Which is more "high brow"?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I was thinking of this comparing me and The Mikado. We both hate crap like Disaster Movie and Hannah Montana, but we differ otherwise in what we like, thought both of us like "high brow" stuff. Of course we all know about my hatred of Shakespeare and I voted HP for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and I'm sure Mikado isn't the biggest fan of David Gordon Green or Guy Picciotto. I'm also thinking of Eraserhead here, at least in regards to music.

So basically I'm comparing "classics" here to underground, indie artsy stuff. Which is more high brow then? Casablanca or Donnie Darko? Opera or some artsy ultra-hipster band like Signal to Trust or The Appleseed Cast? Blake Schwarzenbach or Bob Dylan? War and Peace or some DIY 'zine with an ultra-limited press that makes no sense and is really just artsy rambling? Etc. Interesting thought really.

[Jake]

Both are intellectual, so...

Dumb question

[Earth]

So basically I'm comparing "classics" here to underground, indie artsy stuff. Which is more high brow then? Casablanca or Donnie Darko? Opera or some artsy ultra-hipster band like Signal to Trust or The Appleseed Cast? Blake Schwarzenbach or Bob Dylan? War and Peace or some DIY 'zine with an ultra-limited press that makes no sense and is really just artsy rambling? Etc. Interesting thought really.

High brow usually refers to the arts outside of popular culture, composition/opera, etc., so I don't think folk, rock, and alternative bands would count. Neither would film, unless it's subject is seen as being above regular popular culture topics.

I'd say the 'classics', whatever the artistic field, art, literature, would be seen as "high brow" instead of the indie and underground aesthetic popular culture has now.

[The Mikado]

I'll have a response later, but this is a very good question, and I'll think about it for a bit.

[Sensei]

Ever seen Frasier?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Both are intellectual, so...

Dumb question

Are both intellectual though? There may be some overlap in the categories (There Will Be Blood for example was both very popular with the hipster crowd and the other crowd), but I doubt anyone here would call my music taste similar to intellectuals, or consider Juno such a movie.

Ever seen Frasier?

Not sure what you're getting at.

[War on Want]

Classic as opposed to Indie, people who listen are in the hippie/super elite indie crowd are much more likely to call anything "below" their tastes trash with everything, while indie/"old school" scene kids are less likely to bash so easily but I see it working both ways. There are a$$holes in both groups.

There is lots of overlap though between indie kids and hippies though, especially among the much younger ones(16-25 or so), because lots of the hippies were indies a very short time before. This is especially true with music tastes.

What is with Schwarzenbach being considered indie anyways? Isn't he hero worshipped by those in the punk scene but less so among old school emos?

[Jake]

Are both intellectual though? There may be some overlap in the categories (There Will Be Blood for example was both very popular with the hipster crowd and the other crowd), but I doubt anyone here would call my music taste similar to intellectuals, or consider Juno such a movie.

Intellectual in terms of requiring thought.

[The Mikado]

The question is fair enough.

Skip this paragraph if you aren't patient/willing to listen to me ramble.  "High art" tends to be the art from a period that is considered worth preserving, and there's a pretty strong correlation that one period's "indie" art is the next period's "classic" art.  Classical music is dying through its own ghettoization and elitism.  People like Gershwin and Bernstein, earlier on in the twentieth century, bailed on classical music, deciding to import their talents into jazz and other contemporary genres.  Classical music became the home of academics inflicting their bad ideas on a once noble genre.  I dare you to listen to this: http://www.lunanova.org/podcasts/phantasy.mp3  That's mid-20th century composer Arthur Schoenberg.  And it's almost impossible to listen to...because Schoenberg knew that hundreds of years ago, the Western ear had decided what combinations of notes were pleasant and unpleasant, and decided to experiment with the unpleasant combinations.  Great textbook stuff, but making intentionally unpleasant music is not a good way to make your genre any new fans.  (I think Schoenberg's music sounds like letting a bunch of cats loose in an orchestra)  Today, there is exactly one contemporary classical composer of any sort of public reknown, and John Adams isn't exactly Giuseppe Verdi.  Adams just has a fanatical following because he's the last one of any great talent who isn't doing the John Williams thing and writing movie soundtracks.

If you skimmed the last paragraph, what I was saying is that classical music has failed to protect itself from becoming museum-piece art.  There's no "new" classical music worth listening to besides Adams.  If there are no new pieces added to the repertoire, it will turn into what it is: people showcasing what Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and the rest did hundred of years ago,, and slowly fade away.  No more drawing lines forward (X inspired Y, and you can see influences of his work in Z).  The lines will have a terminal point.  Besides, the academic ghettoization makes it even more moot.  It's impossible to claim that any composer besides Adams has any effect today, and it's almost impossible to claim that he does himself.

Indie culture is far more creative and inventive at the moment than classical culture.  No new great works of music will emerge from the classical genre (I'd go so far as to say no more good ones will emerge, but that would anger John Adams' fanbase).  I'm fine with the current repertoire (I'd hear Mozart over Schoenberg, Prokoviev, or John Adams any day), but it's fixed now.  Your genre's still progressing, and is in fact the avant garde.  Heaven knows that the mass market art of today will not survive.  Pop culture has become a cesspool, and the vast majority of it won't last months, let alone decades.  Indie films (I love indie films and foreign films), music, etc. have a much better shot of being representative of the late-20th early 21st centuries in art history textbooks of the 22nd century than anything in the classical or mainstream outfits, as the two-dozen 90-year-olds and New York Times music critics that keep contemporary classical music alive die off and put the wretched thing out of its misery, and as the mass-market crap of today fades from memory.  Which isn't to say that the music of Haydn and Mozart will disappear, only that they'll be played alongside today's "scene" music at concert halls, one representative of the 18th century, the other of the 21st.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

What is with Schwarzenbach being considered indie anyways? Isn't he hero worshipped by those in the punk scene but less so among old school emos?

1-What do you mean by "old school emos"? I can't think of anyone who would identify with that category, even those who listen to the style. They would identify (if they're going to use any of these labels) as punk, indie or hardcore. No self-respecting person would call themselves an emo kid, even using the original definition.

2-Schwarzenbach doesn't have much to do with emo directly. Jawbreaker was always a punk band. They influenced emo greatly, but were never part of the scene. And Jets to Brazil was just a straight indie band.

[Countess Anya of the North Parish]

Classic is more high brow.

[Earth]

... Classical music is dying through its own ghettoization and elitism.  People like Gershwin and Bernstein, earlier on in the twentieth century, bailed on classical music, deciding to import their talents into jazz and other contemporary genres.  Classical music became the home of academics inflicting their bad ideas on a once noble genre.  I dare you to listen to this: http://www.lunanova.org/podcasts/phantasy.mp3  That's mid-20th century composer Arthur Schoenberg.  And it's almost impossible to listen to...because Schoenberg knew that hundreds of years ago, the Western ear had decided what combinations of notes were pleasant and unpleasant, and decided to experiment with the unpleasant combinations.  Great textbook stuff, but making intentionally unpleasant music is not a good way to make your genre any new fans.

You're just using your own taste instead of what should be a well rounded criticism of the state of classical today, and you're flat out wrong. If anything, Schoenberg and other experimental composers are what energized modern classical music, and brought in new and creative ideas, both musically, and academically, not doomed it. What hurt classical was itself, by it's elitist, exclusionary attitude towards culture, and it's commercialization.

Instead of fostering a healthy, and open atmosphere towards the public, it kept it's head in the clouds, expecting to continue healthily into the future without taking into account changing norms. The one exception is film, where classical whored itself out to, reducing beautiful works of art into nothing more than repetitious background music for a tender, or scary moment. It became the novelty it is today, something completely independent of it's listeners, and closed off by it's own hand.

Schoenberg, or any other composer, is hardly a reason to blame for the decline of classical. One reason is because academics and classical as a whole has never taken kindly to outsider information, or creation. In fighting between academics, academics and the administration, and even between composers, creates an almost fragmented, isolated environment.

Even composers that aren't working in atonality, or dissonance get the short end of the bargain, like the struggle of the minimalists to be accepted by the musical establishment. Only once their public appeal is established, and more importantly, the finances they bring along by amassing fans, do they get let into the concert halls, like Steve Reich or Philip Glass.

Also, the decline in classical is not because of art, but because of commercialization. In order to ensure classical's success financially, it had to rely on the "tried and true" composers, one's guaranteed to bring in massive audiences, and fund the operation of it's opera houses and concert halls. Because of the pressing need for funds, concert halls and organizations were reluctant to showcase the experimental, because of it's limited public appeal, and because of it simply not being familiar to audiences. It couldn't take that chance to risk it, so Romantic and baroque composers won out, just by it's own established track record. 

Doing this, classical music excluded itself from the changing times, from evolving views, and became a one trick pony, stereotypically keeping the outdated, elitist atmosphere alive.

(I
think Schoenberg's music sounds like letting a bunch of cats loose in an orchestra)  Today, there is exactly one contemporary classical composer of any sort of public renown, and John Adams isn't exactly Giuseppe Verdi.  Adams just has a fanatical following because he's the last one of any great talent who isn't doing the John Williams thing and writing movie soundtracks.If you skimmed the last paragraph, what I was saying is that classical music has failed to protect itself from becoming museum-piece art.  There's no "new" classical music worth listening to besides Adams.  If there are no new pieces added to the repertoire, it will turn into what it is: people showcasing what Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and the rest did hundred of years ago,, and slowly fade away.  No more drawing lines forward (X inspired Y, and you can see influences of his work in Z).  The lines will have a terminal point.  Besides, the academic ghettoization makes it even more moot.  It's impossible to claim that any composer besides Adams has any effect today, and it's almost impossible to claim that he does himself.

Once again, you just use your own taste to reinforce your argument, but you're ignoring the thousands of worthy composers alive and working today. Most of them are not known, a lot aren't american, and they have almost no chance of being recognized without major connections for commissions and recitals. It has mostly to do with the financial aspect, in indie and underground music, also.

Classical, by not opening itself up to new composers and works, now only have a very narrow path to walk down, by only featuring the 'rockstars of classical', and they've dug themselves into a hole with their repetition.

Indie culture is far more creative and inventive at the moment than classical culture.  No new great works of music will emerge from the classical genre (I'd go so far as to say no more good ones will emerge, but that would anger John Adams' fanbase).  I'm fine with the current repertoire (I'd hear Mozart over Schoenberg, Prokoviev, or John Adams any day), but it's fixed now.

It would be silly and ignorant of me to say that no new great works of mainstream music will be created, so it's silly to say that about classical, when the sheer number of new blood in music neither of us have ever heard is growing. The fact is that classical will need to open it's doors to more ideas, and essentially become even more commercial if it were to survive modern culture. A rock and a hard place.

There's nothing to fix on the creative end of things, what needs to be fixed is the administrative section of musical academia. It's suffocating itself by relying on the same music for decades to bring in audiences. The same can be said of the major record labels, and both the classical and popular worlds need to find a better business model to make up for the downloading boom/sales slump.

 

Your genre's still progressing, and is in fact the avant garde.  Heaven knows that the mass market art of today will not survive.  Pop culture has become a cesspool, and the vast majority of it won't last months, let alone decades.  Indie films (I love indie films
and foreign films), music, etc. have a much better shot of being representative of the late-20th early 21st centuries in art history textbooks of the 22nd century than

anything in the classical or mainstream outfits, as the two-dozen 90-year-olds and New York Times music critics that keep contemporary classical music alive die off and put the wretched thing out of its misery, and as the mass-market crap of today fades from memory.  Which isn't to say that the music of Haydn and Mozart will disappear, only that they'll be played alongside today's "scene" music at concert halls, one representative of the 18th century, the other of the 21st.

I'm sorry to ramble, but I just can't agree with indie being the avant garde of the modern age. It's too mainstream, and there aren't any developments in the catalogs of the more well known artists. It's nothing new, but repackaged music in a different form. Indie is another product that has been used to create a new fad, and it's a slam dunk from a sales perspective. There are plenty of amazing indie bands, and have been since the 80s, but as a vague genre, and musical 'movement', it's ineffectual to gain real ground. It's just a continuation of the same marketing that brought Punk and Elvis to spotlight. It's real roots are in the undergound, far from the need to be commercialized.

Classical whether we own up to it or not, is not some dying animal that sits in the corner humming Bach, it's gained a lot of the younger generation that wants to continue to make serious music without the garbage of overused styles, image and mainstream trends.

[platypeanArchcow]

Mikado, you don't like Prokofiev?  Philistine! Although I like Shostakovich better, in general.

More seriously, Earth, you should substantiate your claim that there are people alive today who are writing good classical music.  The minimalists don't count because what they write is at best background music.

In truth, good music is the tip of an iceberg that consists of all the amateurs and semi-professionals who write and play music.  Before someone becomes a good composer (or whatever the equivalent is called for so-called "popular" music) they have to be exposed to and fall in love with the genre that they are going to write in.  If the pool of people who are growing up living and breathing classical music is low, then very few talented composers will come out of that pool; the talented musicians will end up in indie rock or whatever else people are growing up listening to (I really have no concept of modern musical genres, sorry.)

As for the topic of this discussion -- really, one can be a snob about anything that has a subset which is particularly good to a discerning taste.  Both of these appear to fit.  It can perhaps be argued that there is more to discern in classical music because it's been developing for longer and has more complex techniques (as far as I understand.)

[Earth]

More seriously, Earth, you should substantiate your claim that there are people alive today who are writing good classical music.  The minimalists don't count because what they write is at best background music.

Of course the minimalists count. I really believe they've been the saving grace of modern classical since the 1960s. There are plenty of great composers working today, from all over the world, the trick is finding them.

Mamoru Fujieda, William Basinski, Wim Mertens, Mary Jane Leach, Kyle Gann, Max Ricter, George Crumb, Ben Davis, John Zorn, Rhys Chatham/Glenn Branca (orchestral guitar composers), Bunita Marcus, Tom Johnson, John Luther Adams (not the same John Adams), Meredith Monk, Pierre Boulez, Ben Johnston, Paul Lansky (electronic composer), William Duckworth, Arvo Pärt (Estonian sacred minimalist), Easley Blackwood, Elliott Carter, Gustavo Dudamel (Venezuelan conductor, born in '81), Henryk Gorecki (Polish composer). I can't recommend these people enough, and there's plenty more going on than just these handful.

[opebo]

I don't really feel qualified or energetic enough to comment on these issues, but I will interject that it really seems bizarre to call Casablanca 'high brow'.. or perhaps I'm not understanding the term.

Oh what the hell I'll comment anyway.  I for one find the indies more accessable.  Does that mean they're lower brow?  (I keep miss-typing it 'high brown', which makes me think of 'high yellow', but that's another thread)

[Tetro Kornbluth]

"high brow" is too much of a cultural notation (or ideology, really) to indicate much. Snobbishness getting you down, BRTD? (Actual question btw)

Not too mention that what exactly is "high brow" changes quite a bit, I've even seen people who refer to, say, Allan Ginsberg or even (lol) John Ford - to give two very different examples - as "high brow". Imagine that 50 years ago.

However contemporary Indie Culture irritates me a great deal, I just find it really superficial whose adherents tend to be young, naive, unimaginative but essentially pretentious "individualists" who think like nearly all the other similiar young, naive, unimaginative "individualists" who make up Indie. In saying that I base my view mainly on the cinema (where I tend to agree with the mainstream that the best American stuff was created in the 1970s, though I don't agand not so much on music, as I know more on the former and I should point out that I have very individual tastes.

Though be in no point there will work being produced which will praised in 30 years time, but that's a generational thing, what really matters is it still looked up to as a model in 100 years time when the historical/social/personal context behind it was evaporated. I can't say it will for There will be blood (which isn't even one of top 5 films this year).

[platypeanArchcow]

More seriously, Earth, you should substantiate your claim that there are people alive today who are writing good classical music.  The minimalists don't count because what they write is at best background music.

Of course the minimalists count. I really believe they've been the saving grace of modern classical since the 1960s. There are plenty of great composers working today, from all over the world, the trick is finding them.

Mamoru Fujieda, William Basinski, Wim Mertens, Mary Jane Leach, Kyle Gann, Max Ricter, George Crumb, Ben Davis, John Zorn, Rhys Chatham/Glenn Branca (orchestral guitar composers), Bunita Marcus, Tom Johnson, John Luther Adams (not the same John Adams), Meredith Monk, Pierre Boulez, Ben Johnston, Paul Lansky (electronic composer), William Duckworth, Arvo Pärt (Estonian sacred minimalist), Easley Blackwood, Elliott Carter, Gustavo Dudamel (Venezuelan conductor, born in '81), Henryk Gorecki (Polish composer). I can't recommend these people enough, and there's plenty more going on than just these handful.

Ah yes, I forgot Pärt.  I haven't heard of any of the other people other than Boulez, but I'll keep a look out for some of these names.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah yes, I forgot Pärt.  I haven't heard of any of the other people other than Boulez, but I'll keep a look out for some of these names.

You might have heard some Gorecki even you've never seen the name before.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I can't say it will for There will be blood (which isn't even one of top 5 films this year).

No it is not considering it was not released this year. It is however easily one of the top 5 of 2007 and has one of the best movie lines EVER.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I can't say it will for There will be blood (which isn't even one of top 5 films this year).

No it is not considering it was not released this year. It is however easily one of the top 5 of 2007 and has one of the best movie lines EVER.

Oh yes sorry, its not one of the top five released last year but released this year in my country. And I'm struggling to think of any lines from it that would qualify. Tbh I've forgotten the whole thing except my thinking on how this film lacked a strong narrative ark and needed a great psychological depth (which it doesn't have, most people just add that to "their own version of the movie").

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Wow Gully does indeed live under a rock if he doesn't know what line I'm referring too. Even most people who haven't seen the movie should:

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Wow Gully does indeed live under a rock if he doesn't know what line I'm referring too. Even most people who haven't seen the movie should:

*shrug* yeah it was amusing. Nothing special though. No Rudger Hauer and "tears in rain" or Gloria Swanson and oh, everything she said in that movie.