C’mon Everybody: Will Music Bring Us Together?

MUSIC WAS an essential—probably the essential—art form of the 1960s. In a way that’s hard for anyone who didn’t live through the decade to grasp, music once reached deep into every facet of existence, from politics to fashion. It seemed destined to maintain a central role in people’s lives forever. Rock ’n’ roll was here to stay. Was its promise of eternal revolution one more false utopia? Today, music has retreated to life’s interstices, as a form of theater, iPod solipsism, an occasion for nostalgia, or an arena for the uninhibited celebration of personal freedom (usually expressed in portrayals of some sexual act or other). What happened?

If there is one writer equipped to answer this question, it is surely Alex Ross. The chief music critic of the New Yorker, Ross has developed a loyal readership, and with reason. He is a musical omnivore, self-consciously exploding categories, ranging from Mozart to punk rock, juxtaposing Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks with Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin. Ross is our postmodern music critic. In a 2003 essay that can stand as his personal testament, he says, “I have always wanted to talk about classical music as if it were popular music and popular music as if it were classical.” One had good reason, therefore, to believe that his panoramic new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, would be a major contribution to explaining the puzzles of the contemporary music scene.

In many ways, and on many levels, Ross doesn’t disappoint. He appropriately opens his book in turn-of-the-century Austria, highlighting a resonant moment in music history. The Austrian premiere of Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé in the city of Graz in 1906 was a cultural event of the first order: everyone who was anyone seemed to be there—Puccini, Mahler, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, crowned heads of Europe, possibly a young Adolf Hitler. Thomas Mann even placed the fictional composer of Doctor Faustus in attendance. Still, for all the glamour surrounding it, the performance had an autumnal, last-gasp quality to it, for several now-familiar trends in music were under way. Orchestras of the time were already developing what has since become frozen as the standard concert repertory, beginning in the Baroque, culminating in Beethoven, and trickling out somewhere around Mahler, with an occasional foray into Stravinsky and one or two other “easy” but old-fashioned moderns. Meanwhile, interest was growing in new popular forms such as the cakewalk and two-step, many of them imported from America and frowned upon by the well-bred.

Most crucially, contemporary music that saw itself as developing out of the classical tradition was losing its audience, as concertgoers fled modernist orchestral assaults. Composers found varying solutions to this problem. Aaron Copland and Kurt Weill, to name two, chose to build bridges to the wider public with accessible works such as Appalachian Spring and Threepenny Opera. Others simply turned away. Ross quotes a well-known article by the composer Milton Babbitt entitled, “Who Cares If You Listen?” In it Babbitt declared, “I here suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition.”

Why, exactly, has modern classical music lost its audience? This is the overriding puzzle, but insofar as Ross attempts an explanation, he appears to be in a state of denial.

“In 20th-century music,” he writes, “through all the darkness, guilt, misery and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.” Who knew? Elsewhere, he describes modern composition as a “sunken cathedral” that is at long last attracting attention. Young audiences, he writes, now “crowd into small halls,” presumably to be drenched by beauty’s downpour. Well, hope springs eternal. But it has been almost a hundred years since Arnold Schoenberg devised his twelve-tone system to free the West from the chains of tonality, and the West continues to embrace its chains. During the 1970s, Pierre Boulez, as head of the New York Philharmonic, made it his mission to instruct New York audiences in the beauties of modern music. Instead, he found that instruction was difficult when the pupils refused to attend class.

It should be said immediately that Ross may be correct and that audiences are only now catching on to the splendors of modern music. Because this is an argument about the future, anyone may hazard a guess. What is true is that Ross has given us the twentieth century as it looks to an advocate of modern music in the classical tradition. What does it look like to someone who is not?

AS ALWAYS, one should begin with Schoenberg—though in this case with his writings, not his music. Schoenberg was an outstanding critic and historian, who understood with as much clarity as anyone the crisis that had overtaken music in the twentieth century. Let us learn from him.

In the eighteenth century, music was comprehensible even to those not technically trained in it. It was organized around a tonal center in which every part related to every other part—during the Baroque era through great polyphonic arcs of sound undergirded by a propulsive, thorough bass and during the Classical through melodies and motifs that were announced, elaborated, and dramatically contrasted with other themes in a free-floating aural universe. Dissonances were allowed into this closed system only if they were carefully prepared and controlled. They were deviations from the tonal whole.

The Romantic composers of the nineteenth century elevated the status of the dissonance by piling harmony upon harmony, blurring tonality. Wagner was the essential figure in all this. After him, dissonance took on a life of its own, and, as Schoenberg writes, “the evolution of music went straight along the path he pointed out.” That path led to what Schoenberg tellingly calls the “emancipation of the dissonance.” And the fact he grasped was that if dissonance was freed from a tonal context, if, that is, consonance and dissonance existed on the same terms, then there was no longer any such thing as a tonal system. All notes in a composition were equal; hierarchies that had been dictated by keys were overthrown. The tonal center had not held. To those who cherished the emotional orderliness and rational coherence of the Western musical tradition, chaos threatened. Indeed, before long all hell would break loose.

No one was more orderly, more buttoned-down, and rule-bound, than Arnold Schoenberg. As a composer it was his job to organize notes, but with the collapse of tonality there was no longer any structure to guide his decisions. So he created one.

Because all twelve notes in the chromatic scale were now equal and independent, he reasoned, every note had to be sounded before any one of them could be repeated. The composition was constructed through the order of the notes—the serial row—and through reversals, inversions, and other manipulations of the row. Later it became evident that the human ear wasn’t equipped to hear the row—or, perhaps more accurately, that the human brain wasn’t equipped to register it in any conscious or felt way. None of that mattered in 1923, when Schoenberg introduced his system to the world. After years of work, he was satisfied that he had found music’s new laws; he felt reinvigorated. “I believe that composition with 12 tones . . . is not the end of an old period, but the beginning of a new one,” he declared.

Not so fast. It was a compelling argument to anyone aware of the musical developments of the time; still, not everyone was ready to go along. Yes, tonality was in trouble in a post-Wagnerian world, but there were ways around the problem. While Schoenberg worked out serialism, Stravinsky introduced pounding new rhythms into the concert hall. Bartok and Copland discovered folk melody. Darius Milhaud turned to jazz and Kurt Weill to the Broadway stage. Then, following the Second World War, a remarkable thing happened. After all the debates, all the explorations of alternative musical avenues in the twenties and thirties, composers began to succumb to Schoenberg’s gravitational pull. So Copland, despite the popularity he had won a few years before, began writing twelve-tone works. Shocking. Yet this was as nothing compared to Stravinsky’s conversion.

The man widely identified as Schoenberg’s greatest rival in the prewar years transformed himself into a twelve-tone composer in the 1950s. The Russians had triumphed over the Germans in the war. Now a German triumphed over a Russian, and the earth shook. One musicologist called Stravinsky’s shift “the most profound surprise in the history of music.” Leonard Bernstein said that “it was like the defection of a general to the enemy camp, taking all his faithful regiments with him.”

And like a victorious army speeding across enemy terrain, Schoenberg’s disciples pushed ever further. Why should serialism be limited to notes where there were so many other elements of music to be brought under control? Pierre Boulez was the general who led the charge, and he extended the serial technique to pitch, rhythm, timbre, and dynamics, taking serialism where Schoenberg probably never intended it to go.

A reaction was inevitable, and it came from a former Boulez ally and Schoenberg disciple, John Cage. Boulez’s impulse was to regulate music in all its aspects; Cage’s was exactly the opposite—to open things up as far as possible, introducing every kind of sound into composition, erasing the distinction between music and noise. Why was a composition that featured garbage cans being thrown down a flight of stairs music and not cacophony? Because the composer said it was. End of argument. And so we have had modern works employing birdsong, the traffic in the Holland Tunnel, the composer’s brainwaves. One piece, by György Ligeti, presents a performer writing words like “crescendo” on a blackboard; another, by Karlheinz Stockhausen, has the musicians taking off in helicopters; a third, this one by Cage himself, repeats a one-minute composition by Erik Satie 840 times over nineteen hours.

Not surprisingly, even tonality reappears in modern composition. Why shouldn’t it, since all was permitted now—giving us the paradox of composers using their absolute freedom to limit their freedom through tonality, or what one modern composer cagily called “non-atonality.” Ross seems to hold out hope that this reemergence of tonality—in the work of minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for instance—will lure larger audiences to modern music concerts. The problem is that a contemporary composer’s tonality is not your grandparents’ tonality. It is not a self-enclosed system with roots deep in culture and history if not in human nature itself. It is just one arbitrary technique among many. It is contingent tonality, tonality that is employed ironically because it contains no thread of inner necessity. It’s not tonality. It’s “tonality.” The world of classical music remains Schoenberg’s world—in which consonance and dissonance exist on equal terms. The genie fled the bottle too long ago.

THERE WAS another path, but it was one that lent itself to a facile snobbery by musical sophisticates juiced in the finest schools because it had dubious requirements: an ignorance of Europe’s music crisis, which opened its practitioners up to accusations of provincialism, even stupidity, or a willful turning away from the crisis, which looked like philistinism or opportunism to those in the know. History and theory played no role in this alternative path, which, to add to the accusations, suggested anti-intellectualism. Along this provincial, philistine, and anti-intellectual path, a composer arranged notes in a manner that simply pleased ears accustomed to tonality, offering his work to the public with the aim of sharing the composer’s own emotionally heightened experience with others in mutually naïve pleasure. “Look at what I’m doing,” the composer says, “Isn’t this terrific?” Because the work is understood as a shared experience between artist and audience, it is based on what can be termed a pop aesthetic, though composers who practiced it in Schoenberg’s era approached the pop relationship with their public in varying ways, depending on their personalities and musical goals. If such a composer was modest and insecure, for example, trusting the taste of his audience more than his own, we can give him the name Irving Berlin. If he exuded confidence and energy, bursting out in all directions to express his musical ideas in every style available to him, let’s call him George Gershwin.

For all his insecurities and his businessman’s eye on the main chance, Berlin still managed to write memorable and lasting songs. But Gershwin is everyone’s favorite. At the same time, he is everyone’s problem. What do we do with him? Music critics and historians can easily ignore Berlin if they choose to do so. What is he to Wagner or Wagner to him, Tristan and Isolde to “God Bless America”? But Gershwin forces questions because he makes claims. Where does he fit into the narrative of post-Wagnerian music history? And which Gershwin are we talking about—the composer of enduring popular songs or the composer of equally enduring works in the classical style, not to mention the great American opera? Or maybe Porgy and Bess isn’t an opera at all, only a collection of great popular songs.

“Gershwin was the ultimate phenomenon in early 20th-century American music,” Ross writes. But he demands the Gershwin of the concert hall. He stresses the man’s sophisticated musical training and twice tells us the story of an encounter with Alban Berg. Gershwin, Ross reports, was “awestruck” by Berg’s compositions, which may have given him “a glimpse of something new, a deeper synthesis than what he had achieved to date”—which is to say, only “Rhapsody in Blue,” the “Concerto in F,” and a slew of songs like “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” “The Man I Love” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.” (Poor, poor pitiful George.) If Ross’s Gershwin had survived beyond the war, he would have started writing twelve-tone compositions.

The other Gershwin can be found in another recent book, Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built. It’s a heartfelt tribute to the great American pop songwriters. Sheed has come to praise Gershwin, Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and a gaggle of others, and praise them he does, exuberantly, without restraint. The work of these pop masters, he exclaims, “constitutes far and away our greatest contribution to the world’s art supply in the so-called American century.” Gershwin takes pride of place as the greatest and most representative of them.

Sheed’s Gershwin could not be more different from Ross’s. “Think of him first and last as a songwriter,” Sheed advises us, if only because that is how Gershwin thought of himself. Even after concertgoers began to take him seriously, he continued to cite Berlin and Kern as the main influences on him, and following every orchestral success, he returned to popular music, turning out gem after gem, writing great songs up to the day he died. As for that famous meeting with Berg that Ross makes so much of, Sheed’s interpretation is that the influence, if that’s what it was, ran the other way. Berg sought out Gershwin, Sheed says, because “there seems to have been a consensus, as firm as it was vague, that Gershwin was on to something that mattered.”

EVEN IF Sheed is right about Gershwin’s place in modern music, as well as the cultural importance of American pop music in general, he concedes that the school he has come to celebrate collapsed after the Second World War into treacle and banality. “Listening to a program recently of the top pop hits from 1940 to 1955,” Sheed writes, “I was startled all over again at how sharp the break was at the end of World War II, as if the bad stuff had been waiting for its cue.” Pop music, he says, was “a dying form.” His book stands as an elegy to it.

Sheed knows that a new musical form was emerging in the fifties to take the place of his beloved songwriters, and that it even shared the same pop aesthetic of Gershwin and Berlin. It simply drew on different sources than they did. But he also knows that he is not the one to write an appreciation of it. His orientation is not only toward the pop song but toward jazz; indeed, he calls pop songs, not entirely accurately, “jazz songs.” And if the postwar pop song had turned into mush, something equally terrible had befallen the jazz that Sheed identified with: it had learned about the emancipation of the dissonance.

Ross writes that, “it was at the end of the Second World War that many young jazz players began to think of themselves as ‘serious musicians,’” which meant, as it had for the European classical composers, abandoning first tonality and then the public. Famously, Miles Davis performed with his back to the audience to show his contempt, and Thelonious Monk sounded like no one so much as Milton Babbitt when he announced, “You play what you want, and let the public pick up what you are doing—even if it does take them 15, 20 years.”

Ralph Bass lived this transition. A jazz fan in his youth, he describes what it was like to be in the audience of Birdland during the bebop era: “I looked and thought, ‘I don’t think there is one cat here who understands what he is playing.’ Then I realized the cat was playing for himself. . . . It was selfish music, man, great but selfish. How many people dig all those chord changes, the patterns? Not the public.” Buddy Holly was more direct. “Jazz is strictly for the stay-at-homes,” he declared. Bass went on to become one of the great early rhythm-and-blues producers and says, “I feel I took part in an important part of history, musical history.” Buddy Holly went on to become . . . Buddy Holly.

FROM THE perspective of a classically trained musician (or an advanced jazz musician), rock was an infernal din emanating from the bottom, the thumping caterwauls of the musically ignorant, particularly the young, particularly the American young. Ignorance did surround rock, but it was the kind of ignorance that Mozart had in mind when advising a young composer against studying counterpoint: “Who knows most, knows least.” Ignorance (another word for it would be innocence) liberated young musicians unaware of the emancipation of the dissonance to take the musical forms and styles at hand and mix them promiscuously, in ways that had never been done before—pop, country, gospel, folk, jazz, blues, just about anything one could find, even, eventually if less successfully, the troubled modern classical style. And of this mixing, the most essential, politically and culturally as well as musically, was, of course, the merging of the many strands of black and white musical traditions. Bass, who traveled through the South looking for black acts to promote (and finding James Brown), was an eyewitness to a racial transformation: at first, whites were admitted to black dance halls as spectators, then they were allowed to dance in their own sections, and finally blacks and whites danced together on the same floors. (What happened next was exactly what gave the racists nightmares.)

It is well known that Elvis Presley developed his singing style in segregated Mississippi by listening to black radio stations, but it’s important to remember that the currents flowed in both racial directions, in fact, in every stylistic direction at once. Chuck Berry, raised on black church music, was influenced early on by Les Paul; his first hit, “Maybellene,” was conceived as a country-and-western song. Little Richard grew up listening to Bing Crosby. Smokey Robinson admired Cole Porter. Ray Charles recorded country music—and, before he died, Buddy Holly was planning an album of Ray Charles songs. Motown under Berry Gordy fused pop and gospel (Gordy originally wanted to name his label “Tammy,” after the sugar-coated Debbie Reynolds hit of the fifties). Atlantic Records under Ahmet Ertegun blended jazz with rhythm and blues (black on black). Sun Records under Sam Phillips, trying to expand the boundaries of country and western, discovered Elvis Presley while looking for a white who could sing black. Nothing was planned; it was all improvisatory, market-driven, determined by ear and audience—the pop aesthetic. When what we know as “the sixties” took shape, it all came together as a stylistic synthesis, most notably through the work of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, an extraordinary, unprecedented hash of musical cross-fertilization.

Rock was something new under the sun, a sudden, unanticipated development, and as such, it was commonly viewed as a music of rebellion, both to those who were sympathetic to it and those who were not. Roll over Beethoven! The times they are a-changin’! Everyone recognized that you had to be under thirty to really get rock; otherwise, you knew too much. But as the music evolved, the attribute everyone could agree on—its adolescent rebelliousness—became the feature that rock’s most successful performers glommed onto, whether in glam, punk, heavy metal, grunge, arena, hip hop, or whatever. In these years, theater—extreme behavior dressed in extreme costumes—tended to displace the music itself as the main attraction at concerts. This was far from the intentions of those baby-boomers who had fought rock’s original battles; it became hard to take the music seriously. (Dedicated musicians, such as the members of The Band, disbanded in the mid-seventies, getting out just in time.) Rock had turned into what its critics had said it always was—a commercial commodity that won teenybopper fans by appealing to mindlessness and immaturity. But the boomers faced an even more troubling problem.

If rock was nothing more than the sound of youthful rebellion, then hadn’t the time long passed for putting away childish things? That’s exactly what a new generation of neocon young fogies was saying. Waving their copies of Allan Bloom, they sneered that the boomers wanted to remain adolescents forever, and anyone who has ever seen an overweight, graying boomer walking around in a Grateful Dead T-shirt knows there is much truth to this charge. But what the post-boomer generation missed was the tension in the choice the boomers faced. Could they really leave rock behind as an artifact of immaturity, a cultural excrescence? Was there no musical or cultural value to it? And what about the idealism that seemed so intertwined with the music? One can’t imagine the civil rights movement or the protests against the war in Vietnam without rock as history’s soundtrack. Did all that have to die the death of innocence as well? These were questions to set a boomer’s teeth on edge.

The appeal of a critic like Alex Ross is that he seems to offer a way out, a means of resolving the tension. Music is music, he insists (which is what Berg told Gershwin), and there’s no need to choose. The boomers can have Dylan, and the fogies can have Brahms. College professors can have early Stravinsky, small-town Rotarians can have Rodgers and Hammerstein, dyspeptic teens can have Kurt Cobain, and George W. Bush can have Merle Haggard. Life is one big musical comedy, so why can’t we all just get along? It’s an attractive, reassuring solution, rendered more so because it is deeply embedded in the American ethos of tolerance. It makes intuitive sense to Ross’s post-sixties generation, and to the comfortable, upper-middle-class readers of the New Yorker as well. Except that it leeches out the singular social, cultural, and political importance music had in the sixties. And it comes with garbage cans crashing down the stairs.

SO LET'S take a step back and look again. Rock may have been considered the music of youth, of rebellion, and of an innocence indistinguishable from ignorance. Set against the backdrop of the entire twentieth century, however, it can be seen as having performed a culturally significant task: it reasserted tonality or, what is the same thing, rejected the emancipation of the dissonance. It planted its flag with the great tonal composers—Bach, Mozart—and refused to follow the post-Wagnerian path. You say you want a revolution? OK, but it’s going to be a reactionary one. The avant-garde composer Morton Feldman may have inadvertently given the game away when he said, “The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical.” Mick Jagger, anyone?

In the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, the defenders of tonality were scorned for their narrow and blinkered conservatism; complacent, unadventurous upholders of the status quo, they were the losers on history’s stage. Tonality was for nerds. The Wagnerians, as Nietzsche had said, were the beautiful people of their era (and their women, he added, were the most beautiful of all). But as the twentieth century taught us, there are worse things than being derided as conservative.

Ross speaks of music after 1945 as entering “a state of perpetual revolution.” Not so, if one takes a stand on the side of the pop aesthetic. Popular song and rock music, Gershwin and Dylan, offer a tuneful steadiness, a historical stability grounded in the heritage of tonality. During the Renaissance, humanists like Galileo’s father opposed the complicated polyphony and medieval modes of the church in favor of simple monody. Professional musicians hated these presumptuous amateurs, but the eventual result was opera. In Elizabethan England, secular music—folk and popular dance tunes—welled up against the musical orthodoxies of the political and religious establishment, pointing the way to Purcell, Handel, and, much further along Lennon and McCartney. Throughout Western history, as one music historian has observed, “as long as secular music remained open to popular influence, tonal tendencies flourished.”

Rock’s battle cry, then, is “Back to tonality!” The pop aesthetic achieves a necessary connection to the past, and that’s a very good thing. But what about the future? After all, we can’t expect modern composers to write like Mozart, not even like Bob Dylan or the Beatles. From Dylan you move down the road to Bruce Springsteen and from Springsteen to Josh Ritter and Rufus Wainwright and a million other folkies yearning for authenticity, until you’re a busker with a guitar around your neck croaking out “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in a subway for nickels and dimes. Even Bob Dylan doesn’t write like Bob Dylan anymore. To rely on the past as a map to the future is to conclude in parody, or pathos. Once again, Schoenberg understood it all, which is why he warned that a retreat to tonality led inevitably to sentimentality.

TO CONFRONT the future, one has to dig deeper into the Western tonal tradition, which in fact is what the rock revolution did all along, and which is what distinguished it from the music of the Gershwins and Berlins who preceded it. At the heart of the entire pop aesthetic is the song, and at the heart of the song is the scale, arranged in sequences of notes that relate one to the other in holistic compositions that are organic and comprehensible. Once you’ve heard a well-constructed song, you understand why each note comes just when it does. A good song has internal necessity. Dylan songs, for instance, have enormous integrity, which allows you to beat up on them, pound on them, stretch or compress them like Silly Putty; they are resilient, always retaining their essential shape and bouncing back to what they were, undamaged and whole. Beatles songs, on the other hand, have a more delicate and intricate, more intellectual and worked-out construction. String quartets can play them. But don’t mess with them—you might end up shattering them into a thousand pieces.

These songs are conceived linearly, with harmony supplementing the melodic line. To be sure, the pop songwriters like Gershwin embedded their melodies in harmonic progressions, giving a distinctive lilt to their music. But they didn’t let the harmonies dictate the structure of their songs; the line came first, which is why their work remains fresh even today. Rameau said that “melody originates in harmony,” but this was never true of the American song tradition. For both pop and rock, the melody originated in the scale (though the scale itself, one step removed, was developed out of harmonic laws). The true heirs of Rameau in America are the country-and-western composers, whose simple harmonies do indeed dictate the pattern of the song, creating boxlike, predictable structures that usually deprive the melodic line of any originality or shapeliness. The result, for both the fans of country music and those who are not, is a prison-house of sentimentality.

Still, there are scales and there are scales. The pop-song masters, with their harmonic awareness, relied on the same seven-step diatonic scale used by Mozart and Beethoven: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C or, thinking in terms of intervals, C-tone-D-tone-E-semitone-F-tone-G-tone-A-tone-B-semitone-C. Although rock composers rely on this scale too, they also draw on the folk tradition to reach back to a more ancient scale, the pentatonic, which does away with the semitones. The pentatonic scale comes in different forms. Probably the most basic in the West is C-D-E-G-A-C. Harmonies applied to this scale are more ambiguous because keys are not as rigorously defined as they are in the diatonic scale. Songs written in the scale above may be in the key of C or the key of G; without an F or an F#, there’s no way of knowing. Pentatonic melodies have a more skeletal quality, as with Dylan’s “Percy’s Song” or the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” The blues scale, with its flatted blue notes on the third and seventh, just where the semitones of the diatonic scale occur, is said to have originated in the forced encounter between the pentatonic and the diatonic.

Pentatonic scales developed before diatonic ones, and they are near-universal, the basis of music in Asia, Africa, and most other places around the world; they show up in old Scottish and Irish airs, in Christmas carols and in medieval dances as well. As the musicologist Bruno Nettl has observed, the pentatonic scale “dominates every major musical style except Western cultivated music.” It is our link to other musical cultures, our bridge to the rest of the world, as well as to our own past.

GLOBALIZATION IS a process that’s taking place culturally as well as economically. Alex Ross has his own vision of cultural globalization, which involves the spread of modern classical music into countries and cultures beyond the West. He even hopes that new audiences in “far-flung places” will make up for the West’s lack of interest in its own modern music. Again, one can’t say with certainty that he’s wrong. But one can harbor suspicions that modern classical music is a kind of Esperanto, universal precisely because it has roots nowhere.

The American pop aesthetic is exactly the opposite. It is rooted first in the many traditions of American music, then in Western tonality, and finally in the universality of the pentatonic scale. It reaches out to other cultures not from above, as a superior force majeure intent on wiping out local traditions, but in a spirit of commonality and shared human experience. It steps onto the world’s cultural stage bringing with it Bach cantatas, Mozart operas, Beethoven string quartets, as well as the songs of Gershwin, Dylan, and the Beatles, saying, “Look at what these guys do. Isn’t this stuff terrific?” Then it falls silent and listens. Because other cultures have created music that they think is terrific too, and the West is largely ignorant and unappreciative of it. Rather than a clash of civilizations, the pop aesthetic introduces the impulse to mix and blend, much as it did in creating America’s musical synthesis in the fifties and sixties. This blending will take time, though, because it occurs slowly, not out of some preconceived expectation about the musical future but, as with the rock explosion, because the music will sound right, feel good. You can’t hurry love, either through some overarching plan or by force. Nor, it should be added, can force prevent the blending from happening. That was tried in many places during the twentieth century, and the only lasting result was massive destruction and wholesale slaughter. It’s natural for people who learn about others different from themselves to want to mingle with them (as natural as it is to be suspicious of them). Sex and music are both excellent integrators.

Not long ago, I was talking to a friend who had recently given birth. We were discussing breast-feeding. She said that when she nurses her child, she is aware that she is engaged in an activity that goes back to the very beginnings of our species, and that she feels she is part of the great stream of life. Music goes back too, not to humanity’s biological origins, but almost—to the origins of human culture. History sent humanity spinning off in different directions. Today, we stand poised for a momentous reunion. That is why Haydn wasn’t exactly wrong when he said “my language is understood in the whole world.” He was ahead of his time. Music is not yet a single language, but now we can see a time when it might be. Making music or listening to it or dancing to it brings everyone together with everyone else, like black and white teenagers in the apartheid South in 1950s America—as long as people are permitted to mix. For, as Haydn did know, music is both universal and elemental. It overcomes differences. Like breast-feeding, it plunges us into the great stream of life.

"C’mon Everybody: Will Music Bring Us Together?"

I would guess not, and I think that's a good thing. The internet has taken hold in a big way, and the old media syndicate is losing control of the music industry. With all the alternative distribution channels available, people are now more free to choose for themselves what they want to listen to. No two people are exactly the same, why should we all want to listen to the same music? Artists are free to make music they like rather than having to dumb down what they are doing to a lowest-common-denominator radio audience. As a result, there's more music being sold commercially that has a narrow regional appeal. The 'World Music' pop genre of the late 20th century is on its' last legs.

There seems to be an undertone of the author pining away for so-called mass movements? With a couple isolated exceptions, they've left nothing but misery in their wake. They seem to be dying out and 'popular' music alogside.

Music used to be a communal, participatory experience; before recording, people gathered for concerts, or they bought sheet music or sang folk songs. Every tiny town had a band; most every family had someone who could accompany on piano or guitar or fiddle -- or even just a harmonica or a washboard -- while everyone, no matter how tin-eared, sang along. The town band, the school assembly, the church choir, the family sing-along -- that was music.

Then came recording, and music stopped being participatory, but it was still communal. Folks would invite friends over to listen to a new record they'd discovered. On the beach, at a party, in their cars, they were listening to the same songs on the radio. That's the '60s dynamic this author is talking about. There were regional differences, and differences by age, but most of the folks you hung around with every day were listening to the same music.

Now, radio is fragmented; each station has a fairly rigid format. People who listen to a country station won't catch on to something they might like in R&B. Rock listeners won't hear any hip-hop.

I'm torn on the question. The RIAA can die in flames and rot in hell, and I certainly like having choices. I burn CDs, I have an MP3 player, and I haven't listened to music on the radio in ages. But I do miss that commonality. The same way I like having twenty thousand Tv channels, but I miss the days when there were only a few and everyone had something to talk about the next day. People aren't going to the theater like they used to, and when they are, it's a googleplex where everyone is watching something different. Or they're renting or downloading. We get news and exchange views not at the diner, or over the fence, or around a stove at the hardware store, but at blogs and sites including this one.

I applaud the fact that the flow of information is no longer in the control of a small oligopoly, but I regret that our cultural common ground is shrinking so fast. American music, movies, culture and cuisine have always been, to use a cliché, a melting pot -- and today I see fewer and fewer places where the ingredients get stirred together.

I have no answers and yes, I know I sound like an old fart who's wistful for the "good old days" but plenty grateful for modern medicine, comfortable cars and air conditioning.

As a result, there's more music being sold commercially that has a narrow regional appeal. The 'World Music' pop genre of the late 20th century is on its' last legs.

Don't write the obituary yet. There's always an appetite for something new, and as you noted, there are more distribution channels than ever. Today, it doesn't take a Paul Simon to introduce African music to the West, or Peter Gabriel to introduce Middle Eastern music, or the Beatles to being the Sitar. Just a friend or a blogger who says "hey, check this out!"

One of my favorite gems I stumbled across on the Internet is an album of Zairean samba music from the '50s -- the technical skill is kind of slapdash, and I can't understand a single world, but it has an infectious energy.

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