On Music
COOK, BRUCE
REMEMBERING THE MELODY BY BRUCE COOK H n some circles just mentioning the name of music critic Henry Pleasants is enough to start a fight. Why should this routinely cheerful man, who comments on...
...But Pleasants occasionally permits himself to be swept away in his enthusiasm for American popular music in general and for certain popular singers in particular...
...The Great Singers, traced the history of opera as a performer's medium...
...Why should this routinely cheerful man, who comments on both classical and popular music for the International Herald Tribune from his base in London, upset anybody...
...He approaches his subject with a spirit of unreserved delight, a certain naivete that is infectious...
...Secondly, and more specifically...
...about the movement of jazz in the '40s toward the abstract: "The bop musician's fundamental error . . . was neither his self-indulgent esotericism nor his incidental dependence upon virtuosity...
...Still, his work does constitute an ambitious attack on esthetic elitism ????on the idea that art is for the happy few And he has convinced me, for one, that music must satisfy and be fed by popular taste if it is to survive...
...This is set forth and developed in three books the Agony of Modem Music, Death of a Music...
...Pleasants has recently published The Great American Popular Singers (Simon and Schuster, 384 pp...
...Can it survive as such...
...Imagine how Martin Williams, Andre Hodeir, Gunther Schuller, or any of the other "serious" jazz critics must bristle at this suggestion...
...He is not unqualified: On the contrary, with a music education at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute and well over 30 years' experience as a critic behind him, there is probably no one with better credentials working in daily journalism...
...It is, first of all, merely to bring Henry Pleasants to your attention because I think his thesis is valid and true and terribly important in its implications...
...What I'm asking from Pleasants, I suppose, is nothing less than a definition of art...
...His presence in The Great American Popular Singers points to a question that always lies just below the surface in Pleasants' writing, one that must be resolved if his critical theories are to be given the attention they deserve...
...As a result, classical music is at a dead end and has been for most of this century...
...To summarize all too briefly: Pleasants argues that to remain vital, any music needs the support of a popular audience and must be fed by a living tradition...
...Pleasants comes perilously close in The Agony of Modern Music and Serious Music And All That Jazz...
...At the same time experience and common sense tell us that the truly good does not necessarily attract a large popular audience...
...In this age of popular culture, few critics have as much to say to us as Henry Pleasants few matter as much as he does...
...9.95), and because it does not expound his thesis but rather rests firmly upon it, this new volume might well be the best place for someone interested in him to begin...
...Pleasants is willing to hold maverick opinions to state the awkward thing, the very basic thing, the thing that often most needs saying...
...Or to state the problem strictly in terms of music again: Are the alternatives really only John Cage or Alice Cooper...
...It is, says Pleasants, a vital music, not moribund like the European variety...
...More and more the singer came under the dual domination of the composer and the conductor...
...In fact, if what I have written about it seems far-fetched or illogical, then blame me and search out the books...
...He speaks with great verve and authority on the vocal art perhaps not surprisingly, for his own training at Curtis was in voice, and he had a brief career as a singer before becoming the music critic of the Philadelphia Bulletin...
...But listen to what Pleasants has to say in Serious Music And All That Jazz...
...His opinions are not outrageous: He refrains from excesses, either of praise or damnation, in his calmly reasoned, crisply written reviews...
...Nothing is so insidious in contemporary attitudes about music?and nothing so destructive As the tendency to think of a good tune as somehow inferior, or ignominious, and to think of the man who writes one, or sings one, or plays one, as a trifler...
...And I certainly hope one is forthcoming...
...It is here, Pleasants concludes, in their relation to language, in their appreciation of the "text" of a song, that American popular singers come forward as reformers of a degenerated tradition, the new champions of the vocal art...
...What has incensed so many (Mark Schubart, former Dean of Juilliard, attacked his work as "scurrilous, unfair, destructive and specious") is Pleasants' basic thesis...
...By the 19th century (and certainly now in the 20th) the voice had become an instrument, and opera had for the most part lost the drama inherent in language when it is used for communication, not simply as sound...
...At about the end of the 19th century, he observes, classical music lost contact with the popular and folk music of Europe, which had long fed it tunes and rhythms, and in the process also lost its audience...
...Given such a thesis, you can understand why Pleasants offends many people in the world of classical music...
...Clearly, a reconciliation of some kind must be made, an equation worked out...
...He disregarded the eternal and immutable factor of memorable melody...
...They favor the same spirit of avant-garde experimentation that has characterized modern classical music...
...One gets the feeling in reading the Introduction to The Great American Popular Singers that Pleasants has, in a sense, put opera behind him...
...American popular music (including jazz), on the other hand, has retained contact with its tradition, and the support of its audience...
...It was his neglect of song...
...My intention, though, is not to offer provocation to them or to anyone else...
...For the thesis he has developed has application far beyond the predicament of contemporary music alone...
...It is, moreover, a separate musical idiom, a synthesis of Western and African influences that has been accomplished successfully only in the United States...
...to suggesting a direct correlation namely, that what is popular is therefore good?although I don't think for a minute he would ever postulate such an extreme formulation...
...The popular singer puts the same emphasis on language, and on the effect of his presentation...
...Combined with his immense erudition as a musicologist, this makes for a point of view that is very fresh indeed...
...It is difficult to take Cash seriously as a singer when he can barely make it from do to do on a musical scale...
...What is the relationship between popularity and quality in any art form...
...and Serious Music And All That Jazz...
...This, Pleasants maintains, is the new music, no less valid than European music was in the 19th century and earlier...
...He begins by delineating the territory that the classical singer and the popular singer hold in common, ingeniously stressing similarities between pop music and primitive opera: "It should not be forgotten that Italian opera was originally a reaction against the melodic artificiality of 16th-century polyphony, an attempt to redirect vocal music toward the melodic and dramatic properties of the Italian language...
...Here, again, he was following Serious-music fashion And courting a comparable disaster...
...Presented in Pleasants' lucid, witty style he is one of the best writers among music critics the ideas are quite sensible and, I think, irresistably persuasive...
...The 17th-century singers of Monteverdi and Cavalli, Pleasants continues, were allowed a full range of embellishment and a freedom of phrasing that was gradually denied performers in the centuries that followed...
...and as with much of his criticism, one has the sensation of discovery pleasants' discovery of another facet of the world of popular music and jazz he had ignored for the first two decades or so of his career...
...Is any art to be solely a minority concern...
...An earlier study...
...it was both a labor of love and a work that must have been necessary for him to write before going on to this one...
...w yj ^ ell, maybe...
...His overall method subjecting popular vocalists to the same sort of musicological analysis he would give to classical singers (examining Billie Holiday's vocal range, investigating Frank Sinatra's use of the appoggiatura)?breaks down completely when he discusses individuals like Johnny Cash or Ethel Merman, who have many vocal defects including downright faulty pitch...
...Yet jazz critics are almost equally hostile to him, since Pleasants has been no less emphatic on the need for jazz to keep its popular roots, whereas the majority of them take the opposite position...
Vol. 57 • July 1974 • No. 15
