Classic vs. Classical

One of the perennial dialogues in culture journalism exalts the connection(s) between contemporary pop music and classical (canonical) music. Now, over the last 15 years, I’ve had experience in both classical- and pop-music performance, and based on that experience I must say I’ve never found such discussions anything less than exasperating. The classical community seems motivated primarily by the idea of “staying relevant,” using popular music as a platform for becoming, well, popular; secondarily, its foundational or ancestral status is reaffirmed to a contemporary audience. (I say secondarily because legitimacy-by-seniority only emphasizes its non-contemporary position viz. popular music.) Pop music’s stake in all this mirrors that of its classical counterpart: the “contemporary” is elevated from the status of mere trend to a place in the canon by affirming its classical inheritance.

This describes a social-historical pyramid of influence and status, though, more than it articulates the specifically musical features of what the cultural “classics” have in common. When Michael Jackson died recently, I was in a hotel in Toronto, mesmerized by the media extravaganza as it played out on CNN. In a retrospective of MJ’s career (a “look back” courtesy of all CNN’s own footage, since that channel no doubt was the preeminent looker-on of Jackson’s personal and professional life), one of the producers he worked with was featured as a talking head. He noted that one night, not too long before his death, Jackson called him at home.

“How come there aren’t any new sounds?” he wanted to know. The producer asked him what he meant, and according to him, Jackson said, “Well, I mean, somebody invented the drums, right?” The producer’s point in recounting that exchange was that, even up to the last years of his life, MJ was driven by musical innovation, an urge to escape the confines of musical convention (not specifically cultural convention, although of course cultural change has been a consequence of musical innovations by MJ and many other “innovating geniuses,” as Stravinsky called such pivotal figures).

Consider Jackson, then, in light of the classical/pop “connection” dialogue. Here is a musician—a pop musician—who made much of his debt to dance greats like Fred Astaire and, of course, to Smokey Robinson and everyone at Motown. Yet it’s been said recently that the night Jackson debuted the Moonwalk at Motown 25, Fred Astaire called him to offer his congratulations. It’s not that being an innovating genius, as indeed MJ was (most significantly, I think, in dance), means the artist is altogether original, with no musical debt to his predecessors. More often than not, as in the case of MJ and Fred Astaire, the ancestors are nearly worshipped. But attaining the status of a “classic” involves something of a usurping of one’s predecessors, an act or process of outstripping what is “classical.” The pop/classical dialogue we hear so much about today is never, to my knowledge, predicated on this aspect of “connection,” i.e., the aspect of breaking away, of innovation, that redefines the canon by expanding its scope to include, well, the unprecedented.