Great Art, Great Music, and Great Literature

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I recently read a story by an unpublished author that got me thinking.

The story was about a very intelligent woman, Janet, who had attended one of the best colleges in the country, and early in life met an incredibly brilliant woman and fallen in love with her.  They had inspired each other to become more and more immersed in the best of early and Baroque music, which was going through a burst of increased interest in the sixties.  They had separated soon afterwards, when others had entered their circle, but twenty years later they still kept in touch, but now there were siblings and nephews and nieces, all brilliant, all musical, all talented.

Into this circle enters an outsider, a wealthy middle-class girl, a freshman in college, who meets Janet and falls in love with her despite the difference in their ages.  But immediately there is a clash of cultures.  The young girl is more into Harlequin Romances, while the girls of her generation in Janet's immediate circle are incapable of considering anything less highly endorsed by the establishment than Pride and Prejudice.

Personally, I'm on both sides of this divide: the lovers of Great Art, Great Music, and Great Literature, on one side, and the lovers of a wider variety of art on the other.

Musically, of course, I have been largely on the conservative side; my tastes are still centered on the (musical) Baroque, the period from around the time of Purcell in England and Schutz in Germany, to around that of the sons of J. S. Bach: W.F. Bach, C.P.E Bach, and J.C. Bach.  However, since I also like a certain part of the Pop/Rock output of the last half-century, as well as a tiny sliver of the opus of the musical theater, my tastes are not as narrow as they might have been.

In literature, my tastes are a little wider, ranging from Jane Austen to P.G. Wodehouse and even Ronald Searle, and Terry Pratchett.  I have written a couple of stories, but their style hearkens back to that of Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  (I would have hated to admit that a couple of years ago, but now that I'm older, I realize I only have about 40 years of embarrassment left before I pass on that duty to my descendants.)

On the one hand, let's face it: there's an awful lot of stuff out there, begging for adoption into our hearts, our bookshelves, our walls, and our CD and DVD libraries.  Some people have the energy to keep going round looking at books, art and music that they might like, confident that there is something out there with which to fall in love.  Me: I figure that I know there is still stuff out there by composers and authors that I know I like, but haven't got to, yet.  Why would I go looking for new authors?  (When I have, it has usually been rewarding.  But that's beside the point.)

On the other hand, since I have written a couple of pieces of music myself (actually, just two pieces, totaling less than 10 minutes in duration, end to end) I find myself on the other side of the divide: the goal of every composer is to have his or her music performed and heard.  So if everybody else, like myself, was only at all interested in Great Music, I can forget about anyone listening to my stuff at all!

What are the issues?  Living in an age of plenty of everything (and not a drop to drink) as we are, the big intellectual battle, as I see it, is clutter.  Some things come in waves, like movies, for instance.  Every year--especially every winter--we have to decide which movies to see, and so we sift through them, and decide to like particular ones.  With movies, I guess we are lucky.  Few of us are such conservatives that we watch only the Great Movies, such as Casablanca, say. (Though even there, I come close.)  With books, the New York Times mostly decides what we ought to be reading, or we can wait for the movie.  Or we can go to the library, and browse.

With music, browsing at libraries is out, but the radio serves as a sort of musical library.  You listen, and if you like, you send out for it from Amazon, or order it at your local bookstore, or record store.  (I urge the latter; there are plenty of others out there to keep Amazon in the style to which it is accustomed.)

These days, there is also YouTube, which is actually more to do with sound than video, it seems to me.  There are a few teenagers who upload clips of themselves talking to the camera, but by and large, it seems mostly about music.

But, to get back to Janet and her young friend: Literature was initially a barrier between the younger woman and Janet's extended family.  Still, because of the fascinating characters involved, they managed to transcend their prejudices to the point where they were able to go past the superficial superficiality, to the interesting person beneath.  Superficiality is often superficial (though not always, unfortunately).  It's generally a good idea to give half an hour, say, to trying to understand the tastes of a new acquaintance, especially if they are strongly contrasted with your own.  Persisting longer is likely to be to the frustration of both of you.  For myself, I stick to the narrowest of cores of Great Art, Great Music and Great Literature just as a convenience, and not as a matter of principle.  Critical acclaim has little to do with why I like certain things.  I like them now, and I really don't base my preferences on the endorsement of the authorities.  To refer your preferences to some authority stinks of Philistinism.  And they say that's bad, don't they?

[Once again, I must acknowledge Susan Haley, from whom I have borrowed some of these ideas, especially the phrase Great Art.]

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