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Alex Ross has linked to the text of his keynote speech at the Chamber Music America National Conference. As always, he has a lot of interesting and thought-provoking things to say. This sentence struck me as shedding a particular kind of light on one important difference between concert-notational music and other kinds:
I can’t honestly say that Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet is by any meaningful measure “better” than, say, Duke Ellington’s Come Sunday as sung by Mahalia Jackson.
I'm not saying that the difference here is a quantitative "better-or-worse" kind of difference, but rather a qualitative "nature of the beast" difference.
The difference is that the reference is to a particular performance of the Ellington, and the reference to Beethoven is to the work. Again, I think that's a different kind of artifact, not better or worse, but different.
ReplyDeleteCool! I got to know Judith when I taught at Minnesota. We had adjacent offices, with the lovely view of the Mississippi. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Alex.
ReplyDeleteI think these issues are both complex, in that there are a lot of moving definitional parts and overlapping traits between and amongst genres, and simple, because there are things we all "know" about music, but have trouble pinning them down verbally.