If Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal who also blogs at About Last Night, sounds particularly refreshed in our latest podcast, it isn’t because he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Shortly before our interview, he and his wife had recently spent two nights at Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Seth Peterson Cottage, one of the last residences that Wright designed, in Lake Delton, Wisconsin.
Beyond that experience, Terry and I discuss:
- The life and death of America’s mid-century middlebrow culture.
- Louis Armstrong’s place in middlebrow culture.
- Satchmo at the Waldorf, the play that Terry wrote about Armstrong, which recently debuted.
- The interaction between a counterculture and the dominant culture.
- What would Mencken, an earlier biographic subject, think of the Blogosphere?
- The dangerous challenge of revising a Broadway play for contemporary audiences: “Is the Text of a Classic Ever Sacred?”
- The sequel to Teachout’s book on Armstrong, Pops.
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It is truly tragic that European classical music is scarcely heard any more, either on the radio or in public places.
Instead, the “music” we have these days rarely even involves a melody. It’s just poorly-enunciated doggerel set to a soundtrack of pounding noise.
I hae been a follower of Terry Teachout for well over twenty years. His criticism on all subjects is always been fresh and invigorating as well as a delight to read. Too many good Teachout lines to repeat here but my favorite was written when he was comparing the Disney cartoons of the 1950′s to those produced by Warner Brothers and, in particular, Chuck Jones. He wrote -”Disney gave you cartoons that your parents wanted you to see. Warner Brothers gave you cartoons that YOU wanted to see – Animals who could talk beating hte hell out of each other!” That perfectly captured a major slice of my childhood.
Teachout does not touch on what I think may be the leading cause of cultural illiteracy and the death of middle brow culture. That is the fact that the traditional conservators of culture and learning – the universities – have so soundly turned against it and have sought to destroy any unifying culture we may have inherited – especially that from Europe.
Digital information technology only spreads the confusion that has been purposefully sowed by the highbrow attack on highbrow culture. I don’t see it as a cause.
If middlebrow doesn’t exist anymore, what’s PJM?
TT says middlebrow doesn’t exist because the culture has become too fractured and there is no longer the common striving for a mass-marketed high culture. Yet it’s worth remembering that the term “middlebrow” emerged in the early 1920s, first as a pejorative term used by “highbrows” to recognize that a middling culture had emerged that no longer aspired, as it did in the 19th century, to follow the lead of high culture which, after WWI, indulged in a kind of high modernist violence of anti-traditionalism whose political analogues were the totalitarian movements of the mid-century.
In other words, “middlebrow” emerged (and there was a large publishing industry in the 20s and 30s serving it) precisely as a fracturing of the neat, classical, opposition between high and popular culture. Middlebrow was perhaps a kind of hybrid.
It’s true that many forms of the former high culture, like classical music, no longer have much of an audience nor much innovation in the academic ghettos where they are still learned. But that’s not to say that the essential values of high culture don’t still exist (prototypically, the high values the deferral of popular violence by teaching respect for the victims of the resentful mob), along with the corruption by addled elitists (who today, e.g., pretend to defend victims but actually support an anti-Western politics that needs to create victims to wave about), and so also survives today a “middlebrow” reaction to that corruption, at places like PJM, it seems to me.
1389 AD says: “It is truly tragic that European classical music is scarcely heard any more, either on the radio or in public places.”
We have a classical station in San Antonio, Texas. It’s part of NPR, but they do a good job with the music, at least to my admittedly uneducated ears.
Talking about Louis Armstrong as a figure of “middlebrow culture of the mid-twentieth century” is talking about Armstrong well after he became a mere celebrity, as opposed to a cutting-edge figure of the avant-garde. By the time television came along, Armstrong was, musically speaking, a back number—jazz had passed on to bebop and “cool” jazz, neither of which was Armstrong’s forte.
But 25 years before TV became a feature of the landscape, back in the late ’20s and early ’30s, Armstrong was both an avatar of the avant-garde—the jazz trumpeter every aspiring jazz trumpeter wanted to be—and a popular entertainer, back when popular music consisted of every band, sweet, hot, or in-between, doing its own arrangements of the same popular songs.
The black entertainers of the ’20s and ’30s did not have the luxury of spitting in the eye of the larger society; to get anywhere close to the big money, they had to channel their experience into brilliant musicianship that would appeal to a broad swath of society. Armstrong not only produced brilliant dance records, but songs like “What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue?” which managed to address racial issues without leading with rage.
As one of the top black performers of the jazz and later the big-band era, Armstrong, along with Ellington, Basie, and Lionel Hampton, were all performers who were “safe” enough to show on television. But they were considered old-fashioned and establishment figures by that time; the persona Armstrong projected on shows like Ed Sullivan (and in “Hello, Dolly”) was schtick by the time he had the chance to reach such a mass audience—a dim echo of, say, his weird disembodied-head performance in the early-Thirties Fleischer cartoon of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You.”
Anyone who wants to know what Louis Armstrong really was should listen to his early recordings for Okeh, his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens—not his later work as a “beloved elder statesman.”
Put this down as sour grapes, if you want. How is it grown men find irrelevant questions such as discussed in this interview even interesting?
Because man does not live by politics alone.
A LOT of sex wouldn’t hurt.
The purpose of the interview was to discuss with a drama critic, mid-century middlebrow culture and in particular, Louis Armstrong’s role in it. What part of the discussion did you find irrelevant to the topic?
There is a quote that goes, “political beliefs flow from culture.”
The closest thing to modern classical music for instance seems to be movie scores. Quite often the scores are much better than the movies.
Back in the late 1990′s I was surprised at the number of rock and roll artists that came out of the music conservatories like Julliard it wasn’t all garage band wanabe’s that went to the top of the charts.
I’m starting to see more fusion works, especially from overseas, that use elements of classical music especially the use of orchestral effects and classical instruments.
http://ampontan.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/kiyohiko-senba-and-the-haniwa-all-stars-live/
Ed: The “lo-fi” MP3 appears to be truncated at 9:07. (Tried downloading twice.)
My favorite Terry Teachout quote, though I don’t remember where amongst his vast output I found it:
“Life is good, whether it feels that way or not.”