted. The comparison involved not only technical and aesthetic aspects, but emotions and morality as well. Anybody related to

38 Ries, Al & Trout, Jack (1994) -‐ The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Harper Business, New York, p. 3-‐25. 39 Denora, Tia (1993) -‐ Beethoven, the Viennese Canon, and the Sociology of Identity, 1793-‐1803. Beethoven Forum, University of Nebraska Press, vol.2, p. 29-‐54.

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music practices -‐ composer, performer, critic, or listener -‐ all shared awareness of standards of the canon: what sounded right and what did not; and defined their aesthetic judgments accordingly. Non-‐abiding to the canon meant exclusion from circulation.40

Of all the “classical” music publicly performed, recorded, and broadcast throughout the West, the bulk of it was composed before 1900. Even within the 20th century most of the widely performed and appreciated composers — Mahler, Bartok, Strauss, and Stravinsky —produced their best-‐known works before 1940. The works written after 1940s, with few exception, attract little public attention. A segment of better educated listeners might pay a tribute to a newer work, driven by a mix of guilt and duty, but would gladly return back to the classics. The growing availability of avant-‐garde music did not reverse narrowing of its appreciation. What seems to stand behind the loyalty to the canon is the social consensus of felt truth in music communication. The works that are witnessed to reinforce the experience of vitality and relevance are decorated with the shared sense of excellence. Each generation of listeners testifies anew. Canon, then, becomes an aggregate value of felt importance. It is not completely objective, it is subverted to extra-‐musical influences, but it is cumulative and progressive.41

Then the interesting question is: why does accumulation and progress of the valued works and composers halt during the 1930s? The last compositions included in the canonic repertoire are by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bartok, Stravinsky (before his move to the U.S.), Sibelius, and Rachmaninov. All of them were formed as musicians before the onset of ultra-‐modernism in the 1920s. And all of them did not rely on subsidies while writing their canonic works. The Soviet composers present a special case, because they were paid by the state. However the Soviet government before the stagnation era was shrewd in supervision over the new music’s popularity in masses, and had its own bureaucratic ways of calculating the “market value”, not hesitating in pushing the Soviet composers to write in a more accessible way, if the majority of the public had trouble grasping their music. After creation of The Union of Composers in 1932 and right until Stalin’s death in 1953 it was simply inconceivable for any professional Soviet composer to engage into art in sake of art. The entire institution of cultural management, comprised from the professional artistic unions, the Ministry of Culture [Narkompross 1918-‐1939] and the Department of Propaganda and Agitation in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, were designed to exercise surveillance and ideological control over the creative work of all artistic professionals on the territory of USSR.

William J. Baumol, who coined the notion of “cost disease” and became the chief researchers on its historic development in Western economies, reports that the musical economy in the Soviet Union “did not suffer from serious problems of financial deficits, yet received only limited government contributions.” The impression that the Soviet government generously supported music, so wide spread in the West, has no ground. In

40 Weber, William (2003) -‐ Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music. Common Knowledge -‐ Volume 9, Issue 1, Winter 2003, pp. 78-‐99. 41 Steiner, George (1989) -‐ Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 66-‐67.

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reality, only a fraction of productions was subsidized, while the lion share was covered by the earned income -‐ largely, box office receipts. The only exception was the music theater.42

The conservatism of music produced by Soviet composers, their adherence to tonal idioms and close relation to the audience, seen in the West as the attempt to show good will to follow the command of the communist ideological leadership, had a deeper layer into it. Indeed, the experimentally oriented composers, like Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Roslavets, Mosolov, Polovinkin, Popov or Deshevov were forced to stick to the traditional idioms. However, the truth of the matter is that they presented only a fraction of the compositional styles cultivated in Soviet Union. There were a lot more composers who adhered to the language of tonal functional harmony and spoke it without any enforcement, for mere conviction to its expressive capacities. To put it into perspective, the genre of mass song was as populated with talented composers, as the genre of symphonic music -‐ not to forget that most acknowledged Soviet symphonic composers have produced mass songs celebrated by masses allover USSR. Composers like Dunayevsky or Solovyov-‐Sedoi were no less professional than their “experimentally” oriented colleagues, and inside USSR they enjoyed a lot greater recognition and success amongst the audiences. Much of the conservatism and concern for the listener of the Soviet composers must be attributed to the market model of music production paradoxically adopted by the Soviet state in relation to symphonic and popular music.

Many researchers have noticed the fixed property of canon -‐ some even regarded it as some sort of aberration that disrespects the freedom of the composer, the listener and the performer. But to complain on authoritarianism of the classical music canon and blame it in the decline of classical music is not any different than to accuse the Oxford Dictionary in dictating what is right and what is wrong and abusing the speaker’s freedom of speech. Both, the Oxford Dictionary and the music canon, are the collections of models for the successful communication. The canon in music is the materialization of all conventional norms accepted for creating and interpreting music. Naturally, such convention is limited. It cannot include all possible configurations of sounds. It includes only items that are regularly used. These items exactly have been identified once the music users became historically aware: they explored the historic styles and established the limits beyond which the music stopped making sense. This border line was found to be the music before Renaissance.

Naturally, adding new entries into the canon becomes progressively more and more difficult. The same is observed in any codex, be it legal, behavioral or linguistic. Take language: how many words have been added to the dictionary in the 20th century as opposed to the previous centuries? It is hard to invent a new concept that would prove to be useful for the pool of people large enough to make an imprint on the convention. All forms of Western music distributed through market system are characterized by brevity of the listing that constitutes that music’s “hall of fame”. Thus, jazz music contains only 97

42 Rubinstein, A. J., W. J. Baumol and H. Baumol (1992). On the Economics of the Performing Arts in the Soviet Union and the USA: A Comparison of Data. Journal of Cultural Economics 16: p. 1-‐24.

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standards as a core of its repertory, and the bulk of them are dated 1899-‐1930, with rather abrupt cut off afterwards (i.e. 8 jazz core repertory songs composed in 1930 and only 2 in 1931).43

The attempts to identify the best popular music albums of all times demonstrate the same tendency. The period from 1965 to 1969 covers 40% of all featured albums, about 30% belongs to the 1970s, and 20% -‐ to the 1990s. Out of all the authors The Beatles' songs completely dominate the listing, with 4 out of 10 top albums., and overall estimated by 2,021 points, with the next closest Bob Dylan with 705 points, followed by the Rolling Stones with 527 points.44

The monumental historiometric study by Charles Murray outlines the limit of human accomplishment as the notion of the Western civilization that applies to the entire filed of culture, not only arts. Murray argues that the market for great art becomes saturated after a certain point, so that increases in the number of artists can no longer be expected to produce a larger number of important artists. The mechanism for this limitation is the same as in a record store that has limited amount of shelves available for a display of products. After all of the space is taken new records can be added by replacing the previous ones. Similarly, a society has a certain number of slots for great poets or painters at any one time. The market organizes the competition in such a way that there is a handful of leaders cut off the follow-‐up. Why would the record label invest into production of a new violinist star, if they own the rights for pressing more copies of the older violinist who has established a reputation of a king of the violin? Then, why would the consumers suddenly decide to try out a record by a new artist, if they have a chance of enjoying the record of an established authority? We all have a limited amount of time to listen to music, and so we “economize on our search costs” and go with what we know we like. 45

The underlying factor can be called a “greatness fatigue”: the audience has an elastic capacity for absorbing new information, which tends to reduce the greater is the informational density in the consumed work. The functions of comprehension, internalization and memorization of the material set the upper limit beyond which a work of high cultural merit cannot be absorbed. And this limit is not updated with the increase of the audience. An audience of 400 million people cannot focus on and recognize for posterity 10 times as many fine artists as an audience of 40 million people. 46

43 Crawford, Richard & Magee, Jeffrey (1992) -‐ Jazz Standards on Record, 1900-‐1942: A Core Repertory, Columbia College, Chicago, p. V-‐VII. 44 Appen, Ralf von & Doehring, André (2006) -‐ Nevermind the Beatles, Here's Exile 61 and Nico: 'The Top 100 Records of All Time': A Canon of Pop and Rock Albums from a Sociological and an Aesthetic Perspective. Popular Music, Vol. 25, No. 1, Special Issue on Canonisation (Jan., 2006), pp. 21-‐39. 45 Murray, Charles (2003) -‐ Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. Harper Collins, New York, p. 442-‐444. 46 ibid. p. 445-‐446.

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This difficulty of adding new stars as the market is expanding should not be regarded as the fault of the convention. Quite opposite -‐ the fault occurs when an artist communicates in violation of the convention. This is the simple but accurate answer to those who cannot understand why the century of pioneering and experimentation has not made any lasting impression on the public despite the massive use of all means of education and public media to promote the avant-‐garde values. And this failure should not be put on the account of “stupidity” of the general public. The audience holds on to the canon because the works that comply to it are meaningful, and the works that denounce it are meaningless to the audience. No education course sponsored by the avant-‐garde establishment has been capable of fixing this.

The ties between meaningfulness and market are already encapsulated in the very term “convention”: Latin “convenire” united the concepts of “togetherness” (“con”) and “venue” (“venire”). Marketplaces create conventions between sellers and buyers, which make their interactions meaningful to both parties. The same applies to the cultural products. Cultural goods are “experience goods”, using the term by David Throsby -‐ the origins of demand for the arts lies in the formation of taste and development of the “addictive behavior”, when the more the “tasteful” art is consumed, the greater it is desired. The cumulative consumption characterizes every historic form of commercial music. Cultural goods are subjected to rational addiction, because besides the direct aesthetic pleasure to the buyer they yield positive externalities: benefits incurred by the third parties contributing to the public “goodness” -‐ which may be demanded in their own right. This “diffused” value is not fully expressible in monetary terms, and is embodied in the musical canon, which secures the delivery of the symbolic messages to those who consume them. 47

Hence, meaningless music cannot make its way into the canon; in order to be consumed, at first it has to build up the “taste”, which is exactly controlled by the canon. Only then the music would receive the status of a public good. This is what makes artistic good more than simply utilitarian. And that is why it depends on convention and communication. Music performance venue becomes a marketplace where sellers meet buyers and negotiate the price for the next transaction. Musical goods entice by intangible experiences that stem from perception of nuances in music and knowledge of corresponding market information related to the aesthetic value. It is this intellectual component that is responsible for historic association of high music with educated audiences that has sustained up to modern days.

Classical music is married to the market economy. The rise of free-‐lance composer progressed in direct proportion to the rise of the middle-‐class audience, that was looking for new public concert venues in biggest European cities, such as London, Paris or Vienna. Economically, the new democratic audiences received cultural capital in exchange for their money. The listeners collectively owned performances: they made it possible for the entrepreneurs to organize the events of production of high artistic value, encouraging the

47 Throsby, David (2006) -‐ Introduction and Overview. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 7.

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artists to strive for greater and greater levels of mastery. Collectivity was an important condition here -‐ owning performances was unaffordable for an individual listener. 48

By the same token, the star-‐musician's fee, stimulating the musician's professional effort, could be paid only collectively by a big group of concertgoers. Collective consumption enabled free market competition between composers, performers and audiences. The monetary value was generated by interaction of the market forces: audiences competed, bidding for the highest quality live event, trying to attract the most skilled musicians; performers competed to reserve more prestigious and lucrative concert location; and the composers competed to secure commissions from the most influential performers and more profitable or important municipal, cultural organizations, or private donors, who still remained active towards the 20th century.

What is even more important, collectivity of music consumption was reflected into collectivity of musical semiosis. If before, a single aristocratic or religious authority could have been a sole “receiver” of the musical message, now successful reception depended on a big group of people, that all had to be coordinated between each other. This was the foundation for conventionality of musical thought and the ultimate cause for the rise of canon. Canon, market, free-‐lance composition and musical meaning -‐ all of these are links of the same chain.

To this chain should be added yet another principal link -‐ the format of live performance. Classical music originally became significant for the masses in the 19th century by symbolizing and offering the immediate experience of collective identity. Collectivity displayed itself in the most obvious way -‐ as a public gathering called to demonstrate how it feels to be a part of something. 49

The sense of togetherness became a prime vehicle for the dominance of canon and high hand given to the concerts where the concentration of canon repertoire was the greatest. Beethoven’s cult is exemplification of that experience of “togetherness”. Reference of every newly composed symphony to Beethoven’s symphonies is, in fact, evaluation of how much of “togetherness” is present in the work under question. But the width of the canon allowed for more encyclopedic set of referents. In order to measure apples to apples, other composers have been designated as row models for particular modes of expression. A lyrical piano work would be related not to Beethoven, but to Chopin. A dramatic opera would be referred to Verdi.

The pragmatic schemata of how the canon works in music consumption involves the list of model works, their authors, their styles, related genres, instruments, techniques of performance and techniques of composition, notation and notions of its interpretation. Two principal factors determine the constituency of the canon. The first one is the

48 Blake, Andrew (1997) -‐ The Land without Music: Music, Culture and Society in Twentieth-‐Century Britain. Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. 35. 49 Frith, Simon (2007) -‐ Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Wey Court East, UK p. 264

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overlooked matter of the music appreciation literature. It is cardinal in directing the audience, especially not musically educated, into “what is what” in the music that sounds around. Essentially, a music appreciation book is the codex of instructions for an individual telling him how to make use of the musical canon. Noteworthy, the creators of the appreciation literature during its hay days in the 1920s did not perceive the canon as “closed” and sealed -‐ to them it had future. 50

Closing of the canon is a doing of the composers who chose not to abide by the canonic idioms. Of course, compliance to the canon does not guarantee the inclusion in the canon -‐ it merely gives a chance of inclusion. However, the spiral of time occasionally does flip value judgments and leads to rediscoveries of the forgotten works. The addition of Vivaldi and Telemann happened rather late, during the 20th century. Performance of the music written in styles of the canonized composers has become one of the common themes in programming of live concerts and release of new records. It is quite possible that new names are going to become popular and taken as artistic models.

The second factor directly determining the canon is the control of the musical life that is supposed to be exercised by the music critic. Music critic was a crucial figure in institutionalization of the canon. His function can be compared to that of a priest -‐ to perform the sacred rituals of approaching the canon and relating its statures to the work in question, mediating between the listener, who is seeking for the authorization to appropriate that work, and the spirit of the canon. The critic could make or break the premiere of a composition. Thus, Bruckner is known to plea the Emperor Franz Josef to restrict Hanslick, at a time the leading critic in Vienna, hostile to Bruckner’s Wagnerian style, from reviewing Bruckner’s works -‐ when the Emperor asked what favor he could do for the composer.51

The formation and closing of the canon will look neither chaotic, nor aberrational, feeding the conspiracy theories of ideological wars, once the canon is perceived as a form of the market convention. All markets are characterized by their propensity to self-‐organize and progressively order themselves. How this happens is not that different from the evolution of languages -‐ by trial-‐and-‐error of great number of participants. In modern economics this process is analyzed with the help of evolutionary game theory. The way institutions accommodate a consumer’s preferences and beliefs is aggregated to take into account the individual behaviors of number of individuals, together with the constraints, beliefs and preferences by which they affect each other -‐ to set the population-‐level models

50 Chybowski, Julia J (2011) -‐ Developing American taste: A cultural history of the early twentieth-‐century music appreciation movement. ProQuest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, p. 15-‐28. 51 Ellis, Katharine (2001) -‐ The structures of musical life. In: The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-‐Century Music, Volume 1, Jim Samson ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 343-‐370.

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that link individual actions to outcomes for the population as whole -‐ to finally explain something that appears as a spontaneous order.52

From the economical point of view musical canon is a form of cultural capital, more specifically, heritage capital. UNESCO defines cultural heritage as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history”. 53

Musical canon is a particular asset that has been produced throughout few centuries of interaction between music sellers, and that codifies the information about the parameters the musical product should have in order to be in public demand. Canon is a function that specifies the output of a music industry. However, the peculiarity of musical canon is that it is an intangible asset: it cannot be physically sensed, yet it exists as a particular entity created through time and effort.

The historiometric research confirms stability and objectivity of classical canon. Paul Farnsworth pioneered correlation of analysis of surveys of musicologists and professional performers with the data representing the assessment of eminence from most commonly used encyclopedias and history books. This method revealed remarkable consistency in the differential distinction of the classical repertory and considerable agreement between the judgments of the traditional classical music “elite” and cultural reality -‐ proving canonic hierarchy to be “lawful” in a sense of a binding custom of social order.54

More recent revision updated and reassessed Farnsworth’s data to find out that despite few measurement errors, the differential renown of classical composers is expressed in a single latent factor that remains extremely stable over time and accounts for an impressive percentage of the total variance. 55

The economical perspective on musical canon is best seen through the framework of “sociocognitive dynamics” in a product market, elaborated by Jose Antonio Rosa, Joseph F. Porac, Jelena Runser-‐Spanjol and Michael S. Saxon. According to their model, product markets are determined primarily by dynamic consensual knowledge structures that execute two functions: define the goods being exchanged; and coordinate transactional

52 Bowles, Samuel (2004) -‐ Microeconomics: behavior, institutions, and evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, p. 45-‐92. 53 UNESCO (2003). Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. UNESCO, Paris. 54 Farnsworth, Paul R. (1969) -‐ The social psychology of music, 2nd edition, Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa, p.123. 55 Simonton, D. K. (1991) -‐ Latent-‐variable models of posthumous reputation: A quest for Galton's G. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, p. 607-‐619.

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relationships between producers and consumers within market networks. Sellers and buyers understand the market solely based on that knowledge of the products, which they both share. This knowledge binds them together as networked economic actors, stabilizing their equivocal transactions. Transactions are equivocal because sellers and buyers do not possess full information about each other’s preferences and capabilities. Sociocognitive market system allows market forces to make necessary adjustments and increase the market performance. The interaction between buyers and sellers gives rise to novel experiences and perspectives on product usage and marketing, thereby mutually shaping supply and demand.56

An important outcome of sociocognitive interaction is coining of the convention on how specific products are categorized. Such convention stabilizes the market by facilitating information flow, which expedites the assimilation of new products and new uses for old products. As similar products are added in a market category, the product conceptual systems become affirmed in their core attributes. This shifts the shared meaning of the product in the direction of reduction of differences between the new and old products. Therefore, in stable market systems, product category members are often perceived as essentially “the same”, making it very difficult for the late-‐entry producers to join the market and justify to the buyers the usefulness of their product in relation to the goods that are already offered in that market category. An example of this was the situation in the stable minivan market of 1998, when consumers found that the models from Chevrolet, Dodge, and Honda "all seemed the same," despite the differences in their engines. 57

This is exactly the explanation for the phenomenon of “frozen canon”, observed in the repertoires of the “serious” classical music with the advance of the 20th century. The new works, even when they had been composed in compliance with the canon, were viewed as too similar to those works that were already in the repertoire. The public did not see the reason why the new work should replace the old one in a concert program. In order to generate such reason the composer had to market his work in a way that would expose its originality and usefulness; the critic had to seal it; and the performers had to make the audience experience at the same time the adherence of the work to the “right” taste and the freshness of the new product. Such requirements were far from ordeal -‐ Debussy, Ravel or Scriabin were capable of consistently finding their way between Scilla and Haribda in their compositions, not being qualified as too “similar” to the classics or too “dissimilar” to the canon.

A market transaction is a local event that involves a single producer and a single consumer at a given place and time. Product markets, however, have to be regional entities that extend across time, space, and market actors. The transactions have to be reproduced over and over with new participants at various places in order for the market to exist. Such stability is achieved by means of “market stories”: pieces of anecdotal information authored by buyers and sellers that circulate in the marketplace orally and in related media

56 Rosa, Jose A. et al (1999) -‐ Sociocognitive Dynamics in a Product Market, Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue), p. 64–77. 57 ibid.

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to present the products offered at that market in a particular light. The market stories are important tools in building and affirming collective beliefs about the market category boundaries and quality orderings within these categories, leading to consolidation of consensus about the products. 58

For the classical music the function of “market stories” was played by the “music histories”. The appearance of first codices of “great composers” goes hand in hand with formation of the canon -‐ motivated by the necessity to define the raw models for the first students of newly opened public schools of music. Noteworthy that it took about half a century before the list took its ultimate shape -‐ some composers were dropped and some others added -‐ to form the collection of names that are included in the music textbooks of the 20th century.59

The surge of music appreciation literature in the first half of the 20th century and its rigorous implementation in the coursework of schools across the country can be viewed as the expression of general "sacralization" of classical music -‐ directly related to the canonic status. Authors of the textbooks, listening guides and periodicals promoted the ideas of the musical idealism to the general public in a way that would be simple and accessible, yet with the authoritative attitude, enforcing the value judgements without much explanation, or with biased rhetorics -‐ characteristic to religious interpretation. This sacralization has been an ongoing process of constructing the values that persist in the 20th century, reaching well beyond the classroom. During the 1890s-‐1940s the music appreciation movement forged a long-‐lasting ideological foundation with moral, intellectual and national political components -‐ ingrained today in the American culture as "common sense". 60

In the field of arts, characterized by great heterogeneity of products, markets are driven by the consumers. Markets tend to emerge spontaneously. and when they are suppressed, they typically recondition into ‘black markets’. Consumers of art prefer markets because of their efficiency in exchange of supply and demand, which owes to the availability of the product information in the market discourses. Cultural consumption leads both, to the customer’s satisfaction from the present act of consumption, and to the accumulation of knowledge and experience affecting future consumption. If the stock of ordinary goods reduces from consumption, the cultural goods, in contrary, accumulates over time and evolves in systematic manner (despite the irrational and intuitive nature of appreciating the art). 61

58 ibid. 59 Allen, Warren Dwight (1962) -‐ Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music, 1600-‐1960. Dover Publications, New York, p. 88-‐91. 60 Chybowski, Julia J (2011) -‐ Developing American taste: A cultural history of the early twentieth-‐century music appreciation movement. ProQuest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, p. 15-‐28. 61 Throsby, David (1994) -‐ The Production and Consumption of the Arts: A View of Cultural Economics. Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 32, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 1-‐29.

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The flow of market stories constitutes the public discourse crucial in fine tuning of the behavior of the market actors in the ever-‐changing situation of cultural exchange. The stability of the market is a direct result of the capacity of the market discourse to reflect on the minute changes in supply and demand. The volume and content of stories in any one market are indicators of a the stability of a corresponding market category. For the consumers, clearly defined product categories underlie the tacit knowledge that allows to navigate the assortment of products and services. As market categories stabilize, consumers focus increasingly on specific models and attributes of the category, while references to the category itself serve a less important sense-‐making role and fade away from the stories. 62

The demonstration of this tendency can be seen for example in the querelles that have taken place throughout the 18th century: strong anti-‐Italian polemics during the 1700s-‐1720s in London, further complicated by the rivalry of Handel (supported by Tories) versus Bononcini (backed by Whigs); the Querelle des Bouffons in 1750s in Paris, where the Encyclopédie’s party rallied to pose Pergolesi’s opera buffa against Lulli’s opera seria; or the war between Gluckists and Piccinnists that divided Paris during the 1770s by the polemics about the type of drama most suitable for opera. These collisions generated much critical literature published in the media as well as oral discussions in salons, entangling musical, political and literary discourses. At the heart of the controversy was the cultural issue of the concentration of elite population within London and Paris, stimulating formation of much more specialized service industries and cultural niches. The choice between metropolitan tastes, supported by the French and English Royalties and state structures, and cosmopolitan tastes, characteristic for Italian states, such as Venice, set the direction for wide public discussions. Both, Paris and London were consolidating the people’s resources, and growing into the megapolises that housed national cultural capital. The transformation into the consumerist society fed the cultural discourses in these cities throughout the 18th century.63

The market category of opera has been established in Italy during the mid 17th century and was expanded to England and France. As the opera industry has been shaped and stabilized, the consumer’s discourse shifted away from the discussion of opera versus other forms of making music to the discourses involving the matters of sub-‐categories within the category of opera: English ballad opera versus Italian opera seria, opera seria versus opera buffa, French lyric tragedy versus Italian opera seria, or Shakespeare’s drama versus Racin’s drama.

When new category emerges in the market, the discourse focuses on the comparison of the new category to the old ones conceptually linked to it. In the early stage of market development there is little agreement on the attributes, benefits, and usage conditions with

62 Rosa, Jose A. et al (1999) -‐ Sociocognitive Dynamics in a Product Market, Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue), p. 64–77. 63 Weber, William (2007) -‐ Opera and the cultural authority of the capital city. In: Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, p.167-‐171.

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which products in the new category must comply to be considered members in good standing. If a new product is perceived as a substitute for the older one, the discourse will aim at resetting the category boundaries, involving the comparison of the products, their reconciliation and integration of the new information into new, richer, conceptual frame. As the new category stabilizes, the knowledge related to it becomes tacit, and the discourse about it decreases. At this point this tacit knowledge is shared by all the market actors, and is used by them as a referent in interpretation of new stimuli.64

An illustration of this change is an opera reform undertaken by Wagner. His innovative method of stitching the vocal lines into the mesh of the orchestral voicing, fluidity of form restrained from finished traditional structures, and the leitmotif technique set to guide the listener in the programmatic content -‐ all of these caused wide discussions all over Europe wherever the opera market was present. As Wagner’s operas were accepted as a new category of operatic product, the discourse about Wagnerian style started reducing. New operas by Richard Strauss and Alexander Zemlinsky relied on the Wagnerian method, making it into a referential model. Then the Wagnerian convention became tacit, and the Hollywood film composers in the 1930s started using it as a common semantic denominator for dramatic movies to underline the characteristic features of the protagonists in the story and the development of the plot.

The product discourse in the market is a flexible highly reactive phenomenon. Establishment of a new product in the same market category as the old product can cause its acceptability by the consumers to change. Destabilization of a category is also likely to force re-‐evaluation of the products contained in it. “Good” members of a category can decline in acceptability without any physical change to their attribute values, whereas “mediocre” members might improve their standing also without any actual changing. 65

This sociocognitive dynamics is especially typical for the music market, where the history is full of examples of sudden ups and downs, usually explained in terms of changing fashion. In reality, in most cases fluctuations of value are caused by the entrance of the competitive product with extra functionality that generates new discourse and resets the market category. An example of such product replacement was the advance of Parisian operetta in Austria that supplanted production of new Singspiele and brought to life Viennese operetta.

On another hand, the product knowledge tends to become more rigid as the product becomes established in a stable market category, causing resistance to the information about new products. The status quo of an established product is shown to provide a certain degree of defense against the competition in eyes of both, consumers and producers. The research demonstrates a big difference in decision making between the novice and expert market actors. Knowledge might act as an obstacle on the way for the information about a

64 Rosa, Jose A. et al (1999) -‐ Sociocognitive Dynamics in a Product Market, Journal of Marketing, 63 (Special Issue), p. 64–77. 65 Garud, Raghu and Rappa, Michael A. (1994) -‐ A Socio-‐Cognitive Model of Technology Evolution: The Case of Cochlear Implants. Organization Science. 5 (August) p. 344-‐62.

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new product. The experts are able to learn more but learn less due to motivational deficits: when products are perceived as more new, experts rate their comprehension lower than do novices, yet when products are perceived as less new, experts rate their comprehension higher. This research suggests that experts may be unaware when their knowledge has become obsolete.66

This sociocognitive tendency is also very common in the field of music. “Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time” by Nikolas Slonimsky is filled up with examples of conservative rejection of new products. Of course, in most cases the amount of resistance to the change is not infinite, the evidence to which is that all examples except avant-‐garde music from Slonimsky’s list have earned their place in the repertoire and appear to us today as legitimate market products.

Understanding of the sociocognitive dynamics is important for evaluation of the state of a market. Thus, overall reduction of market discourse amongst the consumers of the classical market is a sign of a market failure. Shrinking of the market stories occurs when consumers lose interest in the products. At the present point what holds the Western canon in place is primarily the performance practice. The repertoires of the classics update the consumers on the issues of taste and value, and keep the reference for the new compositions as well.

Evidently, the market for the new serious music has been in total collapse for decades. The questionnaire of 1,560 composers of serious music residing in the United States showed that the median income from composing was only $168, while median expenses totaled $380. One third of the composers had no income from composing at all, while an additional 15% earned less than $100 gross. About three quarters of the respondents earned less than $1,000, with just 18 composers making incomes from composing in excess of $10,000. The average net wage was only $.98 an hour. By far the majority (65%) made a living not by composition but from teaching in an institution of higher learning. The respondents reported a total of just over 29,000 works composed, of which 8,350 (under 30%) have been published and about 1,700 (about 6%) have received a commercial recording. 67

This is a perfect picture of overproduction, sponsored by the academia, in total disarray with the supply at the market. The market discourse is almost completely gone, and the composer’s work resembles more graphomania than economic production. The typical responses to the question about the motivation amongst the composers were that the lack of reimbursement was compensated by the “psychic income” derived from the personal satisfaction from the creative process of composition: i.e. “The most important things in music are its creation and performance -‐ all other activities in the field of music are subsidiary or parasitic.” Marketing was also regarded by the majority of respondents as

66 Wood, Stacy L. & Lynch, John G.Jr. (2002) -‐ Prior Knowledge and Complacency in New Product Learning. Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 29, December, p. 416-‐426. 67 Felton, M.V. 1978. "The Economics of the Creative Arts: The Case of the Composer." Journal of Cultural Economics, 2(1): p. 41-‐61.

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secondary: “marketing a composition may often require so much time, patience and energy that a choice must be made between composing something new”. 68

This attitude is in sharp contrast with the canonic composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn. Therefore, it should come at no surprise that the modern serious composers at the best enjoy the fraction of the authority of the old market composers. Being part of the canon is irrelevant here: mere adherence to the canon constitutes commercial value. In 1919 Ignacy Paderewski became the first prime-‐minister of independent Poland based mostly on his musical credentials, while never being a canonic composer -‐ he was associated with international value by performing the classics. The value of canonic credentials was still appreciated after the war: President Harry Truman performed piano music publicly; President Richard Nixon appeared on the Jack Parr's Tonight Show (March 8 1963) playing his own piano composition; and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recorded Bach’s and Mozart’s piano concertos for Deutsche Grammophon in the 1980s. However, in 2010, President Vladimir Putin chose to play “Blueberry Hill” when he wanted to win publicity at the charitable event.

The market value has a chance of extending beyond the market and generating cultural capital in eyes of general population only when the music maker is engaged into positive discourse with the buyers at the music market. If there is no lasting relationship with the consumer, there is no market value in cultural industry. “Critical success” and “peer respect” are poor substitutes for the market value. When market value for the modern serious music is absent, a finished modern composer’s work can be easily substituted with any other modern composer’s work -‐ that is why the modern compositions are usually performed only once.

The true measure of market value, however, is exactly the plenitude of performances. The output format for music is the audition of a work, which always bounds to live performance (studio recordings are still the records of live performances). But there is a difference between “production” and “performance”: production encompasses many activities that went into the performance (studying the score, rehearsing, maintenance of an instrument etc.), whereas performance is an instance of display of the final product. Because the ticket system forces consumers to pay in advance, the only realistic estimation of the value of the live music product is reproduction of the performance -‐ the more repetitions of the program sell out, the greater the value. Moreover, since the purpose of a performance is to provide a "cultural experience" for an audience, then the experience can be accounted for the final product. Then, the accurate measure of the output of a performing company can be taken as the number of attendances over a given time period, which would represent the cumulative amount of newly produced “cultural experience”.69

If to calculate the cultural output of the orchestras and opera companies this way, then the value of the modern serious music would be even smaller than the current estimations.

68 ibid. 69 Throsby, David (1994) -‐ The Production and Consumption of the Arts: A View of Cultural Economics. Journal of Economic Literature Vol. 32, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 1-‐29.

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The modern day situation with conceptual music, as well as arts, is systemic oversupply. The entire art industry is organized to address the issue of great uncertainty about buyers’ reservation prices for any creative output. This is widely recognized in entertainment industries as the principle “nobody knows anything”: in modern art it is hard to predict whether a new product is going to be a smash-‐hit and a total flop. The reason for this is outright denial of the canon, accepted as the premise for the modern art after the war. Without the canon there is no discourse with the consumer, and therefore the outcome of the sale is completely unpredictable.

The uncertainty of the output’s market value combines with large sunk costs and makes it a bid for the producer to release a new product. An art business pays heftily to an expert in the field who is supposed to evaluate “in-‐advance” potential of an artist, based upon the knowledge about what failed and succeeded in the past. This expert acts as a gatekeeper dealing with the artists. Creative industries are characterized by the policy of “horizontal differentiation” -‐ building a product line (or catalog) of works claiming originality, which however can substitute for each other in eyes of the consumer. In this production model the artists offering their talents to the gatekeeper are in chronic excess supply. The gatekeeper seeks to judge whether the artist’s talent will match the advertising capacities of the distributor, and if that would do to cover the business’ opportunity cost. The standard practices are that the business would cover its marketing expenses, after which whatever income is left, it goes to the artist. However, the uncertainty of the value makes the distributor try to minimize the expenses on the artist’s exposure, and simply drop the “loser” product, and switch to the next in line. This makes the occupation of a modern artist commercially rather unprofitable. An important aspect of industrial organization in the U.S. creative industries is the incidence of non-‐profit organizations which try to help the industry to absorb the losses. However, the main absorber of the pre-‐planned losses is the artist who has to compensate for the lack of economic elasticity of his products by excess labor.70

The excess supply of the artistic labor has been documented for the creative industries throughout the history, and may be necessary as a structural condition of the arts’ growth. However, the last 30 years were marked with the greatest increase in the number of artists across all art sectors. Thus, in France, already, traditionally, overpopulated with artists, over the period 1982–1999 the number of artists nearly doubled; in the USA, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of increase reached 78%. In both countries, the numbers of artists grew higher than for the civilian labor force. At the same time artists were shown to earn less than workers of comparable characteristics in education, training and age, which was accompanied with larger income variability between artists, and greater wage dispersion. The skewed distribution of artists’ income was strongly biased towards the lower end. Yet despite obvious disadvantage of artistic occupation there is no evidence of significant withdrawal from the artistic careers. The avant-‐garde ideology is to blame, that made it possible to reverse the meaning of “success” and “failure”, so that commercial failure is 70 Caves, Richard E.(2006) -‐ Organization of Arts and Entertainment Industries. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 533-‐566.

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seen as artistic success, and commercial success is seen as artistic failure, and the only reliable criterion of value is found in the peer recognition. 71

The mutation of the music market induced by the avant-‐garde cultural leadership should be accounted for the special type of market, so altogether there would be four distinct stages of music market development, each characterized by its specific attitude to the canon, supported by a particular type of sociocognitive narrative. The difference between all four stages is best highlighted by the contrasts in the “value chain” of production of a music work, following the model proposed by John Hartley (2004). The “value chain” concept allows to trace the contribution to the final value of the product through the main stages of its production, which helps to make the business more efficient. For classical music the originator of the product is the composer, who shapes the music work into a comprehensible form, fixes it in notation, then passes it to the distributor (publisher), who delivers the score to the performers, who in turn, learn the music and turn it in the valuable cultural experience for the listeners. Performers, of course, are listeners as well, and accrue the cultural value from the work together with the passive listeners.72

The Gregorian canon defined cultural production of music in the pre-‐modern period (Middle Ages and Renaissance). The Gregorian canon was a genuine religious canon of the Judeo-‐Christian tradition. It regarded the value as divine and designed the production stages in strictly canonic manner, akin to church iconography, to preserve the sacred content of the music work and deliver it to the listener in its authenticity. During the times when the Gregorian canon was formed, the production model was believed to originate in God’s commandments revealed to the prophetic figures recognized by the church (i.e. Pope Gregory I), who then authorized the selected music practitioners to formulate the canonic means of making music (anonymous notators of the chants) based upon the liturgical music in use by the singers, under the supervision of the local church authorities. Then the notated music was put in circulation and made available for the composers to take patches of melodies from the codices and use them as the building material for their works. The technology of construction was controlled by the church authorities -‐ just as the music education, performance practices and interpretation of music by the listeners. In this model the consumers of music derived its value from the hands of the priest, the head of the local congregation.

It is of most importance to recognize the source of convention in the Gregorian canon: its convention does not originate from the consumers’ usage of music. Its convention is decided and imposed on the consumers by the power of church. Although the consciousness of a Medieval person was very picturesque, impressionable and easily suggestible, the perception of external convention could not but appear extraneous to an average consumer, not readily acceptable without the mediation of a learned authority, and

71 Menger, Pierre-‐Michel (2006) -‐ Artistic Labor Markets: Contingent Work, Excess Supply and Occupational Risk. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 765–811. 72 Hartley, John (2004) -‐ The ‘Value Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy. International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 7 no. 1 p. 129-‐141.

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not associated with everyday personal use. Music built on the Gregorian canon must have appeared to the Medieval commoners as at least to a certain degree scholastic -‐ important and valuable, but “beyond the grasp”. When the value of a product is decided by the third party, the consumer of that product does not fully appreciate the product, there is a measure of alienation between such product and its user, because the user does not really feel like an “owner” of such product.

As musical practice has shifted further and further away from the Gregorian base, with the rich idiomatic developments of the Baroque era and growth of the public market of music, the production cycle for the music work passed through great transformation. The market discourse between performers, listeners and composers has led to formation of genuinely public conventions for the new 18th century canon. Although its concept dates by the 19th century, so as its “pinnacle figure”, Beethoven, it would be inaccurate to tag this canon “Romantic”, because the base of it belongs to the music by Haydn and Mozart, and is distinctly related to the Enlightenment aura of Classicism. The most appropriate term to distinguish this new canon from the Gregorian one would be “classical canon”.

The starting point of the value chain in production of a work of the classical canon is not theological, but decidedly aesthetic. The controlling figure becomes a composer, who comes up with the idea of certain musical structures based upon the interplay of his taste, style, beliefs and ethical values, inspiration and an urge to raise a particular topic. The resulting configuration of musical structures becomes the material object of the trade upon its fixation into a score. The publishers distribute it, performers interpret it, critics judge it, and the audiences demand it (or not) -‐ everything is centered around the musical text embodied into the score. The value of the musical ideas of the composer is transferred into the value of the music structures, amplified by the enactment of the performer, recognized and identified by the critic and experienced by the listener.

Unlike the Gregorian convention, classical canon convention originates in the consumption of music -‐ in the effect of certain music structures upon the sensibilities of a listener. The experience of a music product here is inherently personal, involving a great deal of emotional response on continual basis -‐ as a kind of imaginary theater (even in strictly instrumental music), where different moods, characters and events change each other throughout the music piece. In this model, during the audition, the listener becomes “one,” the same with the music. Integration with music instigates the sense of owning the music product: the listening experience becomes similar to the experience of drinking a very delicious glass of wine. In both cases, the valuable product is purchased and consumed according to a sophisticated taste. Moreover, the consumption of music becomes an act of collective purchase by all the members of the audience. Hence, there is an extra layer of sharing the same sensual and intellectual experience, uniting the audience and building a consumer base for a given music product.

The music created under the aegis of “art for art’s sake”, especially the avant-‐garde music utilizes completely different value chain, determined by its rejection of the classical canon and failure to deliver a new functional canon. A new participant in production of music here is a non-‐profit or a governmental organization subsidizing the product.

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Although this donor occupies the same position as the church in the Gregorian model, it stays away from the function of forging and forcing any conventions. The audience does not generate the convention either, because it does not have a point of reference in finding a personal valuable experience in auditioning this music. The listeners becomes alienated from the music by the non-‐conventional music structures, lack of consumer-‐oriented discourse and ambiguity of the sociocognitive information associated with the music performance. The collective factor stops working in this model, because the listeners perceive that the music event is purchased by the sponsor, there is lack of sense of ownership of music, or even worse, there can be the sense of falsification -‐ a feeling of being misled by the marketer into buying the ticket for the event that turns out to be completely different from the customer’s expectations.

In this model the value of the composer’s ideas becomes fixed not only in the score, but in the “manifesto” program notes, without which the score fails in demonstrating the value to the second party. The performers need to comprehend both, the score and the “manifesto” in order to appreciate the value. However, they cannot “amplify” the value, because the “manifesto” component is out of their hands, and the idioms in the score are non-‐conventional: there is no established merit of making such music more or less expressive. In the same position find themselves the critics. That is why the value cannot be transferred further to the listeners: they are not in the position to comprehend the “manifesto”, since it usually is a relatively big stock of information, not optimized for quick learning, and highly technical in language and content. In order to grasp the meaning of such “manifesto” and relate it to the music, the consumer has to have a profound musical education. Therefore, this model becomes bound to the very narrow market of consumption by the people with advanced classical music education.

Breaking of the classical convention market stage into the avant-‐garde market stage also triggered yet another distinct transformation of the music market -‐ the popular music market. It differs from the classical canon market by shifting the supremacy from the composer figure to the performer, who is forced by the industry to act as the author of the music he performs. The production of music is extended to include new cycles: artistic manager who directs the creativity of the artist, supporting musicians who contribute their own creative ideas, lyricists who define the “author’s identity” for the artist, and narrow specialists engaged into the imaging of the performer, such as dress designer, lighting technician. special effects personnel, etc. If the composer is used in the production, his role is usually subsidiary, like that of the lyricist -‐ reduced to fabrication of the sense of authenticity and authorship of the performer over the performed song.

The value of the popular music stems from how authentic the performer appears to the audience. It would be inaccurate to state that there is any inherent value conceived by the performer, since the incidence of the cover songs is extremely limited in the popular music after 1970. Obviously, if a song is not widely performed by different singers, it cannot encapsulate the value in its structure in the manner how the classical canon work does it. The value becomes locked to the “authentic” performer of a song (usually the original performer), and this lock works only for a specific audience, not for any audience. Most of popular music works present the value only to one or two generations, becoming worthless

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to the following generations. It is justified, therefore, to conclude that the value of popular music resides in the consumer. Furthermore, the egalitarian nature of popular music consumption makes the task of formulation of music value excruciatingly difficult -‐ calling for large-‐scale sampling and ethnographic methods of research. The music value in the popular music model is an ever-‐changing aggregate average determined by plebiscite. (ibid.)

However, popular music market is characterized by the heightened sense of ownership in the consumer. It has been reported in numerous studies that fans commonly experience the feeling of “possessing” their idol, as well as being “possessed” by it. This feeling can easily be shared by the entire audience, leading to the sense of unification and power between the listeners. Thus, it appears that those who find value in a particular popular artist, appreciate him to much greater extent than in the classical canon market -‐ often bordering with what can be called obsession or craze.

The musical life of today contains all four types of market products defined above. The Gregorian model still survives in the music of Catholic and Orthodox churches, especially in the monasteries. The products of the Gregorian model exist in the performances and recordings of early music ensembles. Likewise, the classical canon model is sustained in reproduction of historic works -‐ there is no production of new compositions within the framework of this market model. The avant-‐garde model is still employed in production, although in continually shrinking market. The popular music model dominates the marketplace. If to place the models in the order of decreasing presence in the modern marketplace, then the popular music model will have a big lead over the classical canon model, with the avant-‐garde model next and the Gregorian model following.

To understand the sociocognitive dynamics of the music market, the value placement in the production cycle of each model should be correlated with the convention function. The religious nature of the convention in the Gregorian model, with the value placed before the composer, makes this model limited to the religious community and prone to value loss: each link in the production cycle is likely to lose in value, so at the end the listener receives just a fraction of Divine revelation. However, the dependence of church on the religious canon makes this model rather stable: as long as Christian church stays in place it is likely to keep sponsoring the Gregorian canon music.

The avant-‐garde model is sponsored by the governmental structures, academic institutions and non-‐profit cultural organizations -‐ all of them following the elitarian ethics. Their commitment to sponsoring is far less stable than that of church for the Gregorian model. Withdrawal of subsidies is likely to exterminate the avant-‐garde model. The value in it is placed in the composer’s work and “manifesto”, but is poorly transferrable to the audience, making it improbable for the latter to ever develop a demand for the avant-‐garde product. Therefore, the prognosis for this model is highly negative.

The classical canon model has proved to be economically viable, however it has been weakened by the continuous subsidization policies during the last 60 years. Nevertheless, placement of value in the composer’s work and well formulated convention, objectively

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fixed in many documents and optimized for professional training of the musicians as well as music appreciation for the listeners, make it possible for this model to deliver the value to the listener and maintain the demand for the product. Two additional weaknesses make this model vulnerable to failure: its reliance on education, especially for the performance, and lack of new compositions produced in accordance with the convention.

The popular music model despite its over-‐dominance has an important weakness: it has not generated its own convention -‐ therefore, it cannot be regarded as the third Western canon (more on this ahead). Placement of value on the performer, lack of literacy in music making and consumption, and anti-‐intellectual tendencies in the popular market discourses lead to the ambiguity of the value and shortage of documentation on it, contributing to the seasonal nature of the market, with waves of new fashion replacing each other every few years -‐ each wave with its own system of values and set of discourses. The “plebiscite” nature of popular music makes it dependent on the classical canon convention -‐ the closest stable and well-‐defined set of norms required for creation of new compositions. Therefore, as dissimilar with the classical canon works as the popular works may sound, they still have to rely on the basic structures of the classical music. This situation ties both market models together.

The disposition of all four models makes it likely that the avant-‐garde model will keep shrinking, and eventually will become dysfunctional, and disappear. Church music will stay in limited use. Popular music will keep leading the music consumption. Classical canon music is likely to retain its presence as a supportive foundation for the popular music, and as a market of its own, provided the mismanagement of it is going to be corrected.

The historic data leads to believe in the tendency of conservation of the demand. It is held in economics that competitive markets usually produce an assignment of resources that is ‘right’ from an economic perspective. Once the demand for a particular product has been established in the population, it is likely to stay, with the only options to modernize or to segment. The demand for personal transportation is unlikely to disappear, and can only upgrade from horse transportation to cars, or segment into different kinds of cars. Segments are directly derived from the heterogeneity of the customer’s needs. The producer usually identifies such group of consumers that responds similarly to a product, and start addressing this group with his product, upgrading it to satisfy their needs more fully. Eventually the upgraded product becomes different from the original one and starts supplying its narrow subcategory of the market. 73

The music history is a testimony to the fact that demand in dancing, processional or spiritual music is never out -‐ there are just different genres of music that supply this demand. The demand can vanish altogether with the entire consumer base, as it happened with the Ancient Roman instrumental music after the fall of Rome. However, in the history of New Age such cataclysms are gone, and genres in general do not vanish even after the dispersion of their original user groups. Thus, singing songs stopped being the trade of

73 Wedel M., Kamakura W.A. (2000) -‐ Market segmentation: conceptual and methodological foundations, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell MA, p. 3-‐6.

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Venetian gondoliers long before Leonard Bernstein composed "The Kings' Barcarolle" in 1956.

Demand-‐side market failures occur in very few situations: in cases of non-‐excludable public goods, asymmetric information or negative externalities. The private businesses will be unwilling to produce outdoor fireworks, as it will be impossible for them to exclude non-‐paying individuals from watching the fireworks. The business might not provide sufficient information for the consumer, in which case the disappointed consumers would turn down the misleading product. The spillover effects can cause repercussions for a product, cutting down the demand for it, such as in the case of environmental pollution. 74

None of these seems to be capable of destroying the general demand for classical music. The demand disappears for the product whose function is overtaken by a better product. Western music history is a history of continual supplanting one genre for another, more modern and more appealing to the audience. However, for the classical music in toto to be supplanted by something else, that something else has to perform the same function -‐ it has to compete for the same customer base. But there is nothing else around that would elevate one’s spirit and engage one’s intellect so as to merge the audience in the collective experience of sharing the values of the Western civilization. The goals of popular music are completely different from that, whereas the goals of avant-‐garde might come close to be similar, yet its product line falls short of making any lasting impression on the audiences.

It is the classical canon convention that serves as a driving force in the operation of Western classical music market and Western popular music market. The effectiveness of the Western music market is a direct result of the classical canon. The spread of Western music across the globe demonstrates that the Western music market is more effective than the local markets of various countries. Therefore, classical canon should be regarded as an instrument of Westernization of the music world.

Music Canon and the Position of the Western Music in the World

The role of the Gregorian canon was to enable cultural reproduction of the same musical experience -‐ in that sense, this canon was the tool for mass production of the musical works -‐ the foundation of the music industry. In this capacity, Gregorian canon is no different than the rebuilding of the economic structures in the entire empire undertaken by Charlemagne. 75

The post-‐Roman Europe lied in a wrecked state, ruined by wars and epidemics. Many settlements were abandoned, urban population greatly reduced, many professional skills were forgotten. Roads deteriorated because of lack of maintenance and became impassable 74 Arnold, Roger A. (2011) -‐ Microeconomics 10th edition. South-‐Western, Cengage Learning, Independence, KY, p. 365-‐409. 75 Verhulst, Adriaan (2004) -‐ The Carolingian Economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, p. 135.

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in many places. Robbery made any travel into adventure. Political order was unstable. Money supply was scarce and coinage was not uniformed. As a result, income dropped for all strata of population: traditional trade was disrupted, and declining population could not support the infrastructure of public institutions, roads, markets and fairs, or the division of labor and specialization of the previous centuries. Aggregate demand declined, land that was taxed was abandoned, so shrunk sales taxes did not provide enough revenue for local governments. Simple artifacts like pottery were turning into the luxury objects. Artisan production did not disappear entirely, but retreated to rural areas and was performed by part-‐time artisans rather than full-‐time specialists. 76

Gregorian canonization created a steady demand in music products, organized the work force, instituted professionalization of the music related occupations and regularized the production of music -‐ so that a completely new infrastructures were evolved in place of deteriorated Roman heritage. However this type of reform is not unique to the Western civilization. Chinese, Indian, Arabic and Persian civilizations also created canons similar to the Gregorian canon -‐ collectively can be qualified as the notation canons. Subsequently, they enabled mass production of music and established the music markets in the respective territories.

The economic growth in a pre-‐industrial economy occurs from the trade based on regional differences in resource endowments, gains from division of labor, and technological improvement from “learning by doing”.77 This is what characterizes music markets of the “notation-‐canonized” countries. Musicians become full time professionals and move from place to place in search of stable supply. The musical occupations differentiate into singing, instrumental playing, teaching music, coordinating multiple performers in live productions, and manufacturing instruments. Each of the specializations is improved in efficiency through repetition of labor -‐ what is called “economies of practice”. By trial and error the specialized knowledge has been collected on how to run a narrowly specialized business most effectively. As long as the level of aggregate demand does not decline below the critical level, the pre-‐industrial music market can keep growing. If the supply cannot reach enough customers, or if they lose the capacity to pay, the production becomes constrained, leading to the erosion of the accumulated professional knowledge. That is why pre-‐industrial music market favored the countries with big populations and large space: the vast territory provided the opportunity for the market expansion, and the sovereignty increased the stability of law and order over the land.

During the Middle Ages maqam, dastgah, yayue and raga have been developed into the music theoretic systems, feeding their respective repertories of music, establishing schools, tradition and building the customer base -‐ in the way very similar to the Western canon. What made the Western pre-‐industrial music market unique was a gradual process fueled by a combination of different factors.

76 Persson, Karl G. (2010) -‐ An Economic History of Europe Knowledge, institutions and growth, 600 to the present. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 21-‐39. 77 ibid. p. 22

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First, knowledge in Europe started becoming preserved and related to the practical needs by means of theoretical inquiry. The first European universities were not very different from the Arabic madrasas, but from the 12th century they received immunity from civil courts and the right to trial by the university court, establishing the concept of “academic freedom”. Autonomy of the universities allowed rational investigation called to reconcile the philosophy of Greek antiquity, and especially ideas related to understanding the natural world, with the views of the church and the political realities of their days. In the 15th century the Manua Academy initiated the Renaissance curriculum, with trivium and quadrivium balanced by literature and philosophy, with a special emphasis of ethics, as well as by recreation and physical education. In all aspects of the Renaissance curriculum pupils were encouraged to understand and to exercise their critical faculties rather than mere memorization. The purpose of education became to develop intelligence, erudition and moral stand.78

The crucial change was the recognition of human capacity to transform the forces of nature through rational investigation and experiment. Invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1455 opened the way for education through books, expanding the academic scholarship beyond the format of a university lecture. As printing became less expensive, publishers were much more willing to take a financial risk and to provide an outlet for new authors. The share of the population with access to books grew, creating an incentive to aspire to literacy. The spread of intellectualism across the society promoted by book printing has no counterpart in the world except China. However, the major difference between Europe and China was the competitive character of European publishing, and the international trade in books. Unlike the Papacy, Chinese government was able to exercise censorship and restrict freedom necessary for the raise of creative thought backed by empirical research and experiment.79

The second factor was the establishment of the laws and policies in the major European trade cities, which fostered entrepreneurship and abolished feudal constraints on the property sale, protecting property rights and ensuring the protection for the foreign merchants. The development of accountancy made contracts enforceable. The growth of trustworthy financial institutions and instruments provided access to credit and insurance, made it easier to assess risk and organize business rationally on a large scale over a wide area. 80

Third, the philosophy of mercantilism sharpened the competition between the European states, stimulating the maturation of the concept of belonging to the nation-‐state and cooperation of nationals in the interests of their nation. This, along with more shrewd trade policies, increased the economic potentials of major European countries, and prompted their aggressive colonial expansion. Buttressed by constant wars for economic advantages,

78 Lawton, Denis, & Gordon, Peter (2004) -‐ A history of Western educational ideas. Woburn Press, London, p. 44-‐86. 79 Maddison, Angus (2007) -‐ Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030AD; Essays in Macro-‐Economic History. Oxford University Press , New York, p. 79-‐80. 80 ibid. p. 80.

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a group of European countries have developed tools for pursuit of worldwide commercial supremacy. At the same time sovereignty of the European states allowed intellectuals unprecedented freedom of thought: whenever they faced prosecution in their country of origin, they could find shelter in a neighboring country and develop their ideas there, in safety. Migration or refuge were customary options open to adventurous and innovative minds. International exchange of ideas was becoming an important aspect of European cultural life. In Asian countries such international interaction was culturally insignificant. 81

Fourth, Christianity adopted the family model substantially different from what had prevailed earlier in Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as the Islamic world. Strictly monogamous marriage prohibited concubinage, adoption, divorce, and remarriage of widows or widowers, marriage with siblings, ascendants, descendants, including first, second, and third cousins. The main purpose of these rules was to limit inheritance entitlements to close family members, channeling large amounts to the church which became a property owner challenging the possessions of royalty. By time, Christian family model has obliviated traditional loyalties to clan, tribe, and caste, and promoted individualism by allowing to choose the marriage partners. This practice led to establishment of separate households early in people’s life, which resulted in accumulation of wealth. 82

All four of these factors played a big role in the formation of the classical canon in the West. The intellectualization tendency has manifested itself in the field of music clearly in Ars Nova and even more so in Ars subtilior. The entire development of contrasting thematic polyphony should be viewed as an expression of the idea of layering the musical reality: subdivision of the entire texture into autonomous layers, each with its own design -‐ similar to the typical front of the Gothic Cathedral, however each related to the next one by some ratio, so that the parts are correlated by some uniformed principle of organization. This architectonic concept, best expressed in the isorhythmic motet, comes from the same methodology of thought as the scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Ulrich of Strasburg or Bonaventura that distinguished between form and content, rational thought and revelation, yet regarded them still as organic parts of the whole. The idea of an intellectual effort the man had to make in order to come closer to God was equally present in the Western philosophy of the 13th century and in the music of the 14th century.

During the Renaissance the intellectual aspect of Western music work has evolved into the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy of an artwork, following the paradigm of analogy between the Creator giving rise to the world, and the artist-‐creator producing the art-‐work. The music work, within this context, becomes a material entity of the same kind as world -‐ both, can be qualified as “reality” and require investigation and comprehension. None of the Non-‐European civilizations has generated such framework of perception for the music work.

81 ibid. 81. 82 Lal, Deepak (1998) -‐ Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-‐run Economic Performance. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

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Alan Merriam’s in his pivotal “The Anthropology of Music” defines six factors comprising the notion of “aesthetic” in relation to the artwork.83

1) “Psychic distance”, or the sense of “objectivity”, refers to the ability of the listener to remove himself from music, “to hold it at arm's length as it were, and to examine it for what it is”.

2) “Manipulation of form for its own sake” implies that the creator of music cognizes it as a configuration of abstract elements, such as pitches, durations, articulations, intervals, etc. which all influence each other in the way how they can be assembled together.

3) “Attribution of emotion-‐producing qualities in music conceived strictly as sound” defines the semiotics of Western music where the particular syntactic structures invoke designated emotions according to the public convention.

4) “The attribution of beauty to the art product” determines the practice of appreciation of the art object.

5) “The purposeful intent to create something aesthetic” of the Western artist is rational plan of designing an art object with the purpose in mind to affect the art viewer in a particular way.

6) “The presence of a philosophy of an aesthetic” determines the artistic value of a work -‐ aesthetics is a particular discipline with its own verbal discourse that is used to control art production. While non-‐European societies do engage in artistic activities and involve evaluative judgments, however they do not employ any analogue to the Western aesthetic evaluation.

Non-‐Western music is usually not abstracted from its cultural context, but instead conceptualized only as a part of a wider cultural entity. Listening to music in such cultures does not require continual recognition of formal elements, making it doubtful that music form could be consciously manipulated. The creators of music do not sit down and consciously decide which musical elements to connect into a new song. It is a lot more common for non-‐Western cultures to regard the musician as the "unconscious" agency through which music is given to man by superhuman beings. The emotional effect of music is inseparable from the context of music (lyrics, occasion of the performance, structure of the event etc.), and no rhetoric intention is conceived by the musician -‐ his playing proceeds as part of a ritual rather than conscious effort to influence the listener. The existence of a special discipline dedicated to appreciation of art objects in itself is a product unique to the Western civilization. 84

The autonomy of the musical work in Western classical music is responsible for its relative complexity comparing to any other form of music. The evolution of Western music 83 Merriam, Alan (1964) -‐ The Anthropology of Music, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois p. 259-‐ 272. 84 ibid.

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is history of competition in complexity between the Western composers -‐ very similar to competition in technology producing more and more complex devices, from bicycle to spaceship. A historiometric study estimated all survived works of 102 composers with lives spans between 1567 to 1994 on the subject of their eminence (defined by the amount of references in the music literature), versatility and duration of works. The results revealed a distinct trend towards reduction in productivity, corresponding with the growing complexity of melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, form and orchestration. Earlier composers operated in the markets where quantity was more important to the consumers than quality, resulting in the tendency to compose numerous rather similar works. Annual productivity and versatility both increased during the Baroque and Classical eras, suggesting the formative influence of metric and tonal idioms developed during that time -‐ making the task of constructing the composition easier. Average annual productivity then started decreasing, along with eminence, throughout the Romantic era, indicating the growing quest for originality and complexity. The 20th century composers further reduced their productivity, but worked in a wider variety of genres. This favored composers capable of rapidly finding new means of expression, reflected in their eminence (opposite to earlier composers for whom eminence was positively connected to productivity).85

The second factor of Western identity, the notion of private property, backed up by laws, has the equivalent in the opposing concepts of authorship and plagiary. The notion of authorship appears to originate in Ancient Greek culture. Although no evidence for a concept of intellectual property is found within ancient law, there is much evidence that Ancient Greeks were aware of literary theft and looked down at it -‐ perceiving plagiary as encroachment on one’s credit, honor, and reputation rather than property. After the fall of Rome the culture of attribution has been lost, and anonymity characterizes much of the Medieval culture. The revival of the idea of authorship took few centuries and was tied to notions of originality and narration style in literary works. The manner of personalization within the text and the opposition of the ideas of “public” versus “private” in civic life of Renaissance cities prompted the emergence of individualism, which coined the concept of original authorship. In the 15th century Italy the public discourse starts including the topic of “invention” understood in terms of a claim for the ownership of an ingenious device, original method or unique valuable product. The idea of copyrighting the innovation quickly followed: starting from the mid-‐fifteenth century, in printing business, “letters patents” (later called “privileges”) were awarded to secure the exclusive right to publish a book (or group of books) within a particular territory for a limited period of time.86

In music it became customary for the composers to sign their works as a proof of their authenticity. Anonymity became rare, especially in the genres of high art. The originality issue forced the discourse on authenticity and plagiarism. The public consensus was that originality of an artist was a virtue, whereas borrowing from somebody else’s originality, 85 Kozbelt, Aaron (2009) -‐ Performance time productivity and versatility estimates for 102 classical composers. Psychology of Music, vol 37(1): p. 25–46. 86 Long, Pamela O. (2001) -‐ Openness, secrecy, authorship : technical arts and the culture of knowledge from antiquity to the Renaissance. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, p. 4-‐11.

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and imposing it as one’s own, was indecent. By the 17th century it was a common practice to give credit to the source material in case of a derivative work, whenever it was published. However, the work was not regarded as an intellectual property of the composer. With very few exceptions, like Orlando di Lasso who self-‐published his works, composers were selling their music to publishers who acted as the owners of the music. In situations where the composer was on service to a patron, often patrons acted as the owners of their music. Up until the 19th century composers were primarily concerned about their moral rights to protect the authenticity of their works from distortions by the editors of the pirate publications. Hummel, Beethoven, Weber and Spohr were the pioneers in fight for the copyright in sake of their economic interests as authors.87

The concept of authorship passed through few stages of development in the music of the West. Although Renaissance composers cared about their name, altogether the musical material that constituted the work was not regarded as “secured” by the authority of its creator. One composer readily violated the will of another composer, when it came to using his material. Music was thought of as “utilitarian” -‐ anybody was free to make anything they wanted out of the pre-‐existing material. Reworking was considered a norm. As long as the remakes added originality in the treatment of the prototype material, they were considered legitimate. In fact, it was not uncommon that the revising composer would receive a credit for his inventiveness in treating the extraneous material.88

An example of such creative modeling was Monteverdi's madrigal "Non si levava ancor" based on Marenzio's "Non vidi mai," Young Monteverdi was attracted by the genre of canzonetta-‐madrigal, renowned for its lightness, liveliness of rhythms and homophonic textures, the master of which was Luca Marenzio. A number of Monteverdi's madrigals in his first two volumes editions follow Marenzio's music and texts. "Non si levava ancor" reproduces all sections of "Non vidi mai" with their respective techniques, from contrapunctual opening to the homophonic closing. 89

Increase of the commercial activities during the second half of the 17th century greatly increased the demand in new music. Late Baroque composers, such as Telemann, J.S.Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, had to break records in creativity and speed of composition to fulfill their obligations in music services. The time pressures often forced composers into borrowing the music from their own earlier works, as well as the works of other composers. This practice caused the new discourse about the difference between remake and plagiarism. measure of justifiable appropriation of extraneous material.

87 Tschmuck, Peter (2002) -‐ Creativity without a copyright: music production in Vienna in the late eighteenth century. In: Copyright in the Cultural Industries, Edited by Ruth Towse, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham Glos UK, p. 210-‐220. 88 Burkholder, Peter J. -‐ Borrowing, Section 7, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 7.7.2012. 89 Tomlinson, Gary (1987) -‐ Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA. p. 33-‐44.

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In 1739 Johann Mattheson justified the imitations of other composers, provided only “fine models” were chosen, and the emulation of the material took place -‐ not replication, in which case that would be theft. Mattheson drew the analogy between borrowing money and borrowing music: “Whoever does not need to do this and has enough resources of his own, need not begrudge such; yet I believe that there are very few of this sort: as even the greatest capitalists are given to borrowing money, if they see special advantages or benefit in this.” To complete the analogy, borrowing was permissible only where the borrowed material was returned “with interest” -‐ i.e., “one must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived.” 90

Not every case of borrowing qualified Mattheson’s propositions. One of the most notorious expropriators of music was Handel. He generously borrowed from Carissimi, Stradella, Kerll, Keiser, Muflat, Perti, Vinci, Bononcini, Erba, Urio, Graun and Habermann -‐ whenever somebody else’s music would suit his need -‐ without any credit given to the original authors. Quite a number of Handel’s works consist largely, and in some cases almost entirely, of the extraneous material. Thus of 28 choruses in Israel in Egypt, 11 were based on music of other composers, many taken in their entirety. It appears that Handel was aware of the impropriety of such systemic “borrowing”, as he made attempts to modify those sources which were likely to be known to Londoners, and left intact his borrowing from the unpopular music sources. This habit did blemish Handel’s reputation already during his life time.91

The famous anecdote represents Handel’s side of the story (perhaps, applicable to many other cases of blatant plagiarism by the composers whose creativity exceeded that of the original authors). When reprimanded for taking the aria “Ombra mai fu” for his opera Xerxes from Bononcini’s opera of the same title and subject (in turn taken from Francesco Cavalli), presumably Handel replied that the music was “much too good” for Bononcini, so the latter “did not know what to do with it”. And apparently this argument did hold, at least for some, if William Boyce could conclude that Handle “takes other men's pebbles and polishes them into diamonds”. 92

There indeed was a fine line between a reputation of an original thinker capable of “invention” (the period term for the ability to create expressive melodic line) and a thief covering his lack of talent by taking from the more creative peers. There was a reason for Handel to be cautious in how his borrowing appeared to the public. His rival, Giovanni Bononcini, had his entire career ruined by a single act of borrowing: at around 1728, at the meeting of newly founded Academy of Ancient Music, he palmed off the unsigned manuscript of "In una siepe ombrosa" madrigal by Antonio Lotti (1705) as his own. The discovery of the truth three years later led to confrontation, and Bononcini's insistence on

90 Mattheson, Johann (1981) -‐ Der vollkommene Capellmeister. Hamburg, 1739. Translation: Ernest C. Harriss. UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Mich. p. 298. 91 Taruskin, Richard (2009) -‐ The Oxford History of Western Music: The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 327-‐341. 92 Young, James O. (2008) -‐ Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA, p. 48.

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his authorship -‐ with accusations of Lotti of stealing music from him. The created scandal caused severe repercussions for Bononcini, forcing his exile to Paris and later to Vienna, putting the end of lucrative patronage of him by Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough.93

During the second half of the 18th century the shift of public opinion in favor of originality over conventionality became widespread. Imitation of somebody else’s art was viewed as a proof of lack of talent. The notion of genius, evolved in the art discourse around the mid 18th century in its modern meaning of extraordinary gift of intuitive creativity, in contrary, became associated with the originality of thought. The state of “genius” was viewed as an ideal position for an artist, an utmost expression of value, in itself capable of validating the works of lesser quality, once they belong to the artist with the reputation of a genius. Thus, the quest for originality was turned into something like declaration of intention to create a work of high art for an artist. 94

The historiometric research demonstrates that from Renaissance to the 20th century the melodic originality in the works of Western composers has been steadily grown, with relative cyclical fluctuations. The first peak is reached by the time of Monteverdi and Gesualdo. After that, themes became more predictable again, although not as much as during the Renaissance. The new rise started during the time of Haydn, and Mozart, and Beethoven, culminating at a new height with the advent of World War I. Then melodic originality went down again, albeit not dropping as low as the two previous lows. The comparison of 477 composers shows that originality was set as an individual goal in the career of a Western composer. All biographies displayed the same pattern: the lowest originality at the beginning of the career, reaching the maximum on average by the age of 56, followed by a small decline.95

It has to be noted that the relation between originality and success was not straightforward, but rather backward inverted-‐J shaped: the peak of popularity falls on the moderately original melodic thematic writing. Very complex and too simple themes are shown to be less favored by the classical music users. The same applies to originality in melodic development and metric organization.96

However, overall, the evolution of Western classical music clearly pushed for greater originality, making the issue of innovation into one of the deciding factors of success and competition between the composers. The author who would chose to disregard the originality issue simply did not have a chance for public recognition -‐ starting from late

93 The Fall of Bononcini. The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 33, No. 587 (Jan. 1, 1892), pp. 12-‐14. 94 Buelow, George (1990) -‐ Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in English Criticism of the Eighteenth Century. International review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1990. 117-‐128. 95 Simonton D.K. (1998) -‐ Masterpieces in Music and Literature: Historiometric Inquiries. Creativity Research Journal 1998, Vol. ll, No.2, p. I03-‐110. 96 Simonton, D. K. (1987) -‐ Musical aesthetics and creativity in Beethoven: A computer analysis of 105 compositions. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 5, 87-‐104.

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18th century. This concern for originality, together with cherishing it notion of authorship, are completely foreign to the musical traditions of the non-‐European civilizations. In most of them music is regarded as some sort of pool of melodic patterns from which any musician is free to dip out with more or less the same result -‐ therefore, it is not so much a particular musician that matters, but the pool. Making music in this cultural model is reduced to mere craft of know-‐how and material skill to draw from the pool and play an instrument (or sing).

Western music makers also adhered to this model during the Middle Ages. The transformation of it was inspired by Renaissance. The first “official” composer on record was Jacob Obrecht, who was appointed ‘‘compositore de canto’’ in Ferrara, in 1504. Prior to that musicians who created new music were called “makers”, with the distinction that ‘maker,’ unlike ‘composer,’ was engaged in reproduction of the same artifact as a craftsman, repeating the same manufacturing procedure over and over. Composer’s work, on another hand, is highly individualistic, driven by the ideas of aesthetic perfection, which (ideally) manifest themselves in a new original way every time. The transition from craftsman to artist took long time for the musical profession. During Renaissance, even Josquin Des Prez who reserved the right to compose “when he wanted to” failed to equal the status of a Renaissance genius in literature or fine art. It took time before the aesthetic theory crystallized and supported the artistic and critical practices. Then every composer became a possible candidate for the rank of genius. That was the big divider: a craftsman was not a possible genius; only an artist was. The acceptance of the status of “genius” at first in the field of literature, and then in music, in the 18th century England, paved the road for Handel to become the first accredited “natural genius” -‐ an artist producing high quality works driven by an instinctive knowledge, acting on pure inspiration. 97

As we see, the genesis of two cardinal properties of Western music, autonomy of form and authorship, organically connected to the notion of genius (since genius is the model state for every artisan -‐ those who do not comply to its rule are excluded from the field of high art), both have to do with the formation of classical canon. Those structural units which are found in the works of canonized composers over and over again constitute the model structures in the classical repertory that supplies the classical canon. Sonata form is the aggregate mold of symphonies, overtures, sonatas , quartets and concertos by canonized composers. Hence, evaluating the musical work during audition becomes the process of correlation the ideal form to the concrete compositional solution in the auditioned work. And authorship is nothing but the share of originality in this compositional solution. In case if the share is perceived as approximately as high as the originality of the canonic composers, the composer of a new work is declared a genius and joins the ranks with the canonic composers.

The third feature that contributes to the uniqueness of Western culture is the concept of belonging to the nation-‐state, the existence of a cluster of nation-‐states in close proximity

97 Kivy, Peter (2001) -‐ The possessor and the possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the idea of musical genius. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, p. 53-‐55.

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and migration of intellectual leaders from country to country. In music the direct reflection of this feature is formation of national musical identities.

The first European vernacular art form came about in late 13th century Italy, in poetic movement of Dolce Stil Novo, epitomized in works by Dante. It took a breakthrough to split from the Latinized culture while keeping the claim for literary sophistication. The very word “vernacular” means the language of the home borne slaves, connoting a resistance to universals and international currents carried through the Latin language, implying also an alternative stand towards the authority of the Church and ancient classics. And indeed, vernacular artists created works of outstanding naturalism, shifting away their ideal of beauty from the distant monuments of antiquity or proper lines of ecclesiastical texts. In that sense “vernacular” movement became the expression for the new sensual and humanistic philosophy that laid foundation for Renaissance by defining the dialectics of “classical” and “vernacular”. What looked “vernacular” to Petrarch, appeared as “classical” to Leonardo da Vinci. The idea of speaking about universal values in common language, peculiar to the habitants of a local place, has generated a very important dialog with the past, setting the direction for the entire Western art towards contemporaneity and spreading the vernacular philosophy over the continent and through different branches of arts.98

Renaissance affected music later than other arts. The vernacular tendency manifested itself during the late years of the Franco-‐Flemish School, after Josquin des Prez. The differences in treatment of forms and application of compositional techniques existed as early as in Ars Nova, between Italian and French polyphonic genres. However, the rise of the genres indisputably associated with a particular nationality, obvious to the listener upon auditioning the music, dates to the late 16th century Italy. Frottola was the first distinctly national genre, identifiable for its homophonic syllabic 3-‐part texture, with the melody in the upper voice, simple rhythms and simple chords. Rooted in folk music, the genre of frottola stood out in relation to the church music, exemplifying the vernacular case versus the venerated tradition. Based on amorous poetry, simple texture, accompaniment on a plucked string instrument (lute or vihuela) -‐ frottola was definitely popular music of its time, completely secular, courteous, associated with "light", often frivolous, lyrics. Cultivated at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara, frottola quickly paved its way from "light composers" like Bartolomeo Tromboncino or Marchetto Cara to composers highly esteemed for their conceptual status: Josquin, Willaert, Agricola. 99

Just as Medieval Latin culture branched out into the group of vernacular cultures of Italy, Netherlands, France, Germany and England, the strict polyphonic style of the Franco-‐Flemish school, that dominated Western music during Renaissance, started absorbing

98 Keizer J. & Richardson T.M. (2011) -‐ Introduction: The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts. In: The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. Enenkel Karl, volume 19, Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, p. 1-‐18. 99 William F. Prizer (1985) -‐ Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia as Patrons of Music: The Frottola at Mantua and Ferrara. Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), pp. 1-‐33.

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powerful vernacular influences from folk traditions of the local cultures. National idioms were permeating the works of the professional composers and eventually accumulating into the new genres of high art music of unmistakable to the contemporaries national orientation. Spanish villancico often complimented Italian frottola in publications, Italian 16th century madrigal fathered English madrigal and influenced new French chanson (Francis I epoch), Germanic lied and English consort-‐song marked the development of the national vernacular styles.100

During the second half of the 16th century Franco-‐Flemish school has germinated the national schools of composition. Palestrina faceted a new Italian style of the Roman school, with simpler polyphony, smoother cantilena and more consonant harmony. Adrian Willaert formed the Venetian school, renowned for its antiphonal style, dynamic contrasts, instrumental ensembles, especially brass, more virtuosic and concertizing than anywhere else at that time. Clément Janequin and Claudin de Sermisy defined the lines for the development of French school, less melodic than Italian, but more refined in taste, with versatile prosody, including declamatory devices, often employing rhythmic contrast and dance-‐like movement, attracted by picturesque programmatic approach to music. Heinrich Isaac founded the German school, establishing the tradition of the motet-‐like arrangement of the chorales, based on pre-‐existing tunes. usually placed in the discant. Orlande de Lassus set the precedent for the fusion of newly established national European styles: he employed Palestrina’s technique, yet adhering to the ideals of Ars Perfecta, reaching new heights in conveying affections, often contrasting melodious and declamatory styles, employing intense thematic elaborations, or depicting the content of the lyrics or plot by programmatic means.101

The transition from Renaissance to Baroque coincided with the ise of mercantilism and the consolidation of national states, embodied in the crystallization of the instrumental suite by Johann Froberger. The set of German, Italian, French, Spanish, and English dances became the customizable cyclic form for the instrumental solo and ensemble music throughout Europe: different national idioms allowed for an engaging contrast between the movements of the suite -‐ all achieved on the base of entertaining social dances. Baroque music has obtained a perfect fusion of “European” from mixture of “national”, directly reflected in suites titled Les Nations by Francois and Armand-‐Louis Couperins, J.S. Bach, Telemann, Hotteterre, or synonymous works, depicting various nationalities, like L'Europe galante by Campra, Les Indes galantes by Rameau, or Applausi Festivi by Kerll. Ability to write in national styles became a criterion of professionalism for a European composer. After Baroque almost every genre existed in national ramifications. Thus, while the opera seria stayed “a courtly and international affair”, the opera buffa was a national one: the Neapolitan opera buffa, French vaudeville comedy (followed by the opera comique), the

100 Burkholder, J. Peter, Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca (2010) -‐ A History of Western Music, 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, Chapter 11. 101 Konnov, Vladimir (1983) -‐ Niderlandskiye kompozitory 15-‐16 vekov. [Netherland composers of the 15-‐16th centuries], Leningrad, Muzyka.

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English ballad opera, the Spanish tonadilla escinica, and the German Singspiel -‐ all of them performed in the respective languages, or even in local dialects. 102

Non-‐European cultures have not known such conglomeration of national identities, where an artist would have an array of national styles to chose from in creation of an artwork, and in fact, from every master it is expected to possess the craftsmanship of implementing every national style. A Russian, Glinka, authored Spanish overtures that made a more “Spanish” impression than the music by any Spanish composer of that time. The same can be said about Hungarian dances by a German, Brahms. or, symphony No. 9 “From the New World” by a Czech, Dvorak. And again, this national impersonification is a direct product of the classical canon: canonization of composers leads to repertorization of the idioms they use, thereby establishing the pathway for the local folk idioms to become internationally available to all classical composers. Thus, Alexander Alyabiev has been collecting the Caucasian, Tartar, Bashkir, Tourkmen and Kirgiz folk music (some of which he published as “Asiatic Songs” circa 1835). Examination of this music led to attempts to assimilate it in the genre of romance, leading to the foundation of the style of “Eastern romance”. Although Alyabiev remained known primarily as a “light” composer, his songs were extremely popular in Russia, and almost all major Russian composers have written Eastern romances, from Glinka to Rachmaninov. 103

Milii Balakirev, who also authored Eastern romance, became attracted with the Caucasian music and in search of greater authenticity used genuine Kabardinian and Tartar themes in his Islamey. After its premiere by N.Rubinstein, the piece became internationally popular, spreading the “Eastern” idiom abroad. 104

Islamey also served as a model for Rimsky-‐Korsakov in his Sheherazade and Borodin in his Prince Igor, which in turn became models for Western composers like Ravel or Debussy. “Eastern” idiom has elevated from being local Russian idiom to international status. The expansion of Soviet Union to East resulted in a massive educational campaign directed to expose the local populations to the Western culture, and gave a chance to collect the records of the response of numerous nationals from Uzbekistan and Azerbaidjan to “Eastern” idiom of the Western music. Both countries have been controlled by the maqam tradition prior to the 1930s, with minimal exposure to Western music. During the 1940s, a number of Uzbek and Azeri nationals decided upon taking the musical career and entered programs of Western-‐based music education. Viktor Zukkerman, who conducted lectures to such students, kept a record of their first encounter with the Sheherazade. The reaction was that of astonishment from how Rimsky-‐Korsakov could catch such innermost sense of

102 Bukofzer, Manfred (1947) -‐ Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to Bach. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, p.397. 103 Keldysh, Yuri et al (1088) -‐ Istoriya Russkoi Muzyki: 1826-‐1850 [Hystory of Russian Music: 1926-‐1850], Muzyka, Moscow, p. 53-‐54. 104 Ralatskaya, Liudmila (2001) -‐ Istoriya russkoi muzyki: ot Drevnei Rusi do "serebryannogo veka [History of Russian music from Ancient Russia to the "Silver Age"] Vlados, Moscow, p. 177.

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what constituted "Eastern" without being native to it: "this is not an imitation of the East, this is the East itself".105

What allowed Rimsky-‐Korsakov to capture the national character, apart from his talent, was the framework of Western classical music. The Western musical disciplines provide tools to investigate new musical material, identify its characteristic musical features and emulate them by means of different instruments. The classical music’s capacity to absorb folk materials and coin national styles has given it enormous advantage over the other forms of music.

The fourth factor of Western cultural organization is the restricted family model that promotes the institution of marriage and establishment of separate households as a basic unit of cultural life. In the field of music this cultural aspect is addressed by the genre of Hausmusik (“household music”) -‐ music designed for performance in the home environment by family and friends for their own entertainment and edification. The demand for such music was created by the spread of music education (therefore Hausmusik originated primarily in German territories) and reduction in cost of publishing a score. Affordable prices were the condition of attracting the middle class, which has formed the customer base for Hausmusik. Though the concept of private music for amateurs has been around from at least late 16th century, the first publications identified as “Hausmusik” came about in the 17th century, such as Hauss-‐Musik by Johann Staden (Nuremberg, 1623–8), a collection of simple 3-‐part arrangements of sacred songs with the accompaniment. The term “Hausmusik” has been used by the music publishers in the sense of music that is technically very easy, aimed at the beginners and amateurs. In musicology this term is applied in a more loose sense, as of the chamber music miniatures avoiding technical challenges, harmonic complexities and featuring clear melody.

The distinction between private and public music has not been clear until the end of the 18th century. Haydn, Mozart, Dittersdorf, Cambini, Beethoven, Viotti, Paganini and Schubert wrote simple music for private use, characterized by sentimentality and subjectivity of the style. But after Schubert this genre of music started leaning towards didactic application, unconcerned with the matters of artistic advance. 106

During the rebellious 1840s, the issues of the social functions of music were passionately discussed in German press, reshaping the idea of Hausmusik as a national expression of Germanic traits of seriousness, simplicity and common touch. Hausmusik was seen as a cultural crusade for the revival of the "pure and true" music of the German past -‐ seeking, in particular, to extend the didactic literature of the 18th century, like the Well-‐Tempered Clavier by Bach. Most composers post-‐1850s of German stylistic orientation have reflected

105 Zukkerman, Viktor (1975) -‐ Muzykal'no-‐teoreticheskiye ocherki i etudy: o muzykal'noi rechi Rimskogo-‐Korsakova [Musical theoretic essays and sketches: on musical speech by Rimsky-‐Korsakov] vol.2, Sovetskii Kompozitor, Moscow, p.86. 106 Baron, John H. (1998) -‐ Intimate Music: A History of the Idea of Chamber Music. Pendragon Press, New York, p.211-‐212, 306.

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on this discourse. Thus, Schumann quite radically changed his piano style towards greater acceptability by the public, even going as far as re-‐editing his earlier works.107

Hausmusik counterbalanced Salonmusik as the 19th century was passing, offering the supply to the low middle class, as opposed to the upper middle class salons. During the 1850s an idyllic view of the Hausmusik has been propagated throughout Europe, in big part by the marketing efforts of music publishers (predominantly German). It Romanticized the view of the family united by the poetic charms in a private gathering, with few close friends, to share their emotions and escape from the disturbances of the real world into luring fancies. The repertoire focused on the adaptations of the famous music, operatic potpourris, and sentimental, often pseudo-‐virtuoso pieces. 108

By the turn of the 20th century Hausmusik gained popularity over Europe, America and Russia, and started taking over the salon music, and even challenged the concert music. Hausmusik was one of very few musical genres that thrived in the economic dismay of the Weimar Republic. Eugen Schmitz, an influential music critic, was recommending for the government to promote Hausmusik as means of compensation for the depression that drastically cut the concert attendance. Georg Schunemann, the director of the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, in 1932, reiterated the need in Hausmusik for its capacity to build the demand for composers, music publishers, retailers and instrument manufacturers. 109

None of non-‐Western music cultures exploits anything analogous to Hausmusik for quite obvious reasons: the dependance of it on music literacy and on the aesthetic concepts -‐ the key notion of music making at home is to adjoin to the world of intangible poetic experience, to be aware of one’s capacity to hover in the same clouds as great artists of the past, and to appropriate the share of cultural value through the act of performance -‐ perhaps, imperfect and deficient, but what is more important, genuine and personal. Cultural capital is one of the goods accumulated by the Western household: acquiring musical instruments, scores, music records, teaching music to children without any particular goal of accomplishment, just in sake of experience -‐ these are the manifestations of the philosophy of cultural acquisition, still very typical to the Western life style. The Hausmusik literature has shifted recently more towards the pop music songs, but the idea of making music is still vital -‐ from garage bands to karaoke -‐ the philosophy remains the same: entering the spiritual realm of music idols, which is just a modification of the classical Hausmusik.

107 Newcomb, Anthony (2004) -‐ Schumann and the Marketplace: From Butterflies to Hausmusik. In: Nineteenth-‐Century Piano Music, ed. R. Larry Todd, Routledge, New York, p. 258-‐315. 108 Dahlhaus, Carl (1989) -‐ Nineteenth-‐Century Music, transl. J. B. Robinson, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, p.146, 151. 109 Potter, Pamela (1994) -‐ German musicology and early music performance, 1918-‐1933. In: Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 94-‐106.

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Classical canon consolidates Western music into a unique conglomerate of attitudes, projections and experience that satisfies basic individual demands of an individual. If the individual does not have any cultural needs and is perfectly satisfied by his indigenous cultural environment, Western music is capable of implanting the new mentality features into such an individual and promote the need for new cultural experience, thereby generating the demand for Western forms of music making on the territories previously controlled by some other, non-‐Western, tradition.

There are a number of reasons for this cultural “predisposition” on an individual basis to the Western music. One of the most important issues is the notion of cultural eminence. Charles Murray has elaborated a sophisticated index to reflect on the amount of cultural achievement, as reflected documentally for a given period of time in the particular field of inquiry. When this historiometric projection is taken in relation to arts, the curve representing the number of significant artists (whose names are taken from major encyclopedic sources for Europe and non-‐Western countries) over the time shows close match between Europe and the non-‐West up to the 1400, after which the European curve starts rising, surging at the 1600 (in the order of 5 times), and then sky-‐rocketing at the 1800, peaking passed 1900, at about 18 times higher than the non-‐Western curve. And this is a very modest estimation, because separate inventories in the arts were used for India, China, Japan, and the Arab world, while compiling a single inventory in each of the arts for all of the West. Featuring separately the outstanding figures for Germany, France or Italy would have increased the amount of celebrities.110

The situation in arts is not any special -‐ the historiometric representation of the scientific celebrities almost duplicates the graphs distribution in arts. The alternative view of scientific events of innovation and discovery does not change the picture: whether measured in people or events, 97% of accomplishment in the scientific inventories occurred in Europe and North America. Europe continues to dominate, although not as much as in arts, with an aggregate of 78% of the events and 82% of the significant figures. Is this Eurocentric distortion? No, it is reflection of the factual reality: European culture has imported and absorbed influences from the rest of the world, but then in the 18th century it was European culture that exploded with creativity and reorganized the rest of the world. And it is only at the end of the 20th century that the globalized world gives access for the nationals of non-‐Western countries to contribute to the international cultural activities. However, this integration occurs within the framework that has been elaborated and maintained by the West. 111

The reason why the history of non-‐Western countries does not show high eminence benchmarks in their cultural activities is because cultural life in them has operated on the same level of immature pre-‐industrial low-‐density market as Europe did throughout the Middle Ages. Such market was characterized by low competition, sluggish demand, part-‐time professional employment and culture of anonymity. The only economy that actually

110 Murray, Charles (2003) -‐ Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. HarperCollins, New York, p. 249-‐251. 111 ibid. p. 251-‐255.

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outperformed European one up until the 18th century was Chinese, but its culture was overly controlled by the Confucianist ideology that looked at music with suspicion as a potential source of entertainment and distraction from the civic duties and responsibilities. Subsequently, In music, there are virtually no names of composers in Chinese encyclopedic sources (ibid. 602), whereas 13,000 painters are named in just one encyclopedia of art. (ibid. 259) Besides, any chances of international competition that Chinese market had slipped away after British opium trade policies effectively drugged out the Chinese population and ruined Chinese economy.

Just as Western industrialization became the backbone in building the economic infrastructures of the world, Western classical canon became the backbone of expansion of Western presence in the music of the world. The mechanism of penetration is the same: once the new Western commodity is made available at the local non-‐Western market, it quickly becomes wanted, as the consumers find out superiority of the new product in comparison to what was available out there before. Western music products looked as a better commodity than the traditional music products to the local market users -‐ and this was a chain result from the institution of the second canon in the Western music, which remained unchallenged by any non-‐Western culture in the world.

Music Canon and Westernization of the World Music

The succession of two canonizations appears to be a prerequisite for the viability of the music system. The first canon is responsible for setting the standards for musical literacy, which allows to initiate the process of cultural conservation and progressive development. The second canon is responsible for forming the wide user base, organizing it into the market, and employing the market relationships to build the conventions for music use. It is the second canon that secures the quality control and turns the musical products into highly competitive goods, likely to overtake products of similar functions produced in the markets that operate on the grounds of the first canon or no canon.

The process of globalization of the European musical culture started with colonization of the Americas, producing the first samples of Western driven compositions on the new soil by late 17th century. However, the major developments followed the 19th century industrialization and the expansion of international trade. Cultural imperialism produced pockets of pro-‐Western cultural life, noticeable in their rejection of the parochial tradition, but limited to the elite, attracted by the social image of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Foundation of the Shanghai Municipal Symphony Orchestra in 1907 is an example of such isolated patches of globalization. 112

112 Ellis, Katharine (2001) -‐ The structures of musical life. In: The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-‐Century Music, Volume 1, Jim Samson ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 343-‐370.

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But colonization was not the only method for the classical music expansion. It also was decidedly imported -‐ sometimes with drastic consequences. Such is the story of the clarinet music in Turkey -‐ the most popular form of instrumental music as of today, heard in villages, on the streets of Istanbul, in taverns, on concert stages and in conservatories. Introduced in the military bands by Giuseppe Donizetti, hired by the Mahmut II as Instructor General of the Imperial Ottoman Music, to replace the dismissed Janissary Corps, clarinet found its way into the court, when the duties of Donizetti included teaching music to the members of the Ottoman royal family. By the end of the 19th century clarinet became common in village bands. In the set of reforms initiated after 1923, Atatürk established new policy of unification between the folk culture with Western ideals, banning the monophonic music education and inviting the best European musicians to work in Turkey. Adoption of Western-‐based Ezgi-‐Arel notation made learning clarinet performance easier. And institution of public radio in 1927 brought clarinet performance to a wide audience, initiating the placement of the clarinet as a defining instrument of Turkish popular culture. 113

All European nations ended up by being smoothly integrated into the Western classical music tradition, which comfortably absorbed their national musics and molded a unique form for each of the nations. Between the 1860s and the 1930s European conversion into the classical music has been completed, with Armenia, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Bosnia, Albania, Georgia, and finally, in the 1930s, Kazakhstan joining the Western classical community -‐ coining their national styles in operatic and symphonic music. Classical idiom did not become isolated into the ivory tower in these countries. Its harmonic, rhythmo-‐metric, formal, textural and instrumental features merged with the folk idioms and formed dialects of classical language -‐ quite on par with the countries that have absorbed classical music a century earlier: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Greece.

The process of assimilation overall was spontaneous, initiated by the local nationals, and went rather smoothly, by gradual evolution of new classical-‐national idioms to form more complex works. Even cultures based on the well-‐formed musical tradition with its own notation and theory still accepted Western influence. An example of this is Azerbaijan, where Uzeyir Hajibeyov in 1908 with the great success produced the first national opera Leyli and Majnun. It used long sections of mugham with the accompaniment of the tar contrasting the sections written for the Western orchestra and vocalists. After his study for a year in Moscow and another year in Saint-‐Petersburg, his popular operetta Arshin Mal Alan (1913) featured original material (only one folk theme used), without any mugham, completely sustained in Western music forms. His last opera Koroghlu (1936) made use of much multi-‐part choral writing, completely foreign to monodic national forms of music. 114

113 Kragulj, Boja (2012) -‐ The clarinet as a defining instrument of Turkish musical culture. The clarinet, 39 (3) June, p. 59. 114 O’Brien, Matthew (2004) -‐ Uzeyir Hajibeyov and his role in the development of musical life in Azerbaidzhan. In: Soviet Music and Society Under Lenin and Stalin: The Baton and the Sickle, ed. Edmunds, Neil. Routledge, New York, p. 209-‐227.

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There was much public interest to the classical music during the 1920s. A number of clubs carried the series of chamber and symphonic recitals, groups of amateurs played chamber music together, during 1921 celebration of 150 anniversary of Beethoven in Baku 13 concerts were held. Groups of performers on national instruments were performing pieces by Western composers. Azeri composers started writing romances, songs, chamber music and incidental music to plays and films in Western tradition, incorporating the melodic intonations completely foreign to mugham, yet arranged in the way that made an Azari impression. Quite a number of such songs by Uzeyir Hajibeyov and Muslim Magomayev became very popular across the country. The rise of Azari symphonic music was initiated by the suite “Fragments” by Asaf Zeynally (1931). 115

The relative ease of assimilation of Western music in the non-‐Western cultures owed to the framework of musical nationalism, originated in the 18th century England and cultivated by Romantic composers in most European countries throughout the 19th century. The politics of mercantilism resulted in the raise of public awareness of belonging to the same nation, sharing the same roots and seeking cultural dominance. In the same way how the competition for economic control strengthened the nation-‐states, nationalism promoted expression of the musical traits underlying classical music -‐ revival of the folk roots in order to invigorate the high art and reconnect it with vaster groups of population. Competition between major Western European nations led to the “nationalist race”, where the dominance of a stronger nation caused the insurgence of smaller nations or minority ethnicities in national states. Romantic aesthetics, with its keen interest in naturalism of the place of action, especially in opera, provided an artistic form of expressing the national character: through quotations of folklore, engagement of programmatic content, appealing to the national epics, emulation of the musical features of the national dances, using vernacular texts in vocal music etc. -‐ this blend has been reproduced from one nation to another, spreading from the Western Europe to Scandinavia and Eastern Europe.116

The technical apparatus of Western classical music, with its distinction between harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, texture, music form, instrumentation and orchestration, enables a composer with the arsenal of tools to emulate virtually anything. Just as Balakirev or Rimsky-‐Korsakov recorded music they auditioned in their field expeditions and later examined and emulated the folk models, Bartok transcribed the songs of all neighboring nations, and Debussy initiated imitation of exotic Gamelan music, which he heard it at Parisian Exposition 1889 and reflected upon in his “Pagodes”. And Lou Harrison was transcribing the Javanese, Balinese, and Sundanese music in order to emulate it in his works.117

115 Keldysh, Yuri et al (1970) -‐ Istoriya Muzyki Narodov SSSR: 1917-‐1932 [History of music of the peoples of USSR: 1917-‐1932] Sovetskii Kompozitor, Moscow, p. 332-‐346. 116 Taruskin, Richard -‐ Nationalism. Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Accessed 7/7/2012). 117 Spiller, Henry (2004) -‐ Gamelan: The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia, ABC-‐CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, p. 128-‐129.

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The classical composers interested not in sounding exotic, but in capturing the style and spirit of the foreign music could convincingly meet their goals. The example of such “learned cosmopolitanism” is career by Reinhold Glière. The pupil of Arensky, Taneyev and Ippolitov-‐Ivanov, he was the member of Beliayev’s group, influenced by the music of Rimsky-‐Korsakov. After Glière has established his reputation as a canon-‐oriented composer and achieved international recognition with his symphonies and quartets, he turned his attention to national styles. In 1921 he wrote a Ukranian work, Zaporozhtsy. In 1923 he took on a challenging project to compose an opera on Eastern folk tale Shakh-‐Senem for reinstituted opera theater in Baku. Glière has travelled to Azerbaidjan, collected folk material, transcribed mugham performances and came up with the music that stood up to the standard of post-‐Romantic symphonic opera, yet captured the national Azari musical characteristics, with over 30 genuine folk themes artfully interwoven into the dramatic development. The second edition of 1934 (in Azeri as opposed to the 1925 version in Russian) scored a big success with public, press and peers, earning the recognition that Glière showed the direction towards symphonic mugham for the Azeri composers. The reputation of Glière’s expertise in Azeri music was such that in 1937 he was asked by the Azeri organizers of the Festival of Azerbaijani Art in Moscow to be the consultant for all music works, and after the death of Magomayev, Glière was commissioned to complete his last opera Nargiz.118

The same approach Glière used in ballet music, in 1927, studying the traditional Chinese music and popular songs for his ballet The Red Poppy, the action of which took place in a Chinese sea-‐port. Symphonic development based on traditional Chinese melodies was praised for its coloristic yet dramatic impression. The reception of the ballet was triumphal, with applauds and ovations often overpowering music. (ibid. 125-‐138) The folkloric formula became the credo of the composer. During his tour over Buryat-‐Mongolia he collected the Mongolian and Buryat folk material, for his Heroic March (1936) and the music for the film “Buddha’s Deputy” (1935). (ibid. 141) In 1936 the composer was commissioned to write the opera Gyul'sara for the Festival of Uzbeki Art in Moscow. Following the same method that he previously used in Azerbaijan, Glière stayed for a year and a half in Tashkent, constructing symphonic development through the dramatic action on the carefully collected material of the folkloric Uzbeki music and traditional maqam, including the national instruments in the score. The opera was highly rated by critics and was met with great enthusiasm by the public. (ibid. 145-‐149). In 1938 Glière wrote music for the Tadjiki film “The friends meet again”, the Uzbeki film “Alisher Navoi”, and “Fergana Festival” (1940) for the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony -‐ all based on folk material. Opera “Leyli and Medzhnun” (1940) based on Navoi’s poem became one of the most popular stage works in Uzbekistan. 119

It should be added that “popular” in Soviet Union did not mean to be liked by the communist authorities. Quite in contrary, music most popular across the population was likely to be disapproved by the authorities -‐ such as romances by Alexander Vertinsky. Soviet establishment prescribed what to listen to and followed up the prescriptions only in 118 Gulinskaya, Zoya (1986) -‐ Reinhold Moritzevich Gliere. Muzyka, Moscow, p. 113-‐122. 119 ibid. 158-‐161.

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relation to the institutions, not individuals, provided they did not listen to the works banned as “anti-‐Soviet propaganda”. Stating that “Leyli and Medzhnun” was popular in Uzbekistan means that Uzbeki listeners were eagerly buying tickets for the production of the opera or gala-‐concerts that included its music, purchasing the records of it, asking for the excerpts from it on the radio-‐on-‐demand programs, etc. -‐ from the perspective of the consumer, there was little difference between “popular” in the USSR and “popular” in the West.

The knowledge received from studies of tonal harmony, counterpoint and traditional composition in the Moscow Conservatory enabled Glière to emulate unfamiliar non-‐Western music traditions close enough to make the local audiences recognize his emulations as their own and want to hear more of them -‐ Glière remained popular across Soviet Union way into the 1950s, always collecting full houses during his concert tours (altogether giving over 400 recitals throughout his life). (ibid. 198-‐200) The skills of ear-‐training, analysis and composition sufficed to let the composer chose the representative samples of target music, understand the principle of musical communication employed by the music, identify the key structures responsible for musical expression, reconfigure these structures for the purpose of expression of the new, composer’s, libretto or program, and instrumentate the music in a way to resemble the authentic sound. By no means this method was unique to Glière. Many of his students in composition became skillful in the national emulation: Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Revutsky, Lyatoshinsky, Khachaturian, Mosolov, Polovinkin, Rakov, A. and B. Aleksandrov, Knipper, to name the few. Of course, Soviet ideology heavily propped the idea of international solidarity of proletariat, putting pressure on the conservatories to teach the students of composition how to master the national idioms -‐ at least until the demise of the USSR the curriculum of graduate school of music has included subjects that taught how to analyze folk music and make professional arrangements of it. It is indisputable that the theoretic foundations of Western classical music are capable of providing Western composer with the tools for realistic emulation of non-‐Western music, and that based upon such successful emulation, a number of non-‐Western countries have assimilated the Western classical tradition.

Because of this capacity alone, it is wrong to tag Western classical music as just one of the world’s musics. It has clearly demonstrated that it is not one of many -‐ it is very special. No other traditional music system was capable of spreading globally to include other nations and provide them with their national versions of the international musical tradition sufficient to cover those countries’ cultural needs. Territorially, the biggest non-‐European music system was Chinese yayue that has influenced gagaku in Japan, aak in Korea, and nhã nhac in Vietnam. However, inside China, the Han majority has been historically oppressive towards the minorities and their cultures. Han language and philosophy of Confucianism were imposed on the ethnic minorities from the 2nd century B.C., with the purpose to transform them from the “barbarian” state to become Han (the laihua policy adopted in the 2nd century). As a result, by the end of the Han dynasty the eastern, southeastern and most of the so-‐called western barbarians have been assimilated and no longer existed. This policy was reinforced by the education system adopted during the Sui and Tang Dynasties. The Mongol conquest eased up the national politics, however the Ming dynasty restored the Han supremacy and stripped Mongols of their privileges. The Manchu invasion

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instituted imperial privileges for the Manchus, and recognized the Mongol and Tibetan cultures, however restricting the other cultures even to the greater extent, i.e. permitting the minority languages only in religious practices. Western missionaries provided some support for the minority cultures during the 19th century, but Japanese occupation put an end to it in 1895 by imposing even tougher policies, sometimes leading to genocide of the minorities (as in Taiwan).120

Maoist cultural policies did not change the historic repression of the minorities by much. Thus, in the Miao region musical ensembles did not have any ethnic minorities, despite there were mostly Miao Chinese in the audiences. Han musicians would dress up in Miao costumes and present Sinicized versions of Miao songs and dances to an audience whose ancestors had originally created them. But the music of the Miao was not only Sinified but Westernized, with added harmony and Western instrumentation.121

Even if traditional Chinese music was trying to expand and put in place assimilated local national versions of the Han music, this process must have been halted by the influx of Western music. Yayue is in no position of spreading over the world. Today there are concert halls and opera houses in all major Chinese cities. China is the world’s biggest supplier of classical music instruments. So many children play these instruments in China that there is the chronic shortage of teachers. The piano is the most fashionable instrument for the youngster. The performance of a Western opera may draw a bigger audience than that of a Peking opera. The top governmental officials regularly attend orchestral concerts and Western operas and proclaim their love for the music of Mozart and Beethoven. Classical music is viewed as superior to the traditional music in relation to its greater technological development, more sophisticated notation, greater scientific base and wider international appeal. Western instruments and music theory dominate the curriculum of China’s conservatories. Nearly all Chinese composers from the 1970s on use Western harmony and texture in treatment of the folk material.122

It is important to point out that the “selling point” of the Western music for non-‐Western cultures is exactly the aesthetic aspect of music along with the codified into it (by the Western classical canon) market information about the Western music product. It was mentioned earlier in this book that the market discourse tends to establish the cultural values that convert into the cultural capitol of the consumers. Let us zoom in to define what exactly is encoded in the classical music.

First of all, it must be said that the key condition for the canon to stay functional is the vital practice of live performance. Direct contact with the audience is one sure way for the performer to “feel” how his music is perceived. The same goes for the composer: the best

120 Tsung, Linda (2009) -‐ Minority Languages, Education and Communities in China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 34-‐65. 121 Kraus R.C. (1989) -‐ Pianos and Politics in China; Middle-‐Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 155. 122 Melvin, Sheila and Cai, Jindong (2004) -‐ Rhapsody in Red; How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Algora Publishing, New York, p. 299-‐333.

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feedback is being personally present at the concert hall. This experience might be even more important than the critical review -‐ since conventions are social, and not personal. The reaction of the group of people might be better validation by the canon than the opinion of a single person, even he is an expert. Ideally, both opinions should be played against each other and the conclusion derived.

Active concert life with the mass of audience driven to the concert halls is the sign of vitality of the music language -‐ and the means of its development and dissipation. Classical tradition has spread out not so by music publishing or music education. The biggest vehicles in taking new lands was live performance. This is how Sultan Mahmut II was impressed with the concerts, opera and ballet performances given at the Western embassies in Istanbul, and put Giuseppe Donizetti, the older brother of the famous composer, in charge of finding the finest musicians in Europe and bringing them in. Quite symbolically, Giuseppe Donizetti authored the first Ottoman national anthem, marking the new policy of Western enculturation.123

So, what is the message of the act of performance of the classical music piece at the symphonic concert, as it would appear to the listener not familiar with the Western musical canons and their conventions? On the most superficial level, the spectator sees the large group of musicians exposed on the stage, dressed in the same way, engaged in the process of reading music from their parts, and playing their instruments it in a way coordinated with their colleagues -‐ all under the guidance of the conductor. The focus of their activity is the production of complex sonorities which appear to change in time according to the mutual plan, known to the conductor. The audience is supposed to focus on the way how the sound keeps changing and appreciate the difficulties overcome by each individual performer as well as all of them as a group.

This appreciated activity closely resembles the process of the industrial production. Each of the factory workers has his own task to handle, which depends on the output of the fellow workers, and contributes to the final product that comes as a result of the collaborative effort of many participants. The production follows the plan known to the general engineer and administered by the personnel of engineers, mechanics and managers. The plan comes from an inventor, and it is implemented in numerous factories in more or less the same logistics. Each of the participants in the production must possess special qualifications in order to be employed, and has to apply his skills to the work in the most diligent and consistent way. The resultant product is offered for the consumers, who then are free to chose whether to approve of it or not -‐ however, the consumers are estranged from the production process, and have to await for the product to be delivered for their judgment.124

123 Shaw, Stanford (1976) -‐ The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, volume 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-‐1975, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 49. 124 Small, Christopher (2001) -‐ Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music? American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-‐359.

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The transformation of instrumental ensembles into orchestras started in France in the mid-‐17th century and in a century spread over Europe, so that by 1740 almost every large city and every important court had an orchestra. The buildings designed specifically for concerts have been erected starting from The Holywell Room at Oxford (1748). However, the setting of the instruments, their construction and the technique of playing differed widely from place to place, often making the same piece of music sound drastically different when performed at different cities. From the mid-‐18th century to about 1815 the orchestra has become more or less uniformed to provide sufficient “sameness” of the symphonic sound for the composers to reserve to the scoring standards. The orchestral instruments were generally set by the mid-‐18th century, but the accessories (i.e. bows) and instrumental construction became uniformed only in the 19th century. As the patronage for the orchestra dissipated, orchestras were institutionalized into the full-‐time public enterprises with the permanent location (in the form of the philharmonic societies, city orchestras, or theater orchestras) during the course of the 19th century. The profession of the conductor has been established in the first half of the 19th century -‐ with the prerogative over the artistic control over the matters of the interpretation for the entire orchestra.125

This time frame generally coincides with the onset of the industrial revolution -‐ especially its phase of the technological innovation. The introduction of new inventions went hand in hand with innovations in organization, when the small workshops of traditional industries were replaced by the factory system. The first factory built specifically to fit the machines and house the workers was the Cromford Mill, set up by Richard Arkwright in 1771. Factory production was characterized by the concentration of the centrally operated equipment and the workforce divided by specialization of the labor, yet unified by the usage of the machinery in the production cycle. Factory manufacturing led to the increase in the production facilities and capital accumulation. The divorce between labor and ownership of the means of production resulted in mechanization of the labor -‐ the systematic and generalized implementation of the machinery, which substituted for the efforts and skills of man. 126

This tendency applies to the classical orchestra: the modernization and unification of the instruments used in the orchestras and overall increase in the amount of the instruments engaged together. Separation of all instruments into groups, subgroups and delegation of responsibilities for the “production” cycle -‐ learning and rehearsing the music -‐ is a form of division of labor and hierarchical subordination, with the conductor at the top, the concertmaster of the orchestra second, the concertmasters of the groups third and the ranks of the workers (first, second, third-‐chairs etc.). All the performers are estranged from the authorship of the music they create, yet they are united by executing different functions necessary for the final product to take its shape. Mechanization plays a big role in orchestral performance -‐ this is what separates the orchestra musician from the solo 125 Spitzer J. & Zaslaw N. (2004) -‐ The Birth of the Orchestra: history of an institution 1650–1815. Oxford University Press, New York, p. 306-‐342, 368. 126 Crouzet, François (2001) -‐ A History of the European Economy, 1000–2000, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville and London, p. 101-‐104.

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performer: fitting in the group becomes more important than giving the fresh rendition, contributing to standardization of playing, overall prevalence of instrumental technique over creativity.

Factory production was known to generated large increases in labor productivity (the spinning machines: c. 1800 was making in a day as much cotton yarn as 300 workers with spinning wheels). Similar effect can be observed with the orchestral performance: the impression it imposes on the listener is hundred times stronger than the ensemble of 3 or 4 musicians. The scale of the symphonic sound and the factory-‐like organization of performance alone must have attracted the audiences with its appearing modernity and effectiveness.

And indeed the analysis of the repertoire of the 19th century public recitals shows that symphonic music was receiving the status of aesthetic superiority over the other genres during the period between 1848 and 1870. When musical life resumed after the rebellions of 1848, the public taste started leaning towards the orchestras and the classical repertoire. The solo recitals featuring virtuoso instrumentalists or vocalists that were heavily in demand beforehand, now looked shallow and empty. A new generation of virtuosos, like Henri Vieuxtemps, Joseph Joachim, and Anton Rubinstein, switched to symphonic repertoire, favoring concertos and cultivating grand heroic posture in their technique. Symphonic sound became the matter of prestige and public attraction. It was during this period that orchestras elevated their status from private concert societies into symbols of cultural achievement for the entire city or even a nation. 127

That is why Western classical music has been attracting the attention of the nations entering the global economic stage. The national symphonic music to them appeared as a pass to the Pal-‐Mal club of industrialized economies. This has been the pattern for the classical music European expansion in the 19th century, advance in the Americas and Australia at the turn of the centuries, transition to Asia in the beginning of the 20th century and developments after the 2nd World War. Classical music and its conventions were exported to the developing world, including Asia, following in the wake of industrialization, at least among the ruling class. -‐ wherever western consumer values go, western classical music follows quickly, as can be witnessed most vividly in Japan. 128

The symphonic expansion is not cooling down. Fourteen symphony orchestras in Japan is not outstanding amongst Asian countries: 14 orchestras in China 10 orchestras in Taiwan, 8 orchestras in Philippines, 7 orchestras in Hong-‐Kong, 5 orchestras in South Korea, the same in Singapore, 4 in Malaysia -‐ these figures testify about the competitive ranking of new Asian markets in their self-‐evaluated integration into the world economy. The process of “political orchestration” is still going on with foundation of new Asian

127 Weber, William (2006) -‐ The Rise of the Classical Repertoire in Nineteenth-‐Century Orchestral Concerts. In: Peyser J. (Ed.), The orchestra: A collection of 23 essays on its Origins and Transformations. Hal Leonard Corporation, Milwaukee, WI, p. 361-‐386. 128 Small, C (1996) -‐ Music Society and Education. Hanovei; NH: University of New England Press, p. 165.

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symphonic orchestras: Hanoi Philharmonic Orchestra (1997), Macao Youth Symphony Orchestra (1997), Myanmar National Symphony Orchestra (2001, reinstituted 2012), The Siam Philharmonic Orchestra (2002), The Symphony Orchestra of India (2006), Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre Sinfonietta (2006), Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra (2006), the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra (2007), Angkor National Youth Orchestra (2007), UN Symphony Orchestra (2012), the United Arab Emirates National Symphony Orchestra (2012), Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Orchestra (2012), the joined Symphony Orchestra of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Founding the national orchestra and cultivating the symphonic music in national idioms stands for the acknowledgement of readiness of the 3rd world nations to step forward and become equal partners to the nations that have already cultivated symphonic music, which then becomes a form of cultural currency set to evaluate the nation’s capacity for mass production and its reliability as a partner in globalized production cycle. Western classical music also becomes associated with the idea of wealth -‐ by the same token of affiliation with the industrialization. One of the immediate consequences of the factory production within the open market economy was the stable incentive for the entrepreneurs to look unceasingly for new productivity gains. This laid the ground for what economists call “modern economic growth” -‐ a continuous self-‐sustaining increase in product per capita. For the developing nations this model stands in sharp contrast to the slow and fluctuating progress characteristic of preindustrial economies.129

Western symphonic music works as a “subliminal” representation of the advantages of the capitalistic society. This must be the reason for its surge in popularity in Western Europe during the 2nd half of the 19th century and gradual decline in the West, as the Eastern European countries took the turn of symphonic excitement. Naturally, as the nation commits to the capitalistic model and secures its economic base, the urgency in sensing “industrialization” reduces. The other motifs, more important to the social life, come to surface. Such is the topic of overcoming the difficulties -‐ a landmark of Beethoven’s dominance in the Western classical canon.

The satellite of the classical orchestra -‐ the classical symphony -‐ tells the same story over and over again: the story of the person defining himself through the life challenges, becoming stronger and finding unity with the world around. Like in the genre of the western, the same story has to be repeated in multitude of characters and circumstances in order to make the same point: that being rational, having a good goal and staying consistent pays back and will be appreciated by the society. General stories like that can be seen as a cultural ceremony that marks the exploration, the affirmation, and the celebration of certain values, certain kinds of ideal relationships and life attitudes. Symphony becomes the rite whose function is to remind and reinforce the important cultural credo -‐ disclosed through the progression of themes of certain character and their elaboration. That is why autonomy of music is the prerequisite of the symphonic music. The separation of music into an entity of its own does distance the spectator from the rite, but in exchange, engrafts

129 Crouzet, François (2001) -‐ A History of the European Economy, 1000–2000, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville and London, p. 101-‐104.

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a genuine sense of accomplishment in the listener, as the latter penetrates into the message of the autonomous music. The end result of the audition is the affirmation of the listener’s power, multiplied by the amount of listeners in the audience. Experience of rational unity, the championship of intellect over the challenges of nature, is the idiosyncratic purport of the symphony.130

This aspect becomes evident only to those listeners who accept the autonomy of the music work and become proficient in following basic auditory contrasts. However, this level of competence appears to be rather basic, accessible though the numerous instances of autonomous listening. The music history of Soviet Union is filled up with the experimental demonstrations of proficiency in following the autonomous evaluation of the classical music achieved by the audiences in the Asiatic republics and autonomous districts, completely unexposed to the Western music before the 1920s.131

Similar evidence can be traced in Western sources. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), founded in 1939 in the UK, held series of classical concerts in factory canteens and popular venues throughout the war. The surveys of the audience after the concert series by Myra Hess showed "a new understanding between the social classes" and a perceived "message of social harmony".132

The capacity of symphonic music to intellectually and emotionally unite the audience stems from the creativity issue deeply ingrained into the classical music. The same feature of creativity that marks the work of the composer, characterizes the rendition of the composition by the performer and its interpretation by the listener. The source of emotional contagion in otherwise intellectual domain of sense-‐making is a joint act of creation between the listener and the artists. This joint experience sets a new intrinsic value, responsible for the effect of “rational addiction” to the arts. 133

Creativity of listeners is the phenomenon unique to the Western arts consumption. A classical listener has to go beyond traditional ways of thinking about music. Each of the episodes that make the story line in music is unpredictable, and so is the relation of one episode to another, forcing the listener to come up with something new and original as compared to previous act of listening. Creative performance is known to emerge from a confluence of six different parameters: intellectual processes, knowledge, intellectual style, personality, motivation and the person’s environmental context. Many artists regard

130 Small, Christopher (2001) -‐ Why Doesn't the Whole World Love Chamber Music? American Music, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 340-‐359. 131 Keldysh, Yuri et al (1970) -‐ Istoriya Muzyki Narodov SSSR: 1917-‐1932 [History of music of the peoples of USSR: 1917-‐1932] Sovetskii Kompozitor, Moscow. 132 Beaven, Brad (2005) -‐ Leisure, Citizenship And Working-‐Class Men in Britain, 1850-‐1945. Manchester University Press, Manchester UK, p. 225. 133 McCain, Roger (2006) -‐ Defining Cultural and Artistic Goods. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 147-‐167.

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traditional art education as not very effective in addressing all these constituents of creativity, holding that experience is a better teacher. 134

Jacqueline H. Wiggins points out that in the practice of Western music “listening” constitutes analysis and interpretation of the flow of sounds heard during audition. A listener is supposed to identify meaningful elements in the music, retrieve their semantic values and reconfigure the meanings for each of the constituent elements in such a way that their succession would make sense. The entire process of listening to a piece of music is nothing but an intellectual puzzle that each listener has to solve, negotiating meaning for the entire composition on the ground of aggregating semantic values for each of the meaningful elements.135

In this respect, every instance of listening to music, according to the Western tradition, necessarily involves an act of creation. A listener generates information that he did not possess prior to listening. He strains his auditory, attentional, emotional, imaginative and representational abilities in order to grasp the composer’s intention. The challenge of this task is reflected in the very setting of the act of listening: the architectural design of buildings dedicated to the sole purpose of listening to music is characterized by construction of dedicated seats where the listeners can focus on auditory comprehension, isolated from unrelated noises or other distractions. Modern neurophysiological research confirms that musical creativity is essential in life of a modern human being, and neural facilitation in sound processing shapes the general abilities of an individual -‐ going as far as to cause individuals with higher musical aptitude to have increased grey matter volume in the primary auditory cortex.136

Similar to the artist’s creativity, that of the listener might also be more receptive to the experience of the autonomous listening -‐ something that the authors of the music appreciation courses must have overlooked. Creative listening is the discovery that the newcomers to the field of classical music have to make on their own. Once discovered, the heroic message of the symphonic narrative becomes an attractor -‐ a chief reason for consumption of classical music products versus the other forms of music. It is this heroic content that comprises the “selling” point for the non-‐Western cultures of today.

The “symphonic story” is perpetuated not only in symphony -‐ it becomes encoded into the sonata form and penetrates into genres of sonata, trio, quartet, quintet, concerto and overture. Listeners of the chamber music hear the same tale of struggle and victory, told in

134 Bryant W.D.A. and Throsby D. (2006) -‐ Creativity and the Behavior of Artists. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 507-‐532. 135 Wiggins, J. (2002) -‐ Creative process as meaningful musical thinking. In T. Sullivan & L. Willingham (Eds.), Creativity and music education (pp. 78–88). Edmonton: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. 136 Brattico, Elvira, & Tervaniemi, Mari(2006) -‐ Musical creativity and the human brain. In: Musical Creativity Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, Irène Deliège and Geraint A. Wiggins (ed.), Psychology Press, New York, p. 290-‐321.

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terms of themes, their collisions, transformations and recapitulation. A musical theme becomes for the listener an impersonalization of himself, and all the thematic perturbations exemplify the troubles and surprises he has experienced throughout his life. Listening to such narrative, like reading an adventure novel, was by no means abstract. The listener experienced the music flow as a kind of autobiography. The exercise of "identification" was polished through the opera consumption. The lexicon of melodic, harmonic and rhythmo-‐metric idioms was illustrated in a very coloristic and concrete manner in stage productions, where plot and lyrics marked the nuances of dramatic action and characterization quite precisely. Once the listener recognized similar idioms in the instrumental sonata form, he had no difficulties envisaging the corresponding characters. Thematic plan of a musical composition worked as a navigation map in the journey of a listener, where his own voice became the equivalent of the melodic line of a music work.137

When the ideas of industrialization, prosperity and global competition were actual in the everyday life, symphonic music and sonata form were the center point of musical cultural life in the West. As the industrialized economy was becoming a commonplace for the Westerners, they were losing interest in symphonic music. The new nations, eager to join the industrialized community, became attracted by the symphonic music. From this point of view, symphonism went beyond the borders of states and political systems. The communist countries were just as prone to the symphonic contagion as the capitalistic states. Industrialization took place in USSR and China -‐ communist authorities regarded the stage of “socialism” as derivative from “capitalism”, both sharing the same method of mass production, just differing in the ownership and distribution of profit. Soviet administrators were just as interested in popularizing the “factory” mentality and the “heroic” attitude as enlightened British fabricants.

Collectivism shapes the symphonic music production, and it equally shapes the perception of this music by the audience. The listeners co-‐pay for witnessing something impressive that otherwise would be an unaffordable luxury. The listeners share the sense of owning the act of the performance. As the musical storyline entangles, the audience shares the creative experience and unites in re-‐affirmation of the positivistic encouragement at the end of the concert. The symbolic association of the symphonic music with the “heroic factory” model projects very well onto the life conditions in the third world country. It is impossible for an individual there to flourish economically in the under-‐developed market -‐ no matter how much merit that individual has. Immature markets are extremely unstable, predisposed to shrinking in the demand (because of shortage of population in a local market or income loss). Prosperity for an individual in such conditions means prosperity for the market. Hence, the paradigm of the factory carries the connotation of vital importance to the listener from the emerging industrial country -‐ the message that very easily can take the national appeal.

137 Rothstein, Edward (2006) -‐ The new Amateur Player and Listener. In: Peyser J. (Ed.), The orchestra: A collection of 23 essays on its Origins and Transformations. Hal Leonard Corporation, Milwaukee, WI, p. 523-‐538.

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The subliminal message of classical music is codified in the very performance format, where all participants execute ritualized roles. Modern psychology and sociology provide a good grasp of the meaning of a classical performing event. Performers and listeners oppose each other throughout the concert, separated by the stage border: they enter the hall from different doors; they are not supposed to interact with each other; they contrast in action -‐ performers move, while listeners sit idle; performers are entitled to make all the sounds, whereas listeners ought to keep silence; and performers are paid, whereas listeners do pay. The music the performers play is predetermined a long time ahead (sometimes years) and involve much hard work in comprehension, interpretation and technical execution from each of the performers, as well as them as a group. On the other hand, listeners must restrain their impulses to talk, make noises or motions and focus completely on listening. Performers are positioned selectively on stage according to the function they play in music -‐ with all attention (height of the stage, lighting, dressing) going to them. Listeners, in contrary, are seated in egalitarian manner -‐ to provide the most similar visual and acoustic experience. The appearance of the concert hall stands out in relation to other buildings to signify that it is not designed for “everyday” experience. The inside of the building resembles the temple, with the hall being equivalent to the altar. The sameness in construction of the hall is as strictly observed as the sameness of the concert format. In order to be allowed to perform in a concert hall a musician ought to accomplish years of training and demonstrate excellence to teachers and employers in concert organizations -‐ similar to professionals in highly qualified labor within industrialized cultures (i.e. doctors, lawyers).138

The separation of labor by the orchestra musicians is reinforced by the separation of execution by performers from consumption by the listeners. Both parties have their challenges to meet during the concert, so that success at the end glorifies the creative effort on both ends: the work of assembling the storyline of music and the work of parsing it into intelligible idioms and making sense out of their progression. The sounds of music are placed in the epicenter, with all ritual magnitude assigned to them. The behavior code emulates that of a worship ceremony in a temple, where musicians enact the role of priests ordained for this purpose. The classical recital dresses the factory model of music production, where music tells the heroic story of perseverance and victory, into the gown of sacred ceremony that requires great discipline and self-‐control from all the participants.

The authority of the concert transpires into the authority of the education. Western music possesses a coherent and rational music theory that enables it to carry out the function of the default international music language. None of the popular musics that have surfaced in the last century have developed their own music theories. And it is highly doubtful if this would ever happen in the future -‐ since pop music operates on the principles of pure business, and business avoids unnecessary expenses. There is no need for Western pop music theory as long as the traditional Western music theory works. Pop music industry caters to market, and music market depends on convention. The classical 138 Lehmann, Andreas C.; Sloboda, John A.; Woody, Robert H. (2007) -‐ Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills. Oxford University Press, New York, p. 236-‐239.

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canon embodies the convention, therefore it is respected by the pop music industry. Replacing classical canon with something new would induce uncertainty and disorder (as what Shoenberg’s attempts did to the “serious” music field) -‐ which any business shuns.

Western classical canon puts music theory in the position very similar to the English grammar in the international community -‐ as a standard of international communication. Just as Western classical music can emulate the non-‐Western music, Western music theory allows to examine the principles of organization of the local music system, describe their basics, notate the samples of local music, analyze them and optimize the ways of teaching that music to the local population.

This places the Western music theory in a cardinally new position. Suddenly, from being a rudimentary discipline, ought to be learned together with the notation, it becomes a universal tool for comparative ethnomusicology. However, to elevate to this status, Western music theory faces the need for thorough re-‐examination of its traditional notions and definitions, re-‐orientation from the analysis of the score to the analysis of the sounding music, and filtering out the irrational postulates that have been copied from one textbook to another since the 18th century, without much scrutiny.

The musicologists who teach in the field of popular music already report the problems rising from scholasticism and inconsistency of the music theory. An example of this is given by Philip Tagg: when in 2000, he had to write an encyclopedia article on harmony, he spent weeks struggling with the task how to distinguish in terminology between the chords based on the superimposition of thirds (traditionally called “triads”) and those based on the superimposition of fourths. At present, many popular music instructors reserve to informal descriptors like “detective chord”, “Psycho strings”, “high-‐heeled saxophone” etc. -‐ to denote musical structures in a way that average student without any prior musical background would find meaningful. 139

Ideally, the outlines of elementary music theory have to be coherent and inclusive enough for any newcomer to intuitively grasp which attribute in the sound is addressed by which theoretical term. The taxonomy of the classes has to be consistent, and the distinction between classes -‐ clear. The descriptive glossary must be comprehensive enough to cover most common sonorities in reference to their pitch. rhythm, meter, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre, texture and form. Only then the music theory would spare the students new to the Western classical music of confusion, and encourage them to go deeper and learn more.

The advanced music theory contains a very powerful set of tools suited to investigate about any kind of music. The number of versatile theories apply to wide array of situations when a particular kind of analysis is needed. The methodology of analysis allows to tailor the investigation for gaining a musical understanding of a broad range of repertoires,

139 Tagg, Philip (2008) -‐ Essay Review of Simon Frith’s Taking Popular Music Seriously. Song and Popular Culture: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Volksliedarchivs, vol 54 ed. Nils Grosch and Max Matter. Münster: Waxmann.

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across all historical periods and geographic varieties of music, be it art-‐music or popular music.140

Of course, it is inevitable that Western framework will not fit the non-‐Western cultural material perfectly and might result in certain reductions in study. However, this is the only option for thorough examination of a music sample in question, without which no valid interpretation can be generated -‐ the only avenue that leads to the open discussion of that analysis within the community of experts. The ethnomusicological community does not specialize in music analysis and typically focuses on field work rather than on the structure of a particular piece of music. The music theorists, on another hand, specialize predominantly in the Western classical canon or post-‐tonal Western music, lacking experience in handling folklore and non-‐Western traditional music systems. Adequate framework for analysis of non-‐Western music artifacts is yet to be made.141

A recent trend to include "world music" course into the curriculum of music departments as means of balancing the “Europocentric bias” has proven the same point. The school usually hires an ethnomusicologist, or , more rarely, ask a historic musicologist from the music department to present the survey of the musics left out of the curriculum of Western music history. Such practice turns out to be incompatible with deep investigation of the musical life of any group of people. To be effective, ethnographic music studies have to be integrated with the classical curriculum, consistent with traditional teaching of European music, and use a dedicated specialist to present the non-‐Western music in the framework of a particular time and place, preferably supported by performance and ensemble opportunities.142

It is more valuable for students to learn the theory and practice of music making in meticulous detail, logically and coherently moving from the structure of a music work to the performance structure -‐ than exploring many different ethnic musics without analyzing them. At the present moment the theory developed for Western art music is still the most useful framework for studying non-‐Western cultures for most students.143

Something similar is already implemented in the third world countries, where the music educators tend to employ the Western music theory and history to compliment teaching of the performance of local forms of music. When administered in such blend, Western music often gives an edge over the old traditional way of teaching. Even countries that possess

140 McCreless, Patrick P. (2000) -‐ Music Theory and Historical Awareness. The Online Journal of the Society for Music Theory, Volume 6, Number 3, August, 2000. 141 Kang, YouYoung (2009) -‐ Diversifying music theory. Ethnic diversity in music theory: Voices from the field. The online journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-‐Atlantic, 2(1) p. 89. 142 Maus, Fred Everett (2004) -‐ Ethnomusicology, music curricula, and the centrality of classical music. College music symposium, 44, p. 58. 143 Kang, YouYoung (2006) -‐ Defending music theory in a multicultural curriculum. College music symposium, 46, p. 45.

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highly developed ancient traditional music systems, including notation, prefer the advantages of the Western music education. Japan's music education system has been Western-‐based since the 19th century. In an average curriculum, Japanese traditional music is introduced in the area of appreciation -‐ passively, as something to listen to rather than play; students do not have the opportunity to play instruments such as the Japanese drums or the shamisen, and there are hardly any teachers who really understand the music or can play a traditional instrument.

In Singapore, a multicultural society of Chinese, Malays, and Indians, the music curriculum also focuses on Western music— implementing an adaptation of the Kodály method. However, Chinese, Malay, and Indian songs, taught in staff notation, are included in the syllabus, and the so-‐called ethnic musics are taught as part of the compulsory extra-‐curricular activities. In Thailand, Thai music is part of the basic curriculum throughout the school, with Thai notation used alongside Western staff notation.144

In many third world countries the governments simply institute the networks of conservatories duplicating the Western model. The consequences are most evident in Bali, famous for its gamelan and kecak traditions. Separation of composition from performance in the curriculum, and the supremacy of the figure of the composer over the performer, borrowed from the Western tradition, stimulated creativity in Balinese musicians. Western idea of the historic genre development led to marginalization between the adherents of new music and the retainers of the old tradition. The new repertoire has been composed by means of notating and then editing a score -‐ in a way completely different from the traditional way. The produced works were intended for Western-‐style concert performance and viewed as aesthetically superior to the traditional music. Despite their minority status in demographic terms, new works dominated the official culture, setting what one might view as a sign of civilization. 145

The longer the exposure to the Western music goes, the more the general population alienates from its native music culture. This tendency is pronounced even in countries that were completely isolated from the West in the past, and manifested strong nationalistic traits. Thus, Mito and Murao (1999) sought to evaluate the degree of acculturation to Western music amongst the Japanese. They found that Western music has spread into every corner of Japan and is widely appreciated by both, professional musicians and the

144 Takizawa, Tatsuko (1990) -‐ The curriculum of music education from the viewpoint of Asia: A treatment of Western music and traditional music. Facing the future—Proceedings of the 19th world conference of the International Society for Music Education, Helsinki, Finland 145 Stock J.P.J. (2004) -‐ Interface at the Peripheries: Western Impact on Other Musics. In: Anthony Pople and Nicholas Cook (eds) Cambridge History of Twentieth-‐Century Music. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 18-‐39.

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general public. The younger generations were shown to have easier time appreciating Western tunes than the traditional Japanese ones.146

Westernization of world’s music is the trend that is unlikely to seize, whether it is for the best or for the worst of the world’s nations. Musical influence is just another facet of Western leadership: after all, other world’s nations one way or another have been adopting the Western lifestyle. No nation so far has rejected electricity or banking system. Just as technology and industrialization paved the road for the development in culture and economy, classical music provided a framework that proved to be more useful and effective in music production than the local traditions.

The key role in that was played by the uniqueness of the second musical canon to the Western tradition. It is this second, secular, canon that has evolved spontaneously to address the usage of music in the open market conditions. Therefore, music works and music theory produced within this canon have significant advantage over the works and theories that evolved in a single-‐canon cultures, or non-‐literate music traditions. This advantage is of the same kind that products of Western technology enjoy over the devices of the local traditional cultures. When local nationals face the free choice of what product they prefer to use, they go for the Western one because of its greater functionality.

Concise and sophisticated musical notation is one of the singular achievements of Western tradition over the other ones. Literacy provides a way of recording the nuances of performance, intellectualizing music, disseminating it, preserving it, and learning new music. Mastering literacy in this tradition empowers a musician comparing to an illiterate colleague. Once the music is notated, one has a convenient way of editing the music with a certain goal in mind. Non-‐Western music can be treated in the same way, as long as there is a reference to the live performance practice. The spread of classical music across the globe had much to do with the precision of the notation. and relative convenience of sight-‐reading and publishing the score. This alone is a good reason for the acceptance of it as an international standard. 147

It is erroneous to look at the Western classical music theory as an outdated grammar peculiar to just one of many types of music systems available in the world today. To begin with, the term "Western classical music" is a misnomer. it is not local to the Western Europe and the U.S., and it is not “one of many”. but rather “the biggest available”. It is really a multi-‐cultural and international tradition forged by musicians around the world who brought their various individual and cultural perspectives to a music that grew up in Europe but had its roots in Near East and Africa. The cultural heritage of classical music absorbs cultures of all Christian denominations, including Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Middle Eastern Islam, Greek and Roman polytheism, as well as pagan traditions of

146 Mito, H., & Murao, T. (1999) -‐ Memory for Japanese pop songs with different styles: Role of combination of text with melody. In S. W. Yi (Ed.), Music, mind and science (pp. 393-‐407). Seoul: Seoul National University Press. 147 Hargreaves, D. J., & North, A. C. (Eds.). (2001) -‐ Musical development and learning: The international perspective. London: Continuum.

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hundreds of ethnicities across Europe. The creative efforts of billions of musicians over the span of about 2500 years have laid the foundation of the music system most optimal for the needs of people of the world community. There is no other music system comparable in its impact over world over time. Western classical tradition as of today finds its home equally in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas. 148

Role of Western Popular versus Classical Music in Westernization

If the Western classical music usually permeates the non-‐Western cultures “from the top down”, the Western popular music always penetrates “from the bottom up”. Yet the impact of Western popular music on the world is by far greater, constituting its own pattern of Westernization of local musical tongues. David Huron from Ohio State University reports that it becomes progressively harder and harder to find a group of people unexposed to the influence of Western music, which “has swept the globe faster than aspirin”. In 1997, when he joined an expedition of biologists to the remote Javari region of the Amazon, one of the last vestiges of innate tribal culture, sought by anthropologists for comparative studies, he was caught by surprise, encountering subsistence hunter–farmers with transistor radios. As it turned out, even in the western Amazon, people listen to Funk Carioca and Christina Aguilera. 149

Modern anthropologists question if the model of research based on investigation of life style of the tribes isolated from the influence of Western civilization is possible at all. Especially Western music is known to pervade local music cultures and cause rapid enculturation. Almost universal accessibility of radio and television make it highly unlikely to locate individuals naïve to Western music. 150

Western music tends to enter the national music markets and restructure them. A 4-‐year research project "The Music Industry in Small Countries" examined the effects of economical, technological and organizational developments in the music industry during the 1970s on the musical life of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Tanzania, Kenya, Trinidad, Jamaica, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, Chile and Wales. Rapid expansion of the Western popular music sector was found, facilitated through the influence of two technical innovations: silicon chips and integrated circuitry design in consumer electronics, and the spread of a compact cassette. The technical innovations have found their way, in a very short time, into the most remote areas, irrespective of the social or economic system in a country. What is more, the rate of penetration appears to be accelerating. The improvements in instrumental technology streamline the ease of reaching the end users -‐ across all borders. Technological advantages of Western culture may imply cultural

148 Jorgensen, Estelle (2003) -‐ Western Classical Music and General Education, Philosophy of Music Education Review 11, no. 2 (2003): p. 130-‐140, 134. 149 Huron, D. (2008) -‐ Lost in music. Nature, 453, p. 456-‐458. 150 Thompson, W.F. & Balkwill, L-‐L. (2010). Cross-‐cultural similarities and differences. In P. Juslin & J. Slobod (Eds.), Emotion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 755-‐788.

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dominance, a kind of cultural imperialism involving the 'transfer of money and/or resources from dominated to dominating culture group'. 151

Western import is not limited to those countries whose governments are friendly towards the West. Islamic fundamentalism is by no means tolerant to the Western influence. Yet in one of the strongholds of fundamental Islam -‐ Pakistan -‐ the recent study discovered growing interest to Western pop music. 1000 college students, between19 to 24, were questioned in relation to their music preferences and listening habits. Music listening had the highest priority (97.1% prevalence), preferred to all the other indoor leisure activities, including watching TV. Listening to music was also preferred to a few of the outdoor activities as well. And Western pop music was found to trail Pakistani traditional music by a very small margin, with the mean scores of 6.89 versus 7.20 respectively. 152

No resistance to Western influence has so far proved to be in any way effective -‐ even where it was the official policy of a powerful all-‐controlling government. China News Agency called on Chinese people to "pick up the forceful weapon of music and dance, engaging in a struggle of anti-‐capitalism in the cultural terrain," in People's Daily on June 2, 1966. Fifteen years of abstinence from the music of the West did not kill the taste of the Chinese for Western artifacts. The Open Door policy in 1980s legalized the Western classical music, yet kept the doors closed for the pop culture. The population, however, kept smuggling in the pop songs -‐ despite the ban. Chinese authorities tried to fight off by creating state approved 'secular music' in 1986. The campaigns against Taiwan and Hong Kong Cantopop kept following each other until by the mid 1990s the state authorities had to give up and compromise. They partnered with Viacom's MTV and Channel V to produce Chinese pop-‐stars offshore, at least, as a short term measure of control, managing and producing a kind of sanctified popular music that could be conducive to the national ideologies. The lesson learned: demand for Western pop originates from the consumer base, by an individual initiative of each user -‐ and therefore tends to evade the state mechanisms of control. 153

The transnational media corporations make their services, such as radio or satellite transmissions, accessible beyond any local government control. The services come with phonogram and videogram electronic hardware, as well as software, designed for widespread use by virtually anyone. This opens opportunities for local musicians and music users that they never had before. Musicians learn the benefits of sound reinforcement and synthesizers. Music lovers get access to streaming broadcasts. And local

151 Wallis, Roger and Malm, Krister (1984) -‐ Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. The Sociology of Music Series, No. 2. New York: Pendragon Press, 1984. 152 Rana, Shabbir & North, Adrian (2011) -‐ Importance of music for Pakistani youth. Pakistan Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol 9, Dec, 2011. pp. 27-‐35. 153 Fung, Anthony Y. H. (2007) -‐ The emerging (national) popular music culture in China. Inter-‐Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 8, Number 3, 2007.

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culture boosters usually find themselves in position of borrowing Western material instead of generating their own. For instance, it costs a TV station in Trinidad ten times as much to produce a special on steel drum bands as to rent the rights to an episode from Dallas. As time passes the global media conglomerates continue to grow, as does the technological gap between developed and developing companies -‐ thereby only increasing Western cultural presence in the third world.154

Subsequently what can be seen across the world is transculturation of the local music forms with the Western tradition: the stylistic elements from different Western and local models are combined to make an industrial product that would appeal to a wide market. Typically, transcultural music can be identified by the local music users through audition due to its generic “sterile” sound -‐ the “commercial” flavor is generated by deliberate avoidance of features narrowly characteristic to a specific local ethnic group. The transcultural music is designed for cross-‐national distribution through a wide range of media. To produce one music for few markets is more cost-‐effective than to maintain a row of different musics. During the past few decades many local music traditions from Africa and Latin America have been integrated into the media output and gradually commercialized to compete in the media environment. Such traditions are running the risk of being sucked into the transculturation process and losing their identity, ending up as a blank component in some generic "world music" style.155

Yet another path for the Western music invasion is through the Western music instruments, seen as technically superior to the local ethnic instruments by many local musicians. For example, about 1980 the Tunisian singer Zoubaier discovered a synthesizer in a recording studio and after playing around with it realized that the synth could make his gigs at traditional weddings much easier to handle. Following his suit, just in the matter of few years, the synthesizer had supplanted the mezued (a Tunisian bagpipe) in many Tunisian bands playing at traditional festivities. It did not take long before the newly professionalized keyboardists have carried on from merely imitating the timbre of mezued to experiments with new sounds and the keyboard layout, eventually elaborating new patterns of accompaniment and changing the old tradition (ibid).

Musicologists usually view the Westernization by the popular music as something cardinally different from the classical music Westernization. This matter is very important to the issue of the canon, and therefore to the idioms and lexicon of music: does Western popular music have its own canon and its own set of idioms, or does it adhere to the classical canon? How many Western canons are there in place? The process of Westernization reveals what has been imported by the non-‐Western culture: one language with multiple dialects or a bunch of languages.

154 Malm, Krister; Wallis, Roger (1993) -‐ Media policy and music activity. Routledge, London, p.25-‐32, 60-‐77. 155 Malm, Krister (1993) -‐ Music on the move: traditions and mass media. Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993, Vol. 37, p. 339-‐352.

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It must be stressed that all forms of popular music of today originate from the Americanized idiomatic base of English ballad music, dating back to the broadside ballad of the 17th century, with the Afro-‐American rhythmic and melodic influences added through the course of the 19th century. The American music industry standardized the "easy-‐listening" music: once a song became a hit, its makeup was turned into a codified model for production of new songs. So, all "crooning" songs sound very much the same, all "rags" are like a clone of each other, etc. -‐ a true mass production of a commercially successful sample. The music publishing, recording and radio industries all have been oriented toward replication and marketing of once successful model. Not only the rhythmic patterns and melodic phrases become effectively cloned, but even the tempo of most fast songs is replicated from label to label and artist to artist. Consumer obtains an assembly-‐line product, but with very limited choice of “color” and “accessories”.156

Jazz, blues, rock, country, gospel and other forms of pop music, most popular today, are all based on standardization of different samples of music -‐ all built on the foundation of the classical music theory. All these styles share classical tonality, tuning system, chord structures, methods of modulation, rhythmic divisions, metric organization, textures, elementary music form, and principles of basic counterpoint, and instrumentation -‐ everything is borrowed from the classical repertory of the second canon. The same applies to the pop styles originated outside of Europe and Northern America: tango, salsa, raggae, samba, mambo, or bossa nova. They all comply to the same musical grammar and are no different in their organization from the pieces by Grieg or Dvorak. If the musician can play classical music, he should be able to play any of these other types of music as well. Noteworthy, for the inhabitants of non-‐Western countries all of these types of music appear as "western music", foreign to their native music tongue. This cumulative “Western music” is often blamed by them for degrading their traditional forms of music. 157

The distinction between Western popular and classical music in the third world countries is usually seen only by the policy makers, who tend to lean towards the classical music because of its cultural provenance and international acceptance. The dichotomy of classical and popular music exists primarily in eyes of the Westerners. To the third world nationals, whether the Western import is dumped by the governmental decision “from top down”, or smuggled by the individuals “from bottom up”, they appear essentially the same. Lack of historicity in perception of Western music makes it hard to distinguish between stylistic nuances of avant-‐garde, traditional tonal “serious” and “light” music. The overall preference for older tonal forms over avant-‐garde music most likely stems from the extra-‐musical concerns for international cultural authority. 158

If the grammatical and idiomatic base of popular and classical tonal forms of Western music appears the same to the cultural outsiders, and the classically trained musician can

156 Clarke, Donald (1995) -‐ The Rise and Fall of Popular Music. New York: St. Martin's Press. 157 Hargreaves, D. J., & North, A. C. (Eds.). (2001) -‐ Musical development and learning: The international perspective. London: Continuum. 158 Melvin, Sheila and Cai, Jindong (2004) -‐ Rhapsody in Red; How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Algora Publishing, New York, p.293, 328.

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perform the popular music works, then what is the “market discourse” behind the popular music? How does it differ from classical music, and what are the attracting points for the non-‐Westerner to consume it?

To define the social meaning of the act of performance of the popular music, the best strategy is to examine the circumstances of its first consistent usage. Looking back into history, it is important to distinguish popular music from folkloric music. The music that was supplied to the commoners during Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque was not “popular music” -‐ it was folk. This music was cultivated locally without literal transmission, through the acts of reproduction by one musician from another one, with the local community validating and selecting the musician’s variants of a particular dance or song. Consumers of folk music are interested neither in the makeup of the music, nor in the musician’s creativity -‐ folk art centers on the tradition itself -‐ on the sameness of the experience from listening to a particular song or a dance in relation to prior experiences. Folk music tells people about what kind of people they are: this music is created by the community for the community. It can absorb tunes from classical music, but the treatment of such tunes would be lacking the aesthetic features marked above in relation to Merriam.

Popular music differs from folk by its personal orientation. The communal nature of folk music gives it a strong national flavor that serves as a core constituent in folk consumption. It was the surge of political movement of nationalism that brought up the issues of national identity and established the concept of “folk” music -‐ as a tool for awareness of belonging to a community on a national scale. By the mid-‐19th century, every European nation had discovered its proprietary folk genus: the set of musical features believed to bear the representation of “national character”. At first in Germany, and then everywhere else the new “nationalized” idea of folk music was conceived as a counterpart to the classical canon in a dialectic relationship, where the “folk” was feeding the creativity of the composers who then perpetuated the folk value by casting elements of folk style into their works, the best of which received canonic status. The constellation of the folk, the classical and the emerging popular music was in place by the 1850s.159

The historical meaning of the term "popular music" has been denoting to the common people, tinted with the depreciatory implication that it is designed to suit low tastes and is associated with lower classes of the society. The first usage of the term, in the sense of "well favored" (liked by those whose opinion matters) music dates to the beginning of the 18th century, specifically in reference to the musical products for the new, bourgeois, commercial market. This "benevolent" connotation, as Romantic canonization was gaining a momentum, at first slipped towards reference to the "peasant music", but then differentiated from the notion of "folk music", and obtained the diminutive status by sticking to the authored music produced for the music hall. At the turn of the centuries one more property of the popular music was coined: its design for the mass market and distribution by mass media. This connection to the industrialized production and consumption has originated few decades earlier in England, when music publishers,

159 Gelbart, Matthew (2007) -‐ The Invention of ‘‘Folk Music’’ and ‘‘Art Music’’ Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, p. 1-‐13.

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concert organizers and theater managers grabbed the control over production, making consumption of music completely passive -‐ unlike in older times. 160

The passive consumption of a ready-‐made music product is what separates the cultural setting of folk music from popular music, as they started splitting apart. Both of them were addressed to the “people” rather than individuals, as the art music did, but folk music was all-‐inclusive -‐ it appealed to all members of a geographical, ethnic or national community. Popular music targeted a selected group of certain social stratum. Folk music solicited participation: to join the dance, or the chorus. The folk genre framework is usually defined by the application of music in everyday life, and work-‐songs are characterized by facilitating the work activity with the settings of the rhythm and pitch -‐ i.e. the musical phrases of the sea-‐shanties suit rowing. The popular songs completely lose this connection. In fact, it is aimed at the opposite -‐ at washing out the genre specificities in order to appeal to the broader consumer base.

Popular song is designed to please all, and to achieve that it avoids peculiar music traits, and makes listening comfortable, that is passive. The popular song can be told from an easy pleasurable lied (such as some of Schubert's) by sterility of its idioms and overwhelming sweetness of all musical aspects. This unmistakable "popular" flavor has developed as the music industry set the conveyer style manufacture, advertising and distribution of music, much the same as ordinary commodities. Music was categorized into separate products based on consumption: parlor ballads, novelty numbers, show songs, dance songs etc. -‐ all of which were produced more or less in the same way, to assure the adherence to the standard (equaled to the commercial hit) in order to reduce uncertainty and fluctuation in supply and demand. In 1920, Irving Berlin formulated these "standards" in his 9 rules for writing a good popular song:161

1) The melody must be within the range of average voice;

2) The title must be memorable and planted in the song with emphasis, repeated again and again;

3) The ideas and lyrics must suit either a male or a female, so both sexes want to buy a song;

4) The song should contain "heart interest", even if comic;

5) The song should appear original, not directly replicate the "hit";

6) Lyrics must have to do with things common to everyone;

7) The words must have many open vowels; 160 Middleton, Richard (2002) -‐ Studying Popular Music. Open University Press, Buckingham UK, p. 3-‐13. 161 Suisman, David (2009) -‐ Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Harvard University Press, New York, p. 45-‐46.

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8) Music must be simple;

9) Song writer must look upon the song as a mere business, not take music to heart.

Passiveness of consumption for a popular song should be distinguished from appearing passiveness of consumption for a piece of classical music. Both cases oppose active consumption of the folk music, but consumption of classical music only looks passive. In reality, the listener’s mind is engaged into the heavily demanding task of following the stream of music, detecting and interpreting the meaningful elements in it. The priority of perfectionism in performance and outstanding technical abilities reflects exactly on the “laborious” component in listening to the classical music. This priority is notedly absent in performance of the popular music in compliment with the intellectually idle listening to it.

The transition from active folk to passive popular song occurred during the period of industrialization, and should be regarded as its by-‐product. As the working force has migrated from rural areas to the cities, the workers brought together with them their knowledge of folk songs. However, the factory work was breaking away from the pre-‐industrial styles of work ethics. The new labor code was set to expose the principal difference between the new and the old concepts of work. The work at factory was all centered around the machines. The folk work-‐song was based on rhythmicity of the working motions of a person. Pacing to the machines was perceived as contrary to pacing to humans, so singing at the working place was banned in most factories. Discipline became the face value associated with the mechanized labor, and abstinence from music was the seen as manifestation of such discipline.162

Factory workers were fined for singing and whistling, which were regarded as distraction and indulgence at the place where full attention and focus were required. This ban on music at the workplace is regarded as the chief reason for the decline in folk tradition of the industrial nations. In this light popular music became a compensation tool for the working class to vent out the social tension and self-‐reward for eight hours of functioning like a machine. Whatever income the worker has made now could be spent for musical conditioning -‐ purchasing a musical product that makes one feel good. That was the music from the music-‐hall.

Music-‐hall represented the worker’s culture in the makeup of its audience, in the origins of its performers and in the content of its songs and actouts. The association between the working class and music hall was established very quickly: the first music-‐hall was built in 1849; by the 1880s there were about 500 halls in London, and in the early 1890s the 35 largest halls alone gathered 45,000 spectators nightly. After reinforcement of the 8-‐hour work days the increased leisure time and greater wages encouraged entertainment, so as suburban migration of the workers to the outskirts of the city and chores of commuting to their workplace. Music hall became the favorite form of leisure, combining drinks (spectators were allowed to move to and fro the bar), smoking and socializing (audiences

162 Watson, Ian (1983) -‐ Song and Democratic Culture in Britain, Croom Helm, London, p. 7-‐76.

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could talk, join in the chorus, if they liked, or boo). The programming was family oriented: the audience included single female workers and families.163

The music-‐hall song was an embryo of the popular music product as it is known today -‐ inclusive of general population, however serving the lower strata of society -‐ charging little entry fee, but making up by the volume sold. It was not mass produced yet, but it already was designed for “easy listening”: not demanding much attention, spectacular, topical, pleasant, entertaining and rather stereotypical. Most songs were created by the singers themselves, since they could not afford hiring a song-‐writer, by setting their own lyrics to already existing tunes. 164

This was where the popular music crossed paths with the classical one. The prototype for their crossover appeared as early as in 1786, when British music publishers started hijacking the most popular symphonies, quartets and trios by Haydn by extracting the most popular tunes and setting them to lyrics by popular contemporary English poets, arranged for solo voice with the keyboard accompaniment. These editions tried to capitalize on Haydn’s name, marketing the adaptations as “simple”, adjusted to the ease of an amateur and to the informality of domestic entertainment. These songs were very much in demand by the middle-‐class buyers.165

Up until the 1930s popular music shared with classical music too much to delineate between them clearly. Canonized music could make its way to the popular music domain, and vice versa -‐ as it happens, for instance, in Bizet’s Carmen or Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Carl Dahlhaus addressed this transitory phenomenon by the term “trivial music”, encapsulating the forms of light and popular music which are designed for the mass market and are characterized by a peculiar combination of sentimentality and “mechanization” of compositional arrangement (headless usage of stereotypical formula), disclosed as poetic expression which under a closer examination turns into prosaic tautology.166

Trivial music in the 19th century stopped being segregated: it started moving between genres and live music venues, thereby causing the backlash from the connoisseurs of classical music and anathema from the Romantic purists. Thus, in his magazine, Schumann scrutinized the ranks of the composers of his day and tagged the ones “guilty” of flattering the audiences with the worn-‐out idioms. The extent of the anger of the supporters of the canon is explained by their sense of fraud -‐ as if a composer tried to disguise the flawed good as being proper in order to sell it. The truth of the matter, however, is that it is nearly

163 Jones, Gareth Stedman (1996) -‐ Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-‐1982. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, p. 205-‐224. 164 ibid. p. 224. 165 Wheelock, Gretchen A. (1990) -‐ Marriage a la Mode: Haydn's Instrumental Works "Englished" for Voice and Piano. The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Summer, 1990), pp. 357-‐397. 166 Dahlhaus, Carl (2004) -‐ Trivial Music (Trivialmusik): “Preface” and “Trivial Music and Aesthetic Judgment”. In: Bad music: the music we love to hate, ed. Ch. Washburne & M. Derno, Routledge, New York, p. 256-‐277.

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impossible to isolate the structures in the music responsible for the “trivial” impression, because what in one composition appears banal, can acquire a fresh characteristic face in another composition. The best that can be demonstrated by music analysis is the “idling of the elements.” Triviality is a matter of the musical context -‐ a consequence of the mismatch between the compositional devices and the alluded importance. 167

This context often plays tricks by moving the music work from “trivial” to “serious”, even to the “altar” of the “serious” -‐ the canonic repertoire. Thus, Les contes d'Hoffmann by Offenbach used to be the “popular music”, and now it is considered to be a staple of opera repertoire. Waltzes and marches by J. Strauss Jr., initially condemned as “light” music, started making their way into the concert programs in 1870s, and became established in the repertoire of the Vienna Philharmonic around the 1930s.168

History loves to transfer the boundaries, as pointed out by Jorge Borges in his Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote. Cervantes conceived Don Quixote as a good natured but credulous man, who "decided to seek prowess and enchantment in prosaic places", which turned into a tragedy of being vanquished by cruel reality. Yet for both of them, "for the dreamer and the dreamed one", the scheme turned out to be the same: Cervantes also was absorbed into the unreal world of the books, alien to the ordinary world of the 17th century that was hostile to him. Now, for us today, both Cervantes and his hero appear as part of the same myth. Time flattens distances. 169

What follows from the distance between “classical” and “popular” being flattened is that both types of music operate on similar grounds. Indeed, most of the features marked above as special for the Western canonic music apply to the popular music as well. It is authored, sometimes with quite original craftsmanship of the composer. The popular music works used to be denied in copyright on the ground of their triviality until in 1848 three popular composers, E. Bourget, P. Henrion, and V. Parizot attended a cafe where their music was performed by the group of the musicians hired by the cafe owner. The composers refused to pay their bill, claiming that the owner used their labor without paying them, therefore they were using his labor without paying him. The court ruled in their favor, and the court of appeals extended the copyright to the popular music. Two years later the same composers founded SACEM, the first copyright administration union in the world, accredited by Napoleon III despite the protests of the canon supporters. 170

By the end of the 19th century it became obvious that “popular music” work could be original in content and tasteful in style, and that such work could be unfairly ripped off by

167 ibid. 168 Scott, Derek B. (2008) -‐ Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-‐Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford University Press, New York, p. 89. 169 Borges, Jorge Luis (1964) -‐ Labyrinths; Selected Stories & Other Writings, New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York, p. 227. 170 Attali, Jacques (2009) -‐ Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Transl. B. Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, p. 77-‐78.

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talentless imitators, therefore requiring the same intellectual rights as high art works. This acknowledgement is the proof that popular music maintains the same premise of autonomy of music as the classical music does.

A popular music work, like an artwork, is a scheme of certain configurations of rhythm, pitch and harmony that form recognizable patterns -‐ which are protected by law as an intellectual property of the author of that music. The difference is that in classical music the scheme is fixed in the score, whereas in popular music it is fixed in the performance actout. However, this difference is logistic: the score of the classical music does not constitute a music work, it is merely a plan for some ideal performance, of which each actual performance is an attempt of emulation. The memory of a popular artist of the way how to render a song, how to move to it, how to use diction, how to use expressive timing, etc. -‐ all of this is an attempt to emulate the ideal performance as well. And the audience measures the actual performance of a popular musician in relation to such ideal scheme, judging the rendition superb, or lacking in this or that respect. In the same way a cover version of a popular song is judged in comparison to the original execution. After 1950s pretty much each popular song is fixed in the singular rendition by an artist who is believed to authenticate that song, so that the cover versions are judged inferior to it. The very fact that popular audience demands a particular song from a favorite author, and then judges the quality of its rendition, rather than accepts the favorite artist making any music, testifies that popular music is based on autonomy of music structures as opposed to folk art or non-‐Western traditional music.171

The dependency on the autonomy of music must be responsible for the education level consistently shown as the prime concomitant factor associated with the regular attendance of live music events. Higher educational achievement corresponds to greater analytical skills and attention focus, which are likely to make the task of tracking the changes in music structures upon the audition more easy for the listener. Noteworthy, the education factor is shown to prevail over the income factor in the empirical studies in arts economics not only in relation to symphony, opera and ballet, but Broadway musicals, jazz, rock and folk. This prevalence of education is marked for different countries: America, Australia, England and Canada. What is even more interesting, consumption of classical and popular forms of music is characterized by lower price elasticities than other goods and services. Price elasticity of demand measures how much consumers respond to price changes in their buying decisions. The lower the elasticity of demand, the fewer good substitutes the product has in the market. Low elasticity tells about the nature of a product and how it is perceived by consumers -‐ which corresponds with the economic evidence: there is no close substitute for the performing arts.172

171 Frith, Simon (2007) -‐ Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Wey Court East, UK, p. 284-‐285. 172 Seaman, Bruce A. (2006) -‐ Empirical studies of demand for the performing arts. In: Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1, North Holland, Amsterdam, p. 415-‐472.

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The listener needs both, popular and classical forms of music, and consumes the more of both, as his education increases. Thus, popular and classical musics are united in the respect that they encourage the gain of musical expertise. The greatest importance of this displays on the personal level: learning more about the music becomes a form of cultural capital investment for the Western music consumers -‐ spending time, energy and money in acquiring the relevant information on the music they appreciate now, they secure higher utilization of the music in future acts of listening. (ibid.) This pattern is not characteristic of the folk and non-‐Western music consumption in their indigenous live performance settings and their natural local markets.

The overall similarity in consumption of high art and popular culture is a characteristic trait of the Western society. The numerous economical studies demonstrate that towards the end of the 20th century the high arts in the industrialized nations become produced in the manner of a “commodity”, no different than the products of the popular culture. The cultural industry concept has extended to the non-‐profit sector, chiefly responsible for production of the high arts, as well as the for-‐profit sector encompassing the popular culture businesses. Both sectors adopt essentially the same marketing and production model, just reserving higher aesthetic standards and smaller importance of maximizing profits for the non-‐profit sector.173

In fact, it is exactly the underlying similarity in the production of the classical and popular music works that is responsible for the hostility between the professionals specializing in each of these fields. Classical musicians usually see themselves as contributors to the cultural values in the society, and dislike the low artistic standards of the popular music, that cater to too many and end up with the generic music devoid of structural originality. Popular musicians dislike the complexity of the classical music that restricts it to the narrow circle of connoisseurs, thereby propagating elitism, and see the popularity of the music as the measure of its merit: freedom of choice, satisfaction of the everyday needs, social bonding. 174

A century and a half of this dichotomy has eroded the boundary line between the classical and popular fields of music to such extent that now they appear to be separated by an impassible gorge. However, this gorge exists only in eyes of the Western professionals and masterful amateurs. To the non-‐Western outsiders and the Western consumers without musical education there is no break between both fields. Both musics appear rather similar than different.

Although those involved in making a living in high art tend to place value on aesthetic integrity and deny value in things popular; whereas those who make living in popular

173 Hirsch, Paul M. (2000) -‐ Cultural Industries Revisited. Organization Science, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue: Cultural Industries: Learning from Evolving Organizational Practices (May -‐ Jun.), pp. 356-‐361. 174 Foreman-‐Wernet L. & Dervin B. (2005) -‐ Comparing arts and popular culture experiences: Applying a common methodological framework. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 35(3), p. 169.

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culture often appreciate only things popular and debase elitarian works; for majority of buyers and sellers of art objects the preferred relation between the economic value and aesthetic value is that of correspondence. The monetary value of artworks fluctuates as a result of the changes in the canonic status of particular authors, and in reverse, the great demand on certain style of artworks in long run tends to increase the aesthetic standing of this style. Artists and art businessmen long for the “just” price that would align the aesthetic value with the market price. The very idea of value connotes regularity and relative stability -‐ which reflects the necessity to counterbalance the perception of uncertainty associated with aesthetic judgment and market fluctuations. That is why the dynamics in the art marketplace pushes for the correspondence between popularity and aesthetic value despite all the controversies and odds.175

What makes the insiders of the Western culture sector more aware of the discrepancies between “popular” and “artistic”, comparing to the outsiders, is the social meaning encoded in both forms of music. Popular music, just like classical one, relates to the industrialization induced “factory” model -‐ which makes both musics similar in eyes of non-‐musicians or non-‐Western musicians. However, popular music reflects on completely different angle of the “factory” production, of which the Western musicians are painfully aware. So, what is the inherent message embodied in the very format of a popular song?

We already have covered the transformation from the folk music to the musical commodity that took place in the mid-‐19th century industrial England. The workplace became “musicless”, divorcing labor from leisure and confounding popular music to music hall, cabaret and promenade music. The next development was the restoration of music at the working place in the new qualitative capacity of the background music. The origin to this tendency was placed by efforts of Frederick Winslow Taylor and other production managers concerned about rising productivity of the mass labor. By the first decade of the 20th century the idea that the more easy the worker feels at the workplace, the more effective his labor, has been accepted by many big businesses in the United States and England.

Music was realized to be a potent stimulant in the labor process. Slight distraction of the worker’s mind was capable of relaxing his mind and making him less aware of the monotony of the conveyer production. Positively charged music also altered the disposition of the worker, turning the chores into fun. Availability of the public radio transformed the factory once again: this time by adding the commodity music right there, in the background of life. Whole new gamut of meaning was introduced by such use of music: the popular sound was associated with the idea of internal freedom, autonomy, pleasure -‐ reminding the workers of the rewards for putting up with selling their labor for long eight hours. However, at the same time, this music affirms the necessity of the labor. The letters of the workers to the Radio Times in the 1930s demonstrate their awareness of these roles of

175 Ruccio, David et al (1996) -‐ "The Good, the Bad and the Different": Reflections on Economic and Aesthetic Value. In: The Value of Culture: On the Relationship between Economics and Arts. Edited by Arjo Klamer. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, p. 56-‐76.

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music, which determined its specificity in comparison to other forms of music: “they're not allowed to play anything decent anyway; people would listen and stop working”. 176

The principal novelty of the factory radio music was its purposeful generality and vagueness, combined with the pleasurable suggestion it sought to make. The earlier music hall and cabaret musics were quite opposite in their spectacularness, when music exhibited distinct humorous, political, sexual or dramatic content -‐ in fact the earlier popular music was often blamed by the classical purists for its aggressive demand of attention, transpiring into sensationalism and shocking vulgarity. The new brand of popular music encroached on the territory of the classical music by appealing to the mind rather than the physical body, and calling for the contemplative attitude. That must have increased hostility in the adherents of classical music, who from the 1930s on started seeing more of a devil in the popular music, in contrast to the condescending attitude of the 19th century. The writings of Adorno leave the impression that the author felt that the temple of the great music was besieged by the evil forces of “popular music”. The writings of Hanslick or Schumann appear much more positive, more of about just cleansing the temple from the dirt of “popular music”.

The results further indicated that the most frequent activities overall were work/study, social interaction, relaxation, TV/movie watching, and housework. These results seem fairly reasonable, considering that the participant sample consisted of students. More surprising is that, despite what would appear to be a lot of leisure time, music listening as a main activity accounted for less than 5% of the episodes (see Sloboda et al., 2001, for similar results).177 The least frequent of all activities was concert attendance, indicating that live music is becoming a rare form of exposure to music, even among people who are quite interested in music.178

The background popular music changed the disposition of the classical and popular musics towards the “factory” model: both musics strove for a collective identity, but from different perspectives. Classical music cultivated the Enlightenment ideal of subjective freedom, where the collective is defined by the productive activities of the participating individuals. As the popular music progressed, the classical music reacted with genesis of modernism, which kept emphasizing the subjective aspect of an individual production, eventually causing rupture between one’s sense of identity and perception of his place in the collective. From this point on, classical music turned hostile towards a collectivity “that was too immediately achieved” -‐ with the consensus that affirmation of a collective notion

176 Korczynski, Marek (2003) -‐ Music at Work: Towards a Historical Overview. Folk Music Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2003), pp. 314-‐334. 177 Hodges, D. (2010). Psychophysiological measures. In P. N. Juslin & J. A. Sloboda (Eds.), Handbook of music and emotion: Theory, research, applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 279-‐311. 178 Juslin PN; Liljeström S; Västfjäll D; Barradas G; Silva A (2008) -‐ An experience sampling study of emotional reactions to music: listener, music, and situation. Emotion, 2008 Oct; 8 (5): p. 668-‐683.

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violates the authenticity of a subject, and therefore is culturally oppressive and aesthetically false. 179

On the part of popular music, its popularity came precisely as a result of satisfying the individual need to affirm his place in the collective of people. Popular music contributed to the culture by generating the image of a collectivity that did not exist in society. In this respect, popular music replaced the folk music with the industrialized surrogate of the “popular” -‐ the prescriptive ideal of how the common people should be, what kind of music they should like and practice together.

The attitude towards a collectivity became encoded in the format of consumption of both musics. Classical music is composed overwhelmingly by a single author. The performers of classical music do not interact with the audience and have minimum interaction between each other on stage, overall behaving in a highly formal manner. Listening to classical music also appears as a solitary activity at the most part of the performance. Only the applause and encores display the group behavior. Talking to each other is forbidden in the audience, so are the displays of any attitude during the playing, altogether contributing to the reputation of severe repression of everything bodily. 180

The popular music marks exactly the opposite attitude of promoting the bodily expression in both, the performers and the audience. Much of this expression is collective, including dancing movements, singing along and talking between the spectators, as well as between the musicians and the audience. Collective authorship is more common in modern popular song than a single authorship. However, upon closer examination, it becomes obvious that opposition of classical and popular music along the bipolarity of “bodily-‐spiritual” is superficial -‐ in reality, classical music is no less “physical” than popular music, in fact, the range of movement represented by the idioms of dance genres and ballet is much wider than what can be found in popular music. The difference is in the mode of physicality: popular music is implicit in the expression of motion, while classical music is implicit -‐ the motions represented in it are transcendental, ideal actions projected by musical idioms that trigger imagery of the motion in the listener’s mind. 181

The same applies to the appearing bipolarity of personal versus collective. Classical music can appeal to no less collective feeling in anthems, national operas or oratorios. As a matter of fact, national identity is a prerogative of classical music: most world’s anthems are arranged in classical style, including the nations without any Western classical tradition. Collective triumphal feeling of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” transcends into the realm of mental representation rather than singing along with the choir, how it would be typical for the popular music. A real difference that separates “popular” from “classical” is not collectivism per se, but the relation to it: “popular” attitude is that of “being” together, whereas “classical” attitude appeals to “thinking” together. Composer thinks music up.

179 Johnson, Julian (2002) -‐ Who needs classical music?: cultural choice and musical value. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 67. 180 ibid. p. 68. 181 ibid. p. 69.

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Performer thinks out the rendition. The listener thinks of the content of music. All three aspects of classical music consumption are creative acts and they all correlate with the mass of people: the composers who wrote something similar to this, the performers who chose to interpret this music one way or another, and the other listeners, how they have taken this music. Classical collectivity is mentalized and transcendental, and it has to do with the production of meaning for the autonomous piece of music.

Classical music is by its nature laborious. Popular music is recreational. This is the true axis of bipolarity, that makes classical music look “disciplinarian” contrary to “comfortable” popular music. Yet both of them relate to the same issue of collective labor: the popular music compensates for the negative effects of the factory labor, whereas the classical music, especially the symphonic music, glorifies the factory labor. In this sense, both musics are diametrically opposite -‐ one takes the factory model as a great value, another puts the factory model as a source of some damaging stress. Nevertheless, if to thoroughly compare both approaches, one does not exclude the other. Rather, the popular music model supports the classical music model: removal of the stress factor enables more effective factory labor.

And this is exactly what we find in modern Western society: the proponents of classical music are bitter about the popular music, the proponents of popular music are bitter about the classical music -‐ yet both of these musics remain vital despite all the controversies. Classical music is supported by the wide appeal of the popular music that makes the “factory” appear as a fun place to work at. Popular music completely depends on the idea of “factory” that is represented by the classical music. A popular song is only a referential point to the idea of collective labor by the virtue of “recreation time” implying “work time”. The wide circle of popular music lovers provides the pool for the classical music to form the narrow circle of the devotees of the “factory”, eager to contemplate the mission of the “factory”, its sacrifice it takes and the reward for the sacrifice. The “duty” aspect of the “factory” life is not for everybody -‐ only for those who grasp the importance of the “factory” and its advantage over the other forms of labor. Hence, classical music needs a wider pool of people attracted to the sense of “factory” indirectly, as a correlate of recreation.

The “background” popular music moves one step further -‐ by internalizing the popular music and making it more of “personal” and transcendental. Dancing or singing along become “subliminal” in the experience of the background popular music. The simplicity of popular idioms allow for most of the meaningful structures being comprehended off the attention axis (unlike background perception of classical music that is likely to compete for moving to the foreground of the attention). Then the message of popular music merges with the information processed in the foreground of the mind, coloring into the pleasurable tones. Such mode of listening set the direction for personal applications of music (as the technological progress allowed it): listening to music in the car or at home.

The next major update of the format of popular music occurred around 1955, when the musical style dating back to Tin Pan Alley was replaced by radically new instrumental sound of the electric or amplified instruments (guitars and keyboard) and vocals, supported by prominent drums. Tin Pan Alley style was rather close to the classical music

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song, employing the small band of acoustic instruments, including string and wind instruments, with the percussions in the background. The influences of rag-‐time and jazz did that Tin Pan Alley has absorbed did not change the Western European melodic style, harmonization, and formal arrangement, cultivated by professional Jewish song-‐writers from New York (who set the standards for this music), and designed for predominantly white middle-‐class urban audience. In contrast to this music representing a single ethnic and social group, early rock 'n' roll merged together idioms coming from two styles untouched by the Tin Pan Alley composers throughout 50 years of its monopoly at the song-‐writing market: the black descendants of the slaves in South, and rural whites descended from non-‐literate immigrants from the British Isles. By 1940s both groups have migrated from South to all over America and developed the prototype rock 'n' roll style of the 12-‐bar blues form played by the combo of of guitars, bass, drums, often a piano and sometimes a horn or two. 182

The 1955 rock 'n' roll created a new amalgam of stylistic elements on new topics, centered around the matters of sex, discontent with the world and resentment to the school, state and church. This new music proved to appeal, for the first time in American history, to the absolute majority of the population -‐ the same performers, Elvis Presley, Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Horton, during the 1955-‐1960 have captured all three main popular music markets: the 'Best Selling Singles' chart (later renamed 'Top 1oo') that represented the music of Tin Pan Alley; the 'Race Records' chart (later 'Rhythm and Blues') that reflected the music by black performers aimed at black audiences; and the 'Country and Western' chart (later 'Hot Country Singles') that indicated the interests of rural white audiences of the South, Midwest and West. Rock 'n' roll turned out to be the silver bullet for the popular music market of the entire world. Its simplicity of music and text made entry to the foreign markets easy -‐ often the title alone was enough for the listeners to grasp the idea of the lyrics, and not much was lost if the foreign listener understood nothing more than the sense of the title. 183

The rock 'n' roll band set the fashion for the popular music to come. The message encoded in this format of performance is mixed. On one hand, the division of labor went further than ever before, with about a dozen of professions involved in production of the concert. The dependence on the technology became overwhelming -‐ without the electronic gadgets that would fill up few buses and the crew of the engineers the sound of the rock band will be nothing close to attraction of the audience. The same goes for the lighting effects and sound reinforcement. The distribution of this music also heavily depends on technology. These industrialized features are opposed by decidedly “tribal” flavor of the other traits.

The most common form of music making post-‐1955 is by a group of four or five musicians who all are given equal credits as co-‐authors. The front image of such group is egalitarian -‐ as an anarchist commune or a group of friends. During the performance the

182 Hamm, Charles (1981) -‐ The Fourth Audience, Popular Music, Vol. 1, Folk or Popular? Distinctions, Influences, Continuities, pp. 123-‐141. 183 ibid.

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musicians often come close to each other and engage into choreographic motions. Off stage they live together and expose their close ties to each other on photos, in videos and interviews. This public image usually conceals the animosities between the musicians and presents them as supportive of each other. 184

Yet another common feature that unites the representatives of many styles of popular music, starting from rock ‘ n ‘ roll, is their association with youth. The live performance turns into the festival of youth -‐ not alone the young listeners in the audience, but the general idea of “youth”. This connection stays with years, so that few decades later the same music is related by the same audience to their youthful memories -‐ which become the important constituent in the market value of the music. Subsequently, “kid’s behavior” is part of the public projection the musicians engage with the audiences. During the rock concerts the echo games, clapping, shouting, holding hands, feet stamping etc, have turned into the ritual behaviors. 185

The inclusiveness of the performance spread beyond the devices with which the musicians get the audience engaged -‐ the very concept of concert exposure has passed substantial transformation after the 1940s. Earlier popular music followed the exceptionality model of the classical music: performers exposed their unique musicianship in the form of technical virtuosity, great compositional abilities within a given genre, stylistic accomplishment, supreme taste, catchy lyrics, actout, dance act or extraordinary mastery of a particular musical device (i.e. syncopation). The exceptional skills worked as the justification for public exposure. In rural music promoted by Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) since the 1940s and the rock ‘ n ‘ roll the folk features started coming forth to replace exceptionality of the performance with the authenticity, which often involved the folkloric element: the musician projected the message that he or she was no different than the average man or woman in the audience, that anybody with smallest capacity for music could do what such musician was doing on stage. This hyper-‐inclusiveness destroyed any boundaries between that which was exposed and those for whom it was exposed, achieving the syncretic unity characteristic for folk art.

During the 1950s Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the U.S., and Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd in the U.K. introduced into the popular music the format of singing a simple folk-‐like tune, usually with sharp political lyrics, self-‐accompanying on guitar (or banjo) with the basic strum and straight rhythm. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez added the rhythm section and set the foundation for folk rock in late 1960s by Jefferson Airplane and Fairport Convention. However, this music is based on different musical thinking than the traditional folk, characterized by the absence of the accompaniment. The accompaniment brings in the harmonic, rhythmic and textural arrangement, which usually follows popular or classical stereotypes, since most folk rock musicians are either classically trained or in parallel

184 Shuker, Roy (2001) -‐ Understanding Popular Music, 2nd edition. Routledge, New York, p. 109. 185 ibid. p. 205-‐206.

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engage into some purely popular (i.e. rock or punk) bands. Ingermination of the aesthetic factor into the traditional material leads to mutation of the tradition.186

The message encoded in the post-‐1955 popular song format is contradictory: some features maximize the industrial characteristics (technology and division of labor), whereas some others revoke pre-‐industrial traits (folk-‐style inclusiveness, immoderate juvenile behaviors and communal relations). The new popular song masks its original “factory” origin by the veil of fake folk attitudes, akin to the “folk” songs and dances produced by the tourist industries in Hawai. The centerpiece of the new popular song performance is not the folk tradition. but the identity of the leader singer (or the group) disclosed through the prism of the song with its lyrics. This results with the aesthetic arrangement of the material that still segregates the author from the audience in the manner different from epic tradition. The economic format of prepaying for the show further increases the border between the listener, who hires the musician, and the musician trying to secure the future hiring. The actout becomes not about the tradition but about pleasing the listener. “Folk” cover is used to camouflage the sale and flatter the listener by elevating his status to that of the co-‐actor in production of a song. The unrestrained juvenile-‐like behavior also serves for the camouflage purposes, suggesting the idea of freedom, while in reality the show abides by the number of solid rules. Finally, communal public image is a fake because it projects non-‐hierarchical organization, while the business of popular music is hierarchical, with strong subordination.

The post-‐1955 popular song plays “tribalism”: it strives to attract the masses by depicting the natural beauties of life on a “banana island”, free from any obligations of modern Western society, however not depraved of the array of technical gadgets and services developed by capitalistic culture. Mythological mixture of simplicity of nature and comforts of culture makes up a peculiar marketing scheme which makes sense in the situation where the potential customer is tired of work and is looking for some hideout, where “nature” would present the “free” arena for exploring one’s capacities and letting out the inner self that otherwise has to stay gagged and bound by the discipline rules at his workplace. The myth of the banana paradise is there to offset the truth of the hard work in order to keep one’s job.

Again, we see the underlying attachment to the idea of the “factory” production. The tribalist myth makes sense only as a tool to compensate for the labor stress and manage the worker to retain his efficacy in the factory output. The post-‐rock’n’roll song is the same extension of the Western theme of the factory model as the earlier forms of popular music, and the same compliment to the classical music. The increased distance from classical music is illusory: classical music directly glorifies the sacrifice of a “factory” labor, in sharp contrast to the newer popular song that conceals its relation to the “factory”; however, the matter of truth is that both, classical and popular musics still serve the same goal of keeping the factory conveyer line run.

186 Moore, Alan (2009) -‐ The end of the revival: the folk aesthetic and its ‘mutation’. Music History; Dec. 2009, Vol. 4 Issue 3, p. 289-‐310.

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The proof that a modern work of Western popular music still complies to the classical canon is the format of actualization of the popular music performance. Almost all charted popular songs are published as sheet music. Every major record label is affiliated with a publishing house. The published score satisfies all the standards of a classical music score: it is the unique configuration of pitches and rhythms that constitutes the popular music work -‐ which is then offered for sale to the general public, so that an amateur musician can purchase the work and play it at home for himself or friends and family. What is considered “a work” here is the musical composition in the same sense as a classical music composition. The publisher sells the opportunity for an amateur to reproduce a particular composition. Moreover, the popular music publishers adhere to the same practice as classical publishers by releasing multiple versions of a song: for voice, for guitar, for piano solo, for choir, for a band. Existence of several editions of the same music work all considered as a single item is possible only under the premise of autonomy of music form and aesthetic value. Any person with suitable music skills purchases from the music publisher a right for unlimited number of performances for personal use [therefore, popular music performance created by the amateur at his home is going to be an interpretation of the score in completely classical sense].187

Classical music forms a package together with the modern popular song for successful penetration of the non-‐Western markets of the countries that strive to industrialize their economies or/and join the globalized community. Western popular music is capable of emulating the national traditions not any worse than classical music. The pattern established by the “tango craze” starting in the 1910s is repeated over and over again: as some “exotic” music catches the attention of popular music consumers in the Western market, the popular music industry insiders put their energy into replication of this music in order to capitalize on its novelty and sell more of their produce. This, in turn, causes the chain of adaptations to the original “exotic” style -‐ the novel features are tried out in different settings and different genres (i.e. tango-‐song for listening rather than dancing cultivated by Carlos Gardel). However, the overall direction is usually towards greater compliancy with the different types of consumers in the bigger music market. The resultant generalization of musical means of expression and filtering out too narrow, too local and peculiar musical features, reduces its “exotic” appeal. Eventually the commercialized style becomes “fit-‐all” and appears too generic to keep the public interest in the global culture -‐ and the craze goes over.188

This process of transculturation characterizes the popular music field since the 1990s, when the new category of “world music”, coined by 11 European and American record labels in 1987 in their coordinated marketing campaign, institutionalized the ways of introduction of non-‐Western traditional music into the globalized music market. Any ethnographic material collected in field recording or recorded in local studios by local musicians is delivered in Western facilities and remixed with the tracks created by the 187 Dahl Per (2009) -‐ The Rise and Fall of Literacy in Classical Music: An Essay on Musical Notation, Fontes artis musicae,, Vol. 56, Issue 1. 188 Ferrer, Horacio (2000) -‐ The Golden Age of Tango: An Illustrated Compendium of Its History. Art Books International, Shoreham-‐by-‐Sea, West Sussex UK.

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Western musicians according to the vision of Western producers. In the course of this the authentic content becomes hybridized with the technological and musical influences of the Western standards. The music industry is looking for the authenticity just bare enough to generate the flavor of genuine exotic culture -‐ for the Western listener to entertain himself with musical travel. The ethnic material here is needed as an exotic spice for the fast food product. So, the industry is in constant need for new ethnic content, which it handles very close to the colonial trade pattern of bringing the raw material in the metropolis, processing and packaging it there and then selling it in the global market.189

Both, Western classical music and Western popular music follow essentially the same enculturation pattern of importing the ethnic material, identifying its characteristic features and emulating them by accessible means, generating new products and placing them in the international markets. When such products end up in the country of original export, they often appear superior over the original music to the locals. For the third world countries whose economies near the industrial stage, classical music provides the subliminal motivator of the re-‐organization of the labor force. As long as the ruling class of such country understands this connection, it is likely to promote classical music. The countries with pre-‐industrial economies show little interest in classical music. Their population becomes attracted to Western popular music alone -‐ the same way they become attracted to Coca-‐Cola -‐ as a cultural commodity of a new, superior, taste. The Western popular music here acts as a fetish of higher technological development.

The reason why both, classical and popular, musics are capable of following the same enculturation path is because they share the same canonic foundation. Both canons, the Gregorian, controlling the notation, and the classical, controlling the aesthetic and grammatical aspects of music making, stay valid for the production of music in classical and popular music fields. Although the modern popular musicians are often portrayed as illiterate, such view is usually expressed by musically educated people, and tends to qualify any knowledge that is substandard in relation to the requirements of basic music education as illiteracy. In reality, most professional popular musicians, even in rock and rap, possess some competence in the names of pitches, their positions on the musical instruments, basic metric concepts and chords. If they are not capable of reading the staff notation, they usually can read fret tablature or the figured guitar chord notation. Most popular musicians take advantage of the software programs that convert the audio into notation, making the situation with music literacy not that different from calculators: many educated people today cannot multiply or divide multiple digit numbers in their mind, and completely depend on the calculator, but this does not render such people as mathematically illiterate.190

Those popular musicians who are “half-‐literate”, also possess limited knowledge of the classical grammar. Such musicians are not always aware of their knowledge. Thus, it is not

189 Mitchell, Tony (1993) -‐ World Music and the Popular Music Industry: An Australian View, Ethnomusicology, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 309-‐338. 190 Brown, Andrew (1995) -‐ Digital Technology and the Study of Music. International Journal of Music Education 25(1) pp. 14-‐19.

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uncommon for rock musicians to believe that classical music operates according to a set of rules that have little validity for rock music, and rely more on their ear and memory of the rock songs in the matters of composition or arrangement. 191

However, lack of awareness does not mean absence of influence. Musicians can be thinking in terms of what appears to them as rock idioms, which in fact are the implementations of the structural units of the classical music grammar. The building material for the popular musician to make music is rather limited: the assortment of typical vocal motives to make the melody, the rhythmic patterns characteristic for a given genre to make the groove and the progression of basic chords to construct the accompaniment. The choice of the accompanying instrument (instruments) determines the figuration of the accompaniment and the texture of the song. The music rarely uses counterpoint, instrumental passages or modal harmony. The form is always the alternation of verse and chorus, sometimes with the introduction and the vamp at the end. However, this simplicity is misleading. The variabilities and complications start occurring not on the order of musical structures but on the order of instrumentation, mannerisms in performance, laying drum tracks, applying special effects and sound mixing. The basic elements of the classical grammar suddenly take completely new life after the recording, mixing and mastering engineers do their job. The paradox of popular music is that the real music of the song hides in the elusive sonic whereabouts of the recorded tracks and their coloration by means of the arsenal of dynamic and frequency processors -‐ whereas the audiences notice only the melody and believe that it is the tune that makes the impression, and that it is the tune that they like.192

Popular music employs the same material and principles of construction as the classical music, but emphasizes completely different sonic aspects, which collectively aggregate into a unique sound design, known as “the sound” to the popular music industry insiders. “The sound” refers to the end result sonic signature that allows to recognize one band from another by auditioning just a minute of the recording. Live concerts tend to approximate the studio “signature sound” as much as the location allows. The distinctiveness of “the sound” contributes to a big degree to the ranking difference between the band with a name and some starters.

The difference between the classical music identity, which is reserved primarily for the composer and materializes in the configuration of pitch, rhythm, meter, harmony and texture, and the popular music identity, which belongs entirely to the performer and materializes in the rendition and actout of the song as well as the sonic signature of the performance, -‐ their contrast projects on the difference in the perception of both musics. Classical music requires at least some degree of structural analysis from the listener and knowledge of the idioms. For perception of popular music no analysis is needed and the

191 Shuker, Roy (2005) -‐ Popular music: the key concepts, 2nd edition. Routledge, New York, p. 182. 192 Hennion, Antoine (1990) -‐ The Production of Success: An Antimusicology of the Pop Song. In: On record: rock, pop and written word, ed. Frith S.. & Goodwin A., Routledge, New York, p. 154-‐171.

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minimal familiarity with the idioms, the deciding factor is following the “sound” and actout of the singer. Classical music calls for labor, while popular music spares from it -‐ exactly along the line of their relevance to the “factory” model.

Both musics are powered by the same canons and serve the same function of promoting the “factory” style labor in the society, but each music approaching from its own angle. Classical music uplifts to motivate heroic attitude towards the societal duties. Popular music rewards for carrying one’s duties and detracts the attention from negative experiences to positive ones. The products of both musics are highly competitive and tend to win against the local products when introduced at local non-‐Western markets. The local consumers perceive both musics as the same Western music. This similarity between both musics is further amplified by the ease of transfer from classical to popular field and back. Such “migration” of the repertoire has been known right from the institution of the classical canon. And as the developments in the 20th century have moved popular music farther away from the classical music, this migration did not disappear, but quite in contrary, seems to be growing.

Evolution of the Music Market; How Western Music Canon Relates to Westernization of the World

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