How Music Works

by David Byrne

  The artist Alex Melamid satirized beliefs about the mystical and moral power of art in a slideshow I saw, in which he showed photos of himself holding up reproductions of well-known masterpieces by such artists as Van Gogh and Cézanne in front of folks in rural Thailand. He was proposing, with tongue firmly in cheek, that exposure to these “spiritual” works would elevate these “heathens,” and that the artworks might even have some healing properties. It was hilarious, partly because Melamid kept a straight face throughout, but the point was clear: out of context, the great Western masterpieces simply are not the transformative icons they are considered to be back home.

  FUNDING

  Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding—and not all from the government—than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues. This is because of the edifying value ascribed to such institutions by people of a privileged economic and social class throughout much of the twentieth century.

  This arrangement has become a little hard to parse in America, where much of the sponsorship and audience for these institutions no longer comes from old money. Class and wealth were not always synonymous here, but maybe now they are becoming so. Joining the club that supports these venues is a way for a Texas oilman or an arms dealer to seem like a more cultured person. The image is so common as to be a cliché. Jett Rink, James Dean’s character in the film Giant, starts off as oil-field trash, but when he strikes it big he tries to be a society sophisticate. For the most part, the new rich do try to behave and appreciate the same things as the old rich. (Interesting that the titans of tech, the nerdopoly, didn’t follow this pattern—they seem to have little interest in joining those clubs.)

  Funding well-established institutions that play “quality” music isn’t only about a search for status; it is also about keeping many kinds of music or art out of the temple, and discouraging amateurism in general. Hazlitt wrote that “Professional art is a contradiction in terms… Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession.”14 That would seem to imply that no amount of aid or support could possibly do much good—so why fund the arts at all? But I think he means that we should support these geniuses, and let the rest—the ungifted and the unprofessional—fall by the wayside. Marjorie Garber, in her book Patronizing the Arts, responded to this idea, writing, “By this logic, [arts] funding was, in a sense, doomed by paradox: the training, schooling, and fostering of professional artists could only support the wrong artists, the nongeniuses.”15 It’s a bit of a catch-22. The work that has been approved, and that appears in the institutions, must be good, because it’s already been included in those institutions. Sort of a closed system, but I guess that’s the idea.

  Outside of his work as an economist, Lord Keynes was involved in an organization called the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a government arts-funding agency that later morphed into the Arts Council of Great Britain. It was established during World War II to help preserve British culture. Keynes, however, didn’t like popular culture—so some things were deemed outside the provenance of the agency’s mission. Keynes “was not the man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals,” observed Kenneth Clark, the director of London’s National Gallery, and later the host of the popular television series Civilisation. Mary Glasgow, Keynes’s longtime assistant, concurred: “It was standards that mattered, and the preservation of serious professional enterprise, not obscure concerts in village halls.”16

  If we subscribe to the nineteenth-century view that professionally made classical music is good for you and good for the ordinary man, then it follows that supporting it financially is more like funding a public-health measure than underwriting entertainment. The funding of “quality” work is then inevitable, because it’s for the good of all—even though we won’t all get to see it. The votes came in, and the amateurs lost by a landslide. (The Arts Council did, however, modify their brief after Keynes’s death.) There seemed to be no way, meanwhile, to teach folks how to develop their own talent—one was either born with it or not. Hazlitt, Keynes, and their ilk seem to discount any knock-on effects or benefits that amateur music-making might have. In their way of thinking, we should be happy consumers, content to simply stand back and admire the glorious efforts of the appointed geniuses. How Keynes’s friends like Virginia Woolf, or his wife, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, learned their own skills is not explained.

  Elitism is not the sole reason that the “temples of quality” are lavishly funded. There is also the undeniable glory of seeing your name on a museum or symphony hall. David Geffen may have gotten his start managing popular folk rockers, but now his name is on art museums (and AIDS charities). I’m not criticizing this philanthropy, just noting that it’s not being done with the aim of building a thriving network of folk-rock clubs across the nation. Museums and symphony halls encourage this trend by offering more and ever-smaller spots on which to chisel your name. I’ve seen donor names on hallways, cloakrooms, and even on the vestibule as you enter the toilets. Pity the poor donor who proudly points that one out. Soon every chair and doorknob will have someone’s name on it.

  The writer Alain de Botton wonders why our residences and offices are often so enervating:

  I met a lot of people in the property business [developers, as they are called in the United States], and asked them why they did what they did… They said it was to make money. I said, “Don’t you want to do something else? Build better buildings?” Their idea of doing something better for society was to give money to the opera.17

  This kind of compartmentalizing—separating one’s livelihood from one’s social aspirations—is part of the reason David Koch, the hidden hand behind a lot of ultraconservatives and, reportedly, the Tea Party movement in the United States, transforms himself into a respected arts patron by funding a theater at Lincoln Center, or why a Swiss bank that helps U.S. depositors avoid paying taxes generously supports symphony halls and the ballet. It’s almost as if there are moral scales, and by tossing some loot on one side, you can balance out the precarious situation your reputation might be getting into on the other.

  Industry titans have long directed a good amount of their wealth to the acquisition of the artifacts of high culture. After accumulating a collection, they need to find somewhere to park it. Henry Clay Frick was a coke and steel manufacturer and railway financier before he became the founder of the jewelbox museum on the Upper East Side that bears his name. The core collection of American art at the de Young Museum in San Francisco was donated by John D. Rockefeller III, whose wealth was originally generated by his grandfather, the founder of the energy monopoly Standard Oil. In 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner used an inherited industrial fortune to build a Renaissance palace in the swamps outside Boston to house her own collection. Referring to oil magnate John Paul Getty, Carey writes,

  In his view, artworks are superior to people. His art collection was viewed as an external or surrogate soul. These spiritual values attributed to the artworks were transferred to the owner. That owner can be an individual or a nation. It applies to theaters and concert halls as well as paintings. The artworks or performance spaces become like spiritual bullion—underwriting the authority of the possessor.

  Such industrialists, whose wealth was sometimes brutally obtained or whose moral judgment was entirely questionable (Getty felt that women on welfare should be denied the right to become parents), thus engaged in a kind of reputation laundering. Someone who supports “good” music must be a good person, too. (I have no idea why the Mafia dons and the narco-gangsters haven’t wised up to this fact. Wouldn’t you love to see the Joey Bananas opera hall?) Reputation laundering works because it’s assumed that the folks who support fine music would be less likely to commit heinous crimes than the human flotsam that frequent a honky-tonk or a techno club. Participating in the scrums and mosh pits at pop concerts must be less morally and psychologically uplifting than sitting stock-still in complete silence at the balle
t.

  What if, in an imaginary country, a hypothetical king preferred house music to Mozart? Would that confer high status on raves? Would we then see buckets of funding being allocated for dance venues, and witness topflight architects vying to build pop-music clubs out of titanium and imported marble? I don’t think so. But seriously, why not? Why does the idea of equal funding for popular music seem ridiculous? Granted, pop music is supposed to stand on its own two feet financially—“pop” stands for “popular,” after all—so by definition it shouldn’t need help. High-art music is not nearly as popular, so it needs financial support to stay afloat, to continue to have a presence in our culture.

  But there are plenty of innovative musicians who now work in a vaguely pop idiom (though that definition has been stretched a lot lately) who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies. For years, pop music was considered crassly commercial—a place where most musical choices were made solely in order to pander to the lowest common denominator and rake in more cash. Now, though, many would agree that there is a lot more than money behind all the work and innovation that falls within the increasingly fuzzy boundaries of the form. There is still plenty of soulless work being churned out, but I would argue that for sheer quantity of innovative output, there is more going on within pop music than in any other genre. The mere use of electric guitars, laptops, or samples, for example, doesn’t mean the intentions of the composer or performer are any less serious than anything traditionally deemed high art. Much of it is done for the joy of it, with no hope of having a commercial hit. (Though some hit songs can be innovative, too.) Why not fund the venues where these young, emerging, and semi-amateur musicians can make and perform their own music? Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

  POP MUSIC: CAPITALIST TOOL

  Take pity on popular music. Leftist critics like the late Theodor Adorno felt that popular music worked like a drug, pacifying and numbing the masses so that they could be easily manipulated. Adorno felt that the public in general had bad taste, but he generously maintained that it was not their fault; it was the wily capitalists and their marketing folks who conspired to keep the plebes stupid by making them like pop music. People liked pop, he believed, because it was cynically tailored to mirror their sad, mass-produced world. The mechanized rhythms of popular music echoed the industrial production process. One can certainly imagine metal or techno evoking an assembly line or a giant pile-driver; the feeling of surrendering to such a sonic machine might even have a sublime aspect to it, as well. Surrendering feels good. But Adorno doesn’t credit us with the ability to enjoy industrial-sounding music without actually becoming a cog in the capitalist machine. In his view, capitalist societies produced both workers and music via a kind of assembly line. That criticism is still leveled at a lot of contemporary pop music—it’s called “cookie cutter,” now, or formulaic. But did Adorno really think that the music made by the giants of classical music didn’t adhere to any tried-and-true formulas? I hear formulas in almost every genre—it’s rare when something really shatters the rules and appears to be completely sui generis. Besides, you can be a headbanger without accepting your horrible factory job. Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music gives them hope and inspiration. It doesn’t just placate and pacify.

  Adorno’s ideal was Beethoven, and he felt that subsequent trends in German music were corrupted. “It is this lack of experience of the imagery of real art,” he wrote, “which is at least one of the formative elements of the cynicism that has finally transformed the Germans, Beethoven’s people, into Hitler’s people.”18 Here we go again, linking music with moral and ethical values. Adorno maintained that such music—the work of corrupted popular composers—no longer attempted to suggest something greater than itself; it was content to be a utilitarian product, a diversion, a hummable tune. God forbid a tune should be hummable!

  Adorno argued that by reminding the dehumanized masses of their humanity, classical music—classical music, mind you!—threatens the capitalist system, and it was therefore this music that was discriminated against and discouraged. But wait—wasn’t classical music encouraged by Hitler? And isn’t classical music, as evidenced by the symphony halls and opera houses that are proudly displayed in the center of many of the world’s cities, fairly well supported by those very same capitalists? If that’s discrimination, I’ll have some.

  It is easier to find evidence of the overt persecution of pop music by the totalitarian left. In 1928, the Soviets announced that the playing of American jazz was punishable by six months in jail. Jazz jail. Hip-hop is still an underground phenomenon in Cuba, and until recently pop music was narrowly circumscribed in China. The government of the former East Germany was worried about the subversive influence of rock and roll, so they attempted to “inoculate” their populace by introducing a fake popular dance called the Lipsi.G These governments view pop, not classical music, as a potentially disruptive force. While Adorno’s musical favorites might indeed inspire a transcendent look toward the stars, it’s the social aspect of pop in the streets that really frightens totalitarian governments. Even in the United States, popular music has been banned when it seemed to encourage disreputable racial mixing or unwelcome sexuality.

  The Brazilian composer Tom Zé, who has to some extent bridged the elite world of academic composition and popular music, proposes a theory in which, in a weird nod to Adorno, workers are (poorly) “manufactured” by the system—in other words, the capitalist project aims to create cogs in the machine. But Zé says that our manufacture is defective, and that our quirks and our innate humanity make us, in effect, damaged goods. We’ll never work the way we were designed to; our humanity is our saving defect. In a way, he’s saying that while Adorno might be right about the system’s intention, he’s wrong about how things actually work out. Zé and his music prove that we will always fuck the system up in the most beautiful and unexpected ways.

  The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons.19 That these donors should choose to support this music at this institution is of course entirely their business. A 2010 Los Angeles Opera production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle cost $31 million to produce.20 Broadway shows don’t usually cost that much, unless you’re talking about the recent Spider-Man debacle. U2’s last concert-tour budget might be in that range, but those were stadium shows attracting huge numbers of people. And in those latter two instances, the people who wrote the music are still alive, and presumably they get paid a piece out of every ticket sold, which is part of what keeps those production costs up. Wagner has been dead for a long time, so one assumes it’s not his agent who is charging the moon and driving up the cost of these Ring productions. (Granted, it is a four-part epic.) The Los Angeles Opera ended up with a $6 million deficit due to “slack demand for expensive tickets.”

  Los Angeles is not known for its arts funding, public or private. The philanthropist Eli Broad and a few others might be trying to change that, but LA thinks of itself as a place that makes its own culture and entertainment—it tends to value things according to how popular they are and how much money they bring in. These values are completely the opposite of those espoused by the supporters of high-art music. Status in LA comes with having a huge hit, not by being seen at the opera.

  What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money— movies, of course, often cost a lot more than $31 million to produce—but the fact that the audience for this production was, inevitably, fairly small, coupled with the fact that the state ended up footing part of the bill. A $31 million dollar movie—a moderate budget by today’s standards—has a chance of making back its investment and more, and there is the possibility that it will be seen by vast numbers of people. A new opera production is by nature limited from the start. Mos
t of the time they are confined to one theater. Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, observes that some opera and symphony seats cost less than those at Broadway theaters, and less than those for some pop-music spectacles as well. So any charge of elitism doesn’t hold if one uses ticket prices as a gauge. But in general, cheaper tickets are artificial—they are offered at a loss to support the idea that this good and uplifting medicine should be available to all. Like the early museums that were intended to be free for everyone. Private and state funding, in this business model, is supposed to pick up the shortfall. Even with this aid they often have a hard time covering the expense of running and maintaining these halls or mounting their productions, as the Los Angeles Opera Ring production proved.H In fact, since many high-art productions often lose money for their venues, to extend their runs and thereby increase attendance would be to risk going deeper into debt.

  Is this any way to run a business? Opera companies have been trying to compensate for these unfortunate financial realities by looking for other income sources. The Met has set up satellite simulcasts in cinemas—live high-definition broadcasts of the productions for those who can’t make it to the theater. Peter Gelb at the Met has been fairly successful with this kind of thing; the screenings brought in $11 million last year. That is hardly going to make a dent in that $325 million annual operating budget, but every little bit helps. David Knott, one of their board members, echoes the Victorian sentiments when he endorses the simulcasts: “If we can’t bring people to the opera let’s bring opera to the people.” On an outside wall of the new Frank Gehry-designed symphony hall in Miami, a beautiful projection-screen faces a park with outdoor seating.I This area effectively doubles the hall’s size, and makes symphony music available to those who can’t afford a ticket.21