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Rockwell Matters

March 24, 2008

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On March 9, I wrote an entry in my “Rockwell Matters” blog about Nico Muhly’s concert at the Kitchen and what I perceived to be its post-modernist context. In it I included the sentence, “The rock-classical crossover is now organic and complete.”
 
The context for THAT statement is complex. Once there was art and there was entertainment. Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School of what might be called gloomy political aestheticians in the middle of the last century, fueled by a mixture of Marxism and puritanism, railed against any kind of “art” that made money; Adorno was withering about what he called “the culture industry.” Kurt Weill was a special target, especially after he moved to America and had hits on Broadway.
 
In my book “All American Music” in 1983 I was hardly the first to argue that all kinds of music should be perceived as part of a continuum. I believed that, but I still kept my various representative composers, from Milton Babbitt to Neil Young, separated into discreet chapters. I mentioned that Phil Glass and his amplified ensemble and repetitive music appealed to young listeners who might also like rock. But Glass and rock were still different. One was art, however popular; the Talking Heads were rock, however smart. I posited an equivalency without being able to demonstrate it.
 
How quickly things evolve. We now have the tail of barely commercial, independent rock nearly wagging the dog of commercial arena rock. Even the big commercial acts — U2, Björk, Radiohead — experiment in ways that cause classical critics to perk up their ears. Juilliard graduates like Muhly, who works for Glass, can collaborate with indie rock musicians and Björk in an utterly seamless manner. WNYC-FM’s own ongoing Wordless Music series, all installments of which are available on the wnyc.org music web site, celebrates this very fusion.
 
To be sure, this is a coming together of once opposed impulses hardly limited to music, or to the United States. It’s happening in film, in dance, in art. It’s mixed up with multiculturalism, with artists from different world heritages and races making their marks in arenas formerly limited to the lily white.
 
Fusion used to be a dirty word. It meant classical composers selling out or rock musicians ignorantly aping the classical past. Now, with the new “organic and complete” fusion, composers are just making music with a hybrid vitality that I never dared dream, 25 short years ago, could come so soon.
 
— John Rockwell
 
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