Popular Music and the New Man of Skill
Swados, Harvey
Rockland County, the most rural area within close reach of New York City, has attracted a large number of creative and technical workers in the arts who want to live in the unsuburbanized...
...Miller's remarks and the attitude toward popular culture they reveal deserve a wider audience than the roomful of neighbors he addressed...
...One of the promoters happened to be in the audience, a prominent disc-jockey who took irate exception to Mr...
...But my grandmother still entertained certain delicacies of sentiment: it took her quite a while to overcome her feelings of pity for the poor woman whose comings and goings were thus regulated by a mere gadget...
...To Mr...
...But the appearance of the disc-jockey serves as a sharp reminder that Mr...
...Miller had a variety of both simple and sophisti cated retorts...
...When this disc-jockey heard Mr...
...Not long ago the effects of popular music on musical standards were debated by Donald Waxman, an uncompromising young composer, and Mitchell Miller, the distinguished oboe virtuso...
...It has been brought against the popular culture merchants with depressing regularity, and there appear to be no grounds at present for hoping that it may be safely abated as the cultural level rises...
...Waxman had thereby disqualified himself as a commentator on the musical scene...
...Those who play classical records, as well as those who drop their nickles into juke boxes, often do not even listen to it, but merely allow it to fill the air while they drink, dance, eat, talk...
...Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 273...
...Can it be that this contempt in turn really serves to screen from the very ones who harbor it something that would be even more dangerous to reveal—self-contempt...
...I now wake up from my worst nightmares in a panic: they may but mildly foreshadow what I am yet destined to experience in reality...
...the novelty hit enables the workingman to "have a ball" after a hard day's work...
...Some people never think: they just worry...
...But this is an old complaint...
...That this may evoke memories of similar pronouncements by publishers of sado-masochist "mystery" and comic books should not consequently render it nugatory...
...as Schary supplanted Louis B. Mayer, so Miller has supplanted an earlier generation of cigar-chewing Tin Pan Alley vulgarians— and additional examples could be adduced from other fields...
...the lyrics of "I Believe" put into singable words the philosophical banalities which the proletarian feels but cannot express (and is therefore, we are assured, the biggest hit in the world, even played in churches) ; the recording of "Ebb Tide," complete with sea gulls and flowing water, is released during the hot weather, and makes stifling humanity feel cool...
...Miller has not been content to be a "working classical musician," his own modest description of a career that has won him international recognition...
...What was not foreseen, however, was the contempt for the consumer that would lurk behind every platitudinous protestation of faithful service to the vast spectrum of mass taste...
...undoubtedly a man of sensibility and taste, paralleled those of Mr...
...The semi-affectionate contempt of the pitchman for the rube, of the procurer for his customers is here extended to encompass not only the lowbrow, but the middle and highbrow as well—all, in short, who consume music but are not so fortunate as to make it...
...Miss Doris Day's singing of "Secret Love" appeals not only to adolescent lovers but to reminiscent ones as well...
...The implication was that departure from the intolerable middlebrow world was morally sanctioned if it took one to the democratic (and profitable) precincts of the lowbrow, but had to be condemned as a manifestation of snobbism if it led to the segregated area of the highbrow...
...272 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 It was hardly to be expected that these new men of skill would seek to justify their conduct in the terms of their predecessors, who could speak bluntly about being in business to make money...
...And after all, you can't buck success Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 271 in the U.S.A., whether in business or in high art—and Mitch Miller has it both ways...
...A democratic age invents democratic weapons: no respecter of persons, the atom-bomb kills rich and poor, men and women, young and old, soldiers and civilians, the innocent and the guilty, all with a truly remarkable impartiality...
...Freedom is far too sacred a matter to discuss in newspapers...
...The Welfare State: paternalism without any fatherly love...
...They must arouse this desire not only in the impressionable young, but also in millions of ordinary citizens who, while they may be receptive, have not been observed taking to the streets to demand greater quantities of that junk...
...Both defended popular music against those who had no right to attack: because they expressed reserve as to the inherent value of phonograph records, because they could not listen to popular music without becoming ill and hence were not au courant, or simply because as laymen they were intimidated by the superior tech nical qualifications of the defenders...
...There was, for one thing, the incontrovertible assurance that the record companies are giving the public what it wants...
...Waxman admit that he did not listen to the radio, although he too had once been associated with it professionally, and then utter the heresy that he did not believe unreservedly in recordings, he was satisfied that Mr...
...Popular music serves the masses who work for a living...
...Who is to say whether one type of emotional response is superior to another...
...Yet the salesmen of popular culture are anxious for those whose respect they crave to believe what they would apparently like to believe about themselves: that they are merely filling a need...
...it whizzes past the ear and is gone...
...Surely, however, the commercial need for carefully calculated campaigns of saturation must compel them to devote an increasingly large part of their business lives to the stimulation of a desire for junk...
...This year the Foundation has been Summer 1954 • DISSENT • 269 presenting a series of symposiums on the arts, drawing its audience from the broad new middle class of technician-commuters and their culturally ambitious wives...
...or to promote it...
...Rockland County, the most rural area within close reach of New York City, has attracted a large number of creative and technical workers in the arts who want to live in the unsuburbanized country while enjoying the advantages of being close to the city...
...Waxman's complaints that everything is now geared to the juke box, that artificiality has replaced spontaneity, and that current musi cal sentimentality is a hybrid of Salvation Army brass and youngsters screaming for more, Mr...
...Mitch Miller can be seen as the musical counterpart of Dore Schary...
...Music, Mr...
...They are con soled in this unhappy situation by a keen awareness that the sales of pop recordings are a thinly disguised blessing insofar as they make it possible to produce recordings of classical or modern music which will be unprofitable or comparatively so...
...My freedom should be more important to you than your own...
...It can be boring or entertaining, but it can scarcely help us to guess what is going to happen now...
...Miller...
...They would be less than human if they did not wish to subordinate this aspect of their activities in behalf of the claim that their junk finds a market...
...He has a key role in a vast apparatus devoted to the manufacturing of public taste and to the conditioning of that taste through constant reiteration (the disc-jockey and the juke box), and he cannot escape responsibility for his share in the development of a mass demand for mediocrity and worse...
...NOTES FROM A SUPERFLUOUS MAN There are times and places where it is a capital crime to raise an eye-brow...
...Yet the terms of the complaint may have to be revised as the ranks of the popular culture merchants are infiltrated by the new men of skill, who are more adept at the art of self-justification without the aid of a corps of public relations experts hired to mediate their case to an increasingly knowledgeable public...
...Even the musically educated listener, technically trained to follow Beethoven's fantastically inventive convolutions of counterpoint, is in the end having an emotional experience too, for what else is an intellectual appreciation that is so deeply felt as to be moving in itself...
...Only in Rome can you make, with impunity, disparaging remarks about Punic faith...
...Miller...
...For, more than that: thanks to LP, the record companies are now giving the public everything it wants, from wailing balladeers to Beethoven's chamber music...
...It is interesting to observe that the most unrestrained assaults on DISSENT, and on its editors, come not from the veteran spokesmen of entrenched reaction (who would appear to be otherwise occupied), but rather from young intellectuals who apparently feel their own positions as arbiters of taste and policy to be threatened by the mere raising of dissident voices...
...There was no mention of money...
...Having thus aroused the guilt feelings of the entire audience (all of whom must surely at one time or another have listened with only half an 270 • DISSENT • Summer 1954 ear to good music, or regretted the lack of training which effectively precludes the higher appreciation), Mr...
...Nor had there been by Mr...
...History seems to be an endless series of solemn warnings, gossipy anecdotes, bitter Jewish jokes or sententious precedents...
...In a free society, no one has the right to deprive his fellows of a variety of emotional experience which he may disapprove of or find distasteful...
...Obviously, then, the general response to music is basically emotional...
...With the gradual shift of control of the mass media to the hands of educated technicians there is a concomitant shift in the defensive rationale of the culture merchants, and in their resentful mistrust of the egotism and superciliousness of those who insist on the primary importance of the individual, self-centered creator in the arts...
...Waxman's pointing out that in current popular music the melodic line is thin and the emphasis is on audio-technology...
...You can kill half a million human beings by pressing the same kind of button that once delighted my grandmother when it was first explained to her that she could summon the hotel-maid by merely ringing an electric bell...
...One cannot help but suspect that when such a leveling, "democratic" defense of meretricious music is made by a renowned virtuoso, it must conceal a boundless contempt for the mass audience...
...A society that tends towards classlessness could no longer tolerate the niceties that once dictated the beheading of a gentleman but the hanging of a commoner...
...Just so, in the field of popular culture the most heartfelt attacks on the "irresponsibles" and the "esthetes" as subverters of the democratic diffusion of culture come not from those who have traditionally sought the honor of sniping at highbrows, but from the new men of skill, who regard themselves—not without a certain justification— as both liberal minded and cultivated...
...Miller is not merely a successful middleman, peddling a commodity already in demand...
...One of these is the Rockland Foundation, which conducts classes in handicrafts, music and dance for children and adults and periodically sponsors one-man shows of local artists...
...We now have more opportunities to read about democracy than to experience it...
...He is also "A & R Man" (Artists & Repertoire) for Columbia Records, which means that as director of that company's popular music recording division he has been responsible for a considerable amount of the music we hear over the radio and on juke boxes...
...As is the case with the metropolitan middle class, the actors, musicians, writers and painters who reside here often get to know one another through their children and their children's schools...
...My wife has slowly taught me to expect worse than anything I have yet experienced, imagined or dreamed...
...Miller was able to press forward unchallenged to another level of discourse...
...Miller observed, is the most transitory of all the arts...
...The listener who does not know counterpoint can only respond emotionally to Beethoven's Great Fugue, regardless of how much more highly he may value his response over that of the hillbilly music enthusiast...
...The arguments of the disc-jockey...
...The manufacturers, men of taste though they are, simply grapple with reality when they proceed from the incontestible truth that the public prefers Johnny Ray to the Budapest Quartet...
...Himself a well-educated musician, he had left WQXR (America's outstanding middlebrow radio station) because, as he put it, he could no longer bear to listen to the endless repetition of the same forty albums of classical music...
Vol. 1 • July 1954 • No. 3
