Because the University of California is required to accept the top percentiles of high school grads, the incoming freshman class tends to be larger than the university can comfortably admit. Cal has chosen a two-pronged solution to the problem. First, freshmen may be admitted to Cal on “deferred” status, meaning that they are expected to join the student body in the spring semester, after mid-year graduation and attrition has taken its toll. But more importantly, the university has also implemented the Fall Freshman Program via University Extension, a valuable resource that allows 700+ incoming freshmen to take a full load of courses while waiting for the spring semester to roll around.
The FFP costs more than the regular university, but it offers some significant advantages, such as relatively small classes and one-on-one interaction with professors. Although some faculty in the FFP are also regular Cal faculty, others range from retired professors to professionals in their fields, to professors from other colleges, even to the occasional promising recent Cal grad.
I’ve been in the FFP for twenty years, teaching a class in music appreciation that counts as a “breadth” course, i.e., humanities. My approach is historical rather than repertory-based, meaning that I start with medieval music and end with the present day. Along the way I make sure to cover the political and societal background of the music under consideration, as well as looking at contemporary developments in literature, painting, and the like.
It’s a delightful class to teach (at least for somebody with an itch to communicate the joy of music to the public at large), and the students seem to appreciate my efforts, at least judging from the enthusiastic comments that have characterized my course evaluations over the years.
However, about a decade ago one semester’s course evaluation contained a smattering of nastily negative remarks, all of them focusing on a single issue. The gist went something like this: this course perpetrates the myth of Western cultural superiority and is totally biased against anybody except dead white European men. I still remember one quip: I, for one, do not think that the Enlightenment was important at all!
A sudden attack, out of nowhere, on a class on Western European art music as being too Western, too Eurocentric. Hmmmm….I thought, something’s fishy here. So I took a good look at the FFP course offerings for that particular semester. Lo and behold, there it was: a class in “Multicultural Studies” being taught by a brand-new Cal grad, probably on his first teaching assignment. I don’t have access to class rosters, but it took no great stretch of the imagination to figure that my group of discontents were students in that class as well as mine.
Confirmation of my hypothesis came the following academic year, when there was no Multicultural Studies class and I suffered no adolescent sniper attacks. Yep, I thought, it was Dr. Multicultural Studies. I bet he reamed out Western culture at every opportunity—despite teaching in one of the outstanding monuments of that culture.
Several posts ago I related my final speech to my Music 27 students, in which I assure them that “classical” music is for everybody, and it’s for you. It’s our collective birthright, a precious gift that each of us gets just for having been born. It’s ours to discover, celebrate, and love as we wish.
And that means everybody, and not just Westerners. But you do have to go out there and get it; art music will not come to you. It isn’t part of our everyday life as a rule, unlike the puling drivel that infects public spaces from Memphis to Mumbai. All cultures have their traditional folk music and their own flavors of pop music. But Western art music is neither folk nor pop, nor does it necessarily serve as handmaiden to a specific societal function.
We all know that “classical” music encompasses quite a lot of music that isn’t particularly classic. Quite a fair amount of the surviving earlier stuff is strictly liturgical and belongs in the music-for-use category. The vast bulk of ballet and theater music is functional as well, and for that matter quite a lot of opera as well. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term “classical” as a catchall for all “art” music, given my reluctance to think of theater and religious music as being somehow in the same general category as a Beethoven symphony. I’m not speaking in qualitative terms here, mind you: my objection concerns genre, not value.
I’m considering thinking of “symphonic” as a catch-all term for music that is fundamentally non-visual and best experienced via active, attentive listening—as happens (in theory, anyway) at the Symphony. At the Symphony we don’t walk around and talk during the performance; we don’t eat popcorn or swill soft drinks in the concert hall; we keep quiet. The whole point is to focus on the music being played. That extends to the orchestra’s presentation, which is minimalist: no fancy lighting effects, costumes, makeup, etc. (Flashily-dressed soloists are common, but that’s a topic for a different article.)
Thus “symphonic” music embraces not only orchestral, but chamber, solo, and even vocal works that are best heard—and not necessarily seen—attentively and carefully. Thus a concert presentation of an opera becomes a different animal than a staged opera production, piano sonatas and string quartets belong in the same general category as symphonies, but the liber usualis and a string trio playing a wedding reception do not.
As a taxonomic term “symphonic” is probably no better than anything else out there, but it serves the present purpose, which is my notion that “symphonic” music transcends ethnic boundaries, whereas folk and functional music tend to emphasize divisions. Consider the situation in most conservatories today regarding Asian folks: symphonic music has become an important part of a kid’s upbringing, and with it, Asian folks are making up an increasingly large percentage of not only conservatory students but professional musicians as well. A kid from Shanghai studying piano at the San Francisco Conservatory may come from a different ethnic background; he may have grown up hearing traditional tunes that would be utterly unfamiliar to a kid from Denver. But both the Shanghai and Denver kids share Beethoven in common, and if the Denver kid were to visit the Shanghai Conservatory, he would find himself in a familiar environment, despite language barriers.
Because a Beethoven symphony isn’t tied to a specific societal function—i.e., it isn’t part of religious ceremonies, meant to accompany a theatrical production, or tied to a folk-music tradition—it stands apart from ethnic distinctions and can, theoretically, speak to anyone who wishes to listen. True, the harmonic language of Beethoven may differ from that of, say, Javanese gamelan, but the Western harmonic language has become familiar across the globe. Symphonic music is in many ways the English of today’s world, a lingua franca that serves to connect people from disparate cultures and traditions.
That Western music arose in Western culture goes without saying. As such, its development is by necessity bound up with the philosophies and mindsets of Western people. One of those notions is of a music that stands absolutely by itself, music unshackled from specific purpose or utility. Out of that distinctly Eurocentric idea comes a universal art, one which embodies the idea of “multiculturalism” far better than the separatist preachings of a safely cloistered academic.