“And the moment before she died, / she lifted up her lovely head and cried, / ‘Madam, Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.’”
A few things make classical and jazz “art music,” as opposed to pop music. One is that their audiences skew old and rich. Another is that they’re entangled in academia. You can take a course about Bach taught by a professor named Yury Avvakumov, but not one about K-pop. You can get a bachelor’s degree in “Jazz Arts” from the Manhattan School of Music, but not one in punk rock.
Nevertheless, I think the main factor which makes classical and jazz “art music” is that we’re not allowed to dislike it. It’s canonical, unimpeachable. Who cares if we think a Georg Frideric Handel opera is tiresome, or if we find a Max Roach drum solo tedious? No one, because Handel and Roach were geniuses whether we like it or not. It’s out of our control, beyond our grasp. What makes them great is immutable and ineffable — there’s nothing we can do about it.
In the infamous essay “The Composer as Specialist” (initially published under the more contentious title “Who Cares if You Listen?”), the modernist composer Milton Babbitt became the accidental prophet of a similar attitude toward art music.
“Only in politics and the ‘arts’ does the layman regard himself as an expert, with the right to have his opinion heard,” he quipped. Just as someone who knows nothing about mathematics has no right to give his opinion about pointwise periodic homeomorphisms, Babbitt argued, an audience ignorant of music theory has no right to appraise art music.
In the same decade that Babbitt wrote “The Composer as Specialist,” a young Stephen Sondheim — having just graduated college and eager to learn how to write musicals — began to study music theory under the same Babbitt. Although he positioned himself as a high priest of “‘serious,’ ‘advanced,’ contemporary music” and was labelled “the avant-gardist’s avant-gardist,” Babbitt was nonetheless a man “who did not disdain theatre music” according to Sondheim.
“I met with him once a week for about four hours, and we’d spend the first hour analyzing his favorites: DeSylva, Brown and Henderson but sometimes Cole Porter and Kern,” Sondheim once recounted. These men produced some of the core texts of the Broadway repertoire — e.g., “Good News,” “Anything Goes” and “Show Boat” — and Babbitt deemed them worthy of his time and critical attention.
If Babbitt — even given his modernist, antipopulist mores — respected musicals as art music, why doesn’t our culture? Unlike classical and jazz music, which we’ve established one isn’t allowed to dislike, one is very much allowed to dislike musical theatre. When I tell someone I listen to musicals, I feel embarrassed (or, at the very least, like I ought to feel embarrassed). That’s not to say that liking classical or jazz isn’t embarrassing, because it is, but at least liking classical or jazz comes with some cultural cachet. Musical theatre, on the other hand, is treated like it’s silly.
Why? Maybe because musical theatre feels more commercial than classical and jazz, seeing as it’s still commercially viable in a way that they aren’t. Maybe because musical theatre is associated with male homosexuals, but so are many other clouted high arts (e.g., ballet and opera), and they aren’t demeaned in the same way. Maybe because musical theatre is thought of as a genre for teenage girls. Maybe because it’s just not old enough to be art music yet, although it basically evolved contemporaneously with jazz, which enjoys a much better image.
Whatever the reason, it’s a shame. Musical theatre is our cultural patrimony, the product of composers raised on British operettas, well-versed in German classical and fascinated by modern jazz but nevertheless uniquely American through and through.
Look at these lyrics from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical “Carousel”: “Common sense may tell you that the ending will be sad / and now’s the time to break and run away, / but what’s the use of wond’rin’ if the ending will be sad? / He's your feller and you love him. / There's nothing more to say.” The text is folksy — it’s written in dialect, and it even dares to rhyme “sad” with “sad.” Still, like the best poetry of the New World, its inarticulate language manages to articulate a sentiment that highfalutin verse cannot. That is to say, I don’t think Petrarch could've written a good Broadway ballad.
Think of the melody of “Ol’ Man River” from Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 musical “Showboat.” It’s naive, like the tune of a nursery rhyme — just as catchy and twice as profound. Because of the simplicity of the music and the corresponding simplicity of the words in musical theatre, the melody and the lyrics really have to work together in order to function. The consequence is an almost Wagnerian unity of score and libretto, only without the Wagnerian pretension.
As Americans, musical theatre is our particular and priceless artistic inheritance. We could stand to be better stewards of this inheritance, though. Take the corpus of movie musicals as an example. Film snobs love to post stills and clips from “Singin’ in the Rain,” but why do they ignore “Kiss Me, Kate” (which is just as striking) and “On the Town” (which is just as charming)? Everyone’s heard the song “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better),” but why is the movie version of “Annie Get Your Gun” — the musical it’s from — impossible to stream, relegated to Turner Classic Movies?
Musicals deserve the respect given to classical and jazz, the respect due to art music. It’s a tragedy they don’t get it.
